Ready to kick your single-use laundry plastic waste to the curb? Join us as we discuss our revolutionary direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand that eliminates plastic waste, and learn how they scaled up to an eight-figure run rate in under a year. By focusing on DTC sales and leveraging acquisition models like Facebook, Google, and influencer marketing, we were able to make a massive impact on the environment, saving approximately 107 million plastic containers from entering landfills and oceans.
With the introduction of their innovative laundry product, a strip of detergent, they faced the unique challenge of marketing a new form in the cleaning market. Listen in as we explore the importance of creative marketing, risk reversal, and providing a solid guarantee to customers. Plus, hear about their decision to introduce Amazon and retail into their business mix, and the current channel split between DTC, Amazon, and retail.
As we share practical tips on maximizing sales through bundling, leveraging Prime Day, and using price anchoring, discover how to overcome the challenges of managing inventory, navigating cash flow, and scaling up supply chains in a rapidly growing DTC business. Tune in for our insightful conversation filled with valuable takeaways on building a successful DTC brand, advertising mistakes and tips to bust customer objections, and create confidence in your product.
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We launched the brand April 2nd 2019, and we started off with a single product with two different SKUs. This one actually wasn't one of the first ones, but the original product was a laundry detergent in a strip form. We were really the first company to bring this aggressively to the market. There's been a bunch of people that have copied or followed in our footsteps since, but we're the only product that is manufactured in North America and is patented. We launched in April of 2019, and the business grew incredibly quickly. We were anticipating that it was going to be like a side of the desk little business. Instead, it wound up growing to an eight-figure run rate, doing more than a million dollars a month within less than a year. The trajectory of growth was absolutely insane. Here we are four years and a few months later, and we did a round of funding last year to help us grow some more. We're continuing to grow, obviously not at the same pace as 2019 pre-IOS 14.5 days but we're still moving. It's been an awesome journey to build a brand that is something that I can be proud of, because its mission is to eliminate single-use plastic waste. I think today we've eliminated approximately 107 million plastic containers from entering landfills and oceans.
Speaker 2:Did you say zero to eight figures in 12 months?
Speaker 1:Yeah, i think we did over a million dollars in DTC within nine months, just in a single month, not including Amazon or wholesale or anything like that. It was an insane trajectory.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, man. How did you scale it up so quickly? Was it just that you were able to reduce quite a lot of it and you were fortunate in the supply you chose?
Speaker 1:Yeah, i mean the manufacturer. that was the only product they were putting together. There wasn't too big of an issue with production. Obviously, 2019 is a little bit different than today in terms of how well the acquisition models work, compared to things that are a little bit different now. We were able to pretty rapidly scale the product just like bootstraps, so literally self-funded. and obviously when you sell fun, there's a lot of stick handling cash to make sure that you're healthy. But it was primarily on the backs of Facebook, google, some influencer stuff, but pretty simple. I wish I could tell you that it was some complicated secret sauce, but it's the basics.
Speaker 2:I'm surprised you went DTC first. I'm surprised your plan was a retail wholesale straight out of the gate. Is that right? You just thought go DTC. What was the feedback loop there when you did that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, honestly, between myself and my partners, we just didn't have a lot of experience in wholesale Me personally like retail, sorry, i had literally zero. My background was primarily DTC, so subscription products, print magazines with subscriptions, subscription boxes and it just made sense to go with what we knew. I had never even put a product on Amazon before this brand. It's funny because the first time that we put something up there it was probably three months after we launched and I went on vacation with my family and I just threw it up there. I'm like I should probably take a look and see how it's doing. I looked at my phone and I'm like, oh crap, we did like $500 today. I didn't even do anything. Where did this come from? I was like, oh my God, this is an opportunity that I was completely unaware, that. I knew, obviously knew about Amazon. I just never traversed that path.
Speaker 2:Amazon or Facebook. Which one would you cut from your business? You had to cut one. Facebook ads are Amazon.
Speaker 1:I'm still DTC first guy. I think that Amazon is obviously a mammoth beast. I think that DTC is actually more difficult in a sense, or so I hear, But that's again. it's like if you had to go into a hardware store and pick one tool because you know how to use it, the best DTC would be, and obviously Facebook would be the hammer that I would choose.
Speaker 2:What's the company split nowadays in terms of channels? What percentage is allocated to DTC wholesale Amazon?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're still primarily DTC. I would say that Amazon is probably like 20, trying to think wholesale is probably around 20, and then the rest is DTC. Those are rough numbers. I don't have the exact split in front of me, but Amazon and retail are both growing pretty aggressively.
Speaker 2:Are you still focusing most of your attention on DTC or is that shifting just at the moment to maybe some other channels?
Speaker 1:I think that if you set up your ecosystem properly, that pushing one one's up rising ties raise all ships or whatever. I find that whether it's Facebook ads or TV or Google, there's a halo effect. that happens Amazon will grow just as a result of there's 20 or 30% of people that will only buy it. They'll buy from Amazon. They see your ads, they go and Google it. they find it. they wind up buying there. Same thing with retail, especially with our product. that's for those that can see it's a strip. People don't go to the grocery store and go down the laundry detergent aisle and then like I wonder what's new in laundry this week? It's you go down, you grab the thing that you use on a regular basis and then you buy it and you get the hell out of the smelly laundry detergent aisle. So the building creative that goes beyond just D2C is really what's been valuable for us. And furthermore, to kind of like dig a little deeper on that, i don't think that retail is the ultimate solution for every single brand In the category like ours, we had to do a lot of education in order to drive people to stores or give them enough awareness to look for it. But, with that said, the decision to go into retail is largely based on what percentage of your vertical is purchased through that mechanism. Like 80% of laundry is bought at retail, so it would not be in retail, you're missing out on a massive segment of your potential audience.
Speaker 2:How much of a challenge was it? I mean, i feel like we've been conditioned, certainly since I can remember, to buy detergent as a liquid or as a tab. I don't know when the tab was brought into invention, but it makes some sense. How much of a challenge was it for you to overcome that, in that you're offering what is essentially a strip. Psychologically, to me, just being completely honest, it instantly puts a barrier up. How is that going to clean?
Speaker 1:How is this going to clean clothes? And again, i don't know who can visually see this, but this is a strip of laundry detergent, if you're watching the video.
Speaker 2:It looks a little bit like if you pulled off some of your grandma's wallpaper and put it into a sort of half an iPhone shape square.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's about two to three grams, i want to say like two inches by about four and a half inches per strip, and like when we were originally approached to work with this product, the first thing that I thought is exactly what you thought like how is that going to wash my clothes? And I think that's one of the reasons why having a solid guarantee is super valuable, because that is like I know, as like a guy that probably excuse me, like you know, i'm probably not the biggest laundry detergent researcher prior to buying a laundry product up until this product, and I would have just made that assumption. But after doing the research, when you look into it, there's only so much the active ingredient which is a surfactant that you can actually put in your laundry before it just gets rinsed down the drain, but it doesn't no longer has any impact. So these are basically these have been pre-dosed to basically provide the right amount of surfactant per load. And again, the first thing that I thought is exactly what you thought. And we brought them. They sent the patent holder, sent us a bunch of samples in the beginning and we tried it. I was like, oh my God, i can't believe that this actually works. And again, that's totally one of the biggest.
Speaker 2:The biggest challenges that we have is like to demonstrate to people that this actually can clean your clothes, i mean presumably you know, it's not a particularly considered purchase, especially not when you have the real estate of DTC to really hammer home the uniqueness And it's almost, if you haven't tried it, something fun to try. Well, this work, won't it work. You're not going to risk your house on it. But in retail setting it's a bit different, isn't it? Because you've got very little real estate to be able to communicate what it is and how it's going to work. People conditioned just to buy what they always buy. So how have you navigated? that Is it, with landing pages and social proof and all those things. And then and you see that spillover to retail, or you start to see people open up a bit and try new things in the aid of your biggest USP set plastic reduction, would you say.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's plastic reduction, it's, you know, space saving. It's like you know, a lot of people spell their detergent when they're cleaning it like little kids like to eat pods because they look like candy. But I think one of the tough parts with retail again, it's like when you walk down the laundry detergent aisle it's like a wall of these huge jugs. So just by virtue of the size that they are, they like command all of this real estate, which is also marketing opportunity for, you know, the companies that have that space. And so it's kind of a blessing and a curse because we can go to retail locations and say like listen, our product, you can fit like 80,000. 80 containers, right, so 80 packages or more in the same spot that you can hold like four containers of your traditional detergent. So your price per lineal foot is actually crazy higher, so you don't actually need to move as many to justify having this in your retail location. So like that's been a path to getting it into into stores. But you know, really at the end of the day, the big thing is really just educating people that this is an, this is something that they can buy. And just recently, i think, nielsen, they do a lot of the data on different markets and whatnot. We, because of what we've built, we're the first new laundry product to be put into these, the laundry detergent reports, since since pods made their way into the market, or so I've heard internally in announcements at the company. I haven't, i haven't validated that, i never paid for the Nielsen data, but I've heard, i've heard that that's going around the company right now.
Speaker 2:So now you're you're the King Laundry man. What things have you learned about doing laundry that surprised you or interested you? I'm imagining you spent a lot of time there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I've been on TV a few times and they've called me a laundry expert. My wife didn't agree, so I learned that my wife doesn't agree that I'm a laundry expert. I what else have I learned? I've learned a lot about, like, the underlying mechanism, the underlying mechanisms, how laundry works And it's you know, it's, it's pretty exciting, like but no, you know we've. we've produced a couple other products off the back of this. Like we just recently came out with a fabric softener, and a fabric softener introduces a lot of technical challenges, because I'm not going to nerd out too hard on it, but like, essentially a surfactant tries to push all the dirt away from the clothes and a fabric softener So, like you typically put your fabric softener in the fabric softener area in your washing machine and it would go in after the watch cycle to soften it. So we actually made one which is crazy that actually uses the surfactant to again, i'm not a scientist here, but it actually reacts with the chemical in laundry detergent, so you can put it in together and you don't have to like do some sort of song and dance to get it in afterwards And it actually. it actually behaves positively with the surfactant instead of negatively, which was. I don't know if there's a lot of other technologies out there that can soften clothes in the same mechanism. but you know, we had to fly all the way across Canada, which is enormous, and spend a week at the scientists and like going through like what are the important things for us and what aren't, and then like doing all these blind tests and I got COVID and which actually was remarkably not so bad. But you know that's what. I went through COVID, i went through COVID, getting COVID to release these products, but I don't know Like the answer to your question is not really that fun. Like laundry is the second most hated chore in North America. There's not a hole. I can say that they're really spicy enough.
Speaker 2:We want really is table states for any e-commerce store. It backs your store up consistently and it offers you an undo button just in case something was to go wrong on your store which, let's be honest, can happen. And it also provides you a staging environment so that you can have a carbon copy of your live environment to do all your good testing on your QA, try new ideas and not have to worry about breaking something on the live environment. Check code conflicts, app conflicts, everything in between. It's a must have going to store it. Well, yeah, i mean, there's always these myths. I don't know about this. There's the ones that I come across, which is, if you use fabric softener, you can't dry your clothes or tumble dry your clothes.
Speaker 1:It will remove, it's not a myth.
Speaker 2:It's not a myth, so that's true. Okay, right, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, so actually. So basically, when you're making this fabric softening product, you have, like you have a choice like how soft do you want to make this? because it's essentially lubricating the outside of the clothing, so it's like bonding these, like things to it And you want you still want your towels to dry your clothes And I've like bought towels before that like I went to dry it and dry myself off and it just felt like the water was like not sticking to them. I think that's what you're talking about. So you basically have to choose like what's the happy medium? We still want the clothing to have the performance of the clothing or how it was designed, but you also want to have some softening effects so that people feel like they're getting a softener. So it's really like science-ing down to like how do we make this soft enough so that it makes people happy, but not so soft that their clothes have like an oleophobic property to them?
Speaker 2:Oh man, keep making them softer. I'll take the softest clothes you can make, just wrap me up Just like a giant blanket of clothes. I'd love it. Yeah, I didn't use fabric softener until quite recently really, and I've just learned I've been using it very wrong because I usually then tumbledry. So public service announcement look at the knowledge you gain from this podcast. Then tumbledry guys if you use your fabric softener. Just before we get into prime, talk to me about scents. Do you scent them? If you do, how do you choose the right scents to use?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. So we originally launched with two scents sorry, one scented and one unscented. And then we did one of launching a third scents, which is lilac breeze, which is purple, um, smells, smells, very purple. Um, you know, uh, from a scent perspective it's, it's, there's a big percentage of people that like fragrance free clothes, and then there are people that are like obsessed with things that smell well and like, as you've probably seen, like all the bounty unstoppable commercials, and there's a whole bunch of different products now that are really focused on scent. Um, we've never really leaned too hard into it, like we could add something called an encapsulated scent, which would be more potent, but we've always kind of been trying to maintain like a hypoallergenic stance so that the product, like too much scents isn't good for the environment either. So we're trying to keep happy balance, keep people's allergies at bay and um try to provide mild, gentle scents that um delight people and, you know, make them want to continue sniffing our packs.
Speaker 2:That's a good sentence. I want to reword that one on your next podcast Um, but yeah, no, i mean for sure. I mean it amazes me that these companies such as yourselves are able to create a scent that um binds to clothing and lasts for at least a few hours and smells great. You can buy a hundred dollar bottle of puff on and it's, you know, gone within a matter of minutes. Um, so it's wizardry for sure, but I enjoy a scent when I can remember to do it. There's something about it, but there are like said environment. What's your preferred scent? They always have such ridiculous names like autumn, blossom, mornings or, like you know, elephants breath, So I don't know what. what is it? how are you gonna like? it smells kind of like a papaya meets. uh, you know, fresh wind, Yeah yeah, like a papaya breeze.
Speaker 1:Like you know, the funniest thing man is trying to name these scents. So, like, the reason why it's funny is because everything is frigging trademarked. It's insane, Like, like, like, every possible combination of breeze spring, like everything. it's just they're all gone. and um, like we were joking around, like with Lila breeze, like one of the names were like let's call it pussy willow breeze And I was like that one might get taken out of context.
Speaker 2:but playing faster loose there, You might end up in the wrong shops if you do that.
Speaker 1:Yes, people definitely be sniffing your package of things like that.
Speaker 2:All right, let's not get bogged down in potential cancellation. I mean you've got to go. Let's move swiftly on to prime day. Is that a day that you will be focusing on? Is that part of your calendar?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, honestly, in the past couple of years we've we've obviously spent more money during prime day, We've spent more money during like on our DTC side during prime day and stuff, but historically we never participated in the actual discounting because we've always had this belief that, um, we didn't want to excessively discount our product in order to, um, you know, make sales, and that's common, common thing for some people. But this year we're we're planning on participating. Have they actually released the date yet? I know that they are speculating, um, or last I was talking to our PR company, they were speculating on what the date is. I'm not sure if it's actually been announced yet, but we will be participating this year. but I think we're going to be, because I have this great hatred for for deep discounting and training people to wait for sales. I think we're going to be going with that, playing with the idea of bundling.
Speaker 2:Hmm on Amazon. Just go to July the 11th and July 12th, tuesday and Wednesday, 2023.
Speaker 1:Yeah, typically, typically, we that's generally how we do our our sales, like our, like our DTC sales are either with like bundling or like free gifts, and instead of discounting, we offer, um you know, something extra with it. I know the Amazon, to participate in, priming need to be like at least 20% off. So our goal is to include some of our newer products mixed with our traditional products at a better rate.
Speaker 2:And you're talking about doing this on your own store or on Amazon.
Speaker 1:No, no, both, both. So this could be like a massive roll the dice, but, you know, i think at the end of the day, this gets us an opportunity to get more listings, to get more real estate when people are searching for our brand, um, and gives us an opportunity to give a discount, um, but and you know, i think there's a lot of people that, like myself included, uh, that will buy products during prime day that I've like kind of considered but like was waiting for a reason to do it. So, um, i think that there's a lot of opportunity to introduce new customers to multiple new products at the same time. And, yeah, see, that's that's kind of the plan.
Speaker 2:So you're going to put together some kind of prime day bundle and do some images and put that up as a once off or first introduction product for prime day and discount that total bundle price on Amazon Right, And are you going to be building landing pages? Are you going to be putting talk to me about the DTC site? What are you going to do for conversion rate optimization? Do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, um, you know historically what we do when we do, uh, uh, one of these sales is, obviously we whip up a landing page that's um, that's geared towards whatever the event is, and sometimes our designer or developer will kind of come up with some sort of creative new idea. So when those happen, uh well, we actually will split test, so we'll have an A and a B and if the sale runs for, say, five or six days, we'll based on the volume of traffic that we sent to it. we can generally get a pretty good idea in like a day or so which, um, which model works better, and then, um, focus all the traffic on that one, moving forward.
Speaker 2:Nice. Okay, and in terms of your landing pages that you've used previously, what have you found to be the most effective, specifically for you guys in terms of elements on the page, things that you sort of include on every landing page, social proof, you see? does that work for you guys? Like, just, can you give us a list to kind of run down of your pages and what works well?
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. So usually we have some sort of logo at the top, for, because obviously a sales event is typically going to perform the best with people that are brand aware already, we usually put some sort of logo tied to what the event is. So if it's like Valentine's Day or if it's like Earth Day, or if it's whatever Prime Day, we'd have something up there specifically stating why these deals are available. And then if it's less than a couple of five or six days, sometimes we'll put some kind of timer just denoting when the sale is going to end. I find that if you have more than like five days, people tend to be like oh, i can just put this off until later. So if the sales you know five days might even be pushing it, but three, four days, i like to put a timer on there just to let them know, drive up the urgency a little bit. And then I like to use what I call top down selling. So, or another term, for it's like price anchoring, so we'll put the most expensive bundles at the top. We also know which bundles generally perform the best, so we usually put those at the top with usually some sort of like free gift And as you go down the page the offers get less expensive And we usually see like our AOVs at least double during these periods in comparison to just casual shopping.
Speaker 2:What's the psychology behind that. Where does that come from?
Speaker 1:The financial part, like the top down selling, like the price anchoring. Sorry my throat. So price anchoring is just a psychological bias, right? So if you start with something that's expensive and the person looks at it and thinks it's expensive as the price decreases as they scroll down the page, like, okay, that's reasonable. If you start with something high, everything else seems low as they go down. And then somebody who's more logical and wants to see like, oh, what's the price per load or what's the value, They'll kind of do some comparisons and they'll realize, okay, well, this actually makes the most sense for me. I know I'm going to do laundry for a year. I might as well just take this larger bundle, kind of like a Costco shopper, and then not worry about having to buy laundry products for the next year. Oh, and it's pretty cool, I also get this, whatever this other product, for free, to try, as a result of making a bigger purchase.
Speaker 2:Okay, that makes sense. So logo you change, you style it in the theme of the sale. What advantages does that bring? Because that's something that I don't see many people do. Sorry, i missed that.
Speaker 1:Why do we? we don't stylize the logo? We'll have the logo and then we'll have, just like, the name of the event. Or I say reason why. So like again, i can't remember what the psychological principle is, but Robert Kail Vanny wrote a book, i think it's like 50 Ways to Yes or something like that. He's a lot. Some author is persuasion and influence And they did a study where if you go, the people are waiting in line for whatever and you go up and you ask to go in front of them in line. If you give them any reason whatsoever, like can I go in front of you, i'm late for something, 95% of people comply. If you go up and you say like, hey, can I go in front of you, i don't want to wait, it doesn't really matter what it is. It's just the fact that there's a reason and you're saying it immediately makes it difficult for somebody to bust the objection. If you just go up and say, can I go in front of you, we'll be like no, go to the back of the line. But as soon as you say the reason why it's the same thing with the sale If you don't say that this is tied to a specific event, they may believe that in the world of e-commerce, where people are constantly trying to manipulate people into making a purchase, denoting specifically what it's for, and then that person being able to connect the dots and oh, it's primed, oh it's Thanksgiving, oh it's Black Friday, they're like okay, that logic makes sense. I'm interested in this product. I should see what's available.
Speaker 2:And how many units do you try and shift? I liked what you said before about people reasoning with themselves about oh, i'm going to do laundering for the rest of my life, i may as well purchase six months' worth of this, because I'm going to need it and it's a discount. So have you worked out what your point of diminishing returns is? for how many units you try and get someone to buy in that primed day transaction or really any other sale transaction, or is it usually just one unit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so surprisingly the customer journey. A lot of times it looks like they'll start with a 32 or a smaller pack in a trial environment And then, once they've decided that this is for them, a lot of times when we do one of these events they'll take the 384, which is, if you're a single person, that's a hell of a lot of laundry. If you have a family of four, that's statistically a family of four does about one load of laundry per day, not like it might not be every day, but like on Saturday you might do like three loads and Sunday you might do two, and then you might do sheets a couple of times during the week, or towels, super soft towels. But on average the reason was 384, not 365, which would have been one a day was initially when we first started. We didn't have a 384 box, we were just giving 12, 32 packs. So that's how it started, kind of where we still are. It's probably a little bit too much, but it works.
Speaker 2:After a decade ago, when I was messing around with Magento, we were quoting apps at 60,000 per platform iOS, android designed and developed, starting from and companies were buying them because it was such an incredible return on investment. Now, in today's world, in the world of Shopify, tapcar exists And it floored me when I heard that they were going to offer you the ability to have an app in under four weeks, and it's not only that, that they design it for you at least the first version and show it to you with a business case without you having to spend a penny. Seriously, you can go and check it out push notifications, retention, loyalty it's all at your doorstep. And how good are you with your data then? So, if you know someone's gone in and purchased that 384 pack, are you excluding them from campaigns like this, like Prime Day, in things like email marketing, sms marketing?
Speaker 1:To be honest, i'm not the one running the day to day on email now, but we do talk a lot about segmenting and trying to not hit those people with too many emails. The one thing that is cool about our product, though, and why it's still valuable to offer these sales to people who have bought 384s, is I don't know if there's been another product in laundry detergent in the last. I don't know how many years that people are giving it to their family members for Christmas. Like there's, like there. It's insane how many Facebook messages we get oh, my mom bought me this and put it in my stocking, or. But there's like a huge gift in culture tied to like, like laundry detergent, and it's weirdly novel. Like there's like this big Italian dude that teaches at the school that I high school that I went to, and there's somebody that works with us whose son goes there and he like sends us a picture of this big Italian dude, and I would never, i can never in my wildest dreams, imagine seeing this big dude holding like a box of laundry. But he's like holding a box of laundry and like pointing at it and smiling. It's, it's. I think the fact that it's so novel has transcended the. I hate laundry so much that I don't like. You know. It's just a crazy. It was a crazy phenomenon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I think more is just on email came up with quite a good one. I saw on Twitter, which was the plus one concept, where they were emailing out and their limited time offer sent their final email offer closes in two hours or whatever. go make your purchase and then anyone that didn't open that email The next day they'd send final extension email, knowing that, you know, with a discount code, rather than having a timer on the website to just try and juice that last little bit, which I thought was quite clever, which was interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i think that. I think that the only problem I think with that is, if you do that too much, then, like I know, dtc, the world of DTC turns over so quickly. But I think you just got to be careful that you don't get no, you don't become known for being the brand that always has that.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're still extending it one more time, you know, i think especially when you've got a product that is so frequently bought has a high purchase frequency. It's less if you're selling sofas, it makes more sense, but Totally Yeah. So is there anything you're doing or strategically planning to juice Amazon? Will you be allocating more spend to keywords on Amazon? Will you be creating a shop page on Amazon and trying to drive traffic there to do some education, or are you just going to free roll it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have a shop page and everything on Amazon. Again, i mean, our company is pretty big now. We have, like there's probably 120 people. So I don't know the exact specifics around like every strategy or every tactic that's going to be implemented, but we definitely are starting to put more resources to things like I mean it's like a lot of people are doing this, but putting some resources towards, like Google search, like direct Amazon. You know some advertorials that give an offer, like offer the consumer an opportunity to either pick from Amazon or or direct from DTC. And then you're also I mean we're not doing this yet but like the pay with Amazon team is introducing some pretty interesting things. I don't 100% understand how it works yet, but I think that has some interesting future in the DTC space where you can potentially leverage people that previously wouldn't buy from DTC with the buy with Prime. But we're not there yet. We're not, we're not touching it. It's still kind of like on the radar, but not enough to jump in, you know do you use FBA for fill by Amazon Or?
Speaker 2:do you do. Okay, yeah, what have you found? I mean, have you found that against using Other three PLs if you ever did, or did you go straight into FBA?
Speaker 1:So we, we, i mean we use three PLs for D to C and then we use FBA for, specifically for Amazon We? there was a period, what happened? there was a period where we had to ship FBM. Briefly, i can't remember what happened, but it mean FBM is there's a lot of, there's a lot of rules You have to abide by to make sure that you, you know, you don't screw up And say in Amazon's good books, but the as a whole, like I mean the biggest challenge. I think with FBA there was a couple issues during COVID where they were limiting stock. I think again, i'm not in the day-to-day of the Amazon side, but I think that there still isn't quite the total Allowable inventory that there used to be. So there's basically this cat-and-mouse game of like trying to make, like, being on top of inventory all the time. And then you know, in terms of like three PLs, we have like one, two, i think we're in like like probably four, three PLs. One of my, one of the founders of true earth, has a three PL here in Vancouver. So it operates kind of like Western Canada, northwestern US, and then we have a true earth has its own three PL and Mississauga, ontario, and then we're using a couple different American three PLs In the US to make sure that we get like delivery within a couple days. International international we have. We have basically a company shipping all of our product in UK and handling the Amazon as FBA there. For Amazon Australia there's local distribution and we're like all over Europe. I just I don't know the exact, the exact breakdown, but I think we're pretty much only FBA in North America, uk and Australia, although I don't think I don't think Amazon's huge in Australia.
Speaker 2:No, I think you're right. Yeah, I had that too. It's um, it's not as dominant as it is everywhere else. Just tell me a bit about your suppliers then. Have they been able to scale with you as you've grown this? Have you changed suppliers? Have you taken on the supply side yourself? Like what? what's the story there? Is it just been pretty smooth sailing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the, the laundry, our laundry detergent manufacturer, it's the. It's been the same ones the entire time in Canada. And then our dishwasher stuff We actually manufactured ourselves. You know it was crazy. When we launched the dish we had a really large retail order and it was. It was like this race against the clock to manufacture enough and like Manufacturing is a completely different beast than then, you know, running a to see your Amazon business like it's actually work right. Yeah, i mean I'm not gonna pretend like I'm the one that did it, but like you know, you start with like okay, how many of these can we do? How many batches can we create in a day? and like, okay, well, we need this many to fill this order, so we need to figure out a way to produce this much more. and then like Building the whole facility to handle it and like it was, it was crazy like Our team did like an amazing job handling it. But just just quick question on that Where?
Speaker 2:did you get the cash to do it?
Speaker 1:So we did raise. We did a raise last year and we'd partially cashload the The cost to do it originally and then we use some of the VC funds I think to to push it over the edge. But yeah, like, honestly, like producing your own product is not cheap, like, quite frankly, like if I was to go in, like, start from scratch, like, and not have any of this existing infrastructure to play this game, i'd be probably looking for somebody who had a product that could white label or, like you know, customize, because, like I mean, it worked out, it was, it's a great product. It just took a ton of resources and It was, i think was stressful for a lot of people involved.
Speaker 2:But how fine to the line Did it get with with cash flow and things? I know, obviously you got VC money, so that takes some of the burden off, but was it? was it touch and go for it to get that bad? or was it because I've heard that most people who do this Get pretty close to the wire with With doing it? if you can get through it, then great, but was it? you know, without the VC money I imagine impossible, but with the VC money, was it just like imaginable, manageable, which restful was it? You know, really quite tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i don't know like, I think it would have been really, really tough if we didn't have the VC money. Like we were doing it, and I think it was like, again, i don't, i don't have the financials in front of me and I'm the CMO, i'm not the CEO, so I don't have every. I'm one of the founders but, like you know, i just it's not really 100% my lane, but you know, i don't know the. It probably would have been challenging to finish it without the VC money and then, honestly, like the ramp up period, like there's, you have all these delays, trying to get the product out the door, and then somebody places a big order on the wholesale side And it's like we want to sell this D to C But we can't launch it because we don't want to steal inventory from a huge retail purchase. So it was like trying to get the. The big challenge was really like how do we get the manufacturing up like high enough over The rate that we need to sustain to fill that order so that we can also simultaneously start selling direct? and it was, it was a. It was a fun challenge.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. Well, listen, i would love to know a little bit about packaging design. I don't know if you were part of that team. How, how, how much has it changed and what were the catalysts for change to get it to where it is today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, good question. So originally like our. It's funny like we were not CPG guys, we were not like it, just we had one of our magazine Graphic artists help us like, come up with our logo and like our design and we put the the benefits that we thought we're gonna be the most valuable. We looked at some other products and tried to, like you know, make sure that we checked all the boxes. And I mean I think the biggest lesson is here is like if you're gonna, if you're gonna, start one of a new business, there's gonna be a whole lot of stuff that you don't know how to do, but you're gonna have to do it anyways. And like you can sit around and like dream, read books and take courses and and try to make sure that everything's perfect, but at the end of the day, nothing's going to move the ball faster than taking action. And at the end of the day, there was no few of us. We decided what we thought it was gonna look like. Was it the best packaging? Probably not. We've since moved to like again. I didn't know all the stuff four and a half years ago. We've now, you know, we understand how that, how we can validate Packaging using tools like in Tel Aviv I don't know what, what other ones that are out there where you can have panels of people Tell you which package they're the most drawn to and you can do test after test after test after test and comparison to other brands That are similar until you consistently beat the other packages. And I mean that's a huge way to get a leg up on Amazon. But it's also a huge way to get a leg up once you're in retail And you know, at the end of the day, probably even D to C. But when we started I had no idea that any of that existed and we didn't even know Like we didn't even know specifically which benefits were the most important to our consumers. Because we're new, you know we could do as much research as we could find online and other than that, it was like let's roll the dice and see what happens. And here we are, you know, four years later and We're now trying to make sure that we follow proper best practices.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So in packaging, so difficult to get right, retail, wholesale, d to C, amazon, just the semi-conflict it. Do you ever break your packaging apart and Optimize it specifically per channel? I know you never were talking before about how they optimize their mobile packaging and digital imagery. They increase the size of certain elements on the packaging So it's easily readable on a device for Amazon on mobile. It's like there's like a whole industry around. You know the nuances of packaging design, but do you use one consistent package across all channels? Would you break it?
Speaker 1:So, yeah, good question. So, like in Europe, like there's regulatory issues in a lot of different places. So We are moving towards like the US, having US packaging that just has English on it. In Canada We have like English and French. In the UK We made a French on it too, that's just actually I don't remember. But the UK is different packaging too, like I think, i think. Like I think I think like from a, from a different channel, like like retail versus Amazon, versus D to C. We actually did in the beginning because Our packaging, this one's been opened Getting so in the beginning. This is what the package looks like now. But in the beginning this was like flat all the way down and there was a piece of paper that attached here that could tear off. People can't see it on the back. It basically had a protective piece of paper that kind of stuck down to the bottom and we would put the address on the on that piece of the paper and it doubled as a mailer. So it was extra environmentally friendly. But that looks it looks like crap when it's on a grocery store. So we had this more streamlined, easy to tear option for retail and the Human resources to manage like two or three SKUs, plot like we have so many SKUs as is, but like to manage like it just added like a like a skew proliferation nightmare. So we were trying to simplify it now and just a You know you make one packaging change and you have to change a million different things and actually in line with that We're we've got like some automation that packages the products and stuff. I think we're actually looking to have the the package put the load count on when it's when it's folding it, so that, like we can have one standardized package and Like not have to juggle so many different versions of everything.
Speaker 2:You know I Yeah, sounds like a headache.
Speaker 1:But yeah, this is what you have.
Speaker 2:This is what you pay people to do, right? One thing that just popped into my head while you were talking you showed me the packages. I wonder. I'd love to know how much waste there is with liquid detergents, because, if you're anything like me, you fill it to the brim every time because, anything else would be ridiculous. You know, if you actually did, it's like cereal. No one is eating the prescribed 30 grams of cereal and no one is filling up their washing machines to the prescribed amount. I am filling that thing the whole way. I think probably use like five or six loads. I want those big bottles, the same with conditioners. So I like the fact that you just launch a tab into the abyss and that's all you need to do. There's no kind of measuring involved from a cost perspective, but also from an environment perspective. I guess that helps. Let's finish with a quick rapid fire. If that's okay with you, let's go. The biggest mistake made to date in the business.
Speaker 1:In true earth or like in any business.
Speaker 2:Up to you.
Speaker 1:Biggest mistake? Oh man, i would probably say the skew proliferation. That's not that big of a mistake, but it's annoying.
Speaker 2:Right Worst advertising investment True earth.
Speaker 1:Worst advertising, trying to think of like a bad campaign that we threw out there. I put some money in towards getting a documentary made and the guy has been a couple of years and it hasn't seemed like it's made any progress. So that was a pretty big waste of money Just playing with nothing happened or Yeah, it was like okay, that's not how usually this works.
Speaker 2:All right. On the flip side of that, the best advertising dollars that you spent.
Speaker 1:So we actually they're not only right now, because we had some issues with some other brands that are very large. They didn't like them, but we had about a billion views on some of our funny creative that we had produced, like with this video called I'm sure if you Google it you could probably find it on somebody else's channel, but like things you should never mix with water was huge. It had like hundreds. like it probably had like 10 million views in like a day. It was like I don't know if you can still find it. There was another one, real Men Do Laundry and there was another one that did really well. We called it Game Show and it was like this prices right type set up was really awesome.
Speaker 2:Future focus closing out 2023. Where will the company be if it's achieved everything it wants to achieve?
Speaker 1:I think it would be nice if we were in majority of the large retailers in the United States. We're in a considerable number of them, but not quite all of them. I just thought of another bad mistake, that we made actually. Okay. So this one's like a little bit funnier. So we did those two first funny videos and I was like we need to do something a little bit different. I want to get like Purple Mattress did an ad that had like a Sasquatch or like something like that in it. So I'm like I want to do a Sasquatch video. We got to do a Sasquatch video And so I spent like $3,000 making this Hollywood Sasquatch mask that can only be used two times because we have the mouth and everything connected. And the Sasquatch looked like it like a dying coyote, like it just looked unhealthy And like he was eating like beans off the table and it looked like poop And like man. We were getting like hate emails from people saying like I will volunteer to make you new ads, like I can't believe you put a dying Sasquatch and like try to convince us to buy like this multi-service cleaner And like it was just I'm pretty sure that ads still on YouTube. But like it was just a disaster And it was not cheap. It cost us. It was like a high production video, but did he use the Harmon Brothers? Pardon me.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:I didn't, but I used somebody that I met through the Harmon Brothers to do it. It was actually. I've been on Harmon Brothers podcast as a result of some of the content that we've created, but no, but the tip is to never use ugly creatures to sell your product, because nobody wants to see a dying Sasquatch eat poop.
Speaker 2:No, i can imagine. I can imagine. Final thing anything you can drop, give away to the audience. that maybe is a bit of secret source for yourself, something you might have learned over the years, something you found that really works. A little tip about how big or small could be to do with anything that you can drop for everyone listening, if they make it as far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm actually. I've got a video that I'm going to be releasing soon, but I'll give you, like the you don't see a lot of people talk about risk reversal outside of monetary risk reversal. So there's five types of risk that you can reverse in order to limit people's perception of the risk that they face when buying your product. And there's an acronym for it. It's timer. T is for time. How much time is it going to take me to buy and use this product? Like it is going to take two weeks for it to arrive. It's going to take three weeks to arrive. This is a gift for somebody. How can I bust that? How can I reverse that risk? and, like you know, one day, delivery in US or whatever. Also, time in terms of like fitness products if you look at like something like the Abflex from the early 90s, it was like the time it takes you to get the result like abs in three minutes a day. So, like time is a big risk. Identity is a risk. When somebody buys your product is in line with who they believe that they are or who they want to be.
Speaker 2:If.
Speaker 1:I'm an environmentally focused person and you're trying to pitch me on this amazing new plastic product, even if I love the idea that I'm going to have dissonance tied to making that purchase because my I identify as somebody that doesn't use plastic. So how do you bust identity related risk and monetary? That's what everybody uses. You don't like the product will give you your money back, and that's one of the bigger ones And that's why everybody uses. It is for energy. How much energy am I going to consume in order to get the benefits of this product? So if true, earth was a laundry detergent and it wasn't in a strip form and it was like this magical clay that I had to spend, you know, every time I went to go do my laundry, roll it up, put it in a package and, like, put it into the washing machine. That's energy. It's kind of like people who roll their own cigarettes. Most people won't buy it because it's I don't smoke, but like when you're rolling cigarettes, that takes energy to do it. So how do you like? how do you eliminate the energy risk? And then the last one's, reputation, and this is like. The three big ones are time, money, reputation. Reputation is how you think people are going to perceive you if you do this thing. So I'll use the environmentally friendly thing again, like if I am eco friendly and I'm secretly obsessed with these like single use plastic spoons I'm not going to have people over to my house and break these out or take them out to lunch at a picnic, because my rep how I think people are going to perceive me is is important to me, tied to this particular thing. So that's another type of risk that you can bust. So people don't usually think about all the different risks associated with making a purchase, when, when they're trying to sell somebody something And it's low hanging fruit to kind of like interlay this into your offer, ways that people are not going to like basically busting these objections so that people feel 100% confident that the product is right across all five of these potential risks.
Speaker 2:Surely, washing out the objections, disdaining the objections, would be more for the Lord. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1:Where can people find more content like that? Yeah, you can find me on YouTube if you just search my name, ryan McKenzie. I'm on Twitter, rye MCKENZEE. It was the IE, depending on where you are. Yeah, or you can go to get some laundry detergent at truearth. There's nocom when there's no e on troop. That's pretty much it.
Speaker 2:Thank you for watching.