HexClad + Ridge Reveal Their 8-Figure Celebrity Sweepstakes Playbook

I've been gone the last couple of weeks. So I'm coming in, refresh recharge, ready to jam on some D to C E com marketing with Connor McDonald's today. Connor, how you doing? Doing good dude. Where have you been? Well, I was in a girlfriend's 30th birthday. We had a South America scuba trip. So we were in Honduras for that for a week and then our hexclad executive off site just so happened to be starting the day after that. So I went right from

Rohitan Honduras to Tuscany Italy, which is a weird a tough it's tough to get from Honduras to Italy, but we got there and yeah, it was good. A lot of

a lot of good stuff coming in 2027, which is the main focus of of the off site social critical.

Let's get into the the episode today. We're talking all things sweeps. You guys just wrapped up

“an awesome sweepstakes. We are about to launch ours in the next few weeks. I think by the time”

this episode goes live, that our sweepstakes will be live and we have a bunch of different says happening this year that we can chat through a little bit here. Connor, you put out a big tweet the other day kind of really doing an awesome breakdown on your sweepstakes. You said that you described this as ridges first multi eight figure sweepstakes campaign. You know, we run our sweepstakes. We run at the last two years. The first year was a culinary trip, the London last year was a culinary trip

to Paris and this year, it's a culinary trip to Italy. Before we get into some of the details,

can you just give us a lay of the land? What was your offer this year? What was the offer this year?

Because you guys do really cool stuff and it feels like you continue to expand on how awesome your offer is and just to get people more and more excited every single year. What was the offer this year? What were you giving people? Let me take it in even bigger step back quickly because

“this is our sixth annual sweepstakes. We've done it every year. The first one was very small. We”

turned around really quickly. Sean Frank, the CEO and I drove this Jeep out to the desert. We did some off-roading content and we were giving that Jeep away like probably five weeks later, like really sort of by the seat of our pants, sort of execution. But we saw early on that there was an opportunity to really build this up as a tent pole moment for ridge. We really have four

tier one non product launch campaigns. We have our anniversary sale in March. We have our

Father's Day sale in May and June and we've slowly rolled Memorial Day in to that as well. We've got sweepstakes in this late July August period and then we've got obviously our holiday sale in Q4. So we wanted to create this moment in Q3 that could sort of stand up the quarter because otherwise it's not seasonally relevant in any other way. Back to school is not a big period for us. Wedding bands for fall weddings has become like a little bit more meaningful. But otherwise there's

been no like large commercial moments. We wanted to sort of build a campaign around that. And how do we like sort of manufacture our own demand? In a similar way that we do for the anniversary sale anniversary sale. We really do via promo like that's the reason you're buying in March. Father's Day holiday sale. There's natural seasonality. There's natural intent that happens as people need to purchase gifts. Sweepstakes is another manufactured moment where there's

“really no other seasonal reason to be buying from ridge. So that's why we do it.”

The one thing I'll call it is it's largely a full price period for us, which is also really nice to sit between the Father's Day sale, which is a pretty long promo period for us and the holiday sale. The fact that we've been able to manufacture this moment without needing to have discount associated with it. I think it's been like an added benefit that maybe we didn't necessarily foresee. So that is why we started doing this. And then each year we've tried to raise

the stakes. I said early on six years ago we did this like souped up Jeep Wrangler. Then for two or three years we did Hennessy Velociraptor. So Hennessy's a Houston automotive house that just like does these crazy things to F-150s and Ford Broncos. So we gave away a few of those. We partnered with them, which was really cool and sort of credibility building. And then we've slowly tried to like raise the stakes even further. So three sweepstakes ago we did a cyber truck. We had one of the

foundation series, a very early model of the cyber truck. So we did the cyber truck or Hennessy Velociraptor. This souped up F-150. And that was a very cool sort of juxtaposition of a campaign. We ended up having the opportunity to 24 karat gold plate the cyber truck throughout. So it ended up being a gold cyber truck and this crazy F-150 that was just like a really sort of striking and polarizing and what we were describing as the time is like buzzworthy or like at least worthy of being

commented on it. Draw a ton of social engagements people discussed which one they would choose between. Nobody on the internet really likes a cyber truck or the vast majority of people. So it was more of a one-sided argument but like good engagement nonetheless. And then this year well actually a back of quick. Last year we added a $300,000 Lamborghini or a Velociraptor. So same sort of choice but higher price car. And then what we've tried to do every year is just continue

to raise the stake. So this year we did another $300,000 Lamborghini Storado which is a really cool

look like visually striking. And then you also had the ability to get a a four Bronco but it was

GT paint. So it's just like very bright blue and orange. So like extremely visually striking cars and then the real way that we wanted to continue to raise the stakes was to get some sort of celebrity endorsement. So this is something I brought up last year as just another lever that we have to make these even more sort of noteworthy or more of a moment. So we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast but months ago we're talking January and February is when I was having

these conversations but we go to all the talent agencies in LA, UTA, CAA, WME to just begin discussing like what would it look like to engage with all different types of celebrities. We were talking about athletes. We were talking about female models. We were talking about actors etc. And we ended up landing on Tony Hawk which I was super excited about. He's great for the demo. He's been doing more like commercial endeavors recently. People will see him on more commercials. He was just on my first

“million which I think is really cool. I also think he's a sort of like kindred spirit of bridge.”

He's purchased from Ridge before. We were aware of this. Our founder started this like really weird side-brand a couple years ago where he was doing headlights for super 73 bikes.

Tony Hawk purchased from that. So it always felt like there was this sort of like kindred spirit

like relationship between Tony Hawk and Ridge. I thought it was a no-brainer. So we ended going with him and it up leading to, as my tweet mentioned, a fantastic sweep six period for us, multi-eight figure. We were up over 50% year over year. And there's many reasons for that which we could dig into further but really the escalation of it and this celebrity endorsement I think really went a long way. Okay, so I have, I got two follow-up questions. One, you have three

cars, three like multi-hundred thousand dollar cars that that people can choose for. I'm, well, actually, I have three questions. One, who's leading up that operation at Ridge? Who's the one that's responsible for like sourcing these vehicles, getting them wrapped? Who owns the car, production operations? Is that you? Is that someone on your team? That's figuring that out?

“Like, what does that look like? Well, I think there's two parts of the car operation which is funny”

because we're a remote organization that's largely just like moving pixels around on websites and things. There are very few instances aside from like our ops team getting stuff shipped into the U.S. We're really not dealing with that much like physical logistics. Choosing the cars is Sean and the founders of Ridge. They're very passionate about what cars we're getting and what the wraps are going to be. So they actually own the like sourcing of and wrapping of the cars,

something they, they love doing. There's also a ton of debate every year. It's like, we joked that it's like the hardest decision that we make is trying to figure out what cars we want to give away. So that's one. And then the logistics of moving the cars around. I owned more directly a lot. We used to have the cars out in Utah when I was living there and we had like people on the ground helping move the cars between shoots and creators and we'd have to get

a mobile detail around. We do a whole thing. So we owned that. We had someone on the, um, we have a VP of special projects who stepped in and then an overseas sort of a project manager

“who could help just like manage and coordinate that. It was quite a bit easier with more of us”

being back in LA this year. We kept them at the office most of the time. So that is a little bit of a wrinkle in the whole system is, uh, there are a lot of sort of, um, behind the scenes logistics. Yeah. Okay. So you have a VP of special projects that's kind of like a point and shoot person that you can just be like, hey, you're owning these things and that person's going to make sure they get done. Okay. And then, and they do like, for what it's worth like, they're in charge of a lot of AI adoption

right now. Like, kind of special projects has a relates to AI. They do corporate gifting. And then they did like swoopsticks this year. So it's like they're kind of all across the board depending on where we need them to shift their focus. Sure. Okay. And then this is the first year you've had, uh, I mean, obviously you guys have the, the Marquez partnership. So like you aren't, um, you aren't unexperienced with like how to activate like a, I mean, I guess you could call him a celebrity.

Um, like, what, this is the first year you've had a celebrity as like the face of, of this week's sales campaign. So what were the core ways you activated with Tony Hawk? Like, obviously he was front and center in a lot of static imagery. Like, I saw on your website, but can you just talk talk through like, how you activated with Tony Hawk? And then if you have any

data on on how that performed, like we always shoot a hero video with Gordon to announce the

sweepstakes. And we leveraged that in a lot of places. We put it in the second section on the landing page. So like right away, people watch a really engaging video of Gordon. They get a really clear. He just speaks so well. So they get a very clear understanding of what's included. And then everything else is just so much easier because we have this amazing video that we leveraged that and paid. You know, we do paid cut downs. And that's always on the top performing ads. So like,

I feel like we've developed this playbook on how to leverage Gordon in sweepstakes. And I'm curious what, what were you guys thinking about with Tony and how to activate Tony? And then what we're like, did you see any data point showing that, you know, Tony's ads or emails or whatever outperformed, like, non Tony ads and emails. Everybody's talking about AI, but few operators are actually using it to speed up their marketing

and make better decisions. At Ridge, we use run-ath. It's an AI brain for the whole marketing team.

it actually drove revenue. You can plug it into your Clevio, Shopify, North Beam, your whole Google Drive. It reads all of it. So instead of asking what worked last quarter, anyone on your team can ask for 10 evergreen concepts worth testing before Q4 and get them back within minutes. We use it. HexCloud uses it. Jones Road uses it. It's the best AI brain for e-commerce on the planet. If you don't use it, you're going to fall behind. Go to runath.com and book a strategy session,

mention marketing operator sent you and you'll get $1,000 in free credits.

Okay, so we have this large deal with Marcus Brownlee. He's got 21 million subscribers on YouTube.

“He's one of the biggest tech creators. Far different than a celebrity like Tony Hawk, I think.”

Like, at least from my experience in the conversations I've had. Some people, and when we announced our big chief creative partnership with Marcus, I had a number of people texting me to be like, yo, this is really cool. Which is great. And that's like what we want to be doing. But the way we think about that relationship, it's still largely around the distribution that Marcus Brownlee will provide. If we're getting in 10 integrations a year, that is tens of millions

of views that we're racking up that we just think about a little bit differently. Then we would something like this engagement with Tony Hawk. So the way that this partnership worked was, it's only a six-week campaign. So we weren't looking for like a long sort of engagement, which I think was helpful for a lot of these conversations. And then too, it's helpful that we don't have a lot of, we're not in particularly competitive categories,

power banks, wallets, luggages, things like that. If we were like in Food and Bav, it'd be a lot more difficult. This is at least what I learned based on my conversations with different agents.

“If we were a credit card company, obviously, like that's going to come at a much higher rate.”

We are a relatively innocuous brand to be working with. We don't have a lot of conflict. So we're relatively easy to slot in, especially when you consider it's just for the six-week period. So, and is that just because Tony, like, if you're a credit card brand, there's so many credit card brands that want to be working with these people. So like the rate for a credit card brand to work with someone is just through the roof because there's another four, you know,

billion dollar brands that are also going after the same talent. And you guys are like the

only, you know, D to C brand, a nine-figure brand, but there's not other brands in your space that are, like, also trying to go get Tony Hawk to be the face of their campaign. Totally. Yeah, and there's an aspect of exclusivity here too, right? Like, if you get sponsored by Bud Light, like, you can't just do a course commercial next year. Like, that's, that's uh, they baked those into the contract. So the fact that exclusivity is really easy, we're not going

to, for us, as well as we're not going to conflict with anybody else's exclusivity agreement, it's just made it a little bit easier to deal with. So what we got from Tony, we got a day shoot, we got name and likeness for the six-week period, we got the ability to whitelist, we got two posts, two social posts. So that's all to say, like, we weren't really counting on Tony Hawk at all for distribution in and of himself. It came down almost exclusively to, like, let's get

the content that we need and then layer this out, layer this throughout the way that we were activating sweepstakes. So yes, where we placed it, I mean, basically everywhere. Like, he was the hero banner on our homepage, him in front of the cars, we had uh, TV commercials, we had a bunch of ads, who's on our landing pages, who's in the ton of our emails, like we really sort of, and this was a goal from the beginning was like creating a spokesperson for sweepstakes. Like, who is the person who's

really endorsing it this year? So basically, wherever we were talking about it, we were integrating Tony Hawk, where applicable. Um, and then it's funny to ask about performance, because it was one of my biggest fears. Obviously, the biggest, far and away, the biggest production we've done,

the biggest investment in content we've had, we've never really done anything like this before.

One of my concerns was we were going to come out of this period and not be sure what his value was. Just because that happens all the time. A lot of brands, and I talk with with other CMOs and CEOs who have brands who work with celebrities more frequently. And they're often say it's like, it's more of like a brand activation where it's like, hey, you just, you want to be driving impressions. You want to be staying top of mind with people. You want people to have the reaction

of, oh, hey, it's really cool that X brand is working with Y person. And a lot of people just earmark a bit of their budget every year, a few percentage points of the total budget to like those sorts of activations. That would have been fine. And frankly, with the initial reaction and like a number of people reaching out and saying, like, hey, this Tony Hawk engagement is awesome. I would have felt good about it from that perspective. But what we ended up finding was, and I

say this in my note, we basically find just a ton of winners with Tony across the board. Most notably

“something like TV, which I think makes the most sense. He's the most traditional celebrity we've”

ever worked with. Marcus Brownlee hasn't made a huge impact on our ability to run linear TV ads, but Tony Hawk being included so that we can run in bars and at gyms and on the fishing network and things like actually really worked. So we saw response rates basically double. It allowed us to almost double TV as a percentage of our total budget, which I thought was very exciting. And we are coming out of this period saying, hey, yeah, and it's not, that's not necessarily

to say that every celebrity will lead to the same sort of efficiency gains. But in this case,

lot of winning content. Dude, I remember playing Tony Hawk Pro skater back in the day like when I was eight years old and like to Tony Hawk for me is such an nostalgic figure. So I can imagine that, I mean, I don't know what you're, I'm imagining like your core demo is probably like what 25 35 25 to 45, like I imagine that was just such an nostalgic person to activate for this that like really made

“people perk up and say in like, oh, whoa, Tony Hawk, you know, I think it is the perfect person.”

How is Tony in? Because you're shooting like full on TVC. It's like this is like a big production that you did with him. So are you shooting, you shot a TV commercial, are you shooting paid ads like full shoot day like full on like what, what kind of production scale are we talking here? Like is this a six figure shoot day? Is this, is that what we're looking at? The entire, the entire deal was multiple six figures. One of the things that included was we had to use his

production company, which worked out really well because we were able to shoot at his warehouse in front of his halfpipe. So I'm sure we can link to a video in the show notes here, but the hero

video was basically Tony. We had another sort of hero figure who was speaking about the

sweepstakes, which I thought was kind of a fun concept. We had the three cars in front of this like epic halfpipe. So we got to shoot that at Tony Hawk's warehouse. We used his production company. And the main deliverable of that was this like hero video that got cut down into social ads as well as TV ads. It's where we got some of the static assets that we could use throughout the site. Okay, that's awesome. I want to talk about, I want to talk about like measurement a little bit here

because one thing I, you know, it's, like for us at Hax Cloud, like we don't, you know, we, we position our sweepstakes, like in a similar way as rich in the sense that we don't have like a ton of else going on during the moments that we run it except for the prime time sale, which for us is like a big moment, but it's like steering right down the barrel of BFCM. So it's not, it's like a fraction of what we're going to about to drive in a month. And then obviously we're

trying to build our list. A ton during like this moment, because then we go into our BFCM sale.

And like if you look at our, our like average days to first purchase is 86 days on our, on our sweepstakes

from 2024. And that makes sense, right? Because we, we launched this campaign like the middle of September. And then we activate the SCM in December. And we're getting a lot of people to buy. So this is people that's explicitly opted into a sweepstakes pop up. So like for us, we see our opt-in rates go through the roof during sweepstakes. Obviously now the conversion rate is much lower than it is on like an evergreen pop up. Now at first, I struggle with that. I'm like, well, is this really

working? Like if our conversion rate is so much lower than our evergreen like opt-in to order conversion rate, like is this really strong? But the, but the opt-in rate bumps are so big. Even though, like, it's kind of like, it's like a, the AOV versus conversion rate, you know, argument. And like, you look at the net dollars that it drives. Like, okay, this is, this is 100% worth it. Like,

“that's the, that's the kind of the ways that we're thinking about. Like, is this working?”

Is this driving growth for us? Is this a worthwhile activation to do? Because we don't see, it's not like when we launched our first sweepstakes, we all have a sudden saw our revenue go to like 100% growth. Now, did we see really good growth? Absolutely. But it's not like the overall blended Shopify was like, oh, we were trending at 30% growth for the year. Now, we bumped up to 60%. It was kind of, it was kind of roughly the same growth rate. Now, I would argue that based on like the channel

KPI is we're looking at that we would have had a much lower growth rate. Had we not run the sweepstakes? But I just wanted to like dig into that. Because I think sweepstakes is one of those ones where it, you kind of got to dig a little bit to make sure that it is driving a bump in performance. And it

might not always show up and you're like blended growth rate. I mean, obviously, that's the,

that's the goal is that you can really spike your like Shopify and your Shopify growth rate really. But like, how are you thinking about measurement here? And, and how are you like thinking about is the sweepstakes something that is worth it? I mean, you just said you did a multi-hundred thousand-dollar shoot, you know, we're probably investing at least six figures into getting this campaign off the ground every year. You know, we're producing a ton of content. We do a shoot every

year. We're activating with creators. There's a lot that goes into it. How are you thinking about measurement and like validating the cost and the ROI on a campaign like this? People are the most important part of your business and finding real a player is hard and incredibly

“time-consuming. That's why I want to tell you about propel. propel is honestly the best recruitment”

agency that I have personally worked with. They are marketing and operations specialist. They source talent from US, Latin, and beyond for top-peek on brands like Jones Road, like many others that you know and love. At Jones Road, we've hired over 12 people through them. We've hired video editors, graphic designers. We have multiple retention managers, creative strategists from them. What I love is not only they easy to work with, they're quick, but they work on performance. So you

only pay a one-offie. Only once you hire somebody, you don't have to pay, you know, any

them. They've worked really great for us. We've a really great team that they've helped us source.

I had to link in the show notes and submit the form to get 10% off of your first hire.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I'm totally with you, especially if a brand's experiencing like relatively large growth over a couple years. It's really easy for things like this to get lost in the mix where it's like what is the incremental growth unlocked by something like a sweepstakes campaign? The way that we've looked at it in the past, I mean, we've run six of them at this point. And there's really, I guess, two types of comparisons

that we're able to look at to sort of help justify the existence of sweeps or validate that it is truly contributing to incremental growth. One was in 2024, we moved our sweepstakes up a week. That's super like this is not rocket science, right? And we didn't do it for the purpose of measurement. But launching it a week early allowed us to say, we've been growing at, I'm just going to use standard numbers here. 10% growth year over year. We launched sweepstakes. This week of sweepstakes

is comping a week last year where we did not have sweepstakes. So if we're able to go from 10% growth to 50% growth, I think it's pretty clear that the existence of sweepstakes is driving incremental revenue. And the reason I bring that up is because if we've been running it six years in a row, it's actually really difficult to understand that like we have no hold out

“against sweepstakes. That's why I like this as an example is it's like, we're looking”

year over year and we can treat last year's non-sweeps period as a sort of holdout. What is the last week of July look like without sweeps compared to this year's last week of July? And we okay. So that's like super, super simple. Did you do that just? Was that like a thoughtful approach? Literally just to get like for the sake of measurement or no, it just worked out that way. We were thinking about we extended sweepstakes actually. So there was a year where we went from

it being like five weeks to six weeks or something like that. So we actually just pulled it up. So it was more a calendaring decision or a campaign decision around just elongating sweepstakes. But it gave us the ability to have this like very fair comp year over year. So that was one.

The second one is as we've expanded markets, we get really clean reads last year we launched the

UK and Canada and those had no sweepstakes for the entire six week. Previous. The only caveat there is and we've seen this now actually we were we launched in the EU and Australia this year and all the international markets don't respond to Tony Hawk in a Lamborghini in the same way that the US market does. So this is in

“by no means a perfect assessment but we saw two things which I think are interesting.”

We obviously saw extreme growth during the sweepstakes period and then also extremely interestingly because we have four international we'll use the other international markets as a pseudo holdout as well. These are our comparison periods that receive no sweepstakes and largely behave similarly. We don't see a lot of significant differences between growth percentages between our different international markets. So one,

we launched Canada UK last year we're able to see this large growth during sweepstakes great. That is validating in its own way. And we typically it ends up being like 30, 40% growth saying something like that. When looking year on year, comparing. When looking year on year,

when comparing to did not do it the year prior to this is the first year we did it.

And then the other thing that was really interesting for the international markets last year and this is also very easy to sort of miss is we saw a pretty significant sort of tale where we ended sweepstakes in the Canada and UK and then all of a sudden those markets continue to grow at a higher rate than the EU and Australia for the proceeding or the succeeding like six weeks or something. So we saw this very strong sort of halo lift afterwards and these are all again like not particularly

scientific ways of looking at it. But all points in the direction of like this drive and growth in this period as well as surprisingly in my opinion some some pretty like long-tailed growth

“in the international markets. Yeah, that makes sense. Honestly, I was so shocked at like I thought”

our conversion rate on sweepstops. We're going to be like a fifth of what our like evergreen was. And it's actually grown like I'm looking now. We're only like net 5% it's points lower in our first sweepstakes two years ago compared to our like evergreen pop up, which is pretty darn good. I mean, this kind of attracts that type of person that might not buy. So it's it's good to see that over time we can convert these people. How do your how do your sweepstads perform relative

to non-sweeps ads during during your sweepstakes? So I think all of the ads benefit from sweepstakes for the most part we have a lot of like caveats and nuances and things like and this makes total sense. We see sweepstakes play less of a positive role for our wedding band business. This makes sense like it's such a high-intent market. Nobody's nobody's really buying a wedding band because they might win a Lamborghini, right? Like like it's so high-intent. It's more about like

I've got a wedding coming up in September, 90 to ring today. So things like tech or EDC seem to benefit

specific ads end up becoming anywhere between like 40 to 60% of total ads been for those different

categories. So we're we're able to scale spend, right? Like we're able to drive incremental ad dollars that perform often better than our baseline stuff. So that's another way that we're looking at like, well, how are we actually driving the growth in you're saying evergreen ads benefit from sweepstakes because they're going to your website, which has the sweepstakes activated there. So it's just like an on-site zero play. I don't think there's any like the other way to say

that it is like, I don't there's any downside to having the sweepstakes on my website. If I'm just said, if I'm running a wedding band ad and it's like, hey, you're getting married, you need a wedding band come to my site. The fact that in this period, you might win a Lamborghini has no negative

downside to and some incremental person is going to be like, okay, I will purchase today because

this seems sort of interesting. Yeah, you know, the other thing I would just want to highlight quickly because you were talking about opt-ins is the free entry is like a no-brainer reason to visit the website and we have very few examples of this and that actually going into 2027 like to find we're going to have another example later this year but going into 2027 finding more examples or more ways to do this. What we're asking shoppers or just like, you know, social media users

to do all the time is come to our site and purchase from us. Like there's really no like that is that is what we're doing 99.9% of the time during sweepstakes. We're saying, hey, just come here

“entry or email for free and that's all you have to do and now of us and we've gotten more people”

on rich.com. We've gotten more emails. The value of those emails is obviously questionable. It's a very, it's a very unqualified lead that you're gathering at that point but all of a sudden I think there's like really a lot of like long-term benefits of simply having a no-brainer reason, a low-risk, no-cost way to get people to your site and engaging with your brand. And this is obviously like a super non-novel take here but like that's I think a really interesting component of this

entire sweepstakes. We see, you know, like quote unquote click through rate from like partnership ads like quadruple at times five exit times because it's like, hey, don't go to rich.com and use my code and save 10%. It's like go to rich.com right now and so for free for a chance to win a sweepstakes and all of a sudden there's just infinitely more reason to do that. And so that's how we think about this period as well. It's similar to what you're talking about where you drive

and opt and rate. You can drive up click through rate. You can get more traffic to your site. The quality goes down significantly on like a per email basis or per user basis but I do think that there's really long-term benefits to that. Before Q4 hits, the smartest e-commerce operators aren't

“just asking, how do we spend more? They're asking, how do we make every visitor more profitable?”

That is where after self comes in. After cell helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor, contribution margin, and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments. Cart, checkout, post purchase, and even the thank you page. Brands like hexclad, ridge, and pilar increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero-risk upsells, we've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion. It's just more free money in your pocket. And with rocked

thanks, you can offset your after-cell subscription. No redesigns, no risky funnels, just better economics. Want to see how much money you can make with after-cell? Go to aftercell.com/rocket, revenue, forecast, put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts. I think there's a balance to it to make, as far as entry merchandising goes, we've thought a lot about this with the question becomes, what's the sweet spot between, obviously you're going to

get higher opt-in rates and lower conversion rate on your options during this period? But is there a way to filter a little bit? So for us, the way that we've done it is just how many, it's just how we assign entries to those non-purchase events. So we're saying, hey, you can get 25 entries if you opt-in to email another 25, if you opt-in to SMS. But if you go buy this $100 cookware,

“say you can get a hundred, if you buy this $700 knife, say you can get $1400. So I think that”

merchandising also, it kind of somewhat detours the people that aren't as serious about buying eventually, because if you're someone that truly, truly, truly is the person that goes an option to every single giveaway, if you see that you're only getting 25 entries or 50 entries for email and SMS, but then you also see that, well, the 7 piece knife set is 1500 entries. I think that detours some people and says, I'm not even going to do it because obviously people are

going to have way more entries than me in way in way higher chances. So I would never go and say,

like I guarantee you, if we were to go and make our email SMS opt-in to 100 entries, we would get 50% opt-in rate, but I got our conversion rate would go from 13% to 3%. You know, I think there are ways to, like, not swing too far, where with how you're merchandising the entries on the opt-ins, because otherwise you're just going to get, like, a terribly unqualified list. I do, I generally agree. Two of our winners, again, we've had, there's a couple of years where we've

They never purchased anything from us. They just signed up for email, maybe SMS, they had, like,

40 entries and they won. So it does totally happen. I also don't think people are being

“as calculated. Like, you know what, I think is probably the more common path.”

It's someone says, "Hey, I'm going to go enter for free. I'm going to get my 25 entries, because this YouTuber just told me I should." And then, "Hey, I'm on rich.com." And it's like, these, you know, pieces of hard-shell luggage look pretty sick. And I'm traveling next week. So, like, I'm just going to get one. I think that ends up being like the way more common sort of buying behavior. And then they're like, "Okay, sure, yeah, I'm going to get a couple hundred more entries

for making this purchase." But that's just, like, again, it's at the end of the day. I'm like, I don't need to have this perfect equation or, like, set of incentives necessarily. Like, give me the no-brainer reason and the exciting, interesting, engaging message for why someone should come to rich.com. And then our products and our imagery and our value props are going to do enough of the work that some of these people are just going to convert naturally.

I want to go back to the cars. You have three cars this year? Yes. And the winner selects one or two winners selects? We have two winners. And they're sort of like, stack ranked. What do you do with extra cars? That if someone doesn't take the cars? Because either,

both winners each take a car and you have one left over car, or both winners take cash.

“And you could have three cars, not claims. Like, what are you doing with these, these wrapped cars?”

That don't check. Yeah, we know, we get it. We get a ton of, we had a ton of different scenarios. Two years ago, we auctioned off the 24-carot gold-plated cyber truck for charity on Doug Dumeros, YouTube channel, which was a super cool way to sort of like, book and the end of six. Nobody wanted surprise. Not all that surprisingly. Nobody wanted the 24-carot gold cyber truck. We've resold the cars in the past. The Jeep Wrangler wasn't chosen.

So like, we resold that one. So it's just some mix. We've reused cars. The F-150s made an appearance in more than one sweepstakes. So like, that is an option that we have. So it's really just a gut decision. But luckily, you know, cars are assets to some degree. So they do cost money up front. But they do have resale value. I want to dig into a few more things. One, I want to dig into

first is like, you're non, like some of the non-sweeps tactics that are really driving ridges growth

this year. And if I had, from all the conversations we had, if I had to like pinpoint one thing

“that is driving the majority of ridges growth this year, it's like new product go to market.”

It's new categories. It's new products within categories. And I wanted to ask you, I tweeted this at you, but I don't know if it's like the, if like, all it details of my question fully can't through in the tweet. What I was wondering is, obviously, you guys really ramped up your your tactics this year, right? You had the celebrity endorsement. I'm looking at like the notes on your creative stack. Clearly, you ramped up and improved your creative stack this year.

But I also know that you probably had tons of new products available this year that you're promoting, that you did not have the your prior. And that, like setting aside all the sweepstakes tactics, that also would have driven some level of your on your growth, right? So how, like, what, if you had, if you had a guess maybe like how much incremental revenue do you think you drove during sweepstakes this year? In new products or new categories or like, yeah, so new products within

everyday carry or new categories like change as a whole that you just didn't have on, you shouldn't have available last year. And like that's, that's the growth drive. Like what, how much would you attribute to that versus like your new and improved kind of stack of tactics and strategies? We have four categories. We have, for the sake of simplicity or while the business, our tech accessory business or wedding band business or luggage business, we had all of those

categories last year. So like there are many periods of time over the last three years at rich where

we have an unfair comp. We're all of a sudden, rings are doing a million dollars a month and they

were doing zero dollars the year before. So that is like unfair growth that we're getting. This is not really one of those periods. Tech accessories was a more nascent category. So we're getting larger percentage growth there. But wedding bands continue to grow, the wall of business continues to grow. And we actually had like a really difficult comp for our luggage business, like a bunch of reasons. We had section 321 finally ending mid Q3 of last year. So we had things on

promo. We were like quickly trying to sell things out of the inventory that we had in Mexico and Canada. So we just like had this blowout sale for luggage last year where that was like more or less flat year over year. So we got no growth out of a category that we've had for three years. So it's really just a mix bag. What I will say is our oldest and most mature business, the wall of business is growing at the slowest rate. And that's not going to be a surprise to anybody. It's like

the biggest, not actual like nine figure line of businesses, the hardest to grow. We're getting still single digit to high teen percentage growth in certain periods. But really disproportionate growth is coming from the not necessarily new categories, but like still mature in categories. Yeah, one means that's just the law of big numbers, right? Like your percentages. Yeah, like you might

wallets 50% three years ago. Like it's just, it's just those can be misleading. So but even so even

within though like wallets for example, you have, I don't know how many new patterns, new colors, new designs you have this year over last year. Like within that growth, within within wallets,

“like was a lot of that growth due to the, like that's what I was kind of getting at. Like”

how many of these new wallets drove the growth versus like your hero gray black gold that everyone goes for. You know, the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them, clear signal on what's actually driving growth. It can get really, really noisy. There's so much noise. You got platform data. You got blended data, MMM, all the acronyms, MTA experiments, all of it, all pointing in different directions. The more you're spending, the faster you move,

the more the bad signal can cost you. That's why we use house and we've been using it for

years. That's why the other marketing operators do as well. They're the best tool on planet Earth

for measuring what we call incrementality. We talk about a lot on a podcast. What is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business? We have causal MMM for channel level budget calls, causal attribution down to the ad level and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go. And the results speak for themselves. Stock Exchange saw 41% left in IRO using house and you're not stuck with a help desk. You get an embedded measurement

strategies who actually helps your team make better decisions. Their whole team is great. We've worked with a lot of them. They are world class there. Go to house.io/operators. HAUs.io/operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data. That's okay. So I actually didn't get that from your initial question because that's like a super interesting distinction to make. Like when I think about when people often are like, oh, you guys are launching something new products. What

they're talking about is like the new categories that we're launching. And like the really like net new, we would call those silhouettes. The like brand new phone case, the iPhone 18 that just came out last week. Like that's a new silhouette. The duo case is a new silhouette. I figure that's what people are talking about. But then within all these silhouettes or within these product categories

“we're launching a ton of new colorways and designs. And that's what you're talking about. And”

actually for this sweepstakes, it seemed we had a difficult comp year over year that we had more newness last year. And it actually felt like to some degree where we were coming out of a deficit. And that's like, this comes onto a merchandise in question because they're not even necessarily new colorways associated with the sweepstakes campaign. But last year we launched a color right called Consugi, which will come out again in just a couple weeks at the end of October.

And it's this Japanese porcelain themed wallets like black with like gold oil filled cracks in it. It looks like super super cool. That came back into stock in July. And no joke. It's one of those colorways. It like sort of changes the face of the EDC business that we're able to spend more at dollars on it. It becomes a big percentage of revenue. But as we promote that product, we sell far more gunmetal black in other colorways. Just the ability to spend that dollar

so valuable. And that was frankly, we didn't have as strong of a launch to comp that. So it actually felt like from a colorway, newness perspective, we were coming out of a deficit for this period.

“Whereas if we'd had comparable, newness, I think we would have even hit a higher growth rate.”

I see. And then what about what about chains? And like, is it, I think it's just chains. Like, how did that look? Yeah, chains looked fine. We're waiting on more inventory to come in. So that hasn't been as big of a growth opportunity recently as it has been. That's another one in the month of October. Friends and family. They're going to go on promo. Friends and family sale. You and I have talked about is how we're going to try to like sort of activate people in the

month of October. Chains will go on sale for the first time. And I'm really excited about chains as it gets in product through the rest of this year. But not, like, really not a needle mover for this week's experience. You know, one thing you chatted about, which this is one of the things I love the most about our sweepstakes is it is a fantastic way to drive growth in your kind of some of your ancillary categories. Like, that was one of the best growth we saw when we

launched it our first year. It was like, you know, aprons and like non-cookware. Like, we saw a

really amazing growth in those categories. And we didn't have to, we didn't have any margin drop.

It was purely because we were giving people more entries for every dollar they spent in aprons compared to to cookware. So I do think it's a fantastic way to drive some growth in those other categories in a way that doesn't reduce margin at all. We have some some more new tactics coming this year where we're actually adding like a fourth tier to our entry merchandising with a smaller collection of products that are like, we just think we have the opportunity to drive

growth and without without discounting them. And that's, I think, one of the biggest ones first sweepstakes for us at least is like, we don't necessarily need sweepstakes to drive growth in cookware, but it has been a really helpful tactic for for some of these other categories.

I'm assuming some of the less mature business is right. It doesn't end up actually being the

less mature businesses necessarily. I said earlier like wallets and some of the tech accessories do well. It's like a $8, 120 price point. It's like relatively accessible. You can get some bonus entries. I know I just said earlier like, I don't think people are all that calculated about it, but I don't think it's a coincidence if people gravitate towards things that are like, accessible price points and give you a decent amount of entries. Wedding bands don't

really benefit, as I mentioned, and then luggage we find difficult because it's such a high price

“point where it's like, if you want to enter the sweepstakes a $400 piece of luggage, even though you're”

going to get $800 or $1200, it's still such a big dollar commitment. Like you're not just like, oh yeah, the Lamborghini seems interesting. Like, let me casually buy this $400 a heart shell luggage. So that's one that like really doesn't benefit as well. And then the other really interesting behavior that we were looking at. So I don't know how many brands are thinking about this and part of me thinks I'm like way too in the weeds here. But what we've looked at is

if we spend a dollar promoting wallets, we drive in an evergreen period. We drive the vast majority of revenue attributed to those ads is wallet revenue. It's like it's not perfect, but it's like 88 90% it's really, really high. And that's because like when we're promoting the product and someone clicks through on it, it's because they are interested in that product and therefore they buy it at a really high rate. It's like not rocket science whatsoever. What we see during sweepstakes,

which is really interesting. And when I say 90% in this case, 90% comes from wallets and let's say 5% comes from tech accessories and 5% come from travel, something like that. Nobody shows up and randomly buys a wedding ban. What we see during sweepstakes and my thesis here is because someone's clicking through for a different reason. They might be interested in that product, but they might be interested in what is Tony Hawk promoting and they might be interested in like

how do I get the chance to win this $300,000 Lamborghini. When they click through that ad, even though we're thinking of it as a wallet ad, they are purchasing a much wider range of products,

“which I think is super interesting. And maybe kind of what you're describing, where someone's”

clicking through on the 12 piece, but they just want to participate in the culinary experience in Italy. They want the chance at that. So they're actually going to convert on a much smaller pan set because they just want to be participating in some way. And that ends up like really sort of screwing with the way that we think about MER by category in this period specifically. We see this massive distribution of cross-category buying. So that's another thing that happens

here is like it's not necessarily any one product benefits disproportionately, but like people end up shopping in a much more distributed way than they typically do. Yeah, the value proposition that people are coming in on as much more broad in general. It's not as product specific. We see we see our individual product grow a lot during sweepstakes for for that reason, right? People are like, hey, I want to buy something because I want to improve my chances of winning, but like if that's

the mindset they're going to go by a 10-inch pan versus a 12-piece set. I want to talk about

“creative because you guys did a lot of different things this year creatively that I think are”

are very, very exciting. So according to your post on Twitter, you said that partner page adds

an affiliate content accounted for about 40% of ridges about a spend and it was basically zero

last year. You guys launched 2200 ads. You had 53 hundred TikTok creators post or sorry, 5300 videos from TikTok creators. So you guys clearly shifted towards like this creator-led ad flywheel this year in sweepstakes, which I imagine, you know, paid off pretty well if you put 40% of your budget towards that content. So do you speak to like, what was the thinking this year in that shift in creative and like, operationally, how did you go and execute on this many piece of

content? All right, this ad is technically a job posting for neon pixel, but but stay with me here. neon pixel is hiring performance marketers. People who actually get incrementality, they understand hold out the understand triangulation and really that's the entire pitch because when you sign with neon pixel, these are the marketers that are running your CTV strategy. We've been with neon pixel at Hexclive for three years now and they really do work like an extension of our team.

Live on real living room TV in days, helping with creative strategy, same day end card swabs and measurement read in our stack, not just some black box dashboard that we don't really understand

have insights into. And that's ultimately what a managed service looks like when it's

staff by real operators and real marketers. So whether you want to work on the sharpest CTV accounts in DTC or you want that team running yours, go to neonpixel.co/careers to apply. Totally, yes, so there's two things going on there. One is, I would really like to be spending way more dollars behind single handle partnership ads, what like people historically would have called white listing. This goes back to like, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the

same people in new ways. So a big chunk of that 40% comes from just partnership ads, not necessarily

“content created by partners, but ads run through new pages and they typically highlight those people.”

So this would be a lot of Tony Hawk partnership ads, a lot of Mark has brownly partnership ads, which come from his page and then we had a really big effort and we do for all of our sort of like tier one campaign activations with founder content and we'll run some of those via like our founders page. So that's where a lot of those dollars go from a go-to is like, how are we just reaching people in ways that are a little bit more unique. They're not coming from our own page. They have a

different angle. There's more people involved. It's more humanizing, et cetera, et cetera. So that's like one big chunk. That's been an effort all year. Sweep six with the addition of Tony Hawk, like benefit, and disproportionately from that. But this would be a trend that we would see

basically any given month and it's accelerating throughout the year. The second thing which we've

talked a bunch about is, I've been calling a TikTok shop, but really at the end of the day, it's like, how are we activating creators at scale? And we talked about this a few weeks ago, but we've really shifted a lot of our attention from being TikTok oriented, TikTok GMV oriented to let's just get great ad content created by dozens or hundreds of creators. And that's where like, I'm beginning to blur the lines between videos getting posted to TikTok that might end up in GMV

max, but we have the ad rights and make it into our ad account as well as tribe creators who are producing content that's going straight into the ad account. That is what made up like of the 40

“percent, I think it's like roughly half something like that, high teen, something like that. But”

those are less sweepstakes dependent and more just us beginning to get the flywheel going of building great ad creative with affiliate at scale, which again is a trend that we're going to see even after sweepstakes. Not sweepstakes dependent at all. I think going into October and November December, like it's going to be an even larger percentage of our budget, we're going to start paying out. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the year, we're not paying $100,000 out in

like affiliate fees to either TikTok affiliates or tribe affiliates. So that is just sort of a continuation of a trend that I think helped contribute to sweepstakes independent of like the increase in the prizes or the addition of Tony Hawk. Yeah. And like the ability to brief creators at scale, via TikTok shop and via tribe is what allowed you to activate this many creators, this many pieces of content, right? Like this is not something that you were going in that side doing like

“on a one to one basis, like that just probably wouldn't, wouldn't be practical. Briefing is not”

even the right word. Like what we're talking about internally now is like create a coaching and education. We want to give them the loose tools and information they need to create good ads.

But it's not about briefing at all. It's like, hey, here's the direction like here's what has

worked in the past. Now you go be creative, produce as much content as you want, and that has led to winning ads. And again, that comes down to like, it doesn't create ads on a high percentage basis. The winning ad per concept actually really low. But the fact that it has basically zero risks to us upfront. And the fact that we can produce so much of it just means that we can actually find winners at a pretty reliable and frequent rate. Yep. Okay. We'll know. So I was going

to kick it to you, independent of sweep sex or maybe you guys are thinking about as it really so the sweep sex is coming up. Um, just affiliate's generally like, or are you guys, are you guys thinking about tribe? How's TikTok shop shaping up? Like, where does that all stand for you guys? We haven't expanded to tribe yet because we're starting with TikTok shop. We've actually

had our first TikTok shop affiliate ad that like really took off. This actually happened outside of

the activation that we did with T bars. We are just now getting our like Google Drive folders of literally hundreds of pieces of content from the T bar competition activation. So we're about to get those those pumping in the ad account. I have been so happy with how TikTok shop has been going. I mean, we have obviously with a lot of brand equity at this point. So when we really started going outbound via UGA with these competitions, we were getting like huge GMV max folks applying

to get our product. So that's really exciting. The old like the GMV max as a whole has obviously grown a lot. Our revenue, for sure. I should say just overall GMV, we're putting more spend into GMV max ads now. Like, and now we're about to just like see how all this volume of content does inside of our meta account. So we might go to tribe at some point. We just haven't so far because we really want to focus on TikTok shop and see how this content performs. Also seeing

a totally different distribution of products performing well for us inside of TikTok shop. Very similar to what you talked about. Like for us, it's a lot of the individual cookware products. It's like our splatter screens and steamer baskets are doing well. So it's it's pretty cool to see that we're just like we're able to push some of these other products at historically. We haven't

distributions. There's way more products being seeded to creators. And I think it's just like

becoming this really really exciting way to drive growth in a category that we might never build

ads around. We're never in a build meta ads around like steamer baskets or a lot of these like smaller products. But it's giving us, you know, it's empowering that we can go and say, hey, this is like a CRB tier launch. But we have acquisition plays here now. Like we have actual like demand, jann acquisition play is not just, hey, let's merchandise is prominently on the website. And it'll get picked up organically. Like it's it's kind of creating this whole new distribution

channel for us on some of these these smaller AOV more niche products, which is which is really

“exciting to see. And it it's just like very incremental to want another, I think, is as ultimately”

the the conclusion. Most brands treat customer support as a cost. But with AI, every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention, recover revenue and grow your LTV rich panel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets. They allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support. You can test different windback offers on refund requests, subscription save offers during cancellations and product recommendations that turn chats into sales. Plus, they guarantee you're

going to save money. 50% of your support volume automated in 30 days or your money back. That's a pretty good offer, if you ask me. So at a rich panel dot com slash demo, they'll build an AI support team live for your business and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you. Yeah, 100% and like I think that's a I mean, we talked about it quite a bit and it's cool to hear you guys really experience it. The brands that I've spoken to that are big on TikTok shop. It's like

it's a big catalog activation play. It's like you never really know, you know, you guys didn't

show up being like, oh my god, we got a hit TikTok product in the steamer baskets, right? But it's like, but because you have hundreds of people, just kind of picking and choosing what they want with an idea of what content they'd create. Like, it's just activation that you couldn't possibly create internally. And we've seen a similar thing, but the reason we've moved to tribe is because I don't think we have as big of a catalog and as much opportunity to really activate from that

perspective. It's like, okay, yeah, our tracker card product is like our hero product to touch up. We don't have like six of those. We don't have like 12 of those. It's a relatively concise catalog. The wallets aren't a particularly great fit for, you know, the problem and solution content, the storytelling content, the like value driven plays that I think performs a well on TikTok

“shop. So that's why we need to be shifting a lot of our efforts away from”

because what I'm saying here is if TikTok is going to work, you were somewhat beholden to what

can work on TikTok shop. Brands with big catalogs, you have a lot to work with. There are many things that can work to a really high degree on TikTok shop. For someone like us, it's actually we'll do a couple hundred grand a month on TikTok shop. We'll continue chipping away at growth there. Really our biggest opportunity is going to come down to like getting more wallet sold. That's going to happen via meta at a more effective rate. So let's just align affiliate incentives

with that. But it sounds like you guys are nowhere near that point. Like there's a lot of meat on the bone for growing TikTok. Yeah, not yet. And also a lot of what is working in TikTok shop. It is still cook where products. It's just individual products. So what what we need to see and like we don't know this yet because we just don't have enough data on running these ads through meta. But like if someone, if we get like someone that makes a really good piece of

content on like our high-sided pan, let's say, which is a very popular product line for us. Like these are, you know, like the seven court chicken fryer and the five point five court high-sided pan. These are really popular individual cookware products. For someone to like see an ad about the high-sided pan, which is still cookware. And then they go to our website. It's not that much of a gap to cover for them to be like, actually, I want to go buy this

60 set of the 12-piece set because at the end of the day, the value propositions on what makes our cookware unique is the same between a 12-inch pan as it is between a griddle, as it is between a high-sided pan. Whereas you guys obviously there's a lot more difference between like your your charging banks versus your wallet versus your rings. Like I think there's more differences here. So and we saw this with our Japanese products as well. Like we're promoting these

Japanese products that have been really successful. Those cost like 130 bucks, the AOV on those ads was like in the mid-200s up to 300. So clearly people are going and buying multiple products here.

“And that's what I want to wait and see is like what's the AOV going to be on an ad promoting a griddle”

or a high-sided pan, which is a single product promotion. But I would bet that people are going to get to the website and opt in for a bundle because that's how we position to get savings during an evergreen moment. So I think based on what happens there, we may or may not need to go to drive and say hey we need you guys to promote the top he's set or the 60's set only. But I'm hoping that we can promote more new products but not see AOV come down too much because of all the reasons

that I that I just mentioned. 100%. You know it's a great I love the point that like at the end of the day they're all cookware products. And what we're talking about is almost like the transitory

when they see the 12 piece set on on Instagram like they are going to understand that connection they're

going to say hey like I saw this I was interested in this on TikTok shop. I understand how this what I value didn't on TikTok shop is like transitioning over to what I'm now seeing on Instagram. And if you guys were like hey we don't care at all. We're just going to come out with a bunch of viral-ish stuff and we're going to sell makeup and hair scrunchies and whatever else like that

has no transitory brand value that's not going to benefit the 12 piece set in any way.

So yeah are you guys going to do um I'm super curious to hear about some sort of geo-lift test that I'm sure you'll do at some point because I I would think that even though you're promoting individual products on TikTok shop that I could see there being quite a bit of spillover to shop

“a fine Amazon on higher value orders just because like I think people are more comfortable spending”

$2,300 on those platforms. Yeah um we're trying to get the GMV Max ads hold out to set up it's not like an out of the box solution as I'm sure you know so we're trying to get in touch with the right people because that is like the highest priority hold out that we want to run is a GMV Max hold out and see what kind of halo there is into Amazon and in Shopify so that's that's like number one on our list we're just trying to get in touch with the right ads team at TikTok to get

“that set up on the back end and then we'll run it um I think we might also do the same thing but”

just do a hold out on the TikTok shop affiliate content we're running in meta now I don't want to

do that right away first and foremost I just want to launch these ads and see like what the

performance north-beat metrics look like relative to other ads and the AOV and all those things and I think a follow-up test could be our let's do a hold out now on like all of our our all of our TikTok shop affiliate ads in one sale and holding that out in another silence you what kind of lift all that content promoting such a variety of products

“lifts because I think there's I mean we all know this right people see many it's not like they're”

seeing one ad only over all time they're seeing tons of ads so I think there's a ton of value in people seeing an ad about the 12 piece set and then an ad about the griddle and then an ad about the the high-sided pants and then an ad about the walk I just think there's more like trust and yeah there's more trust baked into that experience versus them getting hit over the head with like a 12 piece set ad or different 12 piece set ads over and over and over again so

I could see all of those ads driving a huge lift not only on those products but like we talked about on our sets as well because of the the value of like promoting multiple products to the same person over the course of of many months I think there's more more trust there's more use cases more value props to hit on more ways to tell that story when you're promoting 10 cookware product versus like a single set or two