Skullcandy Is Building Black Friday Demand With TikTok Shop

because it felt like, oh, this is a place for maybe widgets or consumer bowls or whatever I might be and that's TikTok shops, which is a place that you guys have had some remarkable success and a lot of your talk was about. So take us through a little bit of your TikTok shop journey.

“How did that start for you and what how has it gone for smoking?”

We're here with Lucas Pactor, the founder CEO of Tribe. So for those that don't know what is Tribe Tribe is like TikTok shop or direct-to-store sales. So TikTok shop was genius. The democratized content, they made it so any average person with a TikTok shop account can sell a product, but it's only limited to e-com and it's limited to people that have

access to a TikTok shop account. Tribe is that, but instead of posting the video on your page, you're just making the video, you're sending it to the brand. If they accept it, you get paid or you get a percentage of whatever revenue generates. With Tribe, what we've been able to do is go from 500 to 1,000 or 1,200 or 1,400

some more at a lower total cost of production, the data is the most important part.

If you give your creators the ability to see what ads are working in real time, they're going to go make the magic happen. So, dude, where can people if they want to check it out? Where do they go? It's just join Tribe.com.

Check it out. Join Tribe.com. I'm excited for this opportunity to connect and for you to share a little bit about what you guys have going on with Alia. I have seen all over the place.

How you guys are transforming something that I think most people don't perceive there to be got large of a potential impact in, so tell us a little about what that is and how you guys make it happen. I'm Sean, co-foundancy of Alia, and what we do is super simple. We just do pop-ups.

Typically, what we see is, like, we'll see a two-ax opportunity, and then we'll see something like a 1.8x increase in welcome, though rather than you. So, then that's the key metric to track here. Of course, we want revenue to go up as a whole, but like there's a little bit so much a pop-up can do.

“I think the best thing about us is that we offer 30-day free trial, no strings attached,”

that you can cancel if it's not worth any for you. During that free trial, we'll manage the pop-ups for you, we'll give you kind of the outcomes that we promised we'll be able to go. So, where do people go to side after try it? Yeah, so, Alia, pop-ups.com, A-L-I-A, pop-ups.com.

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It's the morning. We just woke up. I was out late last night, haven't I? I'm too old for this. I don't know if I'm old for this life.

You were responsible when hardware is. I was very responsible, I think. So, we're going to give it our best anyways, but we're excited. This is real. This is not AI.

They go Skyline here, and we are at Commerce Roundtable Day 2, and yesterday, you took the stage. Wow. So, for those of you who don't know, this is Evan Catlett, and she is the--let me see if I can get all these words--VP of global marketing, e-commerce, domination, total, intergalactic

for school candies. Is that all of them? You got it. She has a lot of awesome well-earned adjectives in her title, but is one of the best marketing leaders that we get the chance to work with every day, and took the stage here yesterday.

“Today, Commerce Roundtable, to share what I think is really written, a playbook, and”

evident at the center of around managing multiple sales channels, multiple media channels, into one sort of cohesive ecosystem for growing a brand. So, tell us what--what was your talk about? It was a great topic, I think, for particular the audience we had here, a lot of what I shared was really around how school candy is a 23-year-old brand that has on the channel

distribution really had to rethink over the last few years, how we operate, and how we reach consumers, because that has just started changing so drastically, and we had a lot of assumptions about what that meant, what marketing meant, what distribution meant, and really had to unlearn quite a bit. Because you guys were like, so you go, you've been there since 2021.

23, 23, 23, and prior to that, it's fair to say that school candy was primarily retail first.

So a business that was built not digitally first, so coming in in 2023 in an era where most

brands are going the other direction, you had to come in to a business that had existed,

It was interesting and a really fun challenge because we had a ton of cultural relevance,

we had a lot of brand awareness, we had, like you said, massive retail distribution, everything from airports to Walmart to your local surf shop, but we were not really sophisticated in the way that we were engaging our consumers digitally, not really thinking of it as a growth strategy, it was just sort of something that had to be there, and so that's really the big transformation we did over the last three years.

And why, is that just because the culture previously was just so retail focus, like, what did they not see digitalizing partner, like, what was the, how did it get to that point? Because to get as big as they were, like, without any real investment, there's abnormal to raise it. It's a great question.

It honestly just was not a strategic initiative around and that's something that when BG, who's the CEO of Skull Candy, came in in 2023 that he changed immediately and said, hey, we have a couple of core initiatives that are going to be responsible for driving the turnaround and the growth of the brand and growing D to C is one of them, but also, you can't be ruthlessly D to C when you are an omnichannel brand.

“And so I think that's important context as a setup for people, because I think Skull Candy”

people can assert a lot of things about whatever it is, but to the transformation then from a culture that was so staunchly retail first. To now, I think being one of the most sophisticated, like, the phrase on the channel, I think is overused in a way that people think of it as, oh, we're just everywhere, but really what

you guys have built, I think is an incredible relationship between understanding the role

of every channel from TikTok shop to Amazon to retail, how the media plays into one sort of ecosystem. That's a big transition. So I think that's important context is like, this is not a business that was like, oh, they've been digitally native forever and they're just going to being digitally native.

They had to really transform that. So how has that been as a leader dealing with the relationships between retailers, sometimes having a lot of issues with pricing and Amazon wants this product and TikTok needs these things. How do you manage and work across the organization to ensure that all of that moves cohesively into together?

Is that a big challenge? At the end of the day, I think it was the mindset shift from thinking channel to thinking

consumer and just really thinking, where is our consumer discovering brands?

Where are they wanting to engage with brands? And then at the end of the day, all of us, whether you're over a wholesale channel, whether you're over a direct consumer, whether you're a brand marketer or a growth marketer, really you're thinking consumer and how do we meet them where they are and not channel? I'm Sean, co-founder and see you all, yeah.

What we do is super simple, we just do all those, right? So most brands see something like a 2-to-5% opt-in rate and make a clear view of pop-up or post-grip pop-up. We see a 2x increase from what the brand had for onto what they have with all of us. So if you have a 3% see a 6% 5% see a 10% that's really what we do.

We work with brands like AG1, Runes, IMATE, Bill Yubudi, Nike Strength, Bill Thuma, or 5,000 brand in a Shopify. And we care about being really, really good at pop-ups and not touching anything else. How is it possible to be twice as good at something that seems like it would be very hard to differentiate it?

How do you guys make that happen? Yeah, that's really a question.

“And I think one is just our focus on just doing this one thing as a company, right?”

I think like other competitors we have in a space do like this plus ton of the things. So it means that they can't have an extreme focus on this one thing. So I think that that plays the biggest role and then it comes to product. It's really figuring out like one pop-up should you be seeing, right? The issue right now is to play via and we're a part of the play, just like we're very show with them.

But like with their pop-ups it's like everyone sees the same thing. There's no differentiation between you and I, you and I are different shoppers. We should not be seeing the same thing. So what we do is you see what kind of individual this person is, what offer they should see, what copy they should see,

what image they should see based on the data we can gather about them. So one of the things that we try and do is founders is to translate a metric like increase in pop-up rate conversion into what does that mean for me monetarily. So can you help understand if we were to double the pop-up rate, do those customers maintain the same value as the 3% that would have been there?

Like can I really expect to just double the value of every person that comes to my website in terms of their email capture rate? So typically we see it's like we'll see a two-act software rate and then we'll see something like a 1.8x increase in welcome for still revenue.

“So I think that that's the key metric to track here.”

Of course we don't revenue to go up as a whole but like there's only so much a pop-up can do. But like in terms of welcome for revenue that's where that's where we see it. A nice and nice increase. So for us, one of the reasons I care a lot about this, I think we were just coming off of commerce roundtable and part of my speech there was a case study for a brand

And I think a lot of times people make the mistake of confusing email as a retention tactic.

But the reality is if you can increase the value of your welcome flow 1.8x times,

what you're going to do is increase the value of every visitor to your website, your revenue per site does it, which is going to in turn make every click that's more valuable, which in turn makes every ad that you're running more valuable. And it can often times that 1.8x increase in welcome flow email,

could be the delta between profitable or not profitable on your ad spend to be able to scale. Like it has that kind of threshold impact. 100% yeah, it's super true.

“And I think especially kind of as a reproach in Black Friday here,”

like what we did last year, what we're seeing time this year is like obviously, I mean, you're going to have the most eyeballs you'll ever have. Very nice, I'm sorry. So I mean, also CAC is going to be super high. So like you might as well actually get these customers to be there email.

And I think having a nice pop-up during this time is just going to help revenue. And you not only be a CM, but just like going forward after this. That's something. Yeah, everything that you do gets easier. If you have more opportunities to speak to more people for free, right?

If you capture the ability, because the things with your site traffic or advertising is that every impression is paid for, every opportunity to drive a net new visit costs you money. Whereas when you control your email list, there is a cost. It's just much, much smaller. And so the opportunity to then to potentially speak to people on an ongoing base,

especially ahead of a period where you now know that purchase intent is going to be higher than ever.

You now possess this really critical capacity to message these people,

a significant number of times ahead of the peak buying moment is just incredibly important. So what about, tell me a little bit about the model. What's it going to cost me if I want to install this versus my Clevio pop-up? Yeah, and I'm totally certain.

“I mean, I think the best thing about us is that we offer 30-day free trial.”

You know, strings of touch. You can cancel if it's not worth any free. It's totally cool. And so like that's, and then during that free trial, we'll manage the pop-ups for you. We'll give you kind of the outcomes that we promise we'll give. So we usually do see a two X increase during the free trial itself.

And then after the free trial, we do model to model based on sessions per month. I don't think we're super expensive to be honest. I think we're fairly priced, but even if you believe we don't believe we are, you can do a trial. And see if it's seamless what I thought. There you go. So where do people go to sign up at try it?

Yeah, so all you pop-ups.com, A-L-I-A pop-ups.com is a website, so take a look. If you can just say, swing by and so don't be afraid to sell them to CTC since you when you do. Thanks for coming, ma'am. Thank you so much. Yeah, and I think that's right. And so that led you guys to a place where I think a lot of big brands

probably have been hesitant because it felt like, oh, this is a place for maybe widgets or consumables or whatever I might be. And that's TikTok shops, which is a place that you guys have had some remarkable success. And a lot of your talk was about, so take us through a little bit of your TikTok shop journey. How did that start for you and how has it gone for school kids?

Yeah, TikTok shop was interesting because, you know, our target consumer is Gen Z. They are there. We knew, again, going back to think of where you're concerned. We wanted to make sure we were engaging them there with an offering. Transparently, I had very low expectations for it. You don't expect that somebody is going to impulse buy a $279 headphone because they saw a piece

of content around it. And I will say it was quite slow when we first launched it. What the unlock for us was is when we really started just increasing the velocity of creators we were working with and how we were leveraging their content, we just saw the platform absolutely take off for us and start to have real impact in sales and other channels as well.

“So there's a couple of things here that are important because I think one is, there's a bunch”

of tropes and AOV is one of the ones you brought up. Like, if I had built a list of all of our customers and said, "Who will succeed at TikTok shop?" You guys might have been on the bottom. Like, I would have been like this to your point. I don't really know that this is the right medium for it. So there's that assumption that all of us have pre-built in.

And what I think at the platform is incredible at though, is that there is this way in which

when it grabs onto something, it is really, really powerful. And you guys were persistent. So how did you think about or have the foresight to when it was slow to not just give up on it but to keep making the investment was just confident that your customers there, we got to continue to figure it out or what led you to do that? I think there were little nuggets that kept surfacing and also just this the importance of validation for consumer today and of needing

not to see a perfect brand ad to convince them that product is right for them. Or frankly, even need to engage with your PDP that we spend a lot of time creating content on, you know, really they want to see somebody that is like them, that has had a good experience with a product and envision themselves with it. So these little nuggets started popping up that basically

Yeah, really amazing. So what has been the impact from that channel across the business,

“from dot com to Amazon to wholesale? Like where do you feel like you realize most of the value”

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when you upgrade. Once more, outer signal.com/thread to discover the VIPs buying from you. It's in demand creation. I mean, that's been so huge for us. Yes, TikTok shop, GMB is strong and growing and it's now a core part of our DTC revenue stream, but really what it does in terms of creating that awareness and consideration for the brand in a place where consumers are more and more discovering brands, discovering products.

But then choosing to go buy wherever and whenever they want. It's that in and of itself. We're still struggling to figure out how we measure that and start to see the impact in best buy. You're seeing the impact everywhere. It's directly correlational to where we launch a creator campaign for a specific product. That's skewable. And within weeks that skew moves every two. How do you think about, did you guys open up your entire catalog to shop? How do you think

about the managing of the inventory, what affiliate are allowed to post? How do you think about that merchandising piece of it in the channel? We did it first and I think we're still playing around with, should we offer everything on TikTok shop again? Just because there may be that consumer that wants an earbud versus a speaker ahead of phone. When we think about our creator engagement strategy though, we're thinking of it and not being intentional. It's not just

about what we want to sell on TikTok, but again, what do we need demand creation for in the

“entire ecosystem? And that's what we're investing in creator content. So you'll think about, okay,”

where does the core expectation of skew sales across everything? How do we use the creators as an engine for all of that? Exactly. Let's use that as a jumping offer Q4, which is what we're here to chat about is, okay, how do you think about, and how will you engage creators around your Q4 program? And what is the offer strategy across all the different points of distribution for school candy? Yeah, it's, I mean Q4 is our season, right? We are, as every brand in the consumer

electronic spaces, heavily promotional, which honestly means TikTok is likely going to be a really strong vehicle for us again because creators want to talk about what converts, what converts our deals. But for us again, it's going to be looking at where do we want to drive sell through across our entire distribution portfolio? And how do we make sure that we have people talking about those products, knowing they'll convert on TikTok shop, but also knowing that hopefully that'll also

“drive sell through at Amazon at Best Buy at Walmart? Do you have to build cohesive offers across”

all of your retailers? Like, do you have to go to them and say, this is going to be the Black Friday offer build that cohesive layer? How stringent is that for you guys? It's a very, so we do operate with the national promo plan. We like to make sure that from a consumer experience standpoint, they're seeing as consistent of a representation of school candy as possible across

all channels from content to promotion. So that is, you know, inherently always a challenge

when you are thinking, how do we grow D to C as well? Because we can't compete with shipping times of. And we can't compete with, you know, somebody walking into Walmart because they're also buying their groceries there. So what it means is that we also need to focus on what are some other value propositions that are going to get that consumer to buy from us. Whether that's TikTok shop because it's easy to access, they just saw the piece of content, whether it's our dot com

because they can enroll in the loyalty program, get free shipping, earn rewards. That's really where we try to think about how the end of the day the consumer can choose to buy wherever they want. We want to give them the value proposition to to stay with us. Have any of the retailers gotten sophisticated enough yet where they're recognizing that the drive of the cell through is from creators

their name or any of them aware of that and engaging with you on it or no. Not yet, but we would love that. Yeah, that's I'm surprised that they're not like, okay, hey, could we get the brief to say and available target like like that there or that they aren't subsidizing some of that if they're aware of some of that cell through that? I'm sure that's coming. Like the retailers are usually

“little late into the stuff, but I think they are, you know, buyers are absolutely smart enough to”

recognize that brands that are doing well on TikTok are that is driving cell through in their channels and so they're they're supportive of that strategically. But you know, I think at the end of the day, retailers also want you investing in their retail media programs and that's where they

want to see the dollars go first. Yeah. What are their big plans or what are their core initiatives

to you guys have for Q4 when you think about it Black Friday, every Monday, the whole gifting Christmas. What is the strategy that's going to occupy most of your time? I mean, for us, it's already go time for Black Friday. So we have spent the last several months figuring out how is this not just about a promotional plan, but really, how is this, you know, our brand story for Q4 is holiday and it's choose gold candy for holiday, whether that's ask your parents for the product because you

want this or whether it's gift this product. So, you know, for us, the planning, the has already been done at this point, it's now just get ready to execute and make sure that we're sustaining it. So our goal is not just to have Black Friday in and of itself be our biggest day of the year at Navy, but it's really thinking about what is the full cohesive plan to drive consideration for holiday gifting, you know, starting essentially now to then execute with promotions, but also we've seen

some of our largest days be post Christmas over the last two years Christmas day itself and then and you know, we sort of call it like the buyers remorse time frame where people want to switch something out or they got a gift card and so for us, again, it's not just about Black Friday, but it's about how do we sustain really high volumes of sales all the way through

“truly to the end of the year. Yeah, I'm really interested, I think this year to see”

the amount of volume that TikTok shows does on Black Friday, everyone did this weekend, this year,

just to see it because I think it feel like it's the first year that's really central to a lot of

people's strategies to end to see how much of the shopping originates there. As you think about this is a vulnerability in the lead question, but it's one of masking everyone, when you think about that specific weekend, the media spend that you deploy, usually it's a lot, is it incremental or not incremental on day of, how do you think about day of Black Friday spending? That's a good question, you know, my personal perspective is that it's not incremental on day of, I think

where I like to see us is investing ahead of time and then day of should just be harvesting. And frankly, I would love to see more conversions happening through non-paid channels because we've already primed the pump already to go and they're just waiting to confirm that things aren't going to be even on that. Yeah, what about, okay, so the other question I'm asking is start your sale earlier, later, where do you guys think about that? And what is your belief about how

incremental the early sale is versus pull forward? How do you think about timing? Yeah, I think it's challenging because we've trained consumers particularly in our category that promos are just going to start. They're going to be, they're constantly occurring, but also Black Friday is going to start the week leading up to. Yeah. Consumers know that, so whether you want to or not,

“you have to be there with your offers. Yeah. And I think it's, it's frankly made just purchase”

behavior challenging because you then have these laws of like there's back to school, why buy anything unless you absolutely need it in September and October until you get to Amazon Prime Day and October. And then you know brands are going to be dropping Black Friday deals in November. So there's been a conditioning of the consumer that it's a bit inevitable that we then just have to be there early with an offer that is compelling enough to have them choose us over another

audio brand. Yeah, so in your category too, or so much of that promotional rhythm is driven by these large retailers. It's like when Walmart goes on sale, like that's kind of the behavior when it starts. You know, like, and it's interesting. How has Prime Day been huge for you guys this year? How's it done relative? Is it been good? So it's interesting. Prime, I feel like every year, it's a little bit not just for us, but overall, you know, it loses a little bit. And I think that's why

we've seen Amazon introduce another product. Yeah. Yeah. That big spring sale. You've got July Prime or June Prime this year. You've got back to school. You've got October Prime. So I think it's also because Amazon did a great job creating essentially a new holiday. And now all other retail has

caught on. D to C like D to C sites always match Prime at this point now across brands. So

of the various Amazon events. Yeah. And we do quite well with that. Yeah. It's watching the dates that

they plan to launch them like picking October is such a clear indication of like they're solving for the same thing you are. There was a gap between these clean buying moments. We're going to manufacture these and keep pushing them out there. Yeah. It's really interesting. Any channels that you guys are that you're interested in? How about do you guys doing CTV? Are you doing Snapchat? Is there anything else that you're finding that for your customer and product category is interesting or

compelling to you right now? Yeah. So CTV is definitely an area where pushing into more. And again,

“I think it just comes back to demand creation and just being in the forefront of somebody's mind”

definitely doing some incrementality testing there. Snapchat likely will be something we introduce to our mix or test into in 2027. For me, I'm I'm very curious what happens with other social marketplaces. You know, what is met a marketplace look like when does YouTube marketplace really

start to become a thing and you know, eBay do you have a second after market or anything? No,

and that I think there's an interesting, I mean, you'll you see a lot of skulking. Yeah, I was going to say if there's going to be, you know, eBay sellers and gray market. So that's an interesting one refurbished for us could be a really cool opportunity as well. So definitely more to be had and I think again, it just goes back to how is our consumer buying in our category, discovering in our category and then making sure we're what about retail media? Do you guys spend a lot

on rat or any of these other retail media platforms? Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an area that will be expanding into further. Yeah. You know, we have a really strong retail media strategy

with Amazon. We approach that very similarly from an economic standpoint to how we're managing

DSE performance marketing. Yeah. And then, you know, obviously Wal-Mart's investing a lot in their strategy there and you know, I expect that we'll be we'll be looking at ways to, again,

“get in front of the consumer more prominently. Yeah. Um, the other thing I think that's worth”

just talking about because I think you guys do such a good job is thinking about merchandising through the lens of limited edition licensing and how you think about that as support for dot com versus what does other sites get? Like talk a little bit about sort of your like scarcity and limited addition strategy relative to the core skews and how you think about the role of both of those things play. Yeah. It's interesting because we historically have approached limited time offers, um,

co-labs things like that as very much being DSE vehicles. And that should be how we drive, again, that value proposition of coming to folkanity.com versus going elsewhere. We now approach it much more on an individualized basis. So if it's something like a leopard print skew of a crusher headphone, there could be massive volumes to be done on Amazon there. Yeah. And so likely that should live there. We do an all-love pride skew every single year that likely lives in our

own channel and we think of those as a like community support but the energy moments. So when we have sort of these shorter duration energy moments that are almost equally meant to drive just brand desire and interest as as something as revenue. Those are more likely to live as a DTC exclusive because again, we want to get people excited about them and then we want to sell to those quickly as we can. What's the next big campaign that you guys are working on? For those of you haven't seen it,

they have a product collab with both headset Tony Hawks in the ad. Huge commercials, big production. You guys have anything else up your sleeves? Anything cool? I mean, we just launched brand-new speaker line. For Scott Candy, the session speaker line. There are three soon to be more

“incredible speakers. Awesome price points. I think those are going to be incredible for gifting over holiday.”

So we just launched a very fun equally as fun as Tony Hawks campaign for speakers that we'll push into for over the next couple months. Great. Check it out, Evan. You're a rock star. Thank you so much for coming by. If people wanted to hang out and follow your wisdom, where are you on LinkedIn X? You're like, yes, you kind of hang out. You can hang out on LinkedIn a lot. Okay. Go find Evan Catlittle on LinkedIn. Appreciate you stopping by. Thanks. Thanks.