564: From $0 to $100,000 a Day Selling Neckties | Fameez Haroon

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0:39Just head to omnisend.com forward slash founder without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. It's surreal. It's like we came from nothing. We're not fashion dudes per se. We've gone from literally zero customers to over 400 ,000 customers. It's been more in the White House, more in the big blockbuster movies. How How many SKUs do you guys have? Over 10 ,000 SKUs. Yeah, yeah. That's insane. But in saying that, when we first started, it was just about how do we pay the rent? And we used to calculate the rent and how many neckties we could sell. Bamiz Haroon is the co-founder of Ulta, a menswear brand that scaled to over$40 million in global sales.

1:16What began as a scrappy side hustle is now a cult favorite fashion label worn by celebrities, politicians, and even featured on hit TV shows like Better Call Saul and Saturday Night Live. We've had Fox News Anchor say one of the world's best highs on live television, causing 30 ,000 people to swarm the website at the same time. So there's just been some insane highs. I think there is a reality to growing a business, which in equal parts is adventure, fun, exciting, but in also equal parts dread, terrifying. There's a lot of sleepless nights. What's the number one piece of advice you wish someone had told you at the start?

1:53hear the stories learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship welcome to the founder podcast with nathan chan so the first question that i wanted to ask you is you've scaled otar to you know from two thousand from your parents' basement in your bedroom with your brother from$2 ,000 to$40 million in sales, just selling ties. Celebrities, you're telling me offline, all sorts of celebrities are wearing your ties. All sorts of politicians are wearing your ties. You're generating over$40 million,$100 ,000 a day at peak. Talk me through that. How did you get into this?

2:38I like to say that we got, the story was we were walking on the beach one day, we got inspired by some ocean blue um like sea or something like that but the truth is we're just flat broke um we needed to do whatever we could to pay the rent and this is going back say 14 years ago the situation for ourselves was actually incredibly difficult um my parents had migrated from Fiji Islands to Melbourne and we we just do it where we could as a family to pretty much just survive and so yeah like oda was born out of nothing that's been bootstrapped from the get-go so the origin story is like you know myself and shang got invited to a wedding and basically we had worked out that instead of buying a brand new suit every single time you get invited to a wedding it's actually cheaper if you just buy a brand new like necktie because it makes it look like a brand new outfit so we walked into the department store together and back then there was such limited choices in say ties and they were so expensive like it'd be like 150 dollars for like a big grandpa tie or like 98 dollars for a shoestring tie um and it'd be placed next to like a bin that kind of smelled kind of funny we're like okay we'll go with the you know the shoestring tie and so the department store person would come over and and there was just this level of pretentiousness and like that was kind of seeped into the fashion industry and um the guy said to us he's like oh you want that one and we're like yeah we'll grab that one and we we walked out of that experience and we both looked at each other it was almost like a larry david kirby enthusiast at the moment it was like is this real that just happened and then and then me and shane looked at each other, Shane's my co-founder and brother.

4:32We're like, we can do better than this, like, surely. And so that's kind of where O2, like the first spark of O2 was kind of born. Like, okay, like we don't know anything about the fashion industry. We don't come from fashion. We've, you know, we've never started a business. And so it was almost like, you know, I should be thanking that guy who gave us like the cold shoulder, but that was kind of where it started. Like just in terms of getting it going. Yeah. And this isn't your first business. You guys, and you rather try to other business ideas oh man like yeah tell us about that yeah i think we again to get ourselves out of like the situation we tried anything and everything like uh we'll we were we we we try to source kitchenware and we bought that in and it was like 30 units and it cost like say 300 and we we try to sell them on ebay and we we'd send them out and then it would break and like we tried anything and everything to just get ourselves out of the rut that we're in can you tell me more about that right in that situation so like where were you at like yeah so we're working i was working personally 13 hour night shifts trying to just do what we can as a family to kind of just like pay the rent we'd pay the rent in cash like i remember getting those red letters in the mail and would drive to the real estate agent to go go pay it um so it was just tough and then shaheen um my brother and co-founder um he was working at an architecture firm and we we we wanted to just do and try anything we could to to pretty much get ourselves out of that situation so yeah we were just used to failing like it was like failing was just like a like a regular thing because we never knew what success was i remember we bought a book how to start a business for like dummies like that's how that's that's the nature of like our skill set in in the industry um so we knew nothing you know but we just said okay well we have to learn we have we're not going to be stuck here forever we want the choice is going to be more to life than just this so we opened the book we started reading we're like okay you gotta register a company you You got to, this is how you start a website.

6:43This is how you do this thing. Just brick by brick, we learned. And then we, like I said, with the nicer dices, I failed. Then we started selling, you know, iPhone covers and then just anything, everything. But we learned, like, we learned skills within that, how to source, how to actually put things online, you know. And this is going back 14 years ago. When we walked out of the department store and we're like, okay, we can, like, we can build something here that's better than this experience. and it was a lot more clear it's like because the fashion industry was extremely serious it's like okay we can make a brand that doesn't take itself so seriously the fashion industry generally like low quality like okay we can make something that's high quality something fashion industry had very bad customer service like it's okay what does it look like we have great customer service and we actually like our customers and we don't hate them so we we use that as a formula and and and And we just, we ran with that.

7:41And 14 years later, you know, it's gone from, so literally zero customers to over 400 ,000 customers. Like we've had politicians, been born in the White House, been born in big blockbuster movies, The Boys, Better Call Saul, Nick Cannon, Channel 7 News, Channel 9 News. Like it's been surreal to see it everywhere, but it just started from like nothing. Yeah. And talk me through, like how much did it cost to do the first run of ties how did you find your manufacturer like let's go to like real brass tacks yep so so to take you back then um again i started um a business for dummies we we didn't know anything about the fashion industry whatsoever i think that naivety was probably a good thing my brother shaheen i think is the world's best pretty much product developer and sourcer he literally we we said okay we're going to do this seriously we're going to act like a going to put our big boy pants on and act like um what what what is it going to take for us to enter this industry so we we looked at our bank accounts and we're like okay we've got about 400 bucks in our bank account each we can put together our money and we can buy a plane ticket to go to china and so my brother and this is going back 14 years ago literally totally naive to the situation never been in china couldn't even get a visa booked a ticket one-way ticket there and he just figured it out this is like we did the hard way um going back 14 years and he ends up this once he landed he just got to pretty much talking he did a bit googling um kept the book with him he just went through the first factory and we part we had partnered with them but the first batch was really good like we managed to get the initial order through of say 30 it was actually bow ties and we had put them online and i remember the first day when we actually put the initial batch bow ties online we had launched launched it and there was well we're waiting in bed of breath like oh this is gonna be exciting we're gonna sell all this stock zero traffic zero orders day one shopify um shopify yeah and then day two same thing it's like okay we've we've we've pulled our money in how we're gonna get rid of the stock and how much did you put in so the initial order was from memories going back quite a bit.

10:21I think maybe like$1 ,000 or$2 ,000. It was along those lines. That was everything to us. So we had to sell it. And so we did what we could just to bring traffic through. So at the time, we partook in forums, like Reddit forums and anything to just bring traffic to our comp. If someone told me, if I could speak to myself 14 years ago, like, you idiot, just run Facebook ads. how cheap it is like but we didn't know like this is the thing we just did not know like we could have like oh man it's just it's almost frustrating not so what you don't know costs you a lot of money so we didn't we just did not know so we're doing things the hard way like i'm sure it was an easier way than you know jumping in a plane and going to the suppliers i'm sure it was an easier way to take the photos and put online i'm sure there was an easy way but this is the thing we we never entered the industry we did not know and it's starting any business is just a series of learning and and you're just learning things over and over again and reinforcing that yeah so talk me through so you had it was you put in everything you had to start this thing you launched a Shopify store a couple days in still no sales like what like how did you like how did you know like what happened there yeah so the first big one was so we worked out we need to drive traffic and we weren't using Facebook ads at the time we just didn't know so the first thing we did was anything So friends, families, fools, fanatics, we're just contacting anything and everyone.

11:48The first order we actually got was by partaking forums, like Reddit forums and stuff. So when we got the first order through a post that we did on Reddit, that was like, oh, wow, this is success. We got something here. This is awesome. To sell the other stock, we started doing a string of PR outreach. So we tried to get anything, everything that we could. and so we got a write-up on the huffington post um calling us the cheeky clothiers and that kind of just like when we when that article came out that kind of just like got us initial traction and just sold out like the the first batch of wool like you know it was like two thousand dollars revenue for that period like i think it was like a like a like a like a few days i'm like whoa okay this is good we sold out the the initial batch so yeah just anything everything man there was no there was no like it was anything to drive any sort of traffic we and without the facebook ads at the time the long-term strategy we end up working about was more like doing youtube tutorials on how to tie a tie so we worked out there was a big arbitrage in like these like series on how you can actually tie a tie that would get like millions of views so we'd produce our own series and that end is like go to odo.com and so that those things allowed us to build it a bit more long term in terms of actually getting traffic are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey founder plus has you covered with proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results a supportive community of over 30 000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

13:36Try Founder Plus today for just $1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. Yeah. And so that's interesting. So when it comes to tying a tie, you guys would just do these youtube tutorials how did you work out how to rank like how did you get millions of views like talk me through that because that's not easy right there must be heaps of videos out there yeah i think so we bought this encyclopedia of like how to tie ties and there's like 50 different ways to tie a tie and so we're like okay we can do a youtube version of every single one of these and at the end of it have a call tag go to odour.com so yeah we got like a film crew we got like a model and even the models like dude i've never tied any of these ties before this is insane and so to his credit he tied every single one on camera and yeah we we end up putting them online and it ends up getting um like at the start like it was like a trickle thousand views two thousand views but now they've gotten millions and millions of views between all of them um and so that was just one of the things that we did to bring traffic into odo.com so i think the lesson as well is like there's no one way to build a business i think there's a lot of ways you can do it we went you know as i said i'm going back 14 years ago if i could say to myself and shaheen my co-founder just use facebook ads so much easier but we didn't know so we did it a different way and we just built traction one thing at a time one step at a time um and so yeah it's just been a series of learning yeah and when it comes to kind of the facebook ads piece there's also the the dark side of that coin as well right where uh you're too reliant and if it's not working it can it can really fall in your face as well yeah and so you it sounds like you guys you've had a content-led approach which is probably a bit more foundational in many ways yeah right because you're only good as your last ad with Facebook ads in many ways too right you're only because your last creative and and creative dies out it's it's a machine where it sounds like you guys have built some really solid uh foundational content pillars and areas where you consistently drive traffic like those YouTube videos if they're still getting views that will still be driving sales every day right yeah I think so the whole strategy really shifted when we we wanted to like build a brand and what does brand even mean i think like when i think about it the the fashion industry as a whole but it really did take itself extremely seriously and so when we came along and we wanted to invest these kind of high production funny parody commercials like we invested in a commercial that we shot in hollywood that cost the brand like fifty thousand dollars people said were insane for doing it like you can get you know how much ugc you can get which is user generated content for that price and we always said like it is impossible like because it's impossible to tell the quality of the product online you need to communicate the benefits of the product um through positioning the content in a way and so we we tripled down on just producing premium branded content with that's funny as well and humorous and so the big commercial that we did had like an alien in it um he's like he's dropping his iron and saying these ironings is like an ancient technology usher it's a non-iron and so we wanted to position it in a in a bigger way and i think that's allowed us to pretty much get our brand uh and position it in a more or Julius in premium manner, I think.

17:33Yeah. So what's the most that you've spent on a campaign? Yeah, I think we did like an adventure, like Indiana Jones-esque. Yeah, I saw that one. Yeah, yeah. So that one was a big set. And again, people said like we got advice from mentors, like you're saying, like we always ask permission, but it's like, is this a good idea from people who've done hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue every single one of them said don't do it you're an idiot for doing this it just just like please do not do this invest into invest invest into again ugc for thing but my theory my working theory is like i would rather invest into content that makes people laugh and i think you almost have to like i think mr b said it he's like if everyone you're driving down the road and you just see regular cows you're just gonna keep driving but if you see a pink cow then you're gonna stop and turn here like did i just see a pink cow i think we tried that approach by standing out um with the funny sort of humorous content and so i write well i help co-write all the scripts and we just parody like those um sort of big sort of those funny tropes like um whether it's like the adventure adventure thing with like the james bond thing and we just do what we can to yeah make it just make it funny so how much was that how much sorry yeah so that so that one was about 30 000 usd um which obviously in aussie dolls was the dollar tanking has probably yeah yeah um and yeah and like the sets are expensive and the actors are expensive but again we just want to position it that way but what's happened with that is every single time we get inbound because we've got lots of wholesalers contacting us it's just positioned the brand in a more elevated way it's allowed it's allowed us to communicate the benefits of like uh you know uh sustainably made sort of ties made from recycled plastics or the luxurious shirts that's the working theory anyway because you upload that youtube video into the facebook the rise is like nothing it's like less than one so again like i can understand why the mentors say it and they're probably right like they're probably just trying to like protect us from saving money but we're very hell-bent on building something lost past us you talk about brand i think it's an interesting concept around everything when it comes to building an e-commerce brand right like doubling down on it because more than ever it's easier than ever to start an e-commerce company and brand right but with the introductory of ai it makes things easier than ever to start and And it's all about those relationships that your customers have with your brand, Ota.

20:23You've still been able, even if you haven't been investing in brand along the way, only it's a big push now. You've had all sorts of politicians, celebrities. You said a lot of movies now purchase Ota product. Why is that? There's plenty of places to buy ties. like why why why are people choosing you guys good question man there's a bit of a maverickness that comes to people who wear osa um again i think those people align with just being a bit more i guess rebellious but in terms of the content piece yeah i think the cost of content's going down to zero especially with ai and i think what we're going to see now is just like mass-produced content you can choose to do anything so i think what happens here is like like taste is going to be the defining skill and how you um are able to create the taste um for your brand and get it out there because it's an interesting time of over living in where you can literally prompt it and get any image that you want um and put that in like a facebook ad that like we did one recently and it was just a test um where we used like an ai model and we and um and we've been experimenting with this quite a bit like the guy wearing it like a like an odor shirt um and it just looks photo real and that in the past i would have to get like a studio you'd have to get the model um and the cost you know like easily upwards of like five or ten thousand dollars but now it's all within the like a prompting engine um you see like h m they're talking about um like um using ai models and all their in all like in all their shoots as well so yeah we're living in a really transitioning time but i think you have to um use the latest tools to help um like stay ahead i think it's it's interesting because the fashion industry is like it's almost very slow moving generally speaking um so but you have to with e-commerce you always have to stay on top of the latest trends and and hacks to um almost just stay ahead yeah i agree so So what's working now for you guys?

22:34Like how are you growing the brand? Yep. So the biggest thing that's working for us, actually I'll reframe it. Like I remember listening to Mr. Beast again. It was actually a really good interview. It kind of resonated. I got two things from him. But the thing that he said was like, if you're doing something um if you just get a mentor and and ask them how they did what they did and whatever terrain that they're doing it in like you can just get essentially the cheat codes um and implement it within your own business so like i remember listening to that and thinking okay that makes that kind of makes sense like um someone who's done it before it might not apply exactly the same but um like in theory that makes sense so then i i remember hearing about um david fogerty who started this crazy e-commerce business has done hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and it was based in australia i used to think you couldn't even do that out of australia like um how's that impossible so i remember speaking again my chain a call and i was like man we got to speak to this guy like and ask him how you how you even did it so i drafted an email up to him and i remember asking him an email like i'll i'll like i know your time's busy but if we can just have an hour meeting with you we'll pay like ten thousand dollars um like like we didn't get any response initially and then he ended up we like we we end up connecting um again through like there's some online booking link they had when you wanted to start teaching certain things um so we got on the meeting with him and i remember the thing that he said to me um when we finally got on the phone call with him i was really really excited obviously nervous as well i'm like we paid a lot of money just to try and you know on the call and i was saying yeah we're doing a bit of tiktok we're doing snapchat we're doing pinterest and we're doing all these kind of things and he looked at me and he's like he's like like so what's your facebook look like i'm like oh we're doing a little bit of that he's like scrap everything you guys just focus on facebook my really facebook he's like he's like is the most efficient marketing machine in the um history of humankind is exact words i'll just stuck my brain i'm like oh and so that phone call we end up switching off all the other platforms because they weren't returning he looked at it straight away so we got our money back from that one lesson and yeah so now we're really investing and building Facebook out and growing that as a direct-to-consumer thing because we've done the Google, the SEO stuff and over 14 years built a brand that's had a lot of word of mouth.

25:32That's the biggest thing for us. We get about 20 % of sales from just referrals and word of mouth. Our reviews are extremely strong because we focus on great product. But yeah, that one key lesson, man, it's like just focus. Don't get you distracted. that I think that could resonate with anyone. Yeah. So are you able to share like how much you're spending on ads right now? Yeah. So we spend upwards in pretty much like the hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. It depends on, you know, it depends on, you know, the month that we're in or the season because it's a necktie and shirts is pre-seasonal depending on like the country that we're trying to go for um but yeah like a lot of it again to communicate this like it's hard like you know a lot of times you put a you know an ad up and it's you know there's 0.5 return on ad spend like it's it's just a series of just getting hit in the face over and over again i think there's i think e-commerce is glamorized like even um me sharing a quote my success story man it's hard like it's it's it's being like it's like getting punched in the face over and over again waking up with a smile like it's not it's not easy dude um and i think everyone who runs a business can understand that i think we glamorize e-com quite a bit in any business for that matter um but yeah there's a lot of sleepless nights there's a lot of um working out how to navigate the ads and then you know once you start building a team you're gonna want to make sure you can take care of them and when we first started, it was just about how do we pay the rent and we used to calculate the rent and how many neckties we could sell.

27:17And then when you're going year five, it's like, okay, well, how do you build a team? And then how do you build a brand? It's not like we had this be crazy thing from the start, we're going to take on the world. The goals were simple at the start and kind of just evolved. Was it worth it? Has it been worth it for you? 100 % it's been worth it. I think there's obviously a naivety when you start a business, you don't know what you're getting into. And it's allowed us time freedom, location freedom. But then when I say time freedom, is it really freedom? I mean, you're always on at all times. Yeah, I think there's a glamorous aspect to people who found businesses that get painted.

28:09But yeah, I think it's good to talk about the reality as well. It isn't all sunshine and rainbows. I think a lot of shit that we do, we load it up. Like I said, we lose. Even when we did the big Alien Hollywood commercial when we're launching into luxury non-iron shirts, people said, no, don't do that. And for us to go against them, it's like, okay. And we're hoping it was going to perform well as a Facebook ad. it didn't but it worked well as a youtube ad and a brand piece and it's learning it's just it's always a constant cycle of learning man um but yeah it's it's it's um i think that i think there is a reality to running a business which in equal parts is adventure fun exciting but in also equal parts dread um uh terrifying and i think a part of business is just stepping up to the plate and learning and having that ability to um learn from people like yourself people who i could speak to like um i remember telling people that i was um just doing whatever i could to contact people who've gone ahead of me in the e-commerce game because i i do treat i do treat business and life in general just like like it is there's a game aspect like if we've been doing for 14 years and say someone like another mentor of ours is Casey Holliday, who's an amazing ring brand, sort of Quelo, has done like hundreds of millions of dollars.

29:41If they've done it before and you can get in contact with them and learn from them and shortcut your pitfalls, I think there's a lot of value to that. so you talked about the highs and also the lows what what can you take me back to a time where you ever felt like giving up you and your brother where it was just like we're flying really close to the sun too close yeah all the time um i think that's part of it but so i think when we initially started i think the initial traction is the hardest part for any business starting like um just when we first sold the first batch of stock it's like it's exciting well we did it it's like but then the next step is like okay we put all that money back into buying more stock and then starting over and over again um i think the most difficult time as well for odor.com would have been COVID for us and this is for every business so it's not like some sub story because I almost feel bad even saying it because every business struggled that I spoke to I've got friends who run cafes I got like friends who run um you know like gift stores like it was like for us the difficult part was um like there was no weddings there was no events you know there's no like there's no one wanted to wear shirts and ties um during that time people were wearing pajamas you know working from home and zoom calls so at that point it's like okay this is happening to us what can we do to control this like it's like okay we can use this as a lesson to shrink down cost what are the variables that we can control because it's all about like it's well all well and good to say what you can't do but there's things that you can always can control and so we try to keep down costs we try to keep our staff um we did what we could to sell and get us through but on the flip side when covet had ended and weddings came back there was a massive push then all of a sudden everyone's getting married those weddings on monday to friday and like i got invited to a wedding on a wednesday so there's there's a flip side to that darkness as well and just holding on so um yeah it's me me and my brother shaheen um like every day we speak to each other we're equally optimistic some days and some days it's just like oh man it's this is tough like we pull this work into a big product launch and it didn't work um yeah it's it's um it's i think it's um common yeah what about your highest moment were you just like oh yeah this is fun so many yeah this is why we always stay in the e-commerce game man it's like it it's like going to the casino um yeah it's so many high moments dude um when i see um when i see orders and um come from like big tv shows that are gonna wear out of um like Better Call Saul, The Boys, Ota being tagged on Instagram.

33:01Like we've had like Nick Cannon tag it. We've sent parcels to the White House. We've had Robert F. Kennedy wearing Ota ties. We've had Ota ties being parodied on Saturday Night Live. So my brother and Shane have designed like these animal ties that have like turtles on them. and rfk wears them then alec ballwin decided to parody those ties and they're parodying the odour design ties so that i mean it's surreal it's like we again we came came from nothing we're not you know we're not fashion dudes per se um so when you see it parody on a national live stage that's cool um we've had um you know fox news anchors say we've got the world's best ties on live television causing 30 000 people to swarm the website at the same time um so there's just been some insane highs um and that's why we're in it and we and honestly the the biggest high as well is i know that those are like the the vanity ones but i don't know just taking care of the team like when you hire people you want to like you when you're when you're fortunate enough to just like um have staff and they invite you to the you know wedding and um and um and just take care of people like locally and internationally like you know who depend on otah as well those are again i think there's a lot of highs there as well isn't just about those big sort of bad things those are cool um but yeah i think the i think just taking care of um um those things and and being able to provide for that as well has been really really cool as well but there's been some yeah been some amazing high voter as well yeah i saw your face light up it can be somewhat addictive right chasing that that big dopamine hit like it is crazy because i'm thinking of my own me and shane we love playing poker and I think a lot of business is there's a lot of gambling attributes that come to running a business and anyone tells you otherwise is lying to you like for example if you put like me and Shane refer to like things as bets it's like okay well that commercial is like a$30 ,000 bet that's a$10 ,000 bet employees their bets but you're hoping that if you hire somebody and they're going to bring you value um with the company you're betting on them to hopefully work out and sometimes most bets go to zero and but when you do place a bet and um you put it on the roulette table for example um if with e-commerce there can be outsized returns like um and so we have ten thousand dollar bet um on a piece of content can go to hundreds of thousands of dollars and that's why we keep playing the game um of of e-com and so yeah there's a lot of things that correlate between poker and business the hand that you're dealt like you know the hand that we're dealt is you know we start from nothing um you know like there's no money in our accounts um that was the hand that we're dealt we didn't come from money but at the same time i was like i'm grateful for that because we had to work out the skills how to start a business for dummies read that book you know go go to china work out how to market how to build a brand um and and then the flop comes out you know and it's like okay well that card pairs with that card okay i've got a i've got a winning hand a losing hand i can do i throw this away do i fold and give up on the business or keep going and the beautiful thing about business is um you like as long as you're willing to tolerate pain and i think it's equal parts um pain and reward if your ability to tolerate pain and be able to last as long as you can allows you to keep saving up on the plate and getting those outside returns i think jess bares has said that that it's like you're able to step up onto the plate and hit the baseball as many times as you can.

37:22But then if you like with business, you can get outsized returns by hitting home runs over and over again and getting those outsized returns, if that makes sense. The success of your business, a big determining factor is how much pain you're willing to go through. 100 % and your tolerance your pain tolerance and that threshold you agree with that yeah 100 % man I think you have to I think you can do it with a smile and like be optimistic but your ability to tolerate pain because you're trying to grow and I think if you're you know whether you're lifting weights or you're building a business your ability to tolerate pain allows you to grow and there's so many things that we don't know and you know the pain of not knowing I go I go back to 14 years ago if I knew if I could just whisper one message you know just Facebook ads come on man it's they're cheap about back then but it's just not knowing is a is a thing that that can cost and yeah I believe the ability to tolerate pain is a requisite for growth as well you talked about outsized returns referring to business as poker what's been your biggest outsized return thus far in the odor journey yep i think that my bet on investing into big branded commercials and the brand in general and also great quality products like if you google our reviews they're all like it's 4.8 4.9 15 ,000 five-star reviews um yeah the the outsized returns come from like doing things consistently over a long time horizon that compound into of itself that give you compound returns we've been doing for 14 years um when we tell people where like we start as neckties they almost kind of like laugh as I was just neckties like and then we when we said we've been doing it for 14 years and it's grown um yeah the i think the biggest outside return comes from building the brand and great customer product over long term i think that's the equation because e-commerce i think is pretty simple you know you've got product you got price you've got um your website which is your funnel and and then how you do those things and execute on each of those levels in equal measure dictate your success so when it comes to i guess retail you talked a lot about online talk to me about retail what's been your play there from a branding perspective yep um from from a retail perspective um we've been fortunate that like because we've built up odot.com um the re um we've had a lot of good inbound and again this is the bet on so generally if you speak to an e-com person they always tell you almost like a almost like they treat it like crypto it's like i just you get a thousand pieces of ugc and you can bet on this and it'll grow i've inverse was like okay build a cool brand um invest into product and quality and then they'll come to you it's a very inverse approach but you're also hoping that they do come to you in the long term and so we've been stocked in um and we've had contacts from say you know the big hotel chains um like who now stock otter um and but yeah in terms of also in terms of the retail position we did the trade shows as well um going back just before covid and yeah it's it's a big financial outlay as well to do those trade shows um i don't know if you ever done one before but man it's they're tough like i was on the ground there and you set up a booth and um you're kind of hoping that people kind of come towards you i remember standing there for like 12 hours like a day with um um with my wife who was helping me and my friend nick and he was working with Ota at the time before COVID.

42:04And you're just waiting for people to come to you. And like I remember one trade show we did in Denmark and we set up and it cost like$20 ,000. And we had zero people walk through and we all got, like I remember we all got in, we all used to meet up at the coffee shop after and everyone was just depressed. We're just like, oh. and then I'm the business owner, I'm being Mr. Optimistic. Look, it's all learning. We can figure it out when we get back and, you know, and like, don't worry, like we can figure this out. But yeah, like, and this back to my point, business is hard. That's another bet we just lost.

42:50Like we're just, we're so used to just losing and those things. But the retail aspect, again, I'm like, okay, we're thinking about this what's the best digital approach because my skill set tends to go to digital first it's like okay i love storytelling i love building fun parody content i love writing scripts um okay let's just invest into the brand and maybe they'll come to us we we it's not like and because and and so we started tripling down on that because it's not like if we started contacting um you know this you know people in the white house or politicians or you know um these big tv shows hollywood shows to where otah they're not they're not gonna they're not answering our emails they don't care about us but if you build a brand that's cool enough they'll come to you um so that's been the working theory and that bet has definitely paid off but yeah on the flip side but yeah like i lost a lot during those trade shows but you have to learn this is what i mean you just got to keep going and learning and and this is the non-glamorous side of running a business like we went like that day when we did the denmark trade show at the end of it just like i feel like game over again it's like oh this is never like where's the win like because you hear about all these guys getting thousands of retailers and like oh this would be easy we you know it's cool but no it's sometimes you do something it doesn't work and then you just have to step up to the plate again you talked about kind of returns losses bets what can founders do from your experience been you know building business for a while now what can they do to really make sure that they're making like they're getting more wins like they're making less mistakes like because it's really about the decisions that you make like and and how do you how do you increase your likelihood of making the right decision?

44:50What have you learned? What are you doing there? I think we live in the best time ever to start a business. And I think this is going to sound simple or trite, but you could just YouTube shit. You could just Google things. You can actually chat your BT. Like if you've got determination and willingness, you can just work it out. I would say I wouldn't follow what I did because I think also like, Like if I'm mentoring somebody, hey, The Miz, I want to do a big commercial like you guys and I'm betting the house on it and remortgaging. I'm like, don't do that. I'll be telling them what the mentors told me.

45:27Like, you're an idiot. Like, don't do that. It's not a good idea because everyone's success is individual. You can't copy anyone's blueprint. Like it's everyone's individual and anyone who tells you otherwise is just lying to you. Like there's no one formula to do it. I think start small, bet small. If you can, e-commerce, it's a beautiful business where you can. It's the easiest business to start. It's also the hardest business to get real customers to part with their hard-earned cash to give you money. I think people take it for granted. There's big numbers,$1 million,$10 million,$40 million,$100 million.

46:03These are real people. It's not just numbers. It's real people. so the advice I would give is yeah get small figure out temper the farm have conviction think long term take care of the customers you know as I said when we founded the brand is built on the premise that you know the fashion industry generally just hates people like if you walked into a store and there's this level of pretentiousness that's there we had an answer to that and it was again it's a nebulous thought was how do you answer that digitally how can you take care of customers digitally properly um but that was that that was the idea behind that um so just simple ideas execute well and think long term like we've been doing for 14 years 14 years long time man like i've i've seen businesses you know come and go like after one year five years and you know three months and they've done crazy revenue numbers than we do in a month um but we're here for you know i'll exit the business when i'm dead like i'll be doing this for the next 30 40 50 years i think that's that's the long-term view that we've got you said something interesting around kind of we live in a time where you can use chat gpt google etc etc youtube videos however the flip side of that was you shared you know you talked about Davey Fogarty, you know, we've interviewed him.

47:34Really super successful e-com founder here in Adelaide. Nice guy. Yeah, great guy. You're willing to pay him$10 ,000. When should people know when to make those investments? Like I've probably spent well over a million dollars personally in my own personal growth. Like at least, at least. Like coaches, mentors, you know, you and I were talking about Shopify versus BigCommerce, the founder of BigCommerce, one of the founders of BigCommerce. He was a mentor of mine. He was a coach as well. I was paying him$5 ,000 a month for many years to learn. So, you know, that's, we chalk that up. It's 180, probably close to$200 ,000 right there over a few years.

48:18So I've spent like well over a million dollars in my own investments. I'm curious to hear when should people know when to invest in themselves, when to double down with a mentor or coach or you know so it's a really good question i think it's entirely like first you need to be self-aware of what you're good at and what you're not and what actual help that you need and i think that is the secret to life as well being able to articulate the question that you need when we had the when i did what i could to send david i'll get an email to um meet with him for ten thousand dollars um like the the business was doing the revenue to justify it so one decision within the business would save us tens of thousands and it did so that scale made sense um but going into the meeting it wasn't i didn't just rock up and and be like hey man you come and grow my business it didn't work that way i was like I prepared for that interview.

49:24I'm like one hour,$10 ,000. Okay, I'm going to prepare for this. Like I'm preparing for like a job interview. I wrote down all the things about OTA, what I think the things are. And I'm like, being able to articulate the right question. I'm like, if you were me, how would you grow the business by 10 %? It wasn't, it's like if you ever go to a personal trainer and you ask him, hey, how do you make me healthy? It's a very nebulous broad term. as opposed to you say hey i've got a wedding in six weeks time how do i lose a few kilos it's like okay well you can you know go into calorie deficit do this so in terms of at what point to contact people and when i think one be self-aware you don't know any everything and like being humble to understand that um well that's the other thing as well um you have to But I think if you do speak to someone who is ahead of you, be able to take on their advice and not be like, oh, you're wrong.

50:29You're an idiot. Because I know people who've done these mentor calls before and they pretty much just flip out. Its ability to be coachable is probably a skill set as well. um i'm still to this day just trying to learn every single thing and and grow it um yeah i think i think it definitely depends on where you where you're at yeah i agree um situational stage advice is very very very key like you can look at someone you look at someone like him and you know he's doing all this content now he's building his personal brand but when you're just starting out that might not make sense for you right so it depends on what situation you're in and what stage you're in in your business that makes sense but there is an argument to make that if you had of you know worked with him earlier you could have actually made a lot more money getting onto Facebook ads.

51:35Yep. It just depends. Yeah. I think a lot of businesses breaking beliefs as well. Um, and believing what's actually possible out there. Um, I just didn't think for the longest time you can grow like a massive econ business in Australia. I was just so wrong. Um, and so once you break that belief, it's like, okay, well, what are the series of steps and actions it's going to take to actually, um, get you to grow the business by double or triple. or further and further and further. I think breaking beliefs is a big part of growing any business. I'd love to delve a little bit more deeper on that. We'll work towards wrapping up.

52:14Why do you believe that it wasn't possible to build a big business, online e-com business from Australia? You're selling online. Yep. You're selling to the world. Yep. So it wasn't just like it was, you were capped out around the Australian geography. I'd understand if you were just selling to Australia and you were capping out and going, okay, there's only 15 million people. I'm just curious to explore that. Yeah, I wish I spoke to you earlier, dude. I think growing up, my family came from a background of, we ran a milk bar. My parents migrated from Fiji Islands. And so we used to sell$2 Mars bars.

53:01you know i used to be nine years old selling like cigarettes like you know this is in the 90s um like so the scale of you know of a business then you know the milk book like you know a 500 bucks a day is and then you are like unconsciously adopt like a limiting belief it's like this is as far as i go so when we started e-commerce business although we're selling online and internationally and doing the thing. It's like, I'm like, okay, well, a good day is, you know, a couple grand. That's awesome, you know. So 300 ,000, I'm sorry, a couple grand, $600 ,000 business per year. That's amazing. That's as far as we go.

53:39But then you hear other founders who, you know, go, you know, 50 million, 100 million, 200 million, 500, you know, beyond. This breaks the belief system. So I think this is, and back to questioning your own sort of self-limiting beliefs um and where you unconsciously pick them up from or consciously like you don't want to pick up desires as well i think um because like my definition of um like happiness is it's simple i love building a business i love hiring people of trying to take take care of them i love taking care of the customers um and we've kind of purposely kind of kept it small in a way we do our own fulfillment we've had advice people telling us you should do multiple free pls all around the globe and do it this way um but yeah we've kind of purposely almost slowed the growth down to hopefully remain profitable like um sometimes it's some some months are definitely not profitable again this is the reality of any any e-com business or any business in general and like and some months are widely profitable as well and then this is back to the outside um sort of bets um but yeah it and it just comes from uh yeah how we grew up and and and just breaking those beliefs is critical i think how did you identify them identify them yeah i think i think when you just hear stories man i i think that i think this is why the podcast is so interesting and you know even founder for example when you just pops up on my youtube and you see a thumbnail you're like whoa this person's done what 80 million dollars 100 million dollars like what's their story like and you just hear that again and again and again you're like okay well if they could do it like what are the series of things that they did to grow their business um yeah i think just reinforcing the stories it's it's so important um i think it's I think it's the most important thing that you can do if you want to grow.

55:51And if you don't want to grow, that's fine. That's also just as okay as well. I mean, you can have a business that has the same amount of revenue, you know, but you're on end and that's okay. That's what you want to do. I think it depends what you want to get out of life. Comparison is a dangerous thing, right? 100%, yeah. Don't do that. Don't compare your story to mine. Like myself and Shane, like we've had, again, sleepless nights, anxiety. We've had, you know, we thought during COVID the business is gone. What are we going to do after? So do not compare stories. It's just pointless. And if anyone who just hops on about all the successes and don't tell you the reality of it, they're just lying to you.

56:39Like I'm telling you, I run a business. I speak to real business owners who, you know, like who do way more money than me, but then they're also losing money, but then they're doing other things to get money. It's just, it's, it's hard. Like, and this is the reality of it. So, and I can be open and transparent. Like, you know, like I said, some months are good, some months are bad, like, but that's okay. That's all part of business and growth. So we have to work towards wrapping up. I'd love to just kind of talk about the SKUs and some of the manufacturing side of things. Like how many SKUs do you guys have?

57:16Yeah, so we've got over 10 ,000 SKUs. Yeah, yeah. That's insane. Yeah, so we've managed to build close, well, definitely Australia's largest necktie sort of range.

57:33And yeah, in terms of managing that, again, Again, so I've got a degree in logistics supply chain management. I missed the course on SKU management, clearly. I missed the uni class on that. I could have probably used that one. But again, there's a strategy behind the madness. The reason behind that is because when people get married, there's a certain shade of purple they want to match to the bridesmaid dress. Guess what? We've got that color purple. And if you want a certain sort of tie color, we've got it. um if you want um the best non-iron shirts we've got it and it takes takes range um to get there and we're here we're here for the long term as well um but in saying that again the flip side of the lesson is if we were to explore you know setting up another warehouse in a different country we'd just um pick the top selling skews like that it's like praise principle 80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of stock like we started doing analysis it's like ah shit we're the same you know like it's and so again we we we haven't done everything perfectly and clear execution um but this is why it's a series of learnings um as well but in terms of a customer perspective it's really good because they can find what they want um and we we always are able to almost guide them to the to the right product and we always we always definitely have it yeah that's crazy 10 000 different skews and what's really interesting is that stock like it doesn't age you could you could have the one set of ties me shane joke joke about that yeah yeah like i think um we're like we can meet grandpas and our great-grandkids can wear one of these neckties um yeah dude it doesn't age um it's still good it's there's no expiry date on it um well funny funny story about that so um trends come in cycles as well so one year green's popular you know and all of a sudden we're selling out green ties the next year um blue's popular and also blue ties and and then pink's popular for a year and so it comes in cycles and so the stock that's been sitting there for like a few years all of a sudden it's roaring back into success and it's and because we've got it um it sells so there's a there's a there's a method to the madness it isn't all just madness um but yeah we're we in terms of the growth of it because we've learned that i advise people don't do what we did and like don't just spray and pray and get a bunch of um skews um the the apparel business is much more methodical it's um like everything that we do is well like um it's more well thought out it's more expensive the apparel business as well you've got to factor in returns um and you know but like this is why spending money on quality so they can keep it and they can keep forever.

1:00:45And like, that's the goal behind it. Like that's the better bet. And this is why I mean the long-term principles as opposed to like a quick dropshipping type business that, you know, comes and goes. I think that's kind of what we're trying to sort of bet on. Yeah. And I think what's clever, obviously you started with the neckties, then you went into the bowties, and then now you got into the apparel side. Adding that in obviously increases your average order value, higher average order value, the higher likelihood of being able to make ads work because you can spend more to acquire a customer.

1:01:24Damn, man. You know it all, dude. Exactly. You just articulated better than I could. I'm speaking of advice from you. That's perfect. I speak to a lot of people. Yeah, man. You've just hit the nail on the head. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. yeah so this is an auto polo so anyone who thinks why this guy didn't wear it like a necktie in the interview or a shirt in it yeah to this point like this auto polo here with that embroidered anchor like if you buy a shirt and a tie and a polo increases the average order value it increases our ability to acquire customers so this is where almost it becomes what's boring how simple it is but if you break down e-commerce it's like your ability to acquire a customer which is customer acquisition costs, which is pretty much very simply, how much does it cost to buy a customer?

1:02:08At the end of it, what the average order value is, the cost of fulfillment, you know, customer acquisition costs, put all into the equation and what you left is, you know, your profit. That's it. And so because of the large skew range and the insanity to our method and madness um we're able to drive up the average order values um and when we started the average order value was 30 bucks you know it's one time you know but then you know year two went to 40 bucks because we introduced pocket squares now year five so now the average order value is upwards of 150 bucks sometimes it's like 200 bucks um yeah so yeah because we we want people to um you know, yeah, buy the range of shirts and ties, which we really invest heavily on.