DTC POD: How The Best Brands Are Built

On this episode of DTC Pod, Sam Madani chats with Ramon Berrios & Blaine Bolus to discuss how he built Bomani and the ups-and-downs of the entrepreneurial journey. The road to success for Bomani wasn’t easy. They faced a ton of rejection from local brewers, but they persevered and decided to pitch their concept to the biggest brewer in the country, and it worked! But that was just the first step. Sam discusses getting Bomani into customers’ hands, the process of selling to restaurants and bartenders, building brand awareness through the Cold Buzz Crew, adapting during COVID, and expanding Bomani’s retail presence.0:19 - 3:08 What’s Bomani3:51 - 5:41 Launching Bomani6:21 - 10:28 30 questions you should be asking11:32 - 15:58 Partnering with the biggest brewer in the US18:43 - 20:25 Bomani’s first investor20:26 - 22:00 Adapting to COVID22:39 - 23:44 Expanding beyond friends & family24:43 - 29:27 The cold buzz crew29:43 - 36:32 Building partnerships with bartenders and restaurants38:38 - 41:57 Getting into Whole Foods 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Sam Madani - Co-Founder & CEO of BomaniRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Tabs Chocolate is a sexually enhancing dark chocolate founded by two University of Michigan undergrads Jake and Oliver. Blaine and Ramon are excited to have Jake Lewin and Oliver Brocato on DTC Pod to discuss how they designed  specifically for TikTok, negotiating and working with influencers, creating viral videos, and making 90K in revenue in just 3.5 weeks after launch. 2:05 - 8:24 Entrepreneur Background17:58 - 19:27  Getting Started with Tabs24:05 - 27:33 Finding the Right Channel28:44  - 31:29 Working with Influencers32:55 - 37:22 Content / Social  Strategy38:43 - 42:49 Designing for TikTok51:01 - 51:42  Bootstrapped 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Jake Lewin & Oliver Brocato- Founders of Tabs Chocolate Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel 

Mid-Day Squares is the healthy chocolate bar company that’s built a name for itself through its bold content. Today on the pod, Ramon and Blaine are joined by the architect of Mid-Day’s brand voice & content strategy, Jake Karls, better known as the “Rainmaker” at MDS. As a Rainmaker, Jake is out there developing critical relationships with multiple stakeholders (i.e., press, investors, customers, etc.), cultivating the brand’s personality, and getting people excited about MDS.1:17 - 4:27 Idea for Mid-Day Squares4:55 - 7:38 Forming Mid-Days Content Strategy10:07 - 10:55 Creating a Personality11:48 - 13:32 Highs and Lows of Documenting Everything14:00 - 17:55 Turning customers into fans18:24 - 20:37 Celebrity Package Goods20:58 - 23:42 Jake’s background and being a Rainmaker25:14 - 30:46 Misunderstood and Hershey’s lawsuit31:26 - 34:00 Getting everyone on board and therapy34:45 - 38:00 Financing Content38:13 - 42:33 Motivating young people43:12 - 47:42 Evolution of MDS & DTC sales 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Jake Karls- CEO of Mid-Day SquaresRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Chris Bernard AKA “Bernie” joins Blaine and Ramon to discuss Mindright and working with Rob Dyrdek, learning from previous business mistakes of growing too fast, the importance of building your brand’s community before utilizing celebrity ambassadors, how TikTok is helping Mindright grow, and more. Buff Bake 2:07 -3:03Story behind Mindright 6:44 - 10:12Pitching to Rob Dyrdek 11:03 - 14:12Celebrity investors 16:35 - 17:33Leveraging celebrity investors 18:19 - 19:42Getting into retail 22:31 - 24:01Brand ambassadors and influencers 24:34 - 26:27Building the team 30:14 - 32:15 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok  Chris Bernard- CEO of Mindright Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Lindsay McCormick, CEO and co-founder of Bite, chats with Blaine and Ramon about her zero-waste company that makes personal care & hygiene products. Lindsay started Bite with $6,000 dollars and originally hand-made and packaged Bite's toothpaste tablet from her living room in L.A. In 2019, Lindsay went on Shark Tank and turned down offers from Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary. Bite has experienced tremendous growth and continues to be completely bootstrapped and profitable.  9:18-10:12 Visualizing facts11:03-11:45 Pretend your pitching to the sharks 22:28-23:03 Talking to your customers25:33-26:23 Pitching your product in-person to consumer45:50-46:41 Start super niche then expand  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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Lindsay McCormick - CEO and Founder of BiteRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Better & Better recently raised a $4M seed round, Blaine and Ramon got the chance to talk to Vlad in-depth about his entrepreneurial journey, the difficulty of pitching a DTC product in a trend-driven VC climate (note: many investors are interested in investing crypto, NFTs, traditional SaaS, etc), competing against legacy brands like Colgate, using customer feedback to relaunch SKUs, and more!RocketHub and Meural 3:08 - 7:20Inspiration behind Better & Better 7:47 - 10:51Proof of concept 12:05 - 14:13Pitching a DTC to VC 14:34 - 15:33Better & Better seed investors 15:36 - 16:47The questions VC’s ask 17:55 - 21:30Advisors, prototypes, and employees  27:24 - 30:34Decreasing CAC for Better  Better 32:37 - 33:23Bottom-up pitch vs. Top-down pitch 33:24 - 35:57Challenging legacy brands 41:15 - 43:26Improving the product 49:13 - 50:55   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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok Vlad Vukicevic - CEO Better & BetterRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Rob Fraser, CEO of Endur, chats with Blaine and Ramon about how his career as an athlete enabled him to succeed as an entrepreneur and taught him the value of persistence, determination, and the ability to overcome failure. As an entrepreneur of a multi-million dollar brand, Rob discusses the power of bootstrapping & being scrappy (i.e., hitting the pavement & selling directly to customers, getting in-person customer feedback and transferring those learning to the online customer experience), creating a unique business model that allows endur to white-labels socks, maintain cashflow & reinvest that cash into endur or inline inventory, the power of ambassador programs, and how COVID propelled endur to new heights.Being an athlete… 0:56From athlete to entrepreneur… 7:30 - 10:19COVID’s effect on Endur 12:23 - 15:43Avoiding analysis paralysis 16:47 - 17:13Hitting the pavement 17:19 - 21:04Website tips 21:53 - 23:29Brand ambassador program 23:52 - 24:31Identifying brand super powers 25:00 - 27:39Making the first million 28:55 - 30:34The changes after one million 30:36 - 33:16Relentless pursuit of the mission 36:42 - 39:29Endur’s unique business model 39:47 - 43:22M&A 46:16 - 47:41Working in the office 51:13 - 52:07 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok    Rob Fraser - CEO & Founder of EndurRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

David Gaylord has had a multifaceted career in ecommerce. He started at Shopify in 2015 as a customer success agent, became an Ops Lead in the Office of the COO in 2020, and a Permanent Merchant in Residence in 2021 where he uses his knowledge & experience founding Bushbalm - a natural skincare brand focused solely on the bikini line - to inspire and advise aspiring entrepreneurs. David joins Blaine Bolus and Ramon Berrios at the DTC Pod and tells us what it’s like navigating the world of ecommerce. Rising through the ranks at Shopify 3:54Resources to learn about business 14:56How Bushbalm increased AOV 20:21Testing out subscriptions 29:21Getting customer feedback 32:51Advice on starting a DTC business today 35:29The anatomy of DTC 43:42Managing ads for wholesale/ retail channels 46:19Finding success in waxing salons 48:18Expanding the team 51:41 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok  David Gaylord - CEO of bushbalmRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Shaun Brandt, co-founder of Oddit, is a designer and brand builder who is an expert at perfecting the customer journey and reducing friction points. His extensive agency experience (Shaun co-founded a product design agency that grew to 80 employees) helping brands grow enabled him to create Oddit. This first-of-its-kind CRO platform helps DTC brands boost conversion & strengthen loyalty. Shaun chats with Blaine Bolus and Ramon Berrios to discuss what makes Oddit unique and common CVR mistakes brands make. Building Trust 22:01 - 22:27If you don't have a ton of reviews, just pulling in one review, right up front and center, instead of even telling customers what it is what your product is just let a customer or a reviewer do it. So things like that, or, you know, instead of listing number of reviews, maybe list how many products you've sold. So maybe you haven't gotten a ton of reviews, because that hasn't been part of your roadmap yet, but you've sold 10,000 units. That's, that's social proof, you know, 10,000 people have trusted youClear Communication33:34 34:27There's so few users that read every piece of your site, look at a heat map, right? Like it's, it, there's there's a reason there's very specific points that are hot and cold. And it's just doesn't happen, very few users are going to read that entire flow. So I think communicating within actions as specifically as possible is really critical. Same thing with on your PDP, when you have a checkout button, or an Add to Cart button. You know, people are like, they always shy away from putting the price on the Add to Cart button. And I mean, maybe if you're if you're really worried about people being price sensitive, I mean, they're gonna ditch it in their cart if they don't know the price anyway. But I think the simple fact of showing that price and the add to cart, it all it does is it make sure the user doesn't have to look back and forth to the top of the screen. And that little millisecond, it has the smallest effect on conversion and the smallest effect on their drop off, because it's just one less thing that they're doing. Landing Page38:59 - 39:34What's unique about a landing page and where where I think brands could do a lot of learning is that by driving traffic to a landing page that's a little more flexible, a single page with storytelling, checkout. Kind of the full flow on a single page is you learn what works and what doesn't really quickly and you can split test a lot easier. And take those learnings back to your actual domain or your primary site and start to implement them on that end. I don't  think you need to test them on both. A lot of the traffic is the same and a lot of the places that people get hung up is going to be the same.Humanizing Products24:59 - 25:56For me UGC is meant to look like UGC, it doesn't always have to be this high produced  expensive video, it can really be an iPhone video of someone using it. Because when it's positioned the right way in that story the fidelity really isn't as important anymore. And the same goes with your ad strategy. So I think that's one of the main things is visuals. Like, there's something to be said about the brands that have this beautiful Apple feeling of  everything is so perfect and rendered  exactly with the right shadows and lighting and sizing. And that's great. It definitely makes the product look high end and does build a certain amount of trust. But I think you really can't have that exclusively. I think you have to find a balance of not UGC, necessarily, but just that more organic like hey here's the product actually in use. I think that's something that a lot of brands are missing on at least on the website.Alternative CVRs27:20 - 28:29What about the conversion rate of brand ambassadors, right? Like, you're gonna get a ton of people to your site that may not purchase, but if you make an impression on them there, they still might talk about it. like Graza olive oil is a perfect example. I can't even buy it. I can't order it in Canada, right? I can’t order it. I can't try it. But I know 10 chefs/ home cooks like I have preached that brand so many damn times. And I've never tried it. I don't know what the olive oil tastes like. I don't know how good the packaging is. I'm strictly basing it off of their storytelling on their site. And traditional CRO doesn't account for that. Right? That brand converted me into a brand ambassador without ever actually purchasing and I probably converted sales for them without them knowing or anyone knowing. But that’s CRO in the Oddit lens, right? Where you're telling a really unique story, you're showing a product really interesting. And you're doing it really organically in a way that converts people into brand ambassadors and brand believers without even ever trying the product. And I think that's a huge miss for a lot of brands where they're just like data, data data. 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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok  Shaun Brandt - Co-founder of OdditRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel

Matt Mullenax, CEO of Huron, chats with Blaine & Ramon about his men's care brand offering A+ body care products for guys everywhere. This is Matt’s second time on the DTC Pod. The first time we spoke to Matt was during Huron’s launch, and a lot has happened since, including a global pandemic. Matt discusses how Huron evaluates their supply chain on a super granular level and how this informs their content and marketing strategy, selling on Amazon, and keeping a super clean & lean tech stack.   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.Follow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTok   Matt Mullenax  - CEO & Co-founder of HuronRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - COO of OmniPanel