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DTC POD: How The Best Brands Are Built

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Oct 6, 2022 • 55min

#230 - Nigel Thomas: ROAS is Dead, The Keys To Building Bottom Line Revenue

On this episode of DTC Pod, Nigel joins Blaine to break down the foundational building blocks for brands that want to build profitable businesses. They cover topics like how to build solid unit economics, types of content that perform, optimizing customer journeys, understanding attribution, copywriting, landing pages, as well as benchmarks to hit to build a successful brand. 6:35The first one, and we'll get back to this in a second, because it's the most important is unit economics by what are unit economics. The second thing is the content. Again, you can't turn water into wine. If we don't have good enough content to work with, we add need to get that content from the brands, or we need to go out there and use one of our content partners and just get really good content. The third one is the customer journey. At the end of the day, if you've got the best starts in the world, it doesn't matter if the customer journey CRO isn't in place and obviously the retention and it all connects congruently. The fourth area is attribution.10:00 It doesn't matter how good your creative is. It doesn't matter how good your copy is. At the end of the day, if you've got the stronger economics in the backend, you'll always win. Now, add on top of that. Great copy, great customer journey, great creative. Then that's a house on fire.13:30So average order value must be above $50. And again, maybe we can work them to get it above $50 by changing the landing page, but $50, especially at scale, you need that these days, you really do need that. Then the other thing is the CPA to lifetime value ratio, needs to ideally be one to three. I'm saying, ideally within even a 60, 90 day period.21:20 This landing page is built to do one thing. It's built to sell products. There's no light areas for them to click out into the homepage or anything else. All the friction was removed. And we're talking, one of the things that most people don't understand is copywriting. It's all about the headline. That's where most of the people are going to bounce off. It needs of course, beyond brand, but it also needs to hit real deep on the emotions and pain points. David Ogilvy says, they spend 80% of the time researching, 20% of the time writing. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokNigel Thomas - CEO of Alpha InboudRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated
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Oct 4, 2022 • 56min

#229 - Rob Willey: The CMO's Guide To Business Transformation

On this episode of DTC Pod, Rob joins Blaine to talk about how to operate a consumer brand and think like a seasoned executive. They talk about what channels to focus on to grow, how to tap into existing infrastructure, deciding what to prioritize, how to nail a rebrand, finding quick wins for your brand, ins and outs of the beverage and wellness space, bringing a new concept to market, the similarities between marketplace and DTC as a consumer executive, positioning TaskRabbit in a competitive landscape, taking a wholistic approach to marketing, solving issues at their root cause, and much more. 6:40 First, Stop Bad Spend 🚦 And so after kind of understanding the business and understanding the consumer, which I think any good executive needs to do, I don't care what department or what sort of team you lead you, then for me it was kinda like, okay, I, I actually start to try to diagnose what's wrong, you know? And because usually those are the places where you gotta stop spending first. And in my career, I'll be honest with you, people have brought me in because they need something fixed. And so that's usually the case with executives. Turnover happens, particularly at this CMO level because something's not going right.7:30 The Price Of Being Unremarkable 💵 Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. And as a marketer, right, early in my career, I found that sort of offensive, you know, one of the executives at Task Rabbits said that to me. And at first it kind of like, sort of hurt my feelings. I was like, Wow, is that really how marketing is, you know, perceived? But then as I started thinking about it, I, it's true. You know, the more, the, the less remarkable you are as a company, as a brand, as a product, the more expensive it is to convince people to use it.10:30 What the best Startups Get Right 💯 Every good young startup does a couple things. Well, if they wanna be successful, paid social is one of them. Generally PR is one of the other ones, right? Search marketing is part of that. Uh, and then ultimately you have to drive email or retention. And if you can get those systems in place early on, usually at least have some revenue. You have some retention, you have some ltv, right? Your LTV c a ratio starts to like at least look a little healthy and you got something to go on. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokRob Willey - CMO  of CheribundiRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated
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Sep 29, 2022 • 49min

#228 - Jesse Pujji: Kahani & The Future of Mobile Commerce

On this episode of DTC Pod, Jesse joins Blaine to talk about the future of commerce. They discuss mobile commerce, moving from agency to brand owner, increasing conversion, bootstrapping, fundraising, testing out MVPs, getting customer buy in, developing product roadmaps, and much more. 1:17 The Future of Mobile CommerceSo the best way to think about Kahani is ask the question if Shopify or Squarespace or any of the big Ecom, website builders were to build today, what would they use? Would they use a website? Our answer is no. We think that what they would use is something that looks a lot more like TikTok and Instagram. So that's what we're building with Kahani. The vision is in three or five years, you won't go to a URL where you'll start scrolling and tapping around. You'll land on a video or really a picture that sort of takes over your phone. And from there, you'll start to swipe, tap and use all the mobile features that we're used to using in apps. You'll use those on an ECom URL. So that's kind of the big vision. 4:00 Startups Are Like Video GamesI will say entrepreneurship is like a video game. You know, you, you gotta beat the boss on level one before you get to level two. You know, I dunno if you're a big gamer, but when I was a kid, you'd put the cheat code in, you'd go to level five and you'd get crushed. Because even if you could cheat your way to level five, you didn't even know what to do at level five, because you had to have beaten level three and level four to, to figure it out. So I think the same is true for building businesses. 16:00 Save These Strategies for Day 1I think affiliate and email are day one strategies because you get someone else to send you traffic for free, right? So even if you don't have product, of course they're not gonna like it, but I think affiliate you can treat it like they're early customers. If you're a brand, you call them, you build a relationship with them. Hey, this is Jesse, I'm trying to sell a new type of iPhone charger. Here's why I think it's a winner. I'd love for you to place it on there, but look, I'm early. It's funny how much people hide that in the early days. And in my experience in my career, even as an experienced entrepreneur, I've found that sharing that truth and that vulnerability people wanna take a bet on you. You know?18:30It's my number one piece of advice for, for DTC entrepreneurs or even CMOs at bigger companies is when you complain about your CPA relative to your CPM, all you're saying is that I'm not a very good marketer and you go, well, what do you mean by that? I was like, well, other people are somehow making their business work for a $20 CPM. It's your job as the marketer to figure out the click-through rate and conversion rate needed to be able to compete in the market because somebody else is willing to pay $20. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokJesse Pujji - Founder of Kahani & AmpushRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated
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Sep 27, 2022 • 44min

#227 - Gretchen Hollingsworth: Ink + Alloy - Wholesale 101 For DTC Brands

On this episode of DTC Pod, Gretchen joins Blaine to talk about wholesale as a massive competitive edge as a go-to-market strategy for consumer products. They talk about starting paddywax, scaling a business over a career, leveraging wholesale early on, merchandising strategy, selling into big retailers, the inspiration for Ink & Alloy, business building as a 2nd time founder, and much more. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokGretchen Hollingsworth - CEO & Funder of INK + ALLOY Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel
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Sep 22, 2022 • 55min

#226 - Courtney Klein: Storq - Maternity & Apparel. Going Niche To Win Big

On this episode of DTC Pod, Courtney joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about leveraging a niche audience to find scale in apparel. They cover topics including finding your market, your first production run, starting limited but focused, seasonal vs. season-less products, subtleties of niche markets, bootstrapping & growth, affiliates & influencer channels, influencer management tools, tiktok strategy, and more.2:30More children are being born to women over 30 than ever before in American history. When women give birth later and stay in the workforce longer, they have more money to spend because their incomes are usually higher. Also they have different needs when you're having a baby in your 30s you're established and you're in the workforce. When you're younger and in your 20s, those are totally different needs. So as we started digging into it, I realized there was a real market opportunity to address what we now call millennials5:00And so, unlike a lot of companies that are seasonal, we really strive to be season-less. And so, we put out into the market like, okay, here are the four things we're going to get really good at selling these four things. And that's what we did for the first three years of the business was just get really good at selling pregnant people, those four things. And then from there we expanded the product line once we got good at selling those things.35:00And with Tik TOK, what we found is most of the people we work with on TikTok, they don't even ever mention us. They're just creating like 10 pieces of content a day. And they happen to be wearing like our nursing bra in all 10 of those pieces. And in every TikTok, someone will say, where'd you get that? But they know it's not like “hi, I'm here to tell you about Storq”. It's off the cuff. It's just in the background and someone is subtly seeing this bra over and over and over again. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokCourtney Klein - Founder & CEO of StorqRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel
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Sep 20, 2022 • 47min

#225 - Max Kislevitz: BALA - Disrupting Fitness Through Design

On this episode of DTC Pod, Max joins Blaine to talk about starting the brand as a side project, getting early conviction, bootstrapping to launch, landing a major shark tank deal, product positioning, brand design, form factors & digital amplification, early retail strategies, fundraising, go to market point of entry, market disruption, and much more. 10:35 The Best Ideas Are SimpleI think that, like, given this simplicity of the idea, it was hard to have a real conviction about it, right? Like when you think of something novel and new, it's like, God, that's the world's best idea. But when you think about reprising something sort of old and tired, like wrist and ankle weights- like it felt viable and there were like some good aspects of the idea going for it, but it was hard to sort of like bet the farm on this idea. Would people be interested? Would they fundamentally care? So there wasn't like a bravado at the outset about like, we're gonna change the world. I think we've had some of those revelations since in terms of disrupting this ultra serious industry. But at the time we were like, how do we both test the idea and raise the $40,000 we needed to fund the first production run. And Kickstarter was kind of the perfect solution for that.29:20 *8Xing* after Hottest Shark Tank Deal EVERAnd so I think we came in looking for 400 K investment and left with 900K. We've given up more of the company, but I will say that there's so many intangibles associated with that deal. Like Maria's been in photo shoots for us. Mark spoke with us at a South by Southwest panel earlier this year. Obviously there's incredible media value associated with the show. So it really sort of propelled us to the next level. So where in 2019, we did 2 million in sales in 2020, we did 16! So it was like kind of an 8X relative to the prior year.38:00 Disrupting Fitness AccessoriesLike let's invent new products, but let's also introduce meaningful improvements on existing products. And that was the paradigm shift from a single products company to we can be the Lululemon of fitness equipment and accessories, right? Like we can bring a Glossier sensibility to this super serious like CrossFit centric, fitness space. And we can do it through a beautiful product and a playful brand.42:00 Why Point of Entry Is Key for StartupsWe didn't realize how massive the opportunity was kind of hiding in plain sight. We sort of tripped over it, but we really do think that, fitness, accessories, and equipment and the products you're actually working out with should be as beautiful and elevated as the environment or what you're wearing whilst doing those activities. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokMax Kislevitz - Cofounder of BalaRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel
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Sep 15, 2022 • 59min

#224 - Haris Memon: Miracle Brand - 30M+ How to break through the 8 Figure Ceiling

On this episode of DTC Pod, Haris joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about how he built Miracle Brand into a profitable 8 figure brand. They discuss best practices in performance marketing, breaking through the 5M revenue ceiling, the dos/don'ts of working with agencies, incentives of ad networks, a crash course in affiliate networks, why affiliate & retail networks are so effective at scale, how to build with a big exit in mind, how to capitalize (and not capitalize) your business, and much more. 20:102 to 3 years ago, it was probably 80% Facebook. these days it's a third because, Facebook for us and everyone in the world was definitely easier three years ago. And I don't mean that just because of iOS 14 and everything going on in the world, just in general, like traffic networks are always going to get more expensive as time passes. CPMs are always gonna rise. Inventory is decreasing and demand is increasing. So at the end of the day, the advertiser and the ad inventory available is always gonna get more expensive year over year.23:00Most CPG strategics, the reason they actually buy brands that are already scaling in brick and mortar retail is because that's showing them data at scale. That's proving that you can reach mass market America, that you can outpace the legacy players on the shelves. And that you've already proven a level of turnover at scale at the, and at the most important retailers in the country. So that's why most of the big exits you've seen a hundred, 300, 500 million plus are brands that have substantial retail distribution.26:30I can look at a brand and a product and understand whether or not Walmart target CVS into those guys will pick it up. A lot of times, it's it's price point, it's category, it's audience. like, look, you can go to Walmart and go on, a shelf of any category you wanna look at and you can look at their maximum price point. Walmart's not putting a $5 drink in their stores. They're not putting $300 comforters in their stores55:00Why Too Much $$ Can Be A DisasterI think one of the biggest challenges we face in this space is everybody raises too much money. and I don't mean that in a traditional tech way of like, oh, you've burned a hundred million. I just mean that more from like, look a lot of really, really great brands can be amazing 50 to a hundred million exits. but they've raised capital to the point where only a 250 million exit is of success. and you've kind of shot yourself in the foot because look D to C and CPG is not a category with a lot of billion dollar outcomes. It's also not a category with a lot of 500 million outcomes. It's a lot of hundred million outcomes. And if you've raised a 25 million series B, you're gonna have a really tough time getting your board to approve that $75 million acquisition offer. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokHaris Memon - Founder of Nameless Ventures & Miracle BrandRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel
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Sep 13, 2022 • 45min

#223 - Lauren Kleinman: The Performance PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook

On this episode of the pod, Lauren joins Blaine and Ramon to talk about her experience running marketing & affiliate at Ritual, how her performance-minded approach to marketing led her to Dreamday, lessons from the best-in-class brands, the affiliate marketing landscape, why affiliate is such an important channel, the tie between affiliate and PR, how to be competitive when securing press, the editorial landscape, inspiration for the quality edit, how to scale a content team, and much more. 16:00 What Is Performance PR? The Future. 🤩I think what we aim to do as an agency is kind of hit the four KPIs around, we're going to get you the most, press pieces that we can per month. We're going to get you the highest quality press pieces that we can per month. We're going to drive increased traffic through the affiliate channel, and we're going to drive increase revenue through the affiliate channels month over month.20:00 How The Best Brands Keep It FreshWe specifically seek out brands that are, excellent at marketing and excellent at launching new campaigns, launching new collaborations, working with new celebrities or influencers, launching new products. And like, do you have something new for us to talk to on a fairly regular cadence? I would say like at least twice a year at a very bare minimum. Four times a year better, but we have a lot of clients that are like launching something new or doing a new collaboration every couple of weeks. And those are like our highest volume press clients.31:20 The Next Big Marketing Trend 👀Affiliate marketing is still like one of the most efficient channels. I think we had a client last year that they had analyzed like Facebook versus affiliate marketing, and affiliate as a channel was like 15 times more efficient and had 15 times higher ROAS, than paid social. So, I think it is an amazing channel. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokLauren Kleinman - Founder of Dreamday Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel
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Sep 8, 2022 • 47min

#222 - Jasmine Garnsworthy: The Insider's Guide to Consumer PR & Editorial

On this episode of DTC Pod, Jasmine joins Blaine to discuss the landscape of PR for consumer brands. They cover topics like incentive structure for editors, how the landscape of editorial has matured over the last decade, where things are headed, how to nail your pitch, how to build relationships with editors, the role of PR in building consumer trust, how positive PR impacts purchase behavior and brand recognition, lessons as a founder, community building, and the future of consumer, community, & commerce.Be sure to check out Female Founders World for more, as well as their recently launched platform Kizmet - a platform for consumer brand collaborations.12:16Want More Sales? Start Here 👇🏼Maybe you did discover it on TikTok, but then you Google it and you want to establish that there's some credibility there and you see that they were mentioned in a Roundup of the best new beauty products. And so you're like, okay, back my mind. Interesting. And then you see it on your friend's Instagram story a few days later, and then maybe that's where you click through to buy. So I do think that even though the process has changed, you can't eliminate how important that press coverage is.13:00The PR Hack For Partnerships 🗞️getting those like really big mastheads in the early days is really integral for lining up bigger brand partnerships down the track. And then also with retailers. So we know that buyers category managers, if you're looking for an omni-channel approach, like they are reading those roundups to try and discover new brands, they listening as well to podcasts like this one and like our podcast to discover new brands. And you really need to have that coverage if you want to be able to get those kinds of like industry ins as well.16:28Save This For Your Next PR Pitch 💰As an editor, I'm still getting pictures because now I have my own media platform. I'm receiving hundreds of pitches every day, like hundreds of emails coming through the one I'll scan through. If I ever received an email that isn't personalized, doesn't have my name, doesn't have either a direct reference to something I've written, or doesn't have a direct reference to a content tentpole that I'm revisiting in my content all the time, I usually disregard it. The emails that I'm always going to read are from a someone that I know. And that's why having a publicist with a really great relationships with press is so important. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokJasmine Garnsworthy -  Founder of Female Founders WorldRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel
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Sep 6, 2022 • 1h 1min

#221 - Ronak Trivedi: Pietra - The Platform Powering Creator Led Commerce

On this episode of DTC Pod, Ronak joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about evolving dynamics of the creator economy, how creator brands are typically launched, how Pietra solves for sourcing, fulfillment, and e-commerce, productizing a service for the most time-constrained customers, how their marketplace got started, how they raised their seed and series A from top VCs, brands that have launched on Pietra, what scale can look like in this niche, and much more.6:10The Fastest Way To Drop Your Own Line 🛍️So you, as a business owner, went from having to master the supply chain and understand all these pointless things like warehousing and labor and importing and exporting and whatever. To, I have a website, I have a place to sell my product. I have access to the world's best factories. And now all I have to focus on is design and promotion. Everything else is taken care, taken care of for you, through the platform of PIETRA.9:50How To Outsource The Dirty Work 💸Like you didn't have to go spend six months building a data center. Cause in a couple of clicks, Amazon just set up your data center for you. Right. You don't have to go figure out a commercial lease because in a couple of clicks, we worked gave you office space. And that discrepancy, I think, just like in the tech sector allowed all of these amazing developers to like make apps and start companies like Uber being one of them. there needed to be some sort of huge push on the other side of the spectrum. And that's where we really saw an opportunity. I'm like, it shouldn't be that hard for someone who has a cool idea to start their own sneaker line. Like they shouldn't have to spend three years of their life trying to do this.17:40Send This To A Creator 💎Why do they need to care about labor and importing and warehousing and staffing and sourcing? Like they don't, they want to design candles. They want to show up in a warehouse and they want two day shipping everywhere in the US for a cheap price, but like everything else, take it off their plate, let them go on their vacations, let them be creative.36:51Avoid This Partnership At All Costs 😵‍💫Exactly. Even worse. That's like the worst case, right. Where a creator has no control over their company. And so they're like, because you know how to set up a factory, I guess. And like you have some homeys in Switzerland that knows how to make watches. Like you're taking 75% of my business. we take that and say, you can start your business for 39 bucks a month. This episode is brought to you by OpenStore: Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours. Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokRonak Trivedi - Founder & CEO of PietraRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

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