Marketing Operators
Marketing Operators

How Ridge + Portland Leather Goods Launch Hundreds of New Products Every Year

1d ago1:06:5814,678 words

The Podafi briefing · AI analysis

High-volume variant launches and unsexy merchandising drive profitable DTC revenue

5 min brief · 4 takeaways · Based on this episode’s transcript

The 30-second brief

TL;DR
  • 01Launching hundreds of limited-edition SKUs targets returning customers with zero ad spend, yielding highly profitable revenue.
  • 02High SKU volume requires equally high discontinuation rates to manage inventory risk and avoid dead stock.
  • 03Unsexy merchandising tweaks and ambiguous creative stunts can drive significant revenue without relying on massive ad spend.

The big picture

Brands face a tension between inventory risk and the high margins of zero-ad-spend repeat purchases. Launching hundreds of variants targets returning customers, while unsexy add-ons and ambiguous creative drive unexpected revenue without heavy acquisition spend.

Useful for: E-commerce operators looking to increase repeat purchase profitability and optimize product launches through strategic variant expansion and merchandising.

Synthesis of podcast conversations. Speaker claims are not independently verified.

01Retention economics

Returning customer profitability justifies high SKU volume

McCoy Mirkley notes new customer revenue is barely profitable at single-digit margins. In contrast, returning customer revenue is four and a half to five times more profitable for Portland Leather Goods, justifying the operational effort of launching hundreds of new variants annually.

Why it matters. High-margin repeat purchases mean brands do not need massive volume per SKU to justify development costs, making small-batch launches financially viable.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Calculate the profit differential between new and returning customer revenue to determine the minimum viable sales volume for a new variant launch.

The catch. This assumes a high natural repeat purchase rate. Brands with low retention or high acquisition costs may not see the same margin benefits.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

“returning customer revenue I believe last night check was like four and a half to five times more profitable than new customer revenue”
Read the source transcript ↗

Evidence summary · paraphrased

Mirkley states returning customer revenue is four and a half to five times more profitable than new customer revenue, which sits at single-digit profit margins.

02Owned channels

Zero-ad-spend launches via email and SMS

Mirkley observes that 90 to 99 percent of limited-edition SKU sales go to returning customers with zero ad spend. These Tuesday and Thursday drops are driven entirely by email and SMS messages to the existing audience.

Why it matters. Relying on owned channels for variant launches protects margins and reduces reliance on paid acquisition, turning product drops into pure profit events.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Schedule regular, low-key variant drops for existing customers via email and SMS, tracking the percentage of returning versus new customer sales.

The catch. This requires a highly engaged existing audience. Brands with small or unengaged email lists will not generate sufficient volume to clear inventory.

Transcript evidence

Evidence summary · paraphrased

Mirkley notes that limited edition launches sell 90 to 99 percent to returning customers with zero ad spend behind them, relying on email and text messages.

03Inventory management

High SKU volume requires high discontinuation

Mirkley clarifies that launching 5000 SKUs also means discontinuing 5000 SKUs per year. It is a continuous cycle of bringing products in and taking them out to manage catalog health and prevent dead stock.

Why it matters. Treating SKUs as temporary prevents catalog bloat. It forces the business to continually test and prune based on actual customer demand rather than emotional attachment.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Establish a strict lifecycle for variants. Plan to discontinue an equal number of underperforming SKUs for every batch of new variants introduced.

The catch. Frequent discontinuations can frustrate customers if core products are removed. Ensure only true variants and limited editions are rotated, not hero products.

Transcript evidence

From the transcript

“It's worth noting that we launch 5,000 skews. We also discontinue 5,000 skews per year. Right. So like there's it's a come-in come-out type of situation.”
Read the source transcript ↗

Evidence summary · paraphrased

Mirkley explains that Portland Leather Goods launches 5000 SKUs but also discontinues 5000 SKUs per year, maintaining a balanced catalog through constant rotation.

04Merchandising strategy

Merchandising precedes product design

The Ridge operator defines distribution strategy, price point, and target channel before product design begins. This ensures new items fit specific marketing needs, like a power bank built specifically for TikTok Shop.

Why it matters. Marketing teams often struggle to scale products designed without a clear distribution plan. Aligning product specs with channel requirements upfront reduces wasted design effort.

Your next move · Podafi’s suggestion

Create a brief for every new product that specifies the target channel, price point, and primary distribution strategy before handing it to the product design team.

The catch. Over-indexing on channel-specific trends can lead to a fragmented brand identity if the product does not align with core brand values or quality standards.

Transcript evidence

Evidence summary · paraphrased

A Ridge executive explained their process involves identifying the distribution opportunity and price point first. This allows the product design team to work within those specific constraints.

From listening to doing

Take one idea into the week

Suggested experiments, not proven results. Choose what fits your brand.

Test zero-ad-spend variant drops

  1. 01Develop three new colorway variants of an existing hero product in small batch quantities.
  2. 02Announce the variants exclusively to returning customers via a scheduled email and SMS campaign with no paid media support.
  3. 03Track the sell-through rate and calculate the profit margin compared to standard paid acquisition campaigns.

Measure: Net profit per variant compared to the cost of goods sold and marketing spend, measuring incremental contribution rather than attributed revenue.

Guardrail: Stop the test if inventory does not sell through within 30 days, indicating weak audience demand. Do not generalize results if the brand lacks a strong existing repeat buyer base.

Context & limitations
  • Portland Leather Goods owns its manufacturing, allowing for highly flexible and lean small-batch runs that third-party reliant brands may struggle to replicate.
  • The profitability of this model relies heavily on a high natural repeat purchase rate and strong owned channel engagement, which varies by category.
  • Attributed revenue from returning customers on launch day does not equal incremental profit, especially if those customers would have purchased anyway.

Listen to the conversation

0:000:00
Original episode description

“Returning customer revenue is where all the profit is made.” Can every DTC brand sell new products to existing customers, or does the category decide? MacCoy Merkley (CMO, Portland Leather Goods), Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge), and Cody Plofker (Advisor & fmr. CEO, Jones Road Beauty) unpack why new products sold to existing customers drive ecommerce profit, and why some categories can’t lean on r...

Transcript

EN

In 2026, Bridge will have launched over 500 new skews, and Portland leather g...

in the many thousands, because launching new products is one of the most underrated tactics

for scaling e-commerce business, but a lot of people don't discuss how to do it. So we had McCoy murkly on the CMO of Portland leather goods to discuss our good market strategies, the thoughts behind launching new products, and how to get the most juice out of the squeeze. Stay till the end, because McCoy walks a step by step through one of their most fun product launches they've ever had. This is episode 136 of marketing operators. Let's get into it.

All right, we are back with another marketing operator's episode. We are Connor Role Lane List, so you've got me, Cody, and special guest McCoy from Portland leather goods. McCoy, thanks for coming on.

“Hey, thanks for having me. I think it was about a year ago. I think we were on here for the first time,”

so it's uh, we were due to catch up and hang out again. So glad to be here. It's super so to have you. You know, people call you Maverick. How did that nickname come about? Both a great story and also nothing like kind of a terrible story. So the first day I walked in, uh, like officially for work. So not actually my interview, but like the first day I walked in, uh, Curtis was like, what was your name again? Like he had hired me a couple days before or whatever, but I showed up.

He said, what was your name? Yeah, I was like McCoy Mirkley, and he said, that's a terrible name. Hello, everybody. This is Maverick McCoy Mirkley. He's a gunslinger from Tucson, and he's going to come help us do some marketing. And it, I don't, when he calls me McCoy now, like my, my, my government name, it's, it's odd in awkward. It's, it's weird. So I've been Maverick.

It's one of the differences. Bad. Yeah, exactly. It's funny. Like I'm never getting picked up at the airport.

When I went to Mexico, and there was like, uh, you know, a Mexican man there. And he's like, "Hello, Mr. Maverick. Hello, nice to meet you." And like I'd walk all around Mexico where a factory's at, and no, and actually knew me by my first name. It was just all as well. Maverick. So,

“I don't know if that's how, that's how it is. I almost wore a shirt that said Maverick on it,”

too. It just happens to be the brand in the shirt, but I figured that'd be a little too on the nose. We're super stoked to have you board here. Um, figured we'd get into a little bit of the lore. Um, what we're talking about today is launching new products, which, Portland, other goods probably better than anybody else at doing this. Um, I want to get into, sort of, how brands approach deciding to launch a product, and then also just like the logistics and

operations and internal workings of how those products are brought to market. But McCoy, this kind of got on my radar. You were talking about this publicly a couple of years ago. I'm curious where it lands today. But, um, I think Portland leather goods a couple years ago was launching like almost 100 new products a year, 2000 skews or variants. I don't know how you guys are thinking about it. So why don't you give us a sense of, at PLG right now? Like, what is the, uh, what's the volume of

new products coming out look like? Yeah. Yeah. This is something I'm like super excited to talk about. Product and like the product team is, it's not like I think super well discussed inside like the marketing circles and like the role it plays, um, like even complimenting the marketing org. So I'm super excited to talk this up. I think it's gonna be super valuable for people. Um, as you mentioned a couple of years ago, we were right around 100 new products. It was roughly 2000 new skews a year.

Um, we're still keeping pace with that. The actual number of products fluctuates a bit, but the skew count has gone up dramatically. So, um, I know in 2025 we released technically less overall products, but the skew count like more than doubled. And, uh, 2026, I think we're on pace to beat both of those numbers. So I think we'll surpass 100 new products by the end of this year. And I think we're going to be looking at something like 5000 new skews. So we can chop this up and

“this is so important for, and it's how I do my job better. So I think this is like a great topic”

to discuss like, you know, in the marketing context. Yeah. So can you tell us like, what do you, how do you guys define like, quote unquote new product? I have, and I'm happy to get into it. Because we have like a hierarchy in which we think about it at Ridge, but I'm curious to hear you guys, how you guys approach it. Yeah. Yeah. I think this, um, and I'm curious to pick your brain on this and, and Cody too, like, um, maybe, you know, more of the, the circa Jones Road,

um, the West Wings is coming up with a new product today and you want to announce it now. All right, just kidding. Um, in any case, um, we, so we identified this like really early on, where I was like, we have a very small number of products that we actually want to advertise, right? Like they are strategically generic and massive peel enough to where like we can put these on medit and we can

blast them out. I think we did 2 billion impressions or something last year. Like they're, we're

blasting the whole planet. And it takes a good product to be able to like kind of take that heat. But those products don't come around like super often. I'm maybe you share that same opinion. But that doesn't mean that we can't launch products, which have to launch them for like a different, cohort. So for the most part, when we talk about like 100 new products, what I want to be like clear right off the top, we're not talking about taking like 100 new major swings on like net new

categories or hero products to serve as like acquisition fuel. These are mostly limited editions, small runs, colorways, things like that that we're launching and aiming at returning customers.

I'm not sure like with the equivalent.

ridge wallet, for instance. This would be, um, sort of the pseudo equivalent for us. Some of these

are net new products. But they're all back, dude. Like we're, we're Portland leather. There's only so many ways you can cut and so leather bag together. Um, and there's not a lot of variance in it. We're not selling like shoes and toothpaste. We're selling bags. They're, they're right next to each other. Um, they all take about the same square feet of leather. It's just different shapes and sizes from there. But we're trying to find, you know, something that fits everyone's personality and then

attacking each of those customer cohorts, um, individually by what it is we're actually launching

“onto the world. I've talked about it a couple of ways. And I think this is helpful. This is also”

me, like sort of scratching my OCD. It should like, uh, there is a, um, naming convention element to this, I think, where we just think about, we have our general categories laid out. So we have everyday carry. We have travel. We have, uh, jewelry. And we have tech accessories, right? So those are four big categories. And then each of those are filled with what we would call, then call a product category, which is like one step below. And within, um, let's call jewelry, for instance, we have wedding bands

and we have chains and we have bracelets now too. So there's all different product categories. And then even a punch below that is what we would call a silhouette, where we would say, um, you know, within wedding bands, we have an eight millimeter beveled ring. We have a six millimeter rounded ring, uh, etc. etc. You can go down the list from there. And then a punch below that would be the variant where the eight millimeter beveled ring comes in platinum and it comes

in gold. So all of a sudden we have like all these sort of like punch down versions of how we think about a product. And we have this laid out in a master's skew table, which the reason I keep out on this is because it's kind of the underlying product taxonomy for all of our reporting. Our, our master skew table or MST feeds into our Sarah's analytics dashboard. It feeds into our name and conventions for ads so that we are all taught feeds into all the reporting that we do kind of

“across the board. Um, kind of classroom question. Yeah. Are you really big into dinosaurs as a kid?”

No. No. I wish, uh, or the animal kingdom and taxonomy of that were you into that, or this is a new found obsession. It's a new found obsession. Honestly, I missed my calling when I was younger. Uh, I could have been, I could have been a fantastic like eighth grade science teacher, I think. Like, and I guess, been all my day just thinking about this. You love geeking out over this. 100, I do that. It's, it's 100% true. It's also, I think, as we've gone from like,

I say this about rich. We went from the first seven years. I was here. We basically had one wallet

in a couple variants and like that was it. I just had Claude Pollett in 2026, we launched 450 skews across basically 215 new products. Um, so we're launching hundreds of products every year and it's very important to us from a all the way through like from building the SOPs around the products to reporting on those products, so like building the ad engine around those products. I think they're all kind of related to the underlying taxonomy. So, um, McCoy, you talked about acquisition products,

which I do want to get into, but like, do you guys have any additional sort of taxonomy for how you think about the products and does that guide like where you guys are spending time in energy and identifying what you want to launch? Yeah, there's like, so we have like a pretty consistent catalog of leather colors. Like, this would be like material for us, right? And so whether it's like nutmeg, cold brew, whatever the leather type is, um, whenever we launched

like a new product, it's typically like going to come out in those core color variants. Like, we know what customers want and we're looking at something like shape. So it's mostly like for us

it's basically like product title and then down to like the variant level from there. Like what

sizes it and what color is it? Um, it's not ridiculously complicated. I don't think it gets quite as deep as like the the ring situation that you described. Um, and then the other side of this and we're going to chop this whole thing up, but it's like the other side of this is we have what we call like the flywheel or core, we have dynamic colors. And that's where we'll go back through the existing product catalog with a new leather that we've developed in like a limited

addition or limited run. And we'll go back through and fill the catalog with that color to create like a a new variant launch aimed at like returning customers. But um, I had a question for you. Like, okay, so you start with the ridge wallet. Was there an initial hesitancy? Because I can I can I can already hear like people when I talk about this subject, they're like 2,000 skews, 3,000 skews, 4,000, 5,000, whatever. It's worth noting that we launch 5,000 skews. We also

discontinue 5,000 skews per year. Right. So like there's it's a come-in come-out type of situation. But was there like an initial hesitancy going away from like the simplicity of having only a couple hundred skews or the ridge wallet and it's just in color ways to this like massive skew

“explosion? That's what I think would be definitely for you guys. Was there a hesitancy in doing that?”

Like was it demonized in the in the way that I typically hear people like fret having high skew accounts? Every brand I talk to has the same problem right now. He need way more ads and you need better ads. We have agencies, creators and AI that all help with volume. But then there

Can be a week of back and forth.

before any of it is even ready to launch. At Winks, we skip all of that. We have runneth that's

helping with everything. Runneth makes almost all of our statics directly in Slack. They come out launched pretty much one-shot it. Uploads them, analyzes them, does all of it. Runneth also helps with our tribe. We're getting so many videos but we want to make sure that they are appropriate and hitting the right things. Runneth has been trained on all of the feedback and comments that I've given to tribe creators. So it is briefing them. It is cueing all of them and it's messaging them feedback

based on what's working in our ad account. Runneth has started building all of our landing pages for us. A lot of people are talking about having ad and landing page compliance together. Runneth has made that possible by allowing us to ship really good landing pages very quickly. Runneth has a homework

“it has all of the context of Winks and our performance. If you want to check it out, go to runneth.com”

and start your 14-day trial. Tell them Cody sent you so I can hook you up. Everybody wants their businesses problems to be solved by new optimization settings in meta. Like everybody just wants to move pixels around on the computer and print more EBITDA.

So I think that there's always reservations and hesitancy. I mean, it's a cash-intensive

form of expansion where we're going to buy a bunch of new products. So the answer is yes. I mean, and honestly the first few years I was here, we had this sort of internal dialogue that it wasn't necessary. That we were able to grow. And frankly, at the time, we were we were very small business. Facebook ads were cheap. People were getting free checks from the government in 2020 or whatever. We didn't need product expansion or to grow. We were able to

consistently hit 30, 40% year over year growth for six years in a row or whatever. You reach a maturation point in the business where I think product expansion is absolutely necessary. And for a number of years now, it is like, you most important thing that we do is come out with new

“fair, new variants in the Ridge Wallet in order to grow the Ridge Wallet. So I think we kind of”

rip the band it off a number of years ago. And then since then, you know, it's not a, it's impossible to have a precise process in terms of like how to expand or how much to order. So there have been many examples of us way under ordering great launches and then stocking out and then having to chase orders. We also have many examples. We have a skew and I won't call it out specifically. But we have like 22,000 units on hand. We have like hundreds of weeks on hand of this product.

And that just came down to like one bad order when we were really excited about a new color way we were launching. So there were reservations. It's for the reasons that I just mentioned where it just becomes more difficult over time. But like we've tried to further refine the process. So we just order a little bit smarter, reduce some of the downside risk of over inventory, over inventorying, you know, poor performing skews and and it's an ongoing improvement process

of work. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. It's, it's like one of my, I don't know if it's contrary and like views on this, but it maybe is not like the top take from your marketing guy. But I, I'm actually like kind of of the belief that skew expansion or catalog and product expansion should happen much earlier in a business than it traditionally has. But for a very specific reason. And again, we can get into this. But it's like who those products are selling to and like

the profit and revenue composition of what happens when we, for instance, launch a new variant. Like so I can make the case for that as we, you know, kind of build up to it. Can we get into that? I'll, let's say more than I'll push back on it because I, I think there are circumstances and like where it's probably not the case. And I, I think, tends to went too far in the other direction, but there's obviously businesses like an IMA or age, you want that's like printing on

one skew. I think part of it depends on the business and obviously you guys are in, you know, hard goods, not consumables, which is, which is, I think probably a very different dynamic. Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I told a joke with a nine ops last week that I was going to get the phrase, like, it depends tattooed on my forehead because I think all good marketing, all sage marketing advice probably starts with like the caveat like, hey, it depends. It depends on so many things.

It's almost hard to give any advice, right? Like, depends on the team. It depends on the initial skews. It depends on like, but you know, we're, we don't let that stop us here. Yeah. We're going to get into it. Well, let it get muddy real quick. We don't do new ones. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We're just like, we'll drop it on Twitter as a hot take and move on with our days. Just log off and see tomorrow. Okay. So like, for, for me, and where this position,

where I take this position is mostly like, so I split the business. The way we've always run the

business is by splitting the revenue into its largest segments first, which is like, okay, this is a new customer revenue and this is returning customer revenue. So if your business is anything like ours, new customer revenue is like, barely profitable. If, if it's profitable at all,

“right, like some people, I don't, that's what I may other hot takes. I don't think anyone actually”

really knows their customer acquisition costs. I think like, it's nearly impossible to get down to like the scent and dollar of how much you're spending in advertising world on the act of a

Acquiring a new customer.

to get into it. Well, we get into it. We're going to have a lot of episodes together. Don't worry.

So I'm going to park that for a second. But anyways, if you're like us, new customer revenues

like, barely profitable. When we're talking like single digit percentages, returning customer revenue on the other hand, it's pretty good. Right. Like, we do a lot to cost segment. How much we're spending on the act of acquiring returning customer revenue. So when we launch, for instance, 5,000 skews, I don't know what the total number is, but it's going to be something like 4,800 of them. We launch new skews every Tuesday and Thursday. And most of them are this like dynamic flywheel.

When we launch these products, we have like black Friday peak hours every Tuesday, Thursday at 11am. They are selling to 92, 95. Some cases 99% returning customers was zero ad spend behind it. Right. We're launching an email if it doesn't sell out too quick or tax message. And these things fly off the shelf to 90, whatever percent returning customers with no better dollars behind it. Those sales are not the same as in equivalent measure of revenue from new customers. It's so

“much more profitable. For us, it's like a returning customer revenue I believe last night check was”

like four and a half to five times more profitable than new customer revenue. So in any case, the scales are so lopsided that we can do what's looked at as like a lot of work, you know, running up a new product launching a new skew. And if we do, you will notice you corner, which is like order it sensibly, we can launch that. We don't have to hit millions in revenue on every new skew. We can hit a much smaller portion of revenue and because of the the profit composition of

that revenue, it's worth our time. And I've gone through businesses before and like loaded up their their Shopify dashboard and shown them like this metric. And hey, you think this is producing all your profit. But you launched this little sleeper skew. It sold in 90 plus percent returning customers with no ad spend. There's a lot of profit that came from that activity. So that's my case. I mean, we can build it. But that's where I'd start it is like who are you actually selling

new launches to and what quantity? Now, it doesn't work if you're trying to order shipping container full of these things. We own our own manufacturing. So it's quite quick and it's quite lean. But

“that that's the beginning of my case for that. Okay. So that's what I was going to say is like I think”

the supply chain component of that is the trickiest part. For a lot of brands, I think your you run with this issue of having to order a certain quantity in order to even get it from manufacturers. And that might be more than you can easily sell to return to customers even if it is at a high margin. But you guys having your own manufacturing allows you to be super flexible.

You can do far more limited skew runs and then basically just print money by emailing and texting

customers. Yeah. Exactly. I think at the point that we're at now in the business, we could, it would function largely the same even if it wasn't own manufacturing. Like we've nurtured this system to a health where it could support longer term for filament. And so like I think that's more appropriate for general businesses generally. And in a pair of brands already function a lot like this. Like there's some of these major brands are launching and I've got the amount of skews.

They're just not allowed and our skews are not as loud. Like they don't get social media posts and ads and so they largely come out under the radar and sell under the radar. But this would still

“function I think at this stage of the business even if fulfillment windows were like much longer”

from overseas. At Jones Road, we needed thousands of new ads every month. Daily email is lots of creative as well. We needed great people that had really high standards, but we had bootstrap company on a budget. And that is why we were propelled to recruit our team for us. They're specialists in recruiting marketing and operations people from Latin America. And they work with the best brands and agencies in e-commerce. They charge a 1f1c higher.

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Okay, so if I could say one more thing and then I want to hear if Cody has any pushback here. It sounds like the it depends component of this is Portland leather. Good has a type of customer base and is in a category where there is a lot of natural repeat purchase in new skews and new variants. Therefore, you believe brands should a brand like that should invest in product development earlier because even at relatively small unit volume, you can be

printing a lot of profit because it's so much more. It's so much higher margin without the acquisition costs. That's that's your position here in terms of justifying earlier product expansion. Yes, as well as you can, you can change like the composition of the business itself, right? So like if you if you do what what Rich did or I'm sure you guys did, I don't haven't sat inside your guys's boardroom meetings, but it's like you can if you find out like hey

we we sell wallets and we think there's better categories out here. This is a way to like dip your toe and test the water and potentially like I call these like big change the math moments. You know, we as marketers would get really stuck in like this is my acquisition costs and this is my, you know, you're you're optimizing all these like incremental fractions of percentages. And then

Everyone wants something comes along and sometimes that thing is a new produc...

just completely crumples all the math you've been working on for years and throws in the garbage,

right? So these like big change the math moments where it's like oh we have to rethink like the whole business. I think it's a good idea to keep dipping your toe in the water. I know a lot of really smart operators and CEOs like who are stuck in businesses where the category's not great and I'm just like screaming at them all the time like to to try more things in the form of like product expansion for their brand to make the transition from rich wallet to rich, right? Or,

you know, from important other goods. We've tried shoes. We're trying other new exciting categories or types of bags this year that I think I'm really excited about and the whole point of those is again to like change the math that we know so well and intimately that we've nurtured up to health over years and years and years and we'll see if we can make it better like suddenly. Go to any pushback, any any additional thoughts on this? I think that's like a sliding scale,

“almost a pretty linear sliding scale based on your consumability and you know that's what like”

it seems like it's your thesis which I agree with in this show is you know returning customer revenues where all the profit is made and you know without being consumable like the best way for a business like both of your guys to increase LTV is by having different skews in different categories that you can drop to them, right? And you know again a very heavily subscription brand of Marsmen or I may just like doesn't really have to do that and and you can right if you look

at you know maybe like a momentous or something like that like they there are supplement brands that have a wide skew count and probably helps AOV and LTV so it can help but I want to get into a little bit of the next it's also like supply chain operationally like very very different on the business then if you're just a single skew or something like that you know and there's probably pros and cons of each of them but so I would say it's sliding I would say beauty is

somewhere in the middle and so my experience has been both sides and you know we were probably late to product expansion a little bit and and again it is not consumable it is something that you go through and you do you know use and so there is repurchase of same products there's also repurchase of other ones but not everything is incremental and something like beauty or maybe it's you know marginally incremental you have cannibalization of you know another skew and

there's there's only like one or two mascaras you need it's not like you're going to get like you're not going to increase LTV by having an additional mascaras or something like that so there is

“like a much more finite volume and I think something like that exists in the middle”

and where where I rose with Jones Road it's like it's really all for us it's all driving acquisition and it's all hero hero products and it's like not the velocity of launches but it's really it's like what is going to be the next category of the next skew that you can actually put that we could actually put like significant acquisition volume behind and and do that because most skews like don't really support that and it sounds like you're you see a similar thing

at least for the acquisition side so let's see what's your take to my rebuttal? No I think it's spot on right and it's um it when like or let me ask you like I support our question it's it's not in search of a bottle or anything like that I agree um what what was like the last major category you launched that you were like hey this is a winner and like what

did that look like from the marketing side looking at that product from the first 30 days do you

do you remember like what that felt like on the dashboard or any specific I mean for us again like

“I mentioned we launched the first thing I'm checking is like returning customer rate on the sales”

of the items what does that feel like um for you last time ours wasn't category it's actually like very hard and beauty to like all right so you have like the two highest level category so you have like skincare and cosmetics and you're usually one or the other there's a few brands that are both but usually people have their makeup brand and and they have a skincare brand and they're different and they're you know you've credibility and different things but then also from there right there's

not a ton of loyalty so there's hey this is my concealer and this is my mascara and they're often different brands but um so I'd say we were much much more of makeup and cosmetic sprang within that like a new you know for us a hero skill like any complexion face thing is often like a hero skill like a new concealer or something like that is you know the the main one and like one of the first ones where we see it like really really take off but it is hard to have like

we call them like a tier one or like a A you know tier like you have two to three of them I don't know how how your guys add account is concentrated like we probably got up to 100 million with like 80% of our spend on like two to three skews um it's just really hard to kind of crack that you know yeah so like we're our hero products like are they obvious in that first week or on that launch day or does it usually take like a month or two to build and you just kind of like

you're major bets and you're throttling into that expecting it to come you know come up to maturity

at some point in the future. Always pretty obvious um it's still very heavily returning because obviously

you're an email and hit your list and you might be 70% returning on launch day but there's still

A good like A and Me R and like good signs at like acquisition can support th...

with like a few hit and again to talk about inventory I mean I you know I've gone the opposite we're like we've had launches like two or three years ago we're like we did the whole not whole playbook

but like pretty big acquisition landers creative and like it was just never going to be an acquisition

product you know it was like a bronzer and it was just kind of be always like a tier 30 yeah I haven't

“I have no verbal I agree 100% I think so like the idea that where this first like drove me insane was”

we started by manufacturer on products like in the Portland warehouse right so like myself Curtis the the designers everyone was like sitting in one warehouse like making products there was no like you know bit it overseas and you know tech send your tech pack somewhere also was just like somebody in the corner cutting different shapes and selling them together into bags so the idea that like first drove us crazy on this was like we sold our classic toast just a big

basic bag it was like from 2018 until for about a year and a half that was like all I had to advertise and I remember at the very end of 2019 we came out with another product that is still

to say like one of our foundational hero products and I remember when we we walked in I walked into

the business the door and I was like we had an idea and we're like we're going to make this thing and it took like two hours for somebody to cut out the leather and sew it into shape and then it took like two weeks to decide on like how we were going to close the back like a little button and we finished it and we launched it and it was an immediate successful on a memory outside around we were like there has been nothing preventing us from having this idea for a year and a half except for the

fact that we just didn't sit down and like do the work and design the damn thing and that now is like it surpassed our previous hero product which was a classic tote and it's still selling you know millions today so that drove me insane it's like okay what new products could I bring into the business that are going to foundationally like shift the metrics or the health or the size of the business and for us it's just bags it just means we just have to have the idea of the bag now

and design the bag now and do the work now and so that source went up this this good separation

“of product and marketing which is hard I think in smaller companies like they're kind of synonymous”

you kind of have a small crew of people going you know doing their best every single day you don't have like a dedicated R&D or product team but that's the idea that drove us crazy as we're like okay well what other brand what other products have we just not thought of yet that are going to be massively successful for our business and like can we have those ideas today instead of two years from now to make sure that we're like constantly keeping in cycle so we were early to like split

those two things one because we own our manufacturing and two because we like started to have it dedicated design process that was separate from separate from operations by the way that sometimes those get bumped together this is this is something different this was a marketing-minded product force within the company that was trying to design things for hero and new customer acquisition we talk a lot about cac on this show you can't control what metatarges you but you can control

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after sell dot com slash urn dash save to see what after sell could unlock for your business and how you could get the entire software for zero dollars a month what does that look like and set it both of your businesses who is responsible for coming up with what gets made what is both of your inputs on that right i would imagine it is more so than you know most

“and it's probably one of the you guys are too humble to say but like the reasons for success is”

because there's there's strong like dim customer demand behind those things but what's what are the roles look like you guys company and what are your your involvement in both of those processes will start with a call in the go to your counter oh it says that is so excited here from counter because i'm actually like what do you know i want to selfishly what are you from counter

first because i've been like curious about this isn't the best part about being on here it's

like scratch my curiosity um by asking you guys questions like yeah please take it away i think that three main stages in my mind and there's one of the questions i had was around how you guys approach like if you have a merchandising function within the business and how that's defined because the way that i would define merchandising it ridges identifying sort of like the the distribution strategy behind a given product and it's a little bit

independent of the product design it's like identifying hey we need a a affordably priced power bank for tick-tock shop there's something we have coming out in q1 there we're excited about that has nothing to do with the product design it's just like hey what is the channel what is the price point what do we think customers are looking for this is how we plan to distribute it and then the product design team can sort of work into that and then at that point they

have sort of like a price target therefore a cog's target they can think about what are the

Features that work for this channel etc etc that's that merchandising just es...

where is the opportunity and i think this is the point that we missed the most often early on

“and we're like beginning to sort of refine this and i think it's where i can be most helpful as a”

marketer because it can also just be as simple as like i talk about this all the time but one of our main forms of distribution is not for something to be a hero product in and of itself but something that we think can get bundled along with one of our hero products we have our charger sets now get attached to our power banks that are really high rate or um what's another example you know the the our travel system is a really great example as well we have the carry on we

have the long-haul set we have packing cubes we have vacuum packing cubes we've got backpacks and things and then i'm able to say hey we have a great opportunity to sell like you know a $40 packing cube along with our carry on so let's make sure that this gets made that's a really obvious example but like that is a form of distribution that we can identify early on and then the product is I'm team can work on it same thing last example i'll give is like um best buy has an express lane

and we tried the express lane with some of our products in the past with a $75 key organizer called the keycase and it just didn't really work in the express lane so we can take that back to the drawing board and say hey this is an opportunity for a channel and a price point and like you can think about who that customer is in the express lane at best find like let's design into this

little bit further and that's something farther off in the future that will ultimately test into

but that merchandising step in terms of identifying the point of distribution and strategies around

“that i think is really key we're marketing is most involved i would say um then it goes to product”

design and that is like the colors the the engravings the licensing um you know what are the exact features and benefits things like that we are less involved i've historically been less involved at that stage um and then finally you have both those things you're bringing them to market and then there's really sort of like this is fully a marketing exercise at this point but then we say okay what are the ways it can sort of capitalize on this product and there are many examples

of new products for us that will check multiple boxes we're launching by the time this comes out we'll have just launched our vacuum packing set and i think this could be a great TikTok shop product i think it could be a great upsell to our D to C carry on business i also think there's opportunity on Amazon so that will inform our good market in terms of what is our channel strategy what creative do we need who are we activating um so that's those are the three pillars i would lay out marketing

at bridge has the most influence over the first and second ones or the sorry the first and third ones

what about ordering obviously i'm sure you have demand planning teams it's stuff like that are you involved you get a say do you give input into you know quantity that gets ordered and like does this feel like they're right amount for you yeah we used to be like really regimented about

“this and now i mean honestly i i mentioned earlier we're launching 200 new products 200 new products”

a couple hundred new skews new silhouettes new like promotable products is is relatively small for us this year like we launched chains over the summer if you count the iPhone 18 phone case as a new silhouette like we can include that one and we have vacuum packing set so like new silhouettes new hero products for us is like there's three of them this year i think that's where i'm probably the most involved in the ordering process there are other examples another thing

that will have just launched once this publishes is a one piece collab um are you guys do you guys watch any anime or are you familiar with one piece no we'll see how it does i'm extremely excited about it one piece is very very popular sort of across the world right now and um and i think it'll be good and we ended up i think under ordering this product relative to my expectations for it so we'll see where we actually land on this but it's just an ongoing discussion um and if

i think there's marketing opportunity then um i can influence the initial buy and then we're marketing's probably the most involved in order editing is uh sorry inventory ordering is uh when we're reordering something we could say hey what do we actually think the scale is here we just launched

Batman it's working really well we're basically going to stock out in the next two weeks what

do we want that next order to look like marketing can play a big role in so okay i gotta ask i explore another question on this so the new you talk about like the merchandising function which i think is like for me it's something we're talking about now it's kind of a new word that we're we're adding um and looking at it potentially it's like a formal position and is that a a person in the business or is it like a function and is who's actually serving that like you talked about

this product for this channel i my sense would be that that's largely you and Sean in a like just a massive amount of conversations and talking every day having an idea and then not actually being the merchandising function is it that or is there actually a human in your business saying like hey i've i've done the data i've studied the channels and this is i think an opportunity is made i'm i'm gonna have a bed of which it is but it ends up being both

everybody's doing merchandising because it is a function that gets done one way or another so you're totally right Sean or Daniel the founder or myself have a very big role in the merchandising function

We do have a merchandising manager because ultimately when it gets as at leas...

many channels especially with all of our retail channels and our marketplace channels d to c all the categories that we have there's a lot of just like iterative day to day work that is not as high

leverages like this is our new category this are next hundred million dollar business that's where

the manager comes in and can make sure all the people involved in the process those dots are connected

“if your cfo gives you ten million dollars for q four where do you put it?”

medicine's prospecting last clicks is branded search and outdated mm says tv most marketing operators have more measurement than ever and still no decision more data more dashboards more complexity i know we've been here at hex cloud we have mta is holdout tools mm's and you often look at all this data and you start to analyze it but then you you don't make that final step which is what's the decision like what are we doing because of all this data that's where architect

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but the the big ideas i would imagine those come from like the power banks right i imagine that's probably the three of you or whoever it is the combination of people sitting around the war room and saying like we need this right is it roughly correct okay basically yeah so that that's that's super helpful to know because one of the i have this like you know fever dream scenario where somebody's like oh hey you're good at marketing come sit in my company right and you

go and you sit in the corner and they just shovel really bad decisions at you all day long and then like pokey with a stick and like make metal work make metal work and you're like that's not how it works dude like we have to design something people want we have to put it on a channel where we think it's going to be successful like there's a whole strategy here and i think that's something that we're maturing into like we're we're looking to formalize a lot of the the big new ideas and

merchandising in in that way but also in the way that you just described which is like the merchandising manner somebody has to pay attention to what variants are on what channel and how they're selling outside of demand planning because demand planning is a function of like replenishment it's not necessarily like a function of like marketing catalog and revenue generating health right so that makes total sense um that that kind of follows what i thought ours is very very similar right so

same thing that merchandising function started um largely with a courtesy myself like trying to come up with the next thing that we thought our customers wanted um and also the thing that we thought the next new customer wanted um that was fed um either directly to a design team and or the inverse where the design team is like they have the work 40 hours a week right and um at our current

design team there's like 13 or 14 people down in our factory Mexico it's ran by one of our amazing

long-term employees and she's designing new products all the time and so um sometimes we're saying this is what we really think we need we think sling bags this are on the um the uptrend and we need to be ahead of it let's make a sling bag and other times she's working 40 hours a week with 14 people there's like almost like a grocery store aisle of ideas just at all times floating around her office hundreds of prototypes and we get to walk through and find things that we think are interesting and

“pluck them out for different various cohorts so um there's a very large design team and that's how”

mostly how new products come one way or the other we're like specifically sending them out on a mission and the way you describe we need this type of product at this price point for this channel and or we're literally just grocery shopping great ideas and Curtis and I have walked through the design teams rooms several times what I've been down there and looked for like old dead forgotten ideas and plucked them out of you know the trash bin or the dusty corners in the back

just to launch them and find out that they're you know they were sleeper great hits

and then we sold a million dollars in that skew but I remember famously finding like this

this old forgotten about color and I stole the bag to give it our social media manager just to like auction off and um we just launched a whole collection around that pattern and I mean this thing was like legitimately dusty like I had like like get a spray cannon dusted off before I put it in my bag when we took it home we just launched a collection to like seven figures a revenue based off of that like old forgotten pattern in the back of things so it's a little above but

“merchandising I think is increasingly important for us and I think it's also”

we were fortunate that that mechanism came about early in the business I hope some smaller business start thinking about it sooner instead of you know just poking your marketer and being like you know make it work better make it work better like you can actively help that marketer whoever they are if they're not as integrated in the way that you described the way that um I described with the CEO or the merchandiser or the driving force who's ever

Coming up with a big ideas um then take it upon yourself to help that for sor...

by giving them a better product to sell maybe I almost think there's like equal examples of both there's like good marketers at brands who with their biggest point of leverage at this point will be new products that that marketer can really sink their teeth into and continue to scale and then I talked to other brands who like they have other products that the marketing team is just

never like formally supported and scaled so like the meat is already on the bone there

because I do think especially when people start getting into like new silhouettes or new categories and like functionally the marketing needs to look different to add the value products, the landers, the budgets like again we run our business off of like what's effectively like five or six

“different PNLs by our different product lines um like I think the intricacy that it takes to support”

multiple products at scale is something a lot of brands aren't doing either so I almost think almost just as likely it's like hey the marketing team just needs to be held more countable for sort of getting more juice from the existing you know options I agree 100% let me kind of I guess another selfish question like so you the ridge wall it obviously comes out in a lot of like seasonal color ways you know patterns prints whatever it is there's like there is a bit of what

I'm talking about here launching new skews you know limited edition and then I'm looking right now it's like the Halloween patterns what are the what is the day feel like when you launch those patterns is it a great day do they sort of slowly sell through the month like what does that look like internally it's a great question because you brought it up earlier you said like a BFCM level hours when you guys launch new products um and you also seem to say that uh when you're making the

point that brands you're making the case of brands should be investing in product development or expansion earlier is because you launch it to your existing audience and get this high margin revenue um and I agree with all of that except I will give the caveat that at least for our business when we built our customer base off of this very specific type of wallet customer I don't think

anything to that customer base is all that valuable we never even sniff BFCM level hours on new

product launches uh you guys would be yeah you guys would be surprised how small great product

“launch days are for us and I think it's just because like it's something about the product category”

that doesn't lend itself well to repeat purchases like even if we launch a great new color way if we email a million people who own a ridge wallet that has been guaranteed for life that's like you know still functioning with them today it's just like not that interesting guys are not owning two or three wallets in the same way they're owning like women might be owning two or three pairs of shoes or like they might be interested in trying the latest mascara

color or something like that like it just doesn't there's like a little bit more of a sticking point and getting that second order so our best launch days we have two we have two types really one is things that work to our existing customers and work to uh new customers and that would be like we just launch Batman which like right off the bat was a really strong day for us less than six figures on the first day like to give you a sense of scale like if this is one of our best

launches of all time less than six figures on day one um it's also some of our best performing ads with that revenue ends up looking like is a big few days up front we'll see 67% of revenue come from existing customers and then it'll flip and then it'll scale even further where our biggest days will be at days six or seven once we're spending 30 or 40 or 50 thousand dollars a day on these new skews because again our biggest opportunity is is acquiring these new customers

that's almost always how it works for us um there are other examples the one other example

I'll give quickly is things that don't work to our existing customer base but also work to new customers so this is like one piece I almost guarantee you will be this way because neither yeah a great

“example is that none of you have heard of the one piece anime at all I don't I think it's absolutely”

crickets to our existing customer base and I think it rips with once we find the right customer on Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat or whatever else so that curve ends up being way different where we don't get that initial returning customer bump and it just becomes new customers at days you know three four five six seven or whatever yeah so my question is going to be it sounds like you guys probably have a good feeling for this McCoy I'm curious about you but if it rips like as you're developing

into stuff do you have a good sense for hey we think this is just going to be acquisition we think this is just going to be retention are you ever wrong on it this something ever surprised you and is an acquisition product that you just didn't think was going to be oh I'm not rarely a rarely right on anything in my life but um and we're we're we're wrong but close that's about as good as we get grenades and you know horses it's so whatever um the we're pretty we're pretty spot on on this it

most times and if we're not we make ourselves correct by artificially limited limiting you know how much quantity we have and so we'll never know right like I love the the idea that no one's ever forecasted correctly once right like if you sold out maybe you could've sold one more and if you

Didn't sell out well then you've got it wrong um but we're pretty we're prett...

it's rare that we're we get spun up about something in order ten thousand or fifteen thousand of

“something and it's just we launched our crickets it has happened in the past um I mean I remember one time”

we we launched this line of leather bags that was made with like really great high-end vegetable tan leather and we named the collection like the veg tan collection and we launched it we we thought for sure this thing's going to sell out because this is kind of like the cream the crop material this is what all the high-end artists and leather bag manufacturers are using and we're going to do it or leather goods we're going to show out tough we are and we launched this collection to absolutely

crickets like nothing and we did in that in case have thousands and thousands of bags and people started working to use their like veg tan is it is it vegan is it veg made of vegetables like people are so confused um and that's probably the the most blatant example where we got it just completely wrong we haven't made that mistake in several several years um either one because again we're unofficially making ourselves right by limiting the quantities um but we all really have a good

sense of when some things like a potential hero product like you you set it up we do the exercise again we have 14 designers majority of those are women we'll set these bags out on the table and we'll say we used to say which ones do you like and people would go and they'd select their bags based on their personal preference um Curtis got smart one day and said instead of saying which one do you like he said which one's going to sell the best and we would force people one

by one to go and rearrange the bags in order of which ones would sell the best and that answer unanimous what you like is fragmented what's going to sell the best almost unanimous every single time like maybe you're swapping on one and two you wipe everything else off the table those are your hero products those are acquisition products like every single time so I mean we're pretty

pretty pretty dialed in at this point I think not to say we'll never make a mistake again or take

“a swing because I think that's important but I'm wait we kind of got this at this point every”

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to get a free CTV plan for Q4 one thing I'll bring up there I'm curious if you guys have the

“same or or any sort of you'd make any adjustments to this um but in terms of identifying”

hero products and like identifying what's going to sell best we almost always realize it just

comes down to like what's the biggest category right like like we launched many knives at one point uh and Sean loves bringing up the like quote unquote disappointment of many knives and it's like it wasn't that bad like it's it's not that high risk because we ordered a few thousand they didn't sell out that's fine but like many knives the ceiling on many knives is miniscule nobody has a big many knife business like a little keychain knife business um so if you're thinking

about hero products you almost always just want to err on the side of things that people buy often like for us that would be that is like you know something like power banks is always going to outsell carabiners it doesn't matter how cool our carabiner is and how maybe we can get it attached to two or three or four percent of wallet orders like it just never really lines up because it's just there are simply not that many people spending all that much money on carabiners

just getting into categories where people spend more money is like almost always the thing and I

imagine I would think that bags are this way too where like there are going to be some really fun clever bags but they're just naturally more niche than like a good handbag or whatever um and airing on that side is typically the safer option surfing the ridge site while I'm what we're talking like I see I don't know what I missed it or how old it is but like you guys have drinkware right like that's a a product that people have heel pen most women in America

covered and there's like 15 water bottles it's like that that would be like the equivalent of us um of like that idea for me is like something that people can collect or it's um you know wallets are hard you stuff them in your in your back pocket never seen again but uh whether it's like a peril or it's fashion or something like this where somewhere can make a statement or they they appreciate the variance in the products like that's a really good fit for

it too. If you go to we have this insane Facebook group which serves as like our focus group and our customer feedback loop um and you just search the word collection in there

You'll see people have dedicated like entire rooms to collecting our bags or ...

in also in the or sorry the same color in every bag in our collection or they buy the butterfly castle in 15 different variants or something like that so um it is definitely product dependent but that makes total sense to me. I'm a data slash insights guy like I am I am totally fine

“for people to like add their opinion you should like you have to have that taste and I think sometimes”

like I would get pushback of like bringing data and insights to stuff and they're like well

our customers don't always know I'm like let's just have it like let's have it available

and then we can like decide to override it or whatever right doesn't mean we have to do it like customers not always right but it's like always that so we have you know Facebook group with you know hundreds of thousand people we have you know customer panels surveys stuff like that obviously you can look at your review data all your markets stuff like you should do all that and got no like hey how big is blush compared to foundation like for normal business like

do all of that and then I think you can give it your subjective you know hey I think that this product is kind of due great and then also like like after you have all of your data the conversation we would have is like how much do we like it right like if we're in between how much does our product team and the rest of our team like it how much does Bobbie like it like how much does just like how excited do people feel about it right there there is that subjectivity in it

what's our what's our marketing plan for it do are we going to go bigger first one right like are we going to sample a thousand of them a tech tech shop like I don't know about you kind of like that started eating up some significant inventory that we weren't planning for so like that's

“where I think having it's again it's more of a logistical conversation you should talk about the”

demand and hey this is from from the marketing leader here is how I think this is going to do here is how much I think I can put behind the demands but also here is my plans for sampling and stuff like that like I do have to square some away I think that those are are really important and then I think your leadership team whoever it is is like all right which way we're going to be wrong either way right do we want to be wrong with not enough inventory and like what's our risk and

we've had you know to me there's no right answers is the it depends depends on your bet on it and you know what you think it can do and I think it's usually safer to be on the more conservative side but sometimes it's like hey let's go really date we really think that this has the legs and we're going to do everything we can to try to get it there so that's like our my framework and process for code can we go back in a time machine both earlier to this conversation but also

earlier your experience do you have like a flag you can plant in the ground that you're like hey even for Jones Road this from the marketing perspective first not from like a cosmetic beauties whatever perspective first like you identified a product category or an opportunity and it turned out to be successful like from marketing lens into the business first yeah it was a little different because I was I didn't have a CMS why was head of marketing and see you so that was kind of

my right I was the guy the guy who doesn't wear makeup with the least amount of I don't carry a lot of verses I get it but the least amount of knowledge and you know and and probably the way that bobby would create products is more of creative right less analytical so I just tried to apply analytical and you could call it marketing you could call it strategic but just like hey our for example like we read it our blush this year and it's doing really well right maybe

“I don't remember for this this year last year we read it but I think sometimes this year”

help let's together yeah it's one big nightmare probably something like four months ago right maybe six six months ago we'll call it and was like hey this is how ourselves this is how the other ones in the category sell I'm not saying we're gonna beat that but like I think we are relative to the competition like under performing you know and I think we're probably doubling what we were doing and and so my input involvement is just like is two things like

hey here's data here's customer insights here's you know whatever it is people for that here's what they're saying about it like looking to reviews it's to this it's to that but also like

here's what's doing really well in the category let's understand that you know and then

let's obviously create something that is right for our brand better so it's doing that and then the second thing is just being crannily unsatisfied and when they're like oh it's good like no like what about this what about that and like making them go tested because like when I'm gonna have learn it's like product team they just want to check it off you know this one they got cool we're done they they have the product team tested but like no make sure we have stores go

tested make sure we send it to our top creators let's get them testing it like just having and it knowing wants to do it it takes longer it's depending you're gonna get negative feedback but those are the two things that I tried to do just for my all call it a customer obsession standpoint because it's again demand and feedback like at the end of the day we're gonna get harsh feedback from the market on whether people buy it and like it or not let's do has much of that before we actually

launch it wildly can that I was my only a simple tactical pain avoid in psychic is always warranted yeah

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and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you McCoy what's uh what's your answer on

“that one if there's a if you're putting your your flag in a certain launch also if you want to”

weave this in here I'm curious if you guys identify a hero product like what does that go to market look like how do you guys activate and maybe those are the same answer in terms of what in example of what you're most proud of there's been a lot of products that I've had a lot of feedback and input to I don't think I've ever like cut and so a product together by my hand with my own two hands and then like launched it to market but there's I mean a ton of products

that Curtis and I are sitting around going like this is it like let's stamp it let's go for it and it turned out to be successful it was it's going all the way back even to that 2019 product I remember like you know printing a photo and being like we're going to make something just like this

it's a leather bag right there's always always the cut so it's like a t-shirt right it's going to

be shaped like a t-shirt no matter what even going back to that 2019 product like I printed out a photo of that morning at home on my HP inch jet and brought it in was like slapped it on the table like someone's making this today we're going to figure out what this looks like now and it turned out fantastic and then I'm I'm really excited for a collection of products to come out this november which is much more not designed first from from like my brain and curses brain but much more

“like the merch are dising forward like we set out to solve like a a math problem I think in the”

business and we have a whole new collection of products coming out of October or November that I think are going to really we're we're planning to be patient I think they're going to be foundational for the future for report leather guns but on the go to market go me what's that go me bags got me that exactly creatine bags like when you get you're a little low you just or maybe it's got some it's a test restaurant coming you get a little low you feel in sluggish today's recent take a bite I wish that'd be great um go to market so I think it was

Cody I think he mentioned like or maybe maybe it's Cody but even like you know this idea of like tier one or tier two whatever products things like this we have like a similar classification both for campaigns but also just for products so if it's one of the returning customer products these variants like we're still promoting them to make sure that they're successful but not in any like significant way like we would in you know in our quotes like a tier one status so we know it's coming out

“typically at a time a week or two we have our social media team is teasing that both on socials”

sometimes and almost always releasing like a leaked internal list of what's going to come out

to our existing customers via that Facebook group there's 250,000 people in there the average LTV of the members and there's like $3,600 it's insane um these like our most loyal diehard fans so we're leaking like a list of hey here's what's coming here's something you've been asking for that's on the way and then those are launched um usually without a major website promotion like it's not getting homepage banner it's not getting its own you know dedicated tile it's showing up in like a

new arrival swimming on the homepage every Tuesday that's that side of things and then on the hero side of things it's going to look like a classic product rollout that I'm sure we're all pretty familiar with so in advance we're taking not only like advanced photography in the form of like lifestyle and um creative shooting we're turning those into ads we're turning those into you know large emails uh flows you know two three four emails deep announcing the launch and falling back

up and all of these things but then we're also like really trying to hit the ground running with ads been day one so we want to launch we want to take advantage of the purchase volume that we know is going to come from returning customers and we'll launch all those ads and those ad sets day one and then try to throttle spend right behind it and catch some signal from the purchases we know they're going to happen on there um from there it's like nurturing it it's trying to you know

coax a budget up as much as it'll go launching new creative um and really seeing if this thing has legs and as we we have a really high success rate with that mostly because we don't try a whole lot which I this one two times a year and by the time it gets there it's coming from this kind of the process you describe which is like we're really getting feedback from our existing customers which can be dangerous when you're trying to find acquisition products because they like what they

like and new customers like what they like I call it getting your fashion report from a football stadium right if you're just teleported to a random group of people and you like oh my god everyone

Loves blue and purple and you took that as a key learning to go design produc...

home team colors do like it's that's the home team like the the returning customers want what they want and it's different um new customers want something different but in any case um they solve a pretty good idea we talked to our social media manager as it goes through a design process and um all the people there and we do these exercises like arrange it and what's going to sell the best so by the

“time we like actually get to market we're really pretty confident and then I think the thing that”

we have going for us is there's not a lot of people there's plenty of personal manufacturers plenty of bad companies um our bags are designed in such a way that like the leather is the thing that's special about it and then we design them very simply um they're almost like leather shells but there's not really an equivalent brand in the market that doesn't like we do and so not only are we launching something we're very confident in we're kind of launching it to what we perceive as kind of a lack of

competition so that helps too is like the lanes kind of wide open so by the time you do all that

we have a really good success rate it's not to say we've never messed it up we certainly have

but um the past few years the few hero products we've attempted have um almost unanimously events successful and then when you're launching this hero products day one like what has the investment in creative looked like I know you mentioned the advanced photography but is there short-form vertical video is there horizontal stuff like what does it look like at launch yeah it's gonna be

“a little different today um I have flipped a lot of like my fundamentally so I think like affiliate”

content is now like first um our TikTok is as grown exponentially this year and that's and I've seen the power of TikTok and affiliate content so that's on the the docket for any new major launch now but previously um what's what you described it's a short-form video whether it's a UGC agency we're always sitting out to um a trusted group of creators and or influencers we're sitting to them we ask them to leave like an honest review you know on the um product page before it's live

so that product page is launching not to zero stars and a completely unknown perception of what the product's gonna be it's real people um we don't pay them for the reviews they say what they want we try to launch those product page with two or three or four five you know reviews whether it's four five three stars it doesn't matter we don't censor this um and that helps a lot but as much as we can do to prep media it's all of the things you just described um all the way down

to like you know preceding product reviews and things like that it sounds like a great playbook I uh if I could list my favorite one favorite product launch that I was involved in I bug the team for years about doing the key organizer the keycase and it's really in like a very unsexy way because we have done like tens of millions of dollars in this product we launched in 2021 um we've spent essentially no dollars promoting it it's just that it was a great I knew we had

the opportunity well we basically find over and over again it's like people are willing to come to

our site and spend between like a hundred and ten and a hundred and thirty dollars something like that it doesn't vary all that much and we needed to give them more options as they're purchasing their wallet to like to get something else as well as use bundles to like provide more value so this is something that without a lot of creative without a lot of add dollars we've generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue just by like properly identifying what will be purchased

“along with the wallet and then merchandising that correctly on the site and I think that's like a”

very just unsexy example and I've been a part of a number of those because I think they're often overlooked and I just like kind of squeezing out the value that we can from our existing system so that's like if I were to put my flag in anyone I guess it would be that one there's one more that I think was really fun for us which was the we had there was one it was last year so not this this past April not the April that we're in twenty twenty six but April twenty twenty five remember

like seeing a bunch of really fun April fools day marketing campaigns go out and remember calling the design team and I'm like we are going to do a real product April Fool's Day like and I don't want people to know whether it's a real or not like we're going to we're going to really mess with them we decided like one time a year we were going to just like absolutely go crazy and have fun and so we spun up this thing called the bag alone and it was this gigantic

ridiculously impractical leather hot air balloon and it came purely I've never said in the

design team like photos of like giant cow bags and I'm like I want like a four foot cow bag like a duffel bag shape like something just ridiculous we're going to build this whole campaign around it will launch it will use AI but purposefully kind of bad like low-res AI and I don't want anyone to know if the thing is really launched it and so we did that with the bag alone we launched it we put it up and it it cost a ridiculous amount to manufacture because it's so impractical

it's impractical a carry it's I have one upstairs I should have brought it it's this giant balloon shape with no internal pockets so you unzip the you know the lid of the balloon and everything falls to the bottom it's a novelty bag but we launched it and it went perfectly like half of the people thought it was real but we're like kind of curious about it some people bought it and the other half of people thought it was not real and mad and we're like they're scamming they're taking

Money from people this isn't real product and I was so happy all day long I j...

skipping around giggling laughing at this thing yeah we only launched a couple hundred of them

“like because they're they're deeply impractical to make their expensive but these things sold out like”

kind of sheepishly in 38 minutes wasn't a lot of revenue like I think it was like somewhere in like

45 to 50 thousand dollars revenue but we I was so happy yeah see that's so funny you say that though

45-50 thousand dollars it'd be like one of our best product launches of the year day one of my

“oh that's what I'm talking about so you know teach their own yeah we just had we had so much fun with it”

and I to this day people still don't think they're real like people somebody went into our store and found one and was like taking photos of it and people were like accusing her of AIing the photos on some deep conspiracy on behalf of the company so I like I love that but that was my brain child this idea to make like a a real product for April Fool's Day although I had nothing to do with designing the hot air balloon but and in case I was pretty fun all right sweet well guys any

closing comments has a really some product launches otherwise I think that's I think that's a great up no I don't think so I mean I begin it depends get tattooed on my forehead but think about it too

“I think the most important thing for me is again just like diving in if you've never”

go to your shop of my dashboard under product sales and look at returning customer purchase rate for each product sale and you will find things in it you don't think are all that sexy but sell very well to returning customers and you realize you're not advertising this thing a whole lot and it may be a sleeper product for you so I can leave you with one thing go check out

that column see but you can find I like it sage advice well guys good chat this morning always a pleasure

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