Ep 620: How Origin Runs E-Commerce With AI Agents, From Media Buying to Diagnosing Defects

0:00Inadvertently, one of our products was featured on Nicolas Maduro when he was taken from Venezuela. So the hoodie that he had on, on the tarmac, the blue hoodie, was one of our products. I was actually on a ski trip and it was like midnight and my phone started blowing up. They're like, we need to take advantage of this. The goals change over time. The team changes over time. The marketplace changes over time. So like doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result in a changing market is actually insanity. On the AI side, I'm the most bullish on creating interconnected automations that take a centralized goal and feed it down to the individual business units.

0:53Justin Parker:Justin Parker, welcome to the DTC podcast. We are hot off the stage at the Whaley's where we did a panel there with Ashley Kick and Martha from Universal Ads. But I wanted to dive in a little bit more on your journey and origin as a brand because we didn't cover it as much in the podcast. Welcome. First of all, welcome to the DTC podcast, man. Great to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Origin is a super interesting brand. I've done a lot more research on it actually now since before our panel, but for our listeners, can you give me the sort of the origin story of Origin and maybe how you came to it?

1:24Yeah. So, so origin, it's a, it's a great brand, um, started in jujitsu of all things. The owner was a world-class jujitsu competitor. He started making his own, his own gis and, and rash guards and stuff. And, and, uh, and in competition in Abu Dhabi, he saw his pattern on another competitor and he was like, Oh, cool. There's my gi, right? Like that's a fun thing as a, as a founder to see your product out in the wild. And the closer he got, it wasn't actually his, it didn't have his brand on it. And so his partner that he was using in Pakistan to make the geese had given his design to other brands.

2:06So Pete Roberts, the founder of Origin, at that point, he was like, I need to figure a way to do this myself. Like, I can't, I can't let my hard work go to other brands. And so So he, I mean, really exhausted all measures. It's a really incredible story. He bought a loom. He went home and cut down the woods behind his house in Maine and built a timber frame factory and just kind of like put everything of himself into making sure that he could make every single part of the product himself and have complete control over the supply chain. fast forward 15 years and we now make uh we still make jujitsu we make uh jeans and boots and shorts and t-shirts and hoodies and we make it all in america so it's not just the cut and sew in america which is what a lot of brands will do which you know good for them for doing it in america but it's actually the thread and the brass and the leather and every single component is made or sourced in America.

3:18And so, you know, one of the things, I came to origin a few years ago and one of the most fulfilling parts of my job is actually, you know, we'll run a sale or we'll do a promotion, we'll launch a product or something. And that day or the next day you go into the factory and you see the people actually working on the product that you sold on the site. And so it's super fulfilling to like see local people having meaningful work, being able to make things with their hands, being able to support their families off of the products that we're making. And that's a story that we tell over and over and over again.

3:51Like it's kind of our moat in the space. Like we show very proudly, we show the people that work at Origin and the people that make the clothing that we sell.

4:01Justin Parker:And it's become a massive asset in the age of tariffs, I guess, right? Yeah. And you would think like tariffs were an interesting run for us because everybody was getting squeezed, right and the share of the wallet got smaller and smaller right like because people were we we saw that happen and we're like this is going to be a boon for us like this is great but the reality was it was more of a messaging opportunity than it was like a huge boost to sales and i and i equate that to the fact that everything got expensive and we sell premium made gear so it's like when you're, when you're trying to make a decision between, okay, groceries have gone up, you know, X amount of percent, or, you know, the, the day-to-day essentials are getting more expensive.

4:49Something's got to give. And so, you know, sometimes those luxury items tend to be a little bit harder to come by. So tariffs, yeah, we thought it was going to be this, this big run for us. Um, and we did, we did well, but it wasn't like, it wasn't a light switch. We'll put it that way.

5:02Justin Parker:And I guess it runs deeper with you guys, with, with the actual origin of the products all being American, coming from that way, being able to build it. You guys have also had a lot of interesting celebrity involvement a little bit. Talk to me about Jocko's involvement with the brand. Jocko's incredible. Incredible human being. He's got his hands on a lot of different things. He's a high-performing individual. You see that through and through. And so Origin is one of those things. He also, Echelon Front, Jocko Fuel, Way of the Warrior Kid. He's an author. he's a podcaster he's a bow hunter like the guy does everything but he yeah he's we actually just had a meeting with him on friday uh an owner's meeting where you know he we kind of you know you give him the update and tell him how things are going and stuff and just so encouraging really really believes in what we're doing i think that's like the biggest takeaway like it's not just a revenue stream for him he wholeheartedly believes in helping america win you know he's one of those guys that like you see on Instagram when army and Navy play, they try to get everybody to say, okay, who are you rooting for army or Navy?

6:10And Jocko is always like America. He's like,

6:12Justin Parker:I'm just rooting for America, you know? No, but he's great. And the company runs on, on the principles of extreme ownership and working at origin. It's a, it's a very open company. You know, we're very transparent with ourselves, with our customers. And the mission is just incredible. To have the fulfillment of American made, putting your neighbor to work, having meaningful work yourself, it's just a great mission. One of your quotes that I pulled from your LinkedIn was you said, pricing is 10 % math and 90 % psychology. Did you say that? First of all, that's what Claude said you said. It sounds good.

6:54I don't know. I may have hallucinated it.

6:56Justin Parker:But you guys have built yourself as a premium product. And I think you've really earned it with how you manufacture, essentially. Talk to me a little bit about how, I guess, maybe the development of your products and how you've thought about pricing as a company. Yeah, great question. You know, when you make things in America, you're paying a livable wage. And it's not just to the people that work in the factory or the people that work in the offices and stuff. But it's because it's built on the American supply chain, it's everybody along the way. It's the people at the farm, the people at the mill, the people that are making the thread and the leather and all this stuff, right?

7:35So everything is a little bit more expensive and that compounds over the cost of the goods. And so there's also that extreme asset of like, people are bought in because of that, Right. So you, you, you have to balance the, the low margin, relatively low margin compared to, to competitors, right. Cause you know, D to C, right. Like we're competing with other brands that have much higher margins than we do. So they can spend more on advertising. They can spend more on tech. Like they, they've got more to pull from. We absolutely try to make the very best product we can. We have our, our designers are from some of the top brands.

8:15You know, they've come, They've come to us from some of the top brands. They make incredible product. We have a great QA department and we're not skimping on the, just because the goods are expensive, we don't skimp on the features and the make and the actual like manufacturing that goes into it. We take a lot of pride in overbuilding products. So all things considered, there's the necessity of running a business. You have to charge a premium for a product that costs so much to make. But the great part about that is that our value proposition, the customers that we're reaching, the ethos that we adhere to, they're willing to pay it.

8:53And it's not something that we take advantage of in the sense of like, you know, we're not in here. We're not in it to make premium goods for the sake of making premium goods, where the mission is to get people in American made clothing. So there's that, like any other business, there's that line of like, what can the market bear? What amount of margin do we need to make just to keep people employed? And so we're constantly testing that we're trying to round out the offering with some more affordable and maybe less like, well, you know, I'll give you an example. we, we have, uh, our jeans, we have three different price points.

9:31We have a, an entry level, a hundred percent cotton jean, but it comes in one fit and one wash. So there's not as much inventory overhead. It's a single construction, single colors, that, that sort of thing. Then, then we have the next level, which has, it's the performance stretch Delta denim. It's got four different washes, four different fits like, and that's our flagship product. That's what sells, sells the best. And then we have an anchoring product that's a little bit heavier weight, still a little bit of stretch, but it's up there in price. And so we try to cater to what people want. I mean, the end goal is just getting them in American-made products.

10:09So we try to make the product for the price that will fit the customer and meet them where they're at while still balancing the fact that our employees need to make money, the business needs to grow, that sort of thing.

10:19Justin Parker:You mentioned the mythos and how important that is for people paying the premiums, falling in love with the brand. I'm on your website and you really don't hit people over the head with it in a way. Like you've got a few subtle nods to it in the footer built by freedom. You've got the, you know, the four days of freedom sale at the top. What are, what are the most effective ways that you sort of install the mythos with this brand about it being this holistic American company? The American made value prop is first and foremost, right? But we also have great product. We have a lot of new product that we're constantly talking about.

10:54Like we, we try to really balance the messaging so that we lead with American made, but it's not an over the top experience because when you look at the TAM of people that are willing to give you value for American made versus the people that just wear jeans, there's a lot more people that wear jeans then value American made as the number one thing. So we're, we're constantly reevaluating and shifting things around depending on seasonality, depending on what's going, you know, we're coming into July 4th, that messaging will, will certainly amp up as we, as you do like the July 4th capsule and that sort of thing.

11:34But yeah, we it's, it's throughout the whole experience and it's not the only thing in the experience. So we talk about it a lot in social, we show, you know, we're very, we're very open and transparent about the process that the brand goes to, goes through to bring a product to market. Like we'll, we'll show, we'll show the failures. Like you look through our Instagram right now. There's a, there's a particular video of our jujitsu manager ripping fabric in half because we were trying to make this particular a gi with a particular, uh, feature in the, the yarn that we wove into fabric. It just didn't work.

12:07Like it was a, it was a failure and we're like, well, we're going to show people like we've had them along in the process, this is part of the process. It doesn't always work. So there's a lot of different facets of the brand. We don't necessarily lean into any one so deep that it's the only thing we stand for. Made in America is 100 % where we're at, but there's so many other parts of the story that we try to inject in there in the right proportions.

12:33Justin Parker:Another one is your sort of origin in the jujitsu space. How much is that? I guess it's a stream in still, but I guess with all your meta ads and everything, it's not, it's not the, is it the main one still, or how much is a jujitsu, the sort of entry point for people into this brand at this point? Yeah. The jujitsu guys are great. Like those jujitsu people that come to us through jujitsu, they're bought into the brand for a lot of different reasons. And jujitsu being like a, the main one, it's such a like niche that if you find origin and you you're, you're into like the best quality made, best design.

13:07Like that's what you're going to get. And those people, they'll spy other things at a higher rate than people that come, come into the brand through a different Avenue. You'll proportionally as the brand grows, jujitsu, smaller, Tam jeans, boots, hoodies, larger Tam, the proportion of revenue that comes from jujitsu, the proportion of customers obviously shrinks as the other things, other things grow, but that's a huge, that's a huge focus for us um especially now that we've kind of we've established ourselves with the rest of the product offering we spent a few years like building out the product offering so a lot of what we were talking about was new products coming to market you know canvas pants or uh different kinds of hoodies and that sort of thing so a lot of our messaging and we're talking a lot about apparel while still trying to not alienate jujitsu guys because they're like our core audience, but things have settled down a bit.

14:01So we're back into that. Like we're doing jujitsu because that's who we are. And, and that's how our core customers like fell in love with the brand and they're super durable too, right? Like those guys, they've been with us throughout the whole process. They're, they're here and want us to win. So they're super like forgiving. And we try, we try very hard not to take advantage of that and try to make sure that we take care of them as well. And like, give them cool stuff that they want to wear and rep the brand and whatever, whatever. So yeah, the jujitsu guys are great. It's a super niche for DTC e-commerce, but that's, that's where the brand was founded and something we'll never, we'll never get out of.

14:40We'll never give it up. It'll always be, it'll always be part of the brand.

14:43Justin Parker:How does being vertically integrated change the way you think about growth? A lot of brands, they can, you know, fire off an order to an overseas factory and they just have time, there's a time constraint, but, but they can just do it. How does, how does being fully integrated in all of your products and all the, the ingredients of the products change the way you think about growth. It does present challenges for growth, right? From a capital allocation standpoint, from capacity considerations, but it also is a superpower. We can turn things on with the flip of a switch. Like we can, we can see a shortage and instead of having to wait weeks or months, have it on the line that, that day.

15:22So, you know, we, we definitely have gotten better at looking around the corner and seeing the constraints that it does create and using the advantages that we have owning our own facilities and controlling our supply chain as best as we can to make that a lever for growth, really. And we had a viral moment at the beginning of the year. Inadvertently, one of our products was featured on Nicolas Maduro when he was taken from Venezuela. So the hoodie that he had on, on the tarmac, the blue hoodie was one of our products. I was actually on a ski trip and it was like midnight and my phone started blowing up.

16:01And it was, it was the other guys at work. And they're like, we need to take advantage of this. We've got to do something because we didn't actually have that. That color wasn't planned to run until June. And this is January, right? It wasn't, it wasn't planned to run until June and it's, it's midnight. and we made the decision to pull it forward, to put it in the line on, you know, as soon as we possibly can. I think fabric was already inbound at that point. And, um, we put it online that night and started selling it knowing exactly when it was going to, when it was going to start coming off the line.

16:35You know, there's a little bit of a lead time because we weren't planning on it for six months, but we're able to turn it around like on a dime because of owning our own manufacturing and even like the connection that it creates between sales and ops, like manufacturing is connected 100 % to us. Like I'll give you an easy example. Like, you know, you and I met at the Whaley's and the other day we had a customer service came to me and they're like, I think there's something wrong with this particular product. We've been getting a bunch of inquiries about it and it just seems higher than any other product complaint.

17:13I'm like, okay, so let's look, you know, you've identified the issue. Let's see if that's just an anomaly or if it's a trend. So using Moby, we have all our production tech packs in there. We have our reviews. We have our obviously sales data, returns data, social listening, like everything is connected for context. And I asked Moby and I was like, hey, this is the problem that's presented. I need you to go through and look and give me a readout. The end users of this are going to be customer service ops and product. It came back and it said, the reason for your issue on this particular wash of denim is because the tolerances need to be tightened on this one measurement.

17:58If you fix that, and I'm like, this is a, this is Moby is inherently like it started off as a marketing tool. And now it's giving us product advice on how to change the tolerances for the patterns to make this particular product. So not only did it put together an action plan for like, okay, pull out a dozen or two dozen of these particular sizes and measure them against spec, change the messaging on your site, and go to product and have product redo the tech pack so that the patterns will account for that tolerance issue that you were seeing. But the cool part on top of all of this to go back to your original question is that that could actually happen and it could happen right away.

18:42Like it wasn't overseas. It was in North Carolina where our jeans are made. You could have the product team who is in the same facility as the manufacturing. They could go talk to QC. They could pull some stuff off the shelves, measure it. They could adjust the pattern as they need it. And then the ones coming off the line were fixed.

19:00Justin Parker:I want to dive into Mobi too, because that's what we talked about on the panel a lot. But it's funny, the Nicolas Maduro thing is really interesting because one of our people on the Pilot House side who's often coming on the podcast is always wearing his Nike tack, which was the other piece of apparel that he was seen in. And I always wondered, like, how does that – was that a Nike thing? Was that a Jocko Willink thing? Like, how did he get a piece of apparel that you guys didn't even have ready? Yeah. So the story that we've heard behind it and in the off chance that the agent's actually listening, hit us up.

19:35Justin Parker:Might be classified. Yeah. The story that we heard, the color was run in another product a few years ago. Different fabric, same general construction, but a different fabric. So the color that he had on was a color that we were rerunning, but just in a almost identical product. And so one of the DEA agents that took him from the, whatever it was, the helicopter to the airplane or whatever, they threw this, the color we call it. I mean, even just like in the Lord's provision, the color was Patriot blue. Of course. Like you can't write that marketing. No. So they put him in this Patriot blue hoodie because it was bright.

20:22so he's surrounded by a bunch of guys in in uniform he's easily identifiable as he's walking from the helicopter to the to the airplane across the tarmac because he's in a he's in a bright color compared to everybody else and that was that's the account that we've heard outside of that yeah there was no as best we know there was no there was no jock or anything there was it was literally just like one of the agents was an origin fan he had a hoodie in his in his bag or whatever. And he threw it on him. Did you see a boost in sales from that? We did. Well, so because we were able to activate against it, we sold a bunch of them.

20:57Like we pre-sale, we pre-sold a bunch of them. And so then we took advantage of it. We're like, we're just going to run this color in a handful of other products too. We might as well. And so it's become a flagship color for us this year. We got a bunch of PR from it too, which almost more than the sales for us was, was a huge boost to like visibility and awareness, you know, and, you know, obviously the backlinks and all that stuff is great. And, you know, getting, getting recognized by, by LLMs and stuff, having a little bit more traction that way. But yeah, it was, it was kind of a double-edged sword.

21:30We, you know, we had the, we had the PR boost and we also had the sales boost. So it was great. It was a good way to start the year. We hit a lot of our goals. We hit, you know, the first week of January because of, because of that effect. My ops guy was hysterical though. He's like, he had a, one of his goals for the year was to not move launch dates on products. He didn't want to move them left. He didn't want to move them right. He wanted to launch on time. He's like four days into the year and we're launching this product early. He's like, I already lost all my goals.

22:01Justin Parker:So on our panel, we were at the Whaley's. We talked a lot about Mobi and its evolution from Mobi1 as sort of a query engine, which you were talking about, but then also into an agentic led media buyer. I think there's a creative agent and I forget what the third conversion optimization agent conversion optimization piece. And you've been, you've been in it for a while now. You were, so you were in the, like, cause I think they just launched Mobi two publicly. You'd been in the beta previously. Talk to me a little bit about how that process has, has been. You know, it's really interesting that the functionality, it was like a light switch, right?

22:37when they turned it on. Because it's a completely different product. It's not just general, like the AI we were used to in Triple Will, where it's just analysis. It's actually like building and creating and the automations that can run, like it's giving you cadenced visibility and action on areas of the business that we didn't have before. One of the biggest, and the Triple Will guys will attest to this, one of the biggest hurdles that we had right away was the slowdown of the human in the loop. We are absolutely slowing the process by our need for approvals, the inherent nature of our brand and being authentic.