#746- TikTok Live, Shopify, & Reddit Playbook for Amazon Brands

#746- TikTok Live, Shopify, & Reddit Playbook for Amazon Brands Speaker 2: Today, we talk to an eight-figure men's underwear tycoon who gets almost all of his business on TikTok from TikTok Live and also he has an incredible Shopify and Reddit strategy. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that's a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And speaking of e-commerce world, I'm at the e-comm mastery conference here in Nashville, Tennessee. If you guys, maybe my sound is a little bit different or it looks a little bit different. I'm not in my studio normally, but I'm taking advantage of being here. We've got A lot of cool people here and one of them has been on the show before, Jared. Jared, welcome back to the show. Speaker 1: Hey, I'm excited to hang out with you. So, thanks for the time. Speaker 2: Awesome, awesome. Now, Jared, if you haven't heard his story, we're going to start from scratch because you know we have a new format here on the SSP and we have a lot of new listeners and maybe you don't know his story. And Jared's actually done some educational stuff for us on the TikTok side. We're going to have some strategies too, but this is not our educational podcast anymore. That's on the AM-PM podcast, right? We are here more about the journey and the story and like what brought him to where he is today. So that's what we're going to be focusing on today. So, Jared, for those who might not have heard your last episode, can you give us a quick download where you were born and raised, where you grew up, college, majors, stuff like that? Speaker 1: I grew up in a small little town in southern Utah called Parowan. It sounds like heroin but with a P. It's super, super tiny and I lived there my whole life. Then I went to Southern Utah University. It's the most prestigious university in southwestern Utah. I always loved airplanes and so I wanted to go work for Boeing. I put myself through college working for an aerospace company. In southern Utah and then end up going to Kansas to work for for Boeing and so I spent 20 years in aerospace and absolutely loved it was super super amazing and they had this random. opportunity to go work at a pet toy company, which is like, I don't even have a dog, right? As seven boys, they'd be on the carpet enough. I don't need a dog. And so like, I've got catfish. But and so I got recruited to work at this pet toy company where we help put five different businesses together. And one of them was the e commerce business. So selling dog beds, cat scratchers, and that sort of stuff online. And so I learned about selling on Amazon from these guys. I'm like, holy cow, this is really cool. I think this is something that we could do. I always was entrepreneurial. It's expensive and there are things I'm worried about, but one of the tools that those guys were using was Helium 10. They would use Helium 10. That's where I first got exposed to Helium 10 and what it could do. I started using the tool with that company and seeing what it could do and what the opportunity was from an e-commerce standpoint. We end up leaving or we're getting ready to leave that business that got sold to another private equity company. I told my wife, I'm like, we need to start an underwear company. She's like, what are you talking about? Like aerospace and then dog toys and then men's underwear, men's underwear company. And so that's kind of the journey. Speaker 2: Awesome. Now, what year Were you working for this other company like from when to when and then what year are we talking about when you're like, hey, let's go ahead and start our own brand. Speaker 1: 2017 was when I started working the pet toy pet toy company. And so it was about, you know, for four years and so but I started designing the products. You know, while I was working there and so nights and weekends, I was working on designs for my stuff. And then it was 2021 was when I really started when I actually launched the company and then I didn't start selling until 2022. Okay, so talk about how, first of all, how did your wife come up with this idea? Speaker 2: You know, was there any kind of like research done or just the top of her head? The niche here in underwear is very wide, but you had this very specific idea. Talk about that. Give everybody the brand name so they can start looking it up and we'll show some screenshots. It's a very interesting product here. Talk about how in the world you guys landed on this and then how you went from engineering planes to designing underwear because that's not exactly something that somebody would think that you could do both of. Speaker 1: Make that type of leap from aerospace. A lot of it was my designs. My wife is always very supportive of doing it. Exactly. Yeah, your underwear should be like your relationships. They should be supporting you but not smashing you and compressive. So that's one of our lines. Yeah, so the thing is like men's apparel is not very size inclusive. With women's apparel, you'll see a lot more size inclusivity where different body shapes and things like that. Men's is like small, medium, large. It doesn't matter if you're tall and wide, if you're short and skinny. And so men's underwear is designed like that. It's designed as if guys are all the same size. Like women's bras, they have different shapes and sizes. Women are different sizes. Men are also different sizes, but their underwear is not designed that way. We developed the ABCD pouch classification for men because there are two ways that guys can cool down. Either they can move up and down or they can sweat. A lot of dudes are sweating all the time because they're stuck in an abusive relationship with their underwear. Their underwear is like smashing them. They're like, I need air conditioning in my pants. No, you don't. You just actually need something that allows your body to sit the way that God designed your body so you can actually move up and down to regulate your temperature and then you just don't sweat. And if you don't sweat, then you're not going to chafe. And so that's where we came up with the different pouch sizes. But it looks really weird and funny. And so people are like, oh, that's weird. Is that male lingerie or whatever. And so we have to do a lot of work to help educate people, hey, this is why this thing looks weird. But it's cool. We launched on Amazon and we had sales our first day. Real Men Apparel Company is the name of the brand. It may sound corny, but it helps guys remember it. A lot of guys buy stuff and they don't remember the brand. They have to look at the waistband or whatever. What did I buy? Or what did my spouse buy or my girlfriend purchase from or what brand did they buy for me? So yeah, Real Men Apparel Company and we've got a Rhino logo. So if you see Rhino, you might see that Rhino underwear, RM underwear. And so you see a lot of people search for those brands. So if you just search for any of that stuff or search for us on Reddit, we're huge on Reddit. Speaker 2: Awesome. All right. So that first year, I think it was like 2020-21, I'm wearing a throwback Helium 10 jersey or shirt from those years before we changed our logo in honor of this because I knew he started a while back. Now, how did that first year go? Because That's very daunting to get into such a competitive niche and then it's not a matter of, oh, let me have a coffin shelf and maybe I'll have a black one and a red one or something I'll launch with. You're talking, you know, different colors. You just mentioned different sizes and everything that's involved in like, you know, how do you decide like how much to invest in which colors, you know, what sizes or you just, hey, let me just order 300 of every single size. So like talk me through this whole, you know, ramp up These are all not decisions made overnight. I'm sure there's a long process to get you ramped up. Speaker 1: We did as much research as we could. A lot of it started with Helium 10 as far as keyword research and then doing reviews and any sort of volume information that we could find with the research tools available. When you're attacking a billion-dollar brand as a nobody, like a complete startup, no experience in In apparel, let alone men's underwear specifically, and okay, you're going to go compete against Hanes or Fruit of the Loom, like these major brands, like how do you go and do that, right? So you have to pick a super tight niche. And that's the cool thing about Amazon selling online is if you find a really underserved little area of the market, then you can go and attack that, right? And so we started with our D size pouch. So that's the largest pouch size because that's the most underserved Area of the of the market and so and those people are looking for something that works works for them And so we tacked attack there first now, you know the sizes, you know in case the majority people like medium Medium-large and and so we kind of built the distribution around that but some of it is guessing like I don't know how much am I gonna sell in this meet small versus the The large and so are the extra large. And so, yeah, so it was somewhat, you know, guessing when you first when you first start, you know, we could see that there was a need in the market based off reviews and feedback that we're getting. Like as we look at Amazon reviews, we can see that, hey, people don't like this. Hey, I'm getting smashed or I'm sweating or I'm all these different different, you know, pieces of feedback that we could we could get through our analysis. And so it's like we had confidence that there's an opportunity there. But yeah, we just pick one style to start with a boxer brief because that's Most guys are wearing boxer briefs and yeah, launched with that but yeah. Speaker 2: So in that first year of sales, that first calendar year, what kind of gross sales did you end up with and how long did it take you to get profitable? Speaker 1: So we did a million dollars in our first Well, the first calendar year, so it took us about 10 months to get there. It was like actually on New Year's Eve, we hit that one million mark as far as our gross sales. But profitably, we were probably like six, seven months before we actually got to where we were positive. I mean, Amazon didn't even send me any money for like four months because all the money is just like getting eaten up in PPC or in ads just so we could rank there. We had sales right from day one, but initially, we had started a little too broad with some of the campaigns, so we did waste a lot of money from an advertising standpoint because we're like, oh, I'm going to advertise on men's underwear, or I'm going to try to drive, and it's horribly inefficient. Then we dialed in those keywords where we were really actually effective, and then that's where we started to drive the profitability. Speaker 2: What I was going to ask next is because You know, when you go after A niche where there's billion-dollar players in there, you know, hey, I'm going to start a coffee brand. I'm going to start a collagen peptide brand. It's not impossible. It's hard, but it's not impossible. And so what are you know for anybody else out there, you know, who's not like, oh, I'm not going to go into super niche like coffin shelves or wooden egg trays. Like what is the strategy that you learn trial by error? What were some of the things that you learn what advice can give to somebody else out there who is trying to break into something that you know, a lot of established brands might have a strong like might have a foothold on. Speaker 1: Well, we lived in long tail, right? And so from a both from a design standpoint, and then from an ad standpoint, just really, really focusing on those low volume, long tail keywords, and then you know, building those listings around that. So we could really Speak to the needs of those particular customers. I mean, our product was very broadly applicable, but you have to speak to those individual needs. And so we target those keywords. Speaker 2: So then you start for the long tail keywords, maybe a little bit less competition and ones that you actually probably convert better than the big players. And this is before the years of search query performance. Now you can actually see how do you convert better compared to the competition. But What was the process then? I would assume that now on some of your top-selling SKUs, you are actually competing for the main keywords like men's underwear or something or at least some shorter tail, but what dictates when you can play with the big boys? Is it just like once you hit a number of reviews or is it because you've been hitting so many long tail keywords that slowly the short tail High search volume are actually moving up due to those conversions. Talk about that process or have you just completely stayed just focusing on all the long tail and still ignoring main keywords like men's underwear? Speaker 1: You know, like keywords, men's underwear keywords that we compete really well with, but there's others that we don't. I mean, some, they just, the conversion rates are just so, I mean, there's huge volumes. You'll see some keywords and it's like, oh, there's a massive search volume, but the conversions are just really, for everybody, it's super low. So, okay, men's underwear. Okay, Hanes is the top. You know, they're doing the best, but they're still only at the number one position. They're only converting, you know, 5%, 6%, like at the top position. There are some things you could pay to play in there, but there are just so many different brands. From an underwear standpoint, everybody that has a shoe brand has an underwear brand, Adidas, Nike. There are just hundreds and hundreds of brands that you're actually competing with. These are billion-dollar brands, so it's not like there are five billion-dollar brands. You have just a lot of billion-dollar brands you're dealing with. We do compete really well when people search for a Hanes boxer brief. We advertise on a Hanes box of brief and so there's certain even branded type keywords that we'll run ads on. Again, a lot of that comes through auto campaigns and things like that. Now, the thing that really helped us as we built is people just absolutely loved our product. If you don't have a good product, then you can spend as much money as you want, but it's not going to work. We have a 40% return customer rate, so 40% of our daily sales are return customers coming back. And so that just helped us a ton where we had the sale and then very quickly we were getting just return customers coming back and buying more and more and more and more. And so that really, you know, helped us from a volume standpoint and then, you know, as they search on those different Keywords and then we started having a branded search really, really quick and so that helped a ton as well. But part of that is how do you start trying to create a brand where it's not just some generic name. We compete with a lot of Chinese brands that just have these weird names that you can't even pronounce and things like that. So some of them have decent products, but it's like, It's hard to even remember what this kind of made-up word even is. And so because we have a weird name, but people remember it a lot easier, then that really helped our return customer rate. And so like on my logo, originally it was just RM. And so I had a ton of people like really quickly just starting to search for RM underwear. Again, they couldn't remember the brand, but the logo on the waistband, they would search for RM underwear. Speaker 2: It's interesting. I have to wait to get the microphone. There are so many puns that have to do with tighter. I've had to hold myself so I think the audience might be happy that I can just grab the mic and do my dad jokes and stuff because there's been a few times where he said like some word that has nothing to do. It's not sketchy at all, but I'm like, hmm, in the underwear kind of a format. Yeah, we can take that off. So guys, be thankful that we only have one microphone. Here, you're saved for my dad jokes. Fast forward to best year of sales. Was it 2025 or which year? And across all platforms, what was the sales and what platforms are you on now? Speaker 1: So, we're still 50% Amazon. So, last year, 2025, we did 8.5 million in sales. So, about 50% on Amazon, 35% on Shopify on our website, and then 15% on TikTok. So, it was heavier Amazon than TikTok, but the Shopify It has been increasing quite a bit, and our plan is by the end of the year, we'd definitely be higher on Shopify than we will on Amazon, but they all work together, and so that's the thing that's really helped us because some of it's just shopping cart of choice, like where they choose to go. A lot of people discover us on TikTok and then they'll go Google us and then find our website or they'll go search for us on Amazon. We've been live-streaming on TikTok for two and a half years and so when we first started live-streaming on TikTok, we see this huge jump in our branded search on Amazon. We don't have direct attribution but we were seeing so much halo effect from those live-streams that I actually started raising price. Whenever I go live on Amazon, I go raise my price up $5. Because I'm like, if they're going to buy from me on Amazon, I'm going to make the money because TikTok's incentives were like super crazy two and a half years ago. But yeah, so it was like crazy amount of halo effect that we had coming over on Amazon. But yeah, so that's the mix right now. But the Shopify is growing the fastest and a lot of that's on the back of our new product launches. So we're launching a new product every Thursday. So that's a lot of email and SMS. We're just putting that stuff out there as well as on Reddit. We have a pretty strong sub. We created a men's underwear review sub on Reddit. It's the largest men's underwear review sub on Reddit. It's a top 50 fashion sub there. When we launch a new product, we'll go and just post there and say, hey, we just launched this new product. You can come and purchase it. We see a pretty good search on to Shopify from Reddit. Speaker 2: Talk about that a little bit. Two things. Number one, not a lot of Amazon and TikTok shop sellers are on Shopify. So how have you grown that so much? Some specific things like how much is Facebook ads, Google ads, Reddit. Reddit, that's interesting because I think some people when they think about community for their brand, they're thinking about starting something just for their brand. Wait a minute, if this is a men's underwear review, Doesn't that mean that all my competitors or others are going to be like in there and I'm almost like providing a forum to send traffic? Like me from a Helium 10 standpoint, I don't want to have an Amazon software tool Reddit per se and then all of a sudden everybody's talking about these other competitors or whatever. How does that even make sense? But obviously it makes sense for you. So talk about these things, about the breakdown of how you drive traffic to Shopify and a little bit more about this Reddit strategy. Speaker 1: On the Shopify side, when we're live on TikTok, we're having people going and just Googling us. They're searching for the brand when they would see us there, so they would go and search. We're just missing on branded search. Maybe our Amazon listing would show up in Google and so people would find us via that route, but we had a lot of competitors that they're just going to show up on Google for those searches. Originally, when we set it up, it was just solely To capture that branded search coming off Google and then existing customers that just wanted to purchase from us direct. So our website was not great. I mean, we're using Shopify templates that are easy to go and deploy. And so it wasn't like, I mean, it converted really well, but it was mostly like warm traffic that's coming to us. And so it was really easy. And then over a period of like 18 months, we really refined it. It took us probably about a year before we were really comfortable sending cold traffic where I'm going to like go and run a bunch of paid ads to run it there because I'm just not going to convert as well. But now we are doing, it's been about a year, we've been running cold traffic for meta and working to scale that. And so that's going really well. So we'll post on TikTok. So we take our TikTok posts, our branded posts, and then we cross post those same videos to Instagram and to Facebook and to YouTube shorts. And then anything that has a certain level of interaction on meta, has over 100 interactions, organic interactions, then we'll go and put ad money behind that. And some of that is, you know, just capturing emails or SMS to sign up for our list. We give people a 40% off coupon if they sign up for email or SMS, or it's driving them to the website as far as maybe it's a deal or a sale or something like that. And then we try to collect the information as far as get them signed up on the list. And so then we can remarket to them. And so we have like, We have 50,000 warm emails that we have and then we have another 50,000 that we've gathered through. They may be purchased from us on Amazon or some other way, purchased from us from Amazon. Anyway, so we've got the emails and then I have about 13,000 are SMS. Our SMS way outperforms our email there from a sales standpoint on the website. Now, on the Reddit side, we were trying to go and share and answer questions across Reddit about our brand. I kept getting pinged by overactive moderators on Reddit and so I'm like, I'm sick of this. I'm just going to go create my own sub. If I really want the traction that I need, I have to make it a lot more broad, more general. So other people are going to come and share so we could get some scale versus people that are just looking for my brand. Now, what gave us the confidence to go and do this is something that's a lot more broad, is the fact that We love our product. We think our product is absolutely amazing. Now, if you're going to be on Reddit, you've got to be willing to do hand-to-hand combat. It can be pretty brutal as far as people. A lot of people are anonymous and they'll just attack you and so you have to be willing to go and do that. That's something a smaller brand can do. If you're a bigger brand, you're just probably going to lose on Reddit because you can't get things through legal to combat all the comments and questions and all that stuff that comes through. But we've actually, for our sub, We actually have competitors that I've invited the founders to be moderators. So we have moderators that are from other brands because we want it to be a place where guys can come and actually find out legitimate information, not just marketing stuff. They can get legitimate information about products based off their individual unique shape and size and their body needs. We want to create a forum that's like that but also because of our background and the way that we want to go to market, we don't show things on model or on humans. We don't show guys wearing the stuff, which some people have a hard time with that, but we want our product to be more approachable. Over 50% of men's underwear is purchased by women. We wanted to create a forum that allowed women or others to come and ask and get answers to questions if they're buying for someone else and not get reported to HR. They're going to go and search for this at work or they're going to have something pop up when they're sitting in a couch. They don't want somebody to see this. It's inappropriate and so everything is suitable for work as far as the content that we put on there and so people can just come and talk about the product and men's underwear in a non-sexual, non-crass type way and really get answers and so share and ask questions. You have that sort of stuff answered. So we have people that will go on there that will criticize us and so then I respond back to them. And so there's a lot of credibility that comes with that versus, I mean, I could go and just like kick that review off. I could say, oh, we're just not going to allow that review or I'll just like remove it. But instead of doing that, we try to respond to that. And so that helps build credibility with individuals that maybe are haters and or potential customers where we're willing to be transparent and just like, If there's an issue with this or there's a concern about that, we go and address it there. There's credibility that comes along with that. Now, the thing is with Reddit, that is being sucked into all the LLMs. Part of this is a long strategy for us as far as being able to sell to the AI tools and putting just a ton of content out there that's viewed as authentic that's going to go into those tools. We're actually the most mentioned underwear brand. Men's underwear brand on Reddit by like double. So I'm a jockey, Calvin Klein, Hanes. It's not even close as far as the comments and the posts that we have on Reddit. So much so that people just think we have a bunch of bots on there responding, but we just have a ton of customers that are super, super like. Speaker 2: People have been talking about Reddit feeding AI for years and so I would assume that you're one of the most recommended now also on AI, but have you seen so far any noticeable benefits of that? Once the AI started happening, do you see more traffic that you didn't pay for going to Shopify or is it just more like, hey, maybe there's a halo effect because you're getting recommended and then maybe people are going to Amazon? Can you attribute anything to being recommended in AI thanks to this Reddit strategy or is it more just like, hey, I'm just trying to get my real estate now. Maybe it's not doing something for me, but it could in the future? Speaker 1: It's a longer term investment. There are some things where we can directly attribute it. If I go and do a new product drop and I go and do a post, we'll do a review post on the subreddit and we will have 60,000 views on that post, which are high intent reviews or high intent views on that subreddit because it's men's underwear like sub. Now, we're not getting really good direct attribution on that. We see a lot of it just through branded search or people are just coming direct to the website and seeing that. Now, from an AI standpoint, we're seeing a growth of traffic there, but it's still not huge, but we expect it to continue to grow. But the thing is, you have to make those investments way in advance. It's like, are you willing to look a little more long-term? Are you trying to build a brand or are you just trying to get a quick attributed sale? And so it's a lot more long-term strategy to really build that out. And so for the AI tools, We're being recommended more, but we still don't have the history where somebody like a Hanes or something like that has reviews that go back just decades in all these different trade publications, magazines, and there's just a lot more name recognition. We have to make up for that with our more near-term content. Speaker 2: Going back to TikTok, which is, I think, what you're most known for in the Helium 10 community and outside, is You probably, more than any TikTok shop seller I know, have the biggest percentage of sales that are coming from TikTok Live than literally anybody else I know. How did you get onto Live? Talk about the evolution of your strategy and what it actually does mean for your revenue. Just go into it because Guys, the stuff he's doing will blow your mind and we'll show you maybe some B-roll video for those watching on YouTube for some of his lives. Very unique, I'm sure, depending on what he talks about here. We'll try and show some video, but he's got some unique strategies to say the least. Speaker 1: Yeah, so we jumped on TikTok really early, 2023. I think September is when we set up our shop, but we weren't getting really any sales, right? So I posted We put our products on there. There was a few posts, not very much, but I go to China fairly frequently and so I have a friend in Guangzhou that sells on Douyin and so I went to one of his live streams where he's selling women's apparel and he was doing $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 an hour. They started rolling and they do a four-hour live stream every day. And they started rolling and it was just like the cash register was just like ringing. I'm like, holy cow. And so that's really where I saw the vision of where live selling was going and it's just China is four to five years ahead of where we are in the US. And so I'm like 80% of women's apparel that's purchased online is done via a live stream. And so it's just like huge numbers. I'm like, okay, well, this is where selling is going. I need to learn how to do this. And at the same time, I brought in a ton of inventory for the fourth quarter and Amazon starts to slow pay because they're holding money back for reserves. And I ended up in like a super major cash crunch. We're profitable, right? But with selling online, smaller business, cash is king, right? So a lot of people don't understand like how much Like just managing your cash and your inventory is so important, especially with so many SKUs that we have. And so we were in a super major cash crunch so much so that I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to pay my mortgage. Like I've never been in a position like this in my life where I'm like, I don't know if I can pay my mortgage in January because I just don't have enough money. I needed like $100,000 like really, really quick. And so like, I'm literally like praying. I'm like asking God, I'm like, Like, how am I going to, like, where are we going to come up with this cash? Where are we going to come up with this cash? And, like, literally, the distinct answer was, like, you need to live stream. I'm like, ugh. That sucks. I don't want to livestream. That's not my personality. That's not what I do. I can't do that. I design stuff. I'm more of an engineer-minded design type person, introvert. I can't do that. I needed the money really bad. Sometimes when you're desperate, you have to do desperate things. That's where I ended up Just setting up my iPhone and a couple ring lights and I started going live. So it's like a week before Black Friday 2023 and the traffic was just like it just blew up. I mean at the time there was like very few people live streaming like for shop and so it literally like Amazon or TikTok was paying really quick. It literally saved our business. So it wasn't just like, hey, this was a nice thing that helped us grow. It saved... I mean, we would have kept fighting and things like that to power through, but it... It saved the business and it just put us on a totally different trajectory because we had the TikTok sales, cash flow was amazing, and then there was this huge halo effect bleeding over to Amazon with the sales. But having a weird product that just totally looks weird, and we own it. I know our product looks weird. TikTok gave us an opportunity to actually on the live streaming to be able to like describe and tell people like, hey, this is why our underwear looks different. This is why you need to wear something that looks totally, totally weird. You're able to play play like in like be be funny. You're able to go and describe why this looks the way it does and be humorous with it. All of our mannequins have their own names and their own personas, things like that. We've actually done naming giveaways where all of our mannequins are named by the audience that interact and we have been able to build a community through our lives. We have people who come and just hang out on the lives and they've got to meet each other through the live streams and just I don't know how many moderators. We have over 100 moderators, guys, that will just come on and just watch live. I have one moderator that just absolutely loves the brand so much. He lives in Minneapolis and on his long weekends, he will drive down to Kansas and he will hang out with us in the studio just to moderate live because he wants to just hang out with the crew moderating for the live stream. So he'll spend the weekend doing that. So we've been able to make a connection that you just can't make with people on Amazon. I mean, you get comments that are like questions and things like that and reviews, but the interaction, that's an Amazon customer, not necessarily your customer. Whereas on TikTok, they're our customer. And then when I'm live streaming, I mean, people are like interacting with the designer. So we get feedback on the live stream. About colors about styles and so we've designed new products and new colors and things based upon feedback that we've had from from people on the on the live stream and so. Of course, people that we never even would have thought about connecting with, we are able to connect with on TikTok. The algorithm is just absolutely amazing. It's like, okay, this person would be good for your product or whatever. It's like, okay, I never designed products for a double amputee, but we had people that found us on TikTok. They were double amputees. They're like, your product saved my life because of my prosthetics. My prosthetic legs were rubbing on things and your underwear just changed my way of life. People came to us through TikTok and were able to reach out and share their stories and things like that. It's just been really amazing to help build a community around that through TikTok. When we first started going live on TikTok, It was 95% of our revenue was just live stream. It was all live stream. That's all we did was live stream when we first started on TikTok. We were posting videos but still, I mean, the sales on the live stream, it was just the majority and then slowly we started posting more but it was all branded. Like a lot of people like affiliate, affiliate, affiliate, like we were all branded. It was all branded live stream and then we started doing branded posts and so maybe somebody would see us on a live stream and then they would go and get, you know, a day later or two days later, they would go and TikTok would serve them a post and then they would convert on the post and then product card. And so, you know, so that's shifted now where we're more like a third, a third, a third. So we're about a third live stream, a third product card and a third post, but still pretty heavy on the branded side. But the affiliate, the affiliate is growing as well. So we have over 2000 affiliates are posting content for us. A lot of our affiliates are, we have them in two groups. We call them our mercenaries and our missionaries. And so we have some people that reach out to us. They see that the product's going viral. It's doing really, really well. And so they reach out to us for samples. A lot of our best affiliates are actually customers of ours that just want to help preach and share about the product. And so some of them are already set up as affiliates. Others, we've helped them get their affiliate account set up so they could go out there and share about the product. And so now we have a Discord now that we interact with our affiliates and so we can share and grow. You know, grow more on the affiliate side. Speaker 2: Jared has a couple modules in our Freedom Ticket course, our TikTok training part of the Freedom Ticket course that goes a lot deeper into, you know, live streaming and kind of the fundamentals, but maybe a 60-second strategy or two minutes here of some top tips for people live streaming. Like, what are just some quick tips for having successful live streams on TikTok Shop? Because I would say 99% of our audience Regardless of how long they've been on Amazon or TikTok, have not gone live. They were kind of like in your shoes a few years ago. Speaker 1: So a lot of people are just afraid to be live, right? Because it's like, oh, I don't know what to say. I'm gonna look stupid. But I mean, the thing is, if you look stupid on camera, like, and there's 10 people in Indiana that are watching you, like, There's only 10 people watching you. There's not a lot of people you're getting embarrassed in front and you'll probably never see them again. It's just like, just do it. I was nauseous when I was thinking about going live the first time because I'm like, okay, this is going to be super, super scary. If you're not doing well, nobody's seeing you. If you're getting views, it means you're actually doing well. That's the feedback mechanism. If you're getting views, you're actually doing something that people are We're actually engaging with. Now, TikTok is an entertainment platform at the end of the day, right? And so, people want to be entertained. I mean, I've watched lives where it's just a guy in a food truck cutting cucumbers and there's like 3,000 people watching this dude cutting cucumbers and there's something mesmerizing about like, hey, you just stop and you're just sitting there watching the cucumber. And so, it's entertainment. And so, when we're thinking about it, as you're thinking about selling on TikTok, it's like, hey, how am I going to entertain people How am I going to engage people? Because the first thing you've got to do is be able to get people to stop the scroll, right? So there's got to be something interesting going on there. So not having just a blank, whatever. Maybe you're in your warehouse, maybe you're in your studio or whatever. So there's something a little interesting going on from a background standpoint. All you need is an iPhone, ring light, a little decent light, a good mic. I mean, you need a decent camera, but iPhone quality cameras are good enough and a good mic, just a USB mic off TikTok. It's good enough to get started. You don't need a $10,000 set setup. You have some of these beautiful sets. They're really expensive sets and then you watch the live stream and they've got like 15 viewers. And then you have this other guy that's sitting in his dirty garage on a mattress topper and he's got like 4,000 people watching and he's just like crushing it, right? And so you got to have something that's going to actually engage people. Now, you guys got your listings from Amazon. Talk your bullet points and the thing is like your average viewer is like 20 to 30 seconds. And so now from a host standpoint, it can feel like Groundhog's Day. You can want to go off on tangents and this and that but you just talk down your bullet points. And so you just it's kind of the same thing. Over and over and over a thousand times. And so you don't need to be just like, Hey, I have this five hour script or this hour long script. If I'm going to go live for an hour, how am I going to fill an hour? It's, it's just really one minute loop and you just go over it. So if you're not comfortable, I just get a whiteboard, you put it up there, you have your bullet points, and then you just kind of, you just run down that. No, you're going to focus on your, your benefits, your product, uh, versus just features. You don't want to just list all your features and make it boring. It's got to be engaging. Right. And so that's where for us, it's like, We've got the mannequins. We've got different things that are going on that we try to make it a lot more engaging. We have trolls that will jump into our live stream. And don't be afraid of the trolls, right? Because with TikTok, the algorithm loves comments, right? And so you want to do things to help drive comments. So even when there's a troll, the trolls can actually be beneficial, especially if you have like People that really love your products because then you have a troll jump in and say something that's like controversial or insulting you and then you'll have one of your backers like jump in and then they're like having a comment war and an algorithm loves that because, hey, there's engagement, there's something going on there. So comments, shares, and then purchases, those are the things the algorithm likes. Likes, not so much, right? You can spam like things and it really doesn't pay attention. To that, or watch duration, right? So you need people watching longer. So you might want to do something that's like, okay, if I get 10,000 likes, I'm going to do this giveaway or something like that. You don't do that because the algorithm likes, you do that because you want to increase the duration of the watch time. And so the thing is, you've got to be entertaining, but it's just really starting. And so a lot of people are just afraid to start, and it's going to stink the first several times. You're going to be nervous. It's going to be horrible. But you just got to start and just overcome those nerves a lot of us like sellers like Amazon sellers when we're comfortable sitting behind a computer Doing listings designing products and being in front of a camera. We're not content creators. That's not our thing but the thing is like People just love that authentic connection with the, especially if you're a designer, if you design the product, if you created the brand, like there's a connection there that other brands are not willing to do or just can't do. And so there's just a lot of authenticity from being willing to be in front of a camera and be vulnerable. And a lot of people like give you grace for going and doing that. Speaker 2: How long have you guys been using Helium 10 again? What were some of your favorite tools for your team throughout the years? I think you were part of the Helium 10 Elite Program, so have you benefited from that? Finally, what's the future hold? Are you building this brand up to exit one day? Is it a legacy for your kids that you're going to pass down? They're going to be second-generation underwear tycoons? What's the future hold for you and your brand? Speaker 1: Helium 10 was super, super key as we got going as far as just understanding keywords and Cerebro and just a lot of research digging into keywords and then competitors when we were designing our product. I design our listings and all that. Of course, daily alerts and those types of things are super, super helpful. Follow-up. I go through the whole list of tools, a number of different tools that we use that have been very helpful. Portals, as far as QR codes, as far as getting warranties. That was the beginning of our email list, was getting that on our packaging. Helium, the elite. That's part of the reason coming to this conference here as well and with the elite, the calls that we do on the elite. To connect with people that have already been through everything. Since I was starting from scratch, I had no background from an e-commerce standpoint to be able to be on a call with people that are doing seven, eight figures and they could just be really open and be willing to share and answer questions and brainstorm around ideas and was just like super, you know, it's been super, super helpful as we started and as we grew. Of course, the Fibium ticket, that was like incredibly helpful as well. I think two years before I started the brand, some of the original versions of that were super helpful to just really get us up and going, so a bunch of those things together. As far as where we're going in the future, we're on track to do in between $11 million to $12 million this year. We have year-over-year growth on Amazon, but the biggest growth driver there is really on Shopify and then just expanding ads that are really going to drive to Shopify. We're not doing any Google ads right now. We're not doing any YouTube, not doing any Snap, so those are some things that we're going to look at opening up. This year as well as like making our email list a lot more effective. And then the drops, that's really, really big on our website, Shopify, and then as well as on TikTok as well. Because the thing is, when we're doing those drops, we're doing those at full price. There's no discounting on them. And so it's a limited quantity that we're dropping. And so there's a FOMO related with that product. Hey, it's just a one and done. We're going to do it here. So if you don't get it now, it's not going to be there. And so the margins are really good. And the cash flow is really, really good on those weekly drops. And so we have customers that they would just buy more. If we just provide more, but they just don't want the same colors. They want new colors, new prints, in some cases, different styles. Exploration, something's like, hey, I don't know if this is going to work. And so we'll just do a limited drop. I actually dropped a men's thong, right? So it's this modal men's thong. It's like, hey, what is this? How's this going to do? And it was actually our best launch ever of like, okay, it's like with this color set, I had no idea. And so we do do a lot of testing where it's just different colors, slightly different styles. And so we can iterate on that. So our suppliers have been really good. We built strong relationships with our factories. Like I go to China every two months. And so I'm sitting down with them. We're working on stuff together and so we have really strong relationships there. It's not just something I'm trying to negotiate with people over chat. And so since we've invested in that, they've been willing to work with us. Our MOQs have come down. Our prices were cutting a third because we built that direct connection with them. Speaker 2: I never thought about that, guys. I don't think anybody has ever talked about that on this 700 whatever episodes we've had about drops. Historically, you think of like Viral brand, you know, Supreme. Oh, Supreme is a drop. People line up and it's, you know, sells out or like this hat is a drop from New Era Cap. And then this is Doraemon, a Japanese animation character. I was waiting for this hat forever. I timed one of my trips to Japan to get an $80 hat because I'm so into it. I've got Gucci shoes. I don't have many Gucci shoes, but I got Gucci shoes because of this character. I used to wait in line on apps to get sneakers and stuff like that. You think about those things. Everybody knows about that culture. But you think about big brands, how many of you actually can build up your brand, an Amazon brand, TikTok brand, where you can say, hey, you've got people waiting for these limited edition men's thong drops or something? Probably four years ago, if future Jared told him he would be doing that, he'd be like, you're crazy. But think about that guy. How many of you out there? Have a brand that could act with a rabid following that could do that. Something to think about and I think that's a pretty cool kind of goal for us to have. Well, Jared, thank you so much for coming on here. We're definitely going to have you on for like an a.m. p.m. podcast training about all the new stuff you know about TikTok because I'm sure it's changed in the, I don't know how long it's been since we did those other videos, but a year or so. You're a wealth of knowledge. This podcast has gone way over time, but it feels like so fast because you're so good to talk to. So Jared, thanks a lot and good luck to all your endeavors.