#370 – Cracking the Code of Effective Branding with Frankie Thorogood

#370 - Cracking the Code of Effective Branding with Frankie Thorogood Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 370 of the AM-PM Podcast. Got a really good one for you today. Speaking with Frankie Thorogood from the UK. We're talking about branding, building brands, advertising, a lot of cool topics in this discussion. I think you're gonna really get some good value from it and really enjoy it. Enjoy this episode with Frankie. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: What's up, Frankie? Frankie Thorogood, the guest on the AM PM podcast today. How you doing, man? Speaker 2: Very good. Thank you, Kevin. Kevin, the king, the king is here. And we're all just here to learn from him. Speaker 1: It's good to be the king, you know, it's good to be the king. Speaker 2: It's good to be in the presence of king of the king and royalty. Speaker 1: So we we met what? Danny's event, right? Cellar Sessions back in May earlier this year. I think it was. Speaker 2: Correct. Yeah. Speaker 1: A lot of people may not know about you. You're based over in the UK. Are you in London proper or are you outside of London? Speaker 2: I am in very much the heart of London. If you listen carefully, you might hear a siren. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, I hear it. Speaker 2: Yeah. So I am right in the middle of Camden. Camden's quite famous. People, you know, international people might recognize it. It's famous for live music. It's got a lot of history of like punk, rock and roll. So yeah, that's where I live right in the middle of Camden town. Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome. I mean, London's a cool place. I've been, I don't know, probably 9, 10, 11 times over to London. It's always a cool, very diverse city. I used to remember my father used to love to go to the bookstores there back before you could buy stuff on Amazon. I think the first time I went to London, I was in my 20s and my father was making one of his semi-annual trips to go to London just to buy books. And I went with him to London and he would just go and spend like four days just going in all the bookstores because he could get books in English. He's an avid reader that he couldn't find in bookstores in the US. So now he doesn't need to do that. You can get pretty much anything online. But yeah, I remember those days. That was back in the 90s. Speaker 2: Well, there's a certain irony to that, isn't there, considering what we're all up to these days with Amazon? Speaker 1: Yeah, it is. It's almost like a full circle there, but there's a lot of really good books and I've Your guerrilla marketing has been books that have really changed my outlook on things in the past, but it's just, just time. But so I chose instead of spend like you do the few hours a day reading an actual book, I read more newsletter, short form type of stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes books, you know, there's a lot to say about it. But like, you know, sometimes if you get a good one, it's a long game. And it's a slow burner. And sometimes they change your life over time or to change your business over time as well in ways that is not quite easy to pinpoint. The newsletter style is like, boom, here's a point, I'm going to action it tomorrow, I can test the results next week. So I think, you know, we're going to talk about some stuff that I've done in the past. And a lot of the stuff I feel like that's made me successful has been a little bit counterintuitive. And I would argue that like there might be, let's say a gap in the market, or it might be an opportunity for people like us to try and force ourselves to engage with some of the longer form stuff out there for that purpose, because no one else, maybe other people are missing it, maybe it can. For example, I read, I read advertising books. And my Marketing stuff in the broad sense, brand marketing, right? I'm reading at the minute, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Speaker 1: I've read that, that's the book I actually, like three or four years ago, I actually read it cover to cover. Because those chapters are short to the point and it's like good quality stuff. But that's a really good book for those of you listening that if you haven't checked out that, just like Frankie just did, I highly recommend you check that out. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a classic, right? I mean, it's so old that like half the examples are about, you know, the internet didn't exist when this book was written. So you're not going to find... Speaker 1: But that's a good point. That's a really good point. It's like everybody now, there's a lot of young people in the E-commerce business in their 20s, early 30s. I don't know what your age is, but I'm an older guy. I'm in my 50s. So it's... Everybody's like, oh, there's this cool new technique that we're doing now. And I'm like, that's, there's nothing new about that. That's like, it's the same thing that people were doing 70 years ago. And just now it's in a different medium. It's on, it's on Meadow or it's in an email or it's, it's just a different form, but it's the psychology. It stays the same. I always tell people if they're going to read books, if you're in the e-commerce business, some of the best stuff you can do is read marketing psychology because human behavior doesn't change. The delivery of the message may change, the delivery mechanism of the message, but the psychology of human behavior doesn't really change that much. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. People say we've got short attention spans now, talk about like TikTok, you know, advertising, like that hasn't changed either. We haven't rewired the human brain in the last 10 years. You still have to get someone's attention in the first three seconds, the same as you used to when there was three TV channels, or there was no TV and it was just a newspaper. You have to, you know, it hasn't changed either. So, there's a lot to be said for studying some of the old masters Ogilvy, Ogilvy on advertising is like that guy, you know, he He was a copywriting genius. People talk about writing their copy for Amazon. I still write all my own copy, every bullet point, every title, every A plus, every product description. I still write it. I wrote it for the old brands up until the very, very end. Even once we'd sold it, I still, I was like, no, I want to approve the copywriting. So these are, these are like, you know, like whatever, like old school skills, they haven't changed. You can learn a lot from, from some of the old masters as well. Speaker 1: Have you seen a newsletter called The Ad Professor? It's a British guy that actually puts this out. He puts it out I think twice a week. But he analyzes all the old ads, all the old Ogilvy ads, you know, the, I sat down at the piano and everybody listened or whatever, you know, all the famous ones. And then he finds the current ones, all the top ads that are working really, really well currently. And he, I don't know where he's getting all this stuff, but they're amazing. And just to see, you know, he'll do like 20 of them each week. Here's 20 things that are just really creative, really cool that are working out there right now. And he pulls them from all kinds of different places and it's, it's really good because it gives you ideas and inspiration. Like, man, if I applied this to what I'm doing or take this little section, do this little section, it just creates that everything that's old, everything that's old is new again. And there's hardly any new ideas out there. There's nothing really novel and new. And for the most part, it's just a repackaging. And some of the best things you can do is copy smart. Speaker 2: Oh yeah, for sure. What are you trying to reinvent the wheel for? These guys have been doing this for decades. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: Who's the ad professor you said? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's called the ad professor. Yeah, it's coming from a newsletter at marketingplug.com, but he does all the counter stuff. Like I never read The Economist as an ad, you know, or he does, you know, like he shows an ad for a Porsche. It's from Porsche and Porsche, they're showing like a 911 and they're saying, What's the tagline? Did you dream of owning a Hyundai one day when you were a young child or did you dream of owning a Porsche? Really cool stuff like that. There's one that when Twitter rebranded to X, He, it was the World Wildlife Federation, I think it was, you know, Save the Animals, kind of, or PETA or one of those Save the Animals companies. So they showed the Twitter, they showed like a little bird, like a little chick, like a little baby chick. Then they showed the first Twitter logo, the next Twitter logo, the next Twitter logo, the next Twitter logo, and then they put, at the end, they put an X. And then the tagline was, you know, We're here to save the wildlife or something like that. You know, it was really clever. So he finds that kind of really cool stuff and he breaks them down on what they're doing. It's really good. Speaker 2: But when I did a marketing degree, right, that was what I thought I wanted to do. Speaker 1: That's what I got too. Speaker 2: Yeah. But then, you know, so I actually applied to every ad agency in London. You know, like for a job in an ad agency, and these guys hardly pay anything. And every single one of them rejected me. And I always got to the final stage, the final interview stage, and then they would reject me. And I can remember sitting in them, I was really passionate about advertising. I love the psychology element of it. It's basically sales, you know, like it's, you know, I used to say that my interviews, like for me, advertising is like sales, you have to understand the other person. And try to persuade them that your product or service is what they need. I don't think the advertising industry liked hearing that because they're a bit too pretentious. But I used to sit there and look at the brands that they were marketing for and I used to just think, I would like to work on the advertising campaigns for these brands, but you know, I would love even more is to own one of the brands and drive the advertising for my own brand myself. And I feel like, you know, that used to come through, they could kind of sense that I wasn't, my heart wasn't quite in it. And so that's why I ended up, you know, unemployed with my degree, ended up getting into the marketplaces game. Speaker 1: So yeah, talk about that. So you, you tried to, you graduated university, tried to do advertising, didn't work out. So you said, the heck with this, I'll just build my own brand and do it on my own. And that's what you're, one of your big skill sets and what you're known for is branding and, and really crushing and you're crushing it with a, A couple of different brands on that front of your own. Graduated university and then did you go straight into like, okay, I'm just going to develop a product and start doing like some DTC stuff or what were you doing? Speaker 2: So I was desperate to start a business. I was like, I love business. You know, I want to get involved, but I didn't have an idea. I didn't know what to do. Speaker 1: And this is what about 13 years ago? Speaker 2: This is, yeah, 2012. Okay. Speaker 1: 10 years. Okay, cool. 11 years ago. Speaker 2: Yeah. The way I got started was, this is going to be a niche reference, UK people will get this, UK people that follow football, i.e. soccer, will get this, but footballers started wearing a snood. And what a snood is, is a piece of warm thermal fabric that goes around your neck like a scarf, but it's connected at both ends, so you pull it over your head. And as footballers would wear this to keep their neck warm while they're playing football. Now, this is interesting for a few reasons. Number one, the snood was vilified. It was very famous because footballers are famous and everybody follows the Premier League and you've got More and more foreign players, and more and more of this narrative that football is becoming too soft, right? Like football players are just diving all the time. There's no contact anymore. Like they feel now they're feeling too cold, they need to wear a neck warmer. There's this whole narrative. Speaker 1: It's kind of like they're a bunch of pussies or something now or something. Speaker 2: Exactly. I mean, that hasn't really even gone away. But that was that narrative was very strong back then. And so snooze were very famous, and they were getting covered in the media and stuff. And I wanted to wear one because I play football on Sunday morning, Sunday League football, which is very brutal. It's barely football, it's basically just going to war. And I really wanted to wear one because I thought it would annoy my opponents. I thought if I was running around the pitch wearing a snood, they would be like, attack him because he's weak. You know what I mean? And I love that. I just love winding up my opponents and it gives me more power. So I was like, let me get a snood because I want to wind people up basically. And guess what? I could not find a snood in this whole country. Speaker 1: Really? Speaker 2: I could not find it. Speaker 1: What were the football players getting them? Speaker 2: You know what? I've never, I've actually never worked that out. I don't know where they were getting it. It must have some international supply chain that I wasn't aware of. So because I was, there was basically two places you could go shopping back then for sports, you know, sports apparel, Sports Direct and JD Sports in the UK. So I went to, I went to both of those and neither of them sold football snoods. And I was shocked. I was like, I cannot believe this because I can't be the only one that's going to try, going to try and buy one at the minute. So there we go. What do we have? We have a surplus of demands and a lack of supply. Boom, that's a business idea. And so that's what I did. I went to Alibaba. And in those days, you know, like Alibaba, people didn't even, it was relatively new itself. People actually didn't even know about that. I ended up on Alibaba, I ordered some snoods. And in fact, what I tried to do with them was I walked around Oxford Street, again, like in London, the famous shopping street. And in those days, you used to have a bit more independent stores everywhere that would sell like luggage and like, you know, a bit of clothing and stuff like that. I went up and down Oxford Street, And I went up to all the owners of these stores and I made deals of them. I said, I'm bringing in football snoods. Everybody knows what they are. No one's selling them. I'm gonna bring them in. I can't remember what the prices were, but I'll bring them in for one pound. I'll sell them to you for three pounds and you can sell them for five pounds or something like that. And people were interested. I made deals on paper while I was waiting for the goods to come in from China. Speaker 1: Were these licensed with the teams on them or just straight, just simple colors or something? Speaker 2: The most unbranded piece of generic fabric you've ever seen. So you can see where the story might end up going because of that fact. But no, no licensing, no nothing, not even like any unique design at this stage. It was just like order, you know, the first, I had a hundred pounds, I had a hundred pounds of savings money. And I invested it all in snoods. And when I wait for them to come in, I cut all these deals. What happened then was I met somebody through my family friend who had been selling phone accessories on eBay. Again, 2012, Amazon Marketplace barely existed. eBay was actually the place you would go to if you wanted to like, you know, do a marketplace business. And he was like, don't go to these shops, that's just like old fashioned, you should be selling this on the internet and you can use eBay to get straight to market very easily. So that's what I did. And if it wasn't for that one conversation, you might see me today doing deals with retail, high street retail stores, rather than doing anything to do with online. But that one conversation changed everything. And I said, fine, let's just stick them on eBay. The irony of it was that the margin actually ended up no better once you take into account the marketplace fees, the shipping, and so on. So the margin is probably going to be stronger if I just get into these shops. The reach is going to be higher. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. And you know, I'm not, I don't regret it. So, so that's how I got started. I got, I was the first person in this country to sell snoods. I ended up selling snoods to footballers, because I guess they had the same problem as me. Some of the other ones couldn't find where to get them. I sold them to basically every country in the world. Speaker 1: You get an order on eBay from some famous footballer and you're checking your orders and your email's like, holy cow, so-and-so David Beckham just ordered one or whoever it may have been. You're like, no way. Speaker 2: Yeah, but I wasn't even surprised at this point. I mean, I wasn't even surprised at that point because everybody wanted a Snood and I was the only one who had them. So, that was how I started selling. Speaker 1: How did that end up doing in the end? Speaker 2: I wish I could remember the numbers, but when you get into business, I can remember the day I sat there on New Year's Eve and my phone made a dinging noise and it said, ding, ding, ding, you've sold an item, congratulations. And that still to this day is one of my highlights of my entire business career, was selling that first snood. And I was just like, oh my God, we've got something, we've got something here. And I don't know how many snoods I sold, but what I do remember was I ran out of stock and I wasn't, Bullish enough and I didn't order more stock in time. So, you know, I had to keep waiting for it. That was a mistake I learned from which I corrected later. At the time, it felt like I was a millionaire from snoods. The reality is it was gonna be like in the low thousands or I don't know exactly how many. But it didn't last long because as I mentioned, it's like an unbranded, there's no differentiation. Anyone else can go and find out where to source these. And of course, what you end up in is a price game, which is everyone's nightmare on the marketplaces. It's obviously the big downside of using them. And on top of that, it was a bit of a craze, like fidget spinners would be another recent craze that everybody be aware of. It wasn't gonna last forever. It wasn't a sustainable business model, which I knew, but it was what got my foot in the door in terms of selling anything, got me a foot in the door of selling online. And it got my foot in the door of sportswear, which is then how I then developed what became the sportswear brands that we built for the next nine years and eventually sold. Speaker 1: So what kind was that clothing sportswear clothing brands or accessory brands or what kind of what kind of stuff was it? Speaker 2: Yeah, so, you know, athletic sportswear. So like in the I think we in the UK sportswear means, you know, like, actual, you know, athletic apparel that you're going to go and do a sport in, I think sometimes in the US is used to mean like a bit more casual, casual wear as well. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But yeah, it was, it So the next product that I did was compression wear. So compression sportswear was invented by Under Armour. And it didn't really, I think they did it in 2008 or something. There's a good story about how they created that. And it started to become commoditized and like compression wear started to become popular. And again, I was one of the first people in the UK to have like a, you know, like a independent compression wear offering. So that was the first product we did. Speaker 1: People know like compression socks and stuff. Are these more compression like shirts and things? Okay. Speaker 2: Yeah. So you'll see it if you watch athletes these days, you know, like underneath the team jersey, they'll have something else on like a long sleeve top, very tight or some shorts underneath there, you know, like the team kit. So that's compression wear. Speaker 1: So it's the Under Armour. I remember they had big ads during like American football games here where they'd show the guys all in these like really tight black shirts or something and hype it how it made their performance better and all kinds of stuff. So what is it actually, what is, for those that don't know, what is the compression wear? People know it for like the foot, you know, that's a popular item and that's to help blood circulation in your feet, you know, keep you from getting clots and stuff down your feet. So as people age, a lot of times they need, or they're diabetic or whatever, they need compression socks. But when it comes to different parts of the body, like the arms and the chest and stuff, what is it actually really doing there? Speaker 2: Well, there was studies done on it. The main benefit would have been during the winter and it's for warmth. So it'll keep you warm, which we need here usually, not now. Now we're desperate for cold, but yeah. So like a big part of the compressed wear market is like, okay, I'm gonna go play football on Sunday morning, I'm freezing, I wanna wear something underneath, right? And it's lightweight, it wicks. So one of the benefits wicks the sweat from the skin, so you're not drenching yourself in sweat. So like an outer jersey or like a t-shirt like this, if you get gonna sweat on it, it'll become very heavy and wet with sweat. Where the compression layer would sit underneath and it would wick the sweat away, which means like take it from the skin and then it absorbs on the surface of the fabric. And you could actually see that, you could see it happen like if you put it on a wet surface, it would come to the top of the fabric, evaporate off. And then, you know, save you from being drenched in sweat. So it was the sweat wicking. It was the keeping you warm. And yeah, there was, you know, like compressing the muscles. A lot of like people that wore it just enjoyed the feeling of feeling like they were locked in and their muscles were like, you know, being supported more. So there was some benefits there as well. It's been a good three, four years since I wrote a copy for this, Kevin. So you're really testing me. But yeah, that was what we did. So that was the next big thing. Speaker 1: How many different SKUs? You said you did it for eight or nine years before you sold it. How many different SKUs did you have around this? Because you've got to deal with sizes and you're dealing with all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, which is like everybody's worst nightmare these days. Too many SKUs, too many variations. I think we definitely had more than 2,000. I honestly think it might have been at 5,000 at one point before we culled a lot of it. But you know what, it didn't bother us, we didn't find that problem. Speaker 1: Did you have a big warehouse in London there with this that you owned or managed or did you job this out to a fulfillment company? Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember the day that I shipped everything off to the fulfillment. What's it called? Fulfillment company. Speaker 1: 3PL. Speaker 2: Yeah, the 3PL. I remember the day I did that, it was like, wow, like my life has changed because I spent my entire day packing things and then running to the post office. But yeah, I did my research. So what your recent newsletter, or I think it might be recent podcast episode is talking about making profits at the buying side rather than the selling side, right? Something like that. Yeah, and that was one of the lessons I was taught earlier is you don't make your money when you sell, you make your money when you buy. So you need to buy right, yeah? Don't skimp on that. And the same goes for all your service providers. So what I didn't do was go to the biggest, flashiest website, 3PL, who's charging me more just to like give me some account manager or something that I don't need and pay their salary. I scoured the, you know, the country for the most cost effective free PL that I could find. And also someone who was small enough that we would get the service that we felt we needed. And that's what I did. And I ended up working with these guys. And you're asking me like, if I wanted to, you know, talk about anything. To be honest, these guys really deserve a shout out. They're called PacSmart. UK like people can look them up, they're in near Coventry, based near Coventry, which is in the Midlands, which is where most of our warehouses are in this country, because obviously, including the name, it's in the middle, they can ship everywhere quickly. But PacSmart is run by this guy, Nick and this lady Shauna. And yeah, like that changed my whole life working with them, finding them. And I went through so many and I chose who I thought was the best It's a combination of value and service and it really made a difference because you've got that many SKUs, right? And with orders going wrong, they're giving the wrong size or the wrong color, it can happen a lot easier. So it was really important that we picked a good one and those guys were amazing. Speaker 1: So were you selling D2C or were you also selling like still on eBay and did you go on to Amazon and other places or in getting into doing wholesale into like any of those those two big sporting good companies? Speaker 2: We didn't, we didn't. I constantly got asked about wholesale orders or like you know doing some bulk stuff and I just think a lot of people might relate to this now. Like if we start a successful brand, you start to get approaches for these things. So one of the new brands that I'm running now, we got approached by like a very famous department store in the UK, like kind of prestigious place. And I was just like, can I be bothered to like send you 50 units and just like deal with all of your old fashioned ways of working. And of course there's some upsides, but like, I could spend my hours a lot better than doing this deal with you. So it was the same back then with the sportswear. We always had people asking about it, but I just felt the growth of the business was going to be online and direct to consumer or via the marketplaces and not in these wholesale thing. I just wasn't set up for that. So I'm glad we never did it. Amazon tried to do it as well. They tried to buy us, like, you know, do a retail deal, which we luckily never did because that sounded like hell. So it was mainly eBay for a long time and then some people start to try and convince me like you should check out Amazon. And I was just like, I cannot be bothered. Have you seen the state of these flat files? I'm not going to waste my time filling out a thousand cells and like, you know, I have to go for like approval for it and all this stuff. I was like, I forced myself to do it and of course the rest is history. eBay was still doing half a million or something in sales the last time I checked. I mean, we stopped checking it a long time ago with the old business, but we had such powerful listings on eBay that they were just turning over like hundreds of thousands. But yeah, as soon as I got on Amazon, Amazon itself started to grow and we grew with it and obviously it's the place to be now. Speaker 1: So you end up selling that out a few years ago, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, TCA was the name of the brand and it was May 2021. So yeah, just over two years ago, we sold that. Speaker 1: Was that to an aggregator or to a strategic buyer or what was it? Who bought it? Speaker 2: It was an aggregator. Speaker 1: A US one or a European one? Speaker 2: European. European guys. Speaker 1: What was your sales volume when you exited? What were you all doing in gross merchandise? Speaker 2: We don't reveal everything about it, but we were doing like a very healthy seven figures. And we got, you know, this is what we started talking about. It's coming around a little bit now, but what we had was We had a real brand, Kevin. Speaker 1: And how did you build that though? And that's a competitive space. I mean, like you said, Under Armour started and then every Tom, Dick and Harry's got compression something or another because there's a low barrier to entry. So what was it that actually, like you just said, you had a real brand, what made it a real brand and what made it stand out? Speaker 2: You know, we always think like, what are the great brands or Nike, Apple, and we start thinking about the logo and the flashy advertising and stuff. We forget one very important point. How did these companies start in the first place? Right? They started with a great fucking product. Simple as that. Stop trying to cheat the system, people. Just make a good product. Your brand will build itself. Your business will build itself. No one can be bothered to make a good product these days. I guess I actually get sick of it. So we talked about when we met in Seller Sessions and that was my first ever Amazon event ever. And I was even done, like I'd sold the previous company. I've got the new brands now, which I run. They're going to be, they are very successful, but I do, I have fun with it as well. I'm not like completely obsessed with, you know, making money anymore. So I went to sell a sessions for a bit of fun, which is how we ended up meeting. But I got so many people, so many questions. They always ask me like, how did you know what to sell? When they find out I'm on Amazon, how did you find out what to sell? And I just, I'm like confused by the question. Speaker 1: You did what you know and what you would buy. I mean, what you would want and what you would buy, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And made it good and made it better and good. Speaker 2: But I don't sit down there and say, what can I sell? I sit down there and say, what do people want? What do people need and what they can't already get? And is that a great product? And there you go. Then you go and sell it. So I feel like people running their business backwards. What can I sell? I just don't get that. So I didn't build an Amazon business. I built a sportswear brand and I just happened to put it on Amazon. That's how I think about it. Speaker 1: I mean, I did the same thing in 2015 or similar with when the first Apple Watch came out. There was, I was going to like, that looks pretty cool. I think I'll buy one of those. And it wasn't quite out yet. And I was like, how do you charge this thing? How do you, what do people do with it? And you know, you just got to put a cable and like stick it across the table or on the nightstand. And there, I look on Amazon and there's people selling little charging docks, little stands. And back then they're all like, they're cheap pieces of crap made out of like bamboo for 10, 15 bucks. And they all look the same or slight variations. And they were selling like crazy. I'm like, I don't want that. If I'm going to spend, I don't remember what that watch costs, but if that watch costs like 500 bucks or whatever it was, why am I going to put it on some chintzy little bamboo? 15 dollar stand. Apple has an elegant look to it. You know, it's a sophisticated look. You need like a nice white and silver or some sort of, you know, colors that match in a black stand. So I developed my own stand. I developed what I wanted. I spent like $35,000 or something like that in tooling. This stand had, it would hide all the cables. So it had a bottom which popped out and you wrap the cables around. So there's not all these cables laying all over the table. It would charge your iPhone and your On your watch, it had a built-in Bluetooth speaker so that you could just, you know, if you're sleeping at night and you want to listen to some music or whatever, it would tie into the watch or your phone. It had a little channel on the back to hide everything. It sat nice and neat on the corner of the desk. And I put that out at $89 in Christmas time, 2015. And I was selling them like crazy. And everybody else was using, back then, there weren't all these sophisticated tools like there are now. There were a few tools. Let me jump on this bandwagon of being another me too product and just make another bamboo stand. These guys are making 100 grand a month. Let me go do that and find a factory that can just make it slightly different. You can't do that. You got to develop and then the same thing happened with a dog bowl. There was this slow feed dog bowl. My dog was eating too fast. And so it was eating its food when I put it in the bowl and just gulp it down. And so then it would get gas or it'd be burping or whatever. And I was like, this can't be good for the little puppy. So I look it up online. They say, yeah, put a tennis ball in those inside the bowl or something to slow it down. It's got to eat around the tennis ball. But then I look on Amazon, there's this bowl, there's this Dog bowl that's a slow feed dog bowl that has a patent on it. And it's ridged, it looks like a little small little mountain and you just drop the food in there and the dog has to use its tongue to go around the little obstacles to slows them down. Like that thing is freaking ugly. That's the ugliest thing I ever saw, a little piece of plastic. I don't want that sitting on the floor in my house. I want something nice. So I actually developed a really nice bone shaped bowl with silicone and non-slip rubber and all this stuff. And came out with that and it sold like crazy and create a real brand out of it. And that's what I think like you just said is most people are not doing, they're not wanting to put in that work or that effort. They're just looking for the quick buck. What can I find on Helium 10 that says there's an opportunity, find a supplier and let's just do it and make a quick buck and be done with it. But if you build a true brand, you You create a moat around yourself and you create something that actually has value and someone will pay for. Is your brand now, since you've sold it, have you checked in on it, how it's doing? Are they managing it okay? Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, from what I hear, well, I know for a fact it's doing well, because they told me. We had a couple of earnouts and bits and pieces for the couple of years afterwards, which is finished now. So yeah, they have to give me those numbers and it's grown very, very nicely. I'm very proud of that actually, because not all of the brands that were acquired during the, you know, like the rush, the land grab, I think not all of them are doing so well, which is why we're seeing so many aggregators acquiring each other and consolidating and some of them are really suffering. So I'm very proud that TCA's, I'm actually shocked at how well it's doing. I'm a bit like, I've actually realized that I wouldn't have been able to do some of the stuff they've done. Speaker 1: Are they still just Europe, UK or have they expanded out to the rest of Europe or into US or anywhere? Speaker 2: I think they're seeing some really good results in some of the smaller European countries, which people maybe ignore. I think like Spain is doing quite well. But yeah, they're selling everywhere. And I think one of the big deals they did was they got onto Decathlon. Decathlon is like a major, major sports retailer here. And I think they're on the Decathlon website now, which is one of the big projects they did after I'd sold it. And actually Chris, who's my number two, I think he can take the credit for most of that project. So he stayed on with the brand and implemented that. So yeah, like TCA is actually going a lot better than I thought it could, to be honest. They're adding like definitely adding a couple of million to the revenue. So yeah, it's doing well, which is very pleasing. Speaker 1: So what was it about it? I mean, besides just a quality product, you can have a quality product, but nobody knows about it. And that's one of the things that's happening with Amazon now with all this testing they've been doing with reviews. And I'm all for this, but whether you have a product that's been there since 2015, a dog bowl, let's say, that's been there since 2015, and it's got 27,000 reviews, and it's got this big moat around it that a newer, better product may come out, but it doesn't stand a chance because it has 10 reviews or 20 reviews, and so people won't give it a chance. And hopefully it becomes permanent where they don't show the number of reviews anymore. And that will give a new product, a better product, a better chance and it's better for the customer. It's better for innovation, better for the customer. The old school sellers hate it because now they're Their little moat is gone and they have to actually do real business. But what is it besides the quality that made TCA a true brand and made it so good? Was it the marketing? Was it the avatar that you were appealing to? Was it how they made them feel when they did it? They felt that they're part of something? Or what was it that actually, branding is more than just a quality product and a logo, like you said. What was it that really helped you create that brand? Speaker 2: So I used to, yeah, I did used to think about this a lot. And I guess that the metaphor I always gave was actually, um, well, people used to ask slightly different questions. They'd say like, what's your USP? And I'd be like, I just say like, I mean, name me anything that has actually has a USP, like, unless it's a patent. Speaker 1: I'm not a big fan of that USP statement. Speaker 2: I think it's a red herring. Speaker 1: The customer's always right for me. Um, yeah. Speaker 2: So, but I used to think, so if I haven't got a USP, then what the hell am I doing? And the metaphor I always thought was like, the business is like a rope, you know, the rope has got like so many different threads that wind together. So we're very good at this, we're very good at that, we're very good at this, we're very good, we're slightly better at everything than our competitors and overall, you get a nice strong rope, which is the strength of the business. So, what makes a brand? I mean, it's like a question that people talk about forever. And the best definition that I like, the one I go by is Jeff Bezos. He says, your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So it's everything you do, like people hate hearing this because it means it's hard work and you can't just like, it's not just the logo, sadly, it's not just the copywriting, it's not just the imagery, but it's everything you do creates the brand in the mind of your customers. So number one, it is having a great product. And that I'll never, I'll never get away from that. We used to spend like weeks, months, I had like designers and product developers from Under Armour, Nike, Lululemon working for me. Making my products. Tell me another Amazon business that has got people from the giants of their industry making their products. So we start with a great product and part of the way you can get your great product is, guess what? You just ask people. You just ask your customers what they want. And you have to be clever because if you ask them what they want, they might just say a faster horse, like Henry Ford says. So you have to read between the lines, you have to listen carefully, you have to prompt them here and there and you have to do it carefully and they will tell you what they're looking for. Then you can go design it. Speaker 1: But sometimes they don't know what they want. Look at some of the Apple products. I remember when the first iPhone, I think, came out or something. There's a bunch of articles that came out and said, yeah, this is the latest fad. This won't last. But sometimes people don't know what they want. So like you said, you have to read between the lines and you have to prompt them right. Speaker 2: There's a great quote from the guy we were talking about before, Ogilvy, which I always forget exactly how it goes, but it's like, consumers don't know what they want, they don't say what they think, and they don't think what they say or something like that. Basically, it's just, you have to be very tactical about the way you engage with them. But ultimately, You can do it. So that's one way we did it, right? We speak to customers. You also have to have like a knack for it, right? Like I'm not going to pretend that I have no talent whatsoever, but when I spot a great idea or I hear a customer say something, my brain will latch onto it and I'll get that. So, you know, it comes with a bit of, you know, innate ability like to trust your gut on something as well. Speaker 1: But what about what you said, though, about customers asking them what they want? I mean, in our business right now, one of the big things are sites like PickFu, which is a great company, great guys to actually test. And people now are using AI and creating, you know, a hundred different product designs of the latest, coolest dog bowl and then putting that up there and saying, which one of these would you buy? And then they're choosing that one and getting feedback. And the people say, I like this one because it's got rounded edges and I like it because of this. Like, OK, this is the one we're going to do. But the problem with that in any kind of focus groups, stuff like that, and whether it's PickFu or anything else, is that's great maybe for some brainstorming, getting some basic ideas, but people, you just said it, what people say and what they will spend their money on are often two different things. They may say this is my favorite, but when push comes to shove, say, give me 10 bucks for it, like, no, no, no, it's not that great. So how do you get past that when you're doing innovation and branding? And is it just the gut feeling and rolling the dice or how do you, how do you do, how did you do that? Speaker 2: Or how do you do that? Good question. I mean, I've not codified this in a way that we're trying to talk about now, which I will, because this is super valuable. And there'll be companies, I don't even know if people have done this yet. So there's a few things. I mean, number one, if you speak, I speak to people, I like to speak to people one-on-one, like customers, rather than in a group, because group dynamics, you could just throw reality out the window, right? They're just going to start lying. Um, conforming to one another, but I speak one on one. And if you hear the same thing three or four times, it's fairly good indication that, you know, like there's something there. So you can get with the frequency of, of the same response. You've got to be careful not to, you've got to write and deliver a question in an open manner. So just, it's pretty easy, like, would you buy this? Like, it's not, I don't think a particularly useful question, like you say, like they could, you know, whatever they say, we don't know until they put their money where their mouth is. Sometimes you can, so it's important to phrase questions correctly, keep them open-ended, don't prompt them, don't let them think, you know, what it's kind of like, have the person you're speaking to Give them any expectation bias of what they think you want to hear, for example. So there's an art to engaging with customers and that side of things. I'm sure there's millions of resources online people can look at for how to effectively do it. But for me, it's something that came natural, like to listen to people and try and read between the lines. So that's why I've leant into doing it because I found I was naturally good at it. Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things I've done in the past, and this may be, you know, some people may say this is like, Kevin, that's maybe a little shady or something, but I did this. I had a membership site and I did this and I was testing two different prices. I was like, Price for this membership site's gonna be $9.95 or $19.95. And I could send out a poll and say, which would you pay for? And everybody's gonna say the cheaper price, but I'm like, will they pay for the higher price? So what I did is I set up, I said, we're launching this site and I did a split test. And that actually took them all the way through the credit card processing. I didn't actually process the credit card, but they had to enter all their credit card stuff, just as if they, and hit submit. And then they got the thank you and everything. I just didn't actually run the card. And I did testing that way. I've done it also for products where I come up with a new product idea. Let's just say it's a dog bowl, for example. It wasn't a dog bowl, but just say it's a dog bowl. And I have my own customer list. It's one of the values of having your own customer list. And I will segment that list. If the list is 10,000, I'll take a thousand of those people. And I'll put it up a special page on my website that's kind of like, it has a, you know, you can, there's some tools where you say you have to have a link to get to this page so it doesn't just show up. Naturally everywhere, and I would send out an email to these people and say, and I put the doggle up, you know, 3D imagery. It looks like it's real, in stock, available. I said probably shipping in seven days or something like that. And to see if people would actually, and did the same thing. How many of these people will go through and actually give me their credit card for it? And I just didn't charge them. And then I come back and I say, sorry. I think one time I told them it was a test, but sometimes that pisses them off. I think one time I said, oh, we have a shipping delay. There was a problem with, The factory or something, so it's going to be a little bit of delay. I forget what I say, but if it doesn't work, then I'll come back and say something like, sorry, this oversold, we're working on getting some more in or whatever it may be. We're not going to charge your car. We didn't charge your card, so don't worry. You're not on anything. I've done testing like that that actually proves that they want this product. So that's something that I've done to try to overcome those obstacles of put your money where your mouth is. Speaker 2: I've actually heard that from a few places. Yeah, it's um, yeah, it's just actually, I just remember something you mentioned before about the people launch, people want to launch new products on Amazon, they want to get their business, business going. Here's one of my big, you know, my big keys that I think people should try to try to use. And that is rich people shop on Amazon, too. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: And how do rich people shop, right? Do they go to the shopping mall and look for the cheapest shop? No, they go to the fancy place with all the fancy shops. They want to spend money. So they want to use Amazon. Everyone wants to buy everything on Amazon. We don't want to use any DTC sites. We can't be bothered, but we don't use it for everything because there's a dearth of quality and there's just too much overflow of rubbish. And guess what's the biggest indicator of quality? It's your price. So, people need to think about that a little bit more and create really good products and don't be afraid, like you say, to charge for them because prices... Speaker 1: I've actually done that too, exactly what you said. I did this, I had a makeup mirror, a little portable makeup mirror for women that I was selling for several years. I don't sell it anymore, but I was selling it for several years and at Christmas time, I would actually rate, everybody else is selling theirs at $19.95, I would raise the price to $29.95. And then I'll put a $10 coupon on it. You know, one of those clippable coupons on it. So, but when people would come there and they're comparing two different products, they're looking at the nine, there's this is $19.95 one, here's mine, my images are good and everything too, but this one's $29.95, it must be better, it costs more. Well, I'm on a budget, I can't spend, I'd rather spend the $19.95, but wait a minute, there's a $10 coupon, so I'm going to get a better quality item for the same price and they would buy mine. And mine was better quality, but they don't know that, and then they can't touch it and feel it and hold it or whatever. But that's the psychology of marketing. Most people don't think about and I agree with you. I've done that with bully sticks. I've told this story many times. It's in my newsletter and a couple of places where I sold, everybody's selling 30 bully sticks in a bag for 30 bucks on Amazon. I sold three in a box for $55. And everybody just thinks it's always about the cheapest price on Amazon. It's absolutely not. In some categories, in some keywords, it's difficult to compete if you're not competing on price. But there's a lot of opportunities in a lot of spaces where it's not price-based. Speaker 2: Absolutely, and you know the thing with the dog treats is there's even another element which came to mind on top of that for me, which is the customer, i.e. the human buying it, will never actually know how good or bad that thing was for its dog because it can't really get the feedback, right? So there's actually more uncertainty when you're going to put something in the mouth of a child or a dog that you're responsible for. And again, do I really want to put the cheapest thing in my dog's mouth? Speaker 1: No, you're going to, you're selling to the human. It's just, it's the same old thing of McDonald's with playgrounds. You know, they put a playground in there. So the kids say they want to go to McDonald's. It's you're, you're, you're not selling to the, you're, you're selling to not necessarily the consumer of the product, but the buyer of the product. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've seen that as well in the gifting space as well. So there's different, but yeah, this is basic. This is marketing 101. I mean, it made me laugh a little bit when we were at Seller Sessions because you could see the shift happening away from, there's definitely a shift happening now with the Amazon world, which is away from the short termism, away from the hack mentality towards, everyone's saying brand, right? Brand, brand, brand, which is why it's just becoming like ruined the word, which is fine. Speaker 1: They're saying that that's the mantra, but most people don't understand what that means. Speaker 2: Well, exactly. They don't quite get it. And some of the content, you know, is pretty, this is some pretty basic marketing branding 101, which everyone, you've got to start somewhere, but I feel like the Amazon world is so far behind. But that's, you know, that's like a principle that I have, which is, I try to work out what I'm good at and then I think, well, where is what I'm good at going to have the most effect? Where am I going to have the biggest impact? And that's not necessarily the place where everyone else who's good at what I do is playing. I want to find a playground where people that aren't good at what I do are playing because then I can stand out a bit more. So for me, that was the beauty of Amazon was like, okay, everyone here is playing a price war, cheap commodity game. And I'm gonna pretty much do the opposite. And that's a lot of the stuff with TCA, that's what we did. I mean, my titles sometimes were like six words. Six word product title, like Women's Supreme Running Leggings, TCA. Boom, that's the title. No keyword stuffing, no nothing. Do you know what that looks like to a customer? It looks like, damn, these guys are confident. You know, they don't need to, they're not begging for sales. They're confident in what they do. That sounds like an Under Armour or a Lululemon or a Nike type of title, not an Amazon title. So that's how we did it. And it can still work today. Speaker 1: So now you're building another brand, right? Speaker 2: At least one. Yeah, we've got two or three. Speaker 1: Some pottery thing or something like that? Or what was it? Speaker 2: What is it? We're in the creative space at the moment. So after I sold, I mean, I love sports, but like when I've been wearing my own sportswear for 10 years, I was actually sick to death of it. So it was actually like a relief to sell the brand and start wearing jeans again. But I'm a creative guy. I love creating. You can see behind me, I got the guitar, got the piano. I got some artwork back there as well. So I just thought, let me do a business about something that I actually want to do myself. So yeah, so the brands that we're doing now are all in a creative space, which just makes it fun to work on. Speaker 1: So what, are those launched or you're still in the development stage on those? Speaker 2: Launched. I've got other ideas which are yet to launch, but sometimes you don't want to split your focus too many different ways. So I'm kind of wondering whether I launch more now or just try and focus on what we have. Speaker 1: Are you doing it the same way where you're going after more of the premium high quality market in a commoditized industry or are you doing it a little bit differently this time? Speaker 2: Um, no, this time is completely different. This time we're trying, this time we're actually running very much a dual business, Amazon and DTC. So, uh, that's like a new skill set that, that I'm learning is, is more of the DTC, uh, side of running a business because TCA was, was almost all Amazon. We didn't challenge on the DTC side. So yeah, we're doing both of those things. And, you know, Amazon again, it's pros and cons, right? So the pro is you can get products in front of everybody very quickly, very easily. The con is, it's a search, you know, it's a search tool. So if you put something completely new on there that no one's ever heard of, The chances of them finding it are low because they don't know what they're looking for. They can't search for it yet because they don't know what exists, right? So you have to weigh up that when you're using Amazon as well, because you want to be innovative and launch new things that haven't been seen yet, but you have to try and still capture some demand that's already existing. Speaker 1: And so a lot of people are using TikTok for now for product discovery. Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so that's exactly that's that type of stuff that we're actually trying to learn and and it's like a new skill set for us at the moment. Speaker 1: And there's people right now using I mean, tick tocks got their own shop in the UK and they're doing some testing in the US and they got a lot of stuff coming there where they're Setting up their own fulfillment networks and everything because they realize this, that TikTok is a great place for product discovery. They're like, why should we be sending this off to somebody's Shopify site or to Amazon when we could just do this ourself and take those margins? So they're working heavily on that. But there's people that one of the TikTok tactics actually is that to get something going, like you said, on Amazon, if you can't get product, if they don't know you exist and something new and innovative, it's hard to find it. Amazon has some programs that try to help push that out there a little bit, but you give up more points for being in those programs too. But what TikTok, what someone's doing on TikTok is they got really smart. They went out and got five influencers. I think this is Paul Harvey that actually recommended this. Get five influencers to actually create a UCG, user-generated content video of your product, and then post that on their link. And then you run ads using their, against their, using their boost, basically boosting their content, but you run that to a small audience. So if it's a small audience of say five or 10,000 people, And those five or 10,000 people, because there's five different influencers, five different videos, all featuring your product and running to the small audience, it starts showing up in all their feeds constantly. And they start seeing other people doing it. It's this very small subset. So they're like, well, I just... I just saw Kevin's video and I just saw Mike's video. I just saw Susan's video. Man, this must be a hot product. Let me go search for it on Amazon. And then that creates a demand. They go and they're like, this is pretty cool. Let me buy it. And then it creates this flywheel and then you expand it out from there and you can actually almost force product discovery, at least right now, the way the algorithm works by doing stuff like that, which is pretty cool little technique. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's huge. And that's the merging of the worlds that we're seeing DTC and Amazon. You know, in 2012, in 2015, for you as well, Amazon is a dirty, it's a dirty word. Brands don't, even now today, brands turn their nose up. They don't want to be there. They don't want to be associated with it. And that's slowly changing. And it will, you know, eventually that will, I think, disappear almost entirely. But, you know, where there's this snobbery around Amazon, that's opportunity for people. So, you know, I think it's, yeah, it's very interesting to watch that merging of the DTC world and the Amazon world. And it's not so hard anymore to drive people to Amazon. They trust it. They, you know, like we said, they all want to buy things there. So, yeah, I think, Yeah, we're very interested in TikTok and the TikTok shop, like you say, because they're banning all the links, aren't they, to Outbound, to Amazon or whatever. But I don't think it really matters, to be honest. Speaker 1: So what else are you working on? You just got these brands. You got anything else in the oven? Speaker 2: I mean, I literally just make music, Kevin. Speaker 1: All right. I see the digital piano behind you there. What's up? Speaker 2: I was learning, I was playing the piano last night. I got the guitar on the go. I sing as well. I love making music. I don't think I'm going to be a musician or an artist, but it's a passion. And you know what's funny, like with, you know, like an entrepreneurial type of person is your passions tend to start to turn into businesses eventually. So that's why I started these like creative product brands is because I thought, well, I'm already passionate about it. So we'll do it that way. But yeah, I just, I like messing around, like creative, like doing some art and I love writing. I've been writing. I tried to get a blog going but didn't really pursue it. I wrote some stories. All of these things are little passion projects. I love dancing. I'm going dance class later tonight. But I have a feeling that one of them or two of them might start to funnel itself into some kind of business because that's just what I naturally do. So watch this space for what else I might do. I'm a physical product guy at heart, right? Like I just love a good product, you know, you know, you know, once you know how to do it as well, this is something that's so interesting, Kevin, like the second time around is so easy. Starting a business the first time round, it's like you think, for some reason we all do it, we all reinvent the wheel and we learn how to do everything. Maybe you need to, maybe it's not, you can't just get a mentor or follow a playbook, but the second time you do it, I was like, oh my God, like this is so easy. So I think people should remember that as well. Like people who's on their first business right now, it's hard work, it's a grind, it was for me also, but there's a very big difference between the first time you do something and the second in anything and building a business is the same. So, that's what I found and having a bit more fun with it now. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Well, Frankie, if people wanted to find out more about you or to check you out what you're up to, check out your blog or whatever that hasn't been updated in a while or whatever it is, how would they do that? Speaker 2: Instagram, I'm called The Urban Artist, The Urban Artist. So I use that mostly to, you know, share my work there, any of his writing or anything else. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well, which LinkedIn is kind of a funny place. So don't take myself too seriously on there. But yeah, I'd love to connect with people on LinkedIn or Instagram. Yeah, man, I'd love that. Speaker 1: Cool, man. I appreciate your time today. It's been a great chatting with you. Speaker 2: Kevin, it's always a pleasure. The King. The King is here. Speaker 1: The King. The King in the house. Cool, man. I'm sure we'll see each other or be chatting again soon. Thanks, man. Speaker 2: Cheers, bro. Speaker 1: Great discussion this week with Frankie talking about branding and how you figure out how to actually create a true brand on Amazon. Great story and some great insights and some great resources for everybody. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. We'll be back again next week with another awesome episode. We're going to be talking about sourcing in India and some amazing opportunities that you probably don't even know about when it comes to sourcing in India. Even if you don't want to direct all your sourcing over there, just even switching 10 or 20% can make huge, huge differences. So look forward to that in next week's episode. Before we leave today, our discussion today between me and Frankie reminded me of a quote from Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy is one of the greatest copywriters, he's still alive, of our generation. And it's just amazing stuff, but one of the quotes that he said is, marketing is about behavioral psychology and math. Marketing is about behavioral psychology and math. I couldn't agree more. Have a great week, we'll see you next Thursday.