How BrüMate Scaled to Over $100M in 5 Years

How BrüMate Scaled to Over $100M in 5 Years Speaker 1: As a growth marketer, new customer acquisition focused, our post-purchase is a tremendously valuable surface for us in a number of ways, one of which obviously is the how did you hear about us survey, but we don't stop there. We also get to monetize the order confirmation page as additional revenue stream. Additionally, we're sending out link surveys all the time to existing customers asking for feedback specifically on the products they purchased or maybe why they haven't repeated yet so we can try to remove that friction. If you're not surveying your customers one way or another, you're definitely missing out on a treasure trove of insights. Using customer data, finding ways to gather customer data is absolutely critical to how we got here and I believe, you know, sustained competitive advantage moving forward. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by Aftersell. Today we're going to be breaking down how Brumate has had its success in growing in today's market. And we have the director of growth, Hans, who's actually come all the way to join us here in the studio. So first of all, thank you so much for making time out of your day to come and educate all of us and our viewers. Really excited to break down the success story of Brumate. But before that, maybe for the few people who don't know you, can you give us a little bit about your background and where you are at today? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I fell into marketing, honestly. I was running a custom snow ski manufacturing operation in Salt Lake where I live. Thought I was going to be an engineer. Decided that was absolutely not for me, but really fell in love with the marketing, the branding, the creative side of running that business. So ended up getting a marketing degree, going to business school and spent six years at an agency before I went brand side. Agency is a great place to, you know, learn, be a sponge, but I got pretty tired of being a mile wide and an inch deep and wanted to go the opposite, you know, inch deep, sorry, inch wide, mile deep, one brand, one singular focus. And so it's been great. I spent a little bit of time at a DTC startup out of Boston called Brunt Workwear as their director of growth and then have been a roommate just over two and a half years. It's been a great ride. Speaker 2: Before we get started, here's a quick thank you to today's sponsor, Aftersell. At AbbVie, we recently broke $100M in sales and I'm going to share one of the mindset shifts that helped us get there. We call it focusing on the transaction moment. It's that point when your customer has their wallet and is ready to buy. Most brands stop right there, but that's actually where the real opportunity begins. We learned this lesson with Aftersell. Since adding their app to our site, we've transformed our checkout experience into a true revenue engine. All while giving customers a more personalized experience they actually appreciate. If you're feeling the squeeze of rising ad costs and customer price sensitivity, Aftersell is the only answer. Now, let's get back to the episode. Tell us a little bit about the landscape, right? Because I feel like there's been a rise in this category and it feels almost like yesterday, but it's also doesn't, right? It's also been around. You guys have been growing and the category has been growing. But tell us a little bit about the landscape because a lot of the categories we usually talk about are like health, wellness, beauty. Tell us a little about what it takes to sell hardware, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, you would think that a durable good like drinkware, insulated drinkware, is not going to be a high LTV thing, right? You're like, why would people buy more than one? I think really a catalyst, lots of drinkware companies have had their moment in the market, largely trend-driven. You know, Brewmate's first real growth spurt was Introducing a slim can cooler right around the time, you know, White Claw and Seltzers were taking off. But then I think the real, real catalyst for growth that created a ton of white space in this insulated drinkware market was the rise, the meteoric rise of Stanley and the straw tumbler craze. Like I said, created a ton of white space, really brought this drinkware into pop culture, if you will. And like for a lot of folks, it's got to have a matching water bottle with their outfit of the day. They become collector's items. They're highly giftable. So, you know, I think the business has been lucky in that way. We've been the benefactor of this white space that Stanley's created, but we love the competition in the marketplace, the innovation that it drives, you know, how much strategy brands have or the different strategies brands have, their different hero products, like what's driving the market. Like I said, I've been mostly surprised to see just how high LTV, insulated drinkware, can be. Wouldn't have expected it, but it's been a nice upside. Speaker 2: That's incredible. Speaker 3: For you guys, in terms of staying competitive in the market, how are some of the ways that you guys are actually doing that? Are you guys getting feedback from customers, implementing that into the roadmap? What's the strategy there? Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's very, very customer led. We are thankful to have a 70,000. I know you guys have a Facebook VIP group that's very strong as well. Ours just crossed 70,000 folks like in the last few days. So listening to customers from day one, our founder is very active in there asking for feedback as we have, you know, potential new colorways we're going to release, post them in there, ask for feedback, very collaborative in that way. But I think really the differentiation as it has been since day one for Brumate has been in innovation of technology. All of our products are loaded with patents that a lot of other drinkware competitors don't go through the trouble of designing products in-house. They'll just work with contract manufacturers and source something in their catalog, if you will, that's kind of ready to go and slap a logo on. I think the edge we've created and sustained is largely due to just the quality of the product and the innovation that comes with it. And then a customer, when they purchase from us for the first time and receive the product, they can really feel the difference. Honestly, I think that's a big part of it. Speaker 3: Makes sense. And outside of the Facebook group, right, are you guys doing anything to collect data, like post-purchase, surveys, things like that? Speaker 1: Yeah. As a growth marketer, new customer acquisition focused, our post-purchase, our order confirmation page is a tremendously valuable surface for us in a number of ways, one of which obviously is the how did you hear about us survey. But we don't stop there. The how did you hear about us survey obviously goes into beyond just how did you hear about us into some demographic questions and how long they think they've known about us before making a first purchase. But we also get to monetize our confirmation page, its additional revenue stream. Which is nice having ad units there, but additionally we're sending out link surveys all the time to existing customers asking for feedback specifically on the products they purchased or maybe why they haven't repeated yet so we can try to remove that friction. So if you're not surveying your customers one way or another, if it's informal in a Facebook VIP group, if it's more formal and rigorous statistically relevant in terms of actual surveys sent out in emails or in some other surface, You're definitely missing out on a treasure trove of insights. We also comb our reviews. Extensively, every single week, looking for what I call the customer golden nuggets, things that could either be feedback for our product development team or can be, you know, taglines for marketing campaigns or angles to sell product with in our growth media channels. So yeah, I mean, using customer data, finding ways to gather customer data, that zero-party data or first-party data is absolutely critical too. How we got here and I believe sustained competitive advantage moving forward. Speaker 3: Yeah. I think one thing we also just did recently was in our post-purchase surveys, we have a question that's just like, What is like the main reason why you're utilizing this product, right? It's like such a simple question because you obviously know, oh, we're, you know, it's a collagen based product. You're obviously going to use it for hair, skin and nails, right? But then when you get into that deeper, deeper answer, it's like, well, I'm struggling through this. This is why I think this will help me. And I can actually allow you to figure out, okay, what is, How can you make your product a little bit better to serve that specific issue, right? So one of the, I think one of the concerns that our customers had was hormonal imbalance, right? So we saw this come up a lot. And so they were using our products for this issue that may not have been like the right fit, but we realized that that was a problem that they wanted to address. And then we formulated something, kind of teased it in the Facebook group. And the response was crazy, right? So that's how empowering it is to have this data. Even if like people aren't necessarily going out of the way and be like, I want this. It's like they're telling you and then you kind of show it to them and they're like, wait, yeah, that's exactly what I need. Have you had a moment like that at Brumate? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Again, across our Drinkware portfolio products, the real differentiator that I think we've led the market in has been 100% leak-proof Drinkware stuff that you could trust to throw in your, say, Louis Vuitton bag and it's not going to ruin your day. We didn't. You know, just decide that that was going to be our differentiator. It was largely informed by our customer feedback saying, what I really do appreciate about these products you have now is that I can trust them not to leak. So absolutely, we've had those moments and continue to have those moments and learning from our customers again, not just in technology that they're looking for, but like you said, those use cases of products, their preferences when it comes to design features, colorways, um, you know, being on trend, if you will, trying to stay straight, stay relevant and competitive in that way. So yeah. Yeah. Critical. Unknown Speaker: Well, that's really cool. Speaker 2: Um, I'm super intrigued with like just the rise of like, This category almost becoming a fashion piece, an accessory versus a utility, right? Like I think it's like, yes, it's something that helps you drink what you need to drink. But more importantly, it's something that is almost like defines who you are, right? And becomes a part of you. So I'm really curious just on like from a marketing scale, right? It's like, Is that a really important balance between performance and then even how you're talking about brand versus the actual benefit of the product? How do you guys balance that piece? Because I feel like as equal parts, you can almost get lost in like, let's launch a new design, let's come out with a new color, let's keep feeding the trend. But then you kind of forget that, hey, we're selling something that has a utility aspect and there's a reason why people We have to take this for hydration reason or whatever it may be. What's that balance look like and how do you guys go about that for both growth, marketing and branding? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's really critical for us to stay, you know, I'll say on trend, that might be not the exact right characterization, but that's largely driven through Colorway, like limited edition releases, color print launches in existing products. But we also have to balance that with making sure that products themselves stay leading edge and that we're, you know, injecting newness into our product catalog, both to, you know, cross sell new products to existing customers and also, you know, offer new innovative products to customers who may not have heard about us before or maybe didn't feel like we had something that was exactly right for them. I think how that comes across in our marketing, we do emphasize in the bulk of our media investment is in what we'd consider evergreen, you know, colorways and our assortment or business as usual. And, you know, the print, the drops, the print and color drops. Largely at this moment, sell to existing customers. And we kind of do that to ourselves in limited inventory buys. So we send out an email or push notification or mobile app and those things sell, you know, super quickly. I personally would love for us to be able to highlight the limited edition, new seasonal things more in our prospecting. But yeah, I would say Hopefully what comes across in our prospecting media investment is the ethos of the brand in that we are on trend, you are not going to look like a fool carrying our product around, that we've got something that is going to accentuate your day-to-day. And brings the features and functionality that you would expect if you're paying a more premium price point, which we tend to be. So yeah, the mix is important for sure. I, like I said, would personally love to highlight some of our more seasonal limited edition things more in prospecting, but we like to maintain that true scarcity of these things where we've got folks selling, trying to resell something they bought from us on Poshmark for $250 that was $50 originally. So that aspect, I think, also goes a long way in perceived brand value. Speaker 3: Before the show, you mentioned possible retail placement. How is that going to change the way that you guys are gonna start marketing? You know, for a lot of brands, I mean, you guys are way more mature than most brands out there, but for a lot of brands, they kind of rely on, like, maybe the one, two channels to kind of push the DTC. Now that you're in a little bit more placement, store count, and there's more visibility on the brand, how are you guys going to adjust your marketing strategy to be kind of everywhere? Speaker 1: Being an omni-channel brand is a blessing and a curse. What I mean by that, obviously, we love the customer to have the optionality to purchase our product where they're comfortable, where they're shopping, whether that's on our Shopify, Amazon, TikTok shop, in a retail environment, wherever they shop. So that part's the blessing. I think the curse for a lot of growth marketers and folks that grew up in performance marketing, this world that, frankly, Meta built, It's tough to adapt your media mix, your channel assortment and your measurements specifically. I think that's the hardest part. It's really tough to retool that to measure the value of what are very different investments in your brand and that comes through in your paid media investment. So that's something like, you know, I'm not going to say we have it all figured out, but we're going down this path of largely transitioning from using the How Did You Hear About Us survey, which is, you know, just on our Shopify, obviously, as well as MTA and transitioning to a largely MMM based, you know, readout for our media mix. Allocation, but that's difficult. That's really, really difficult and I think that's the curse in it is like omnichannel, the optionality is fantastic for customers to purchase where they are or where they prefer, but as a marketer, trustworthy, reliable, accurate measurement to support that is difficult. Speaker 3: You guys, at some point, were actually spending more time on TikTok than Facebook. And I feel like I've seen this shift in real time over even the last few quarters, where the brands that are doing extremely well on TikTok, TikTok Shop, are the brands that are actually just outperforming everybody else. And I do believe the shift is happening in terms of how you're discovering a product, What's kind of pushing you to maybe go and look at other marketplaces like maybe an Amazon or maybe even the retail side of things and you can't just rely on like, okay, you see an ad on metal, you go to the website and buy, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish. Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, those used to be the days, right? But I'm very curious, like just with the shift in kind of consumer behavior and where they're spending the most time, how are you guys adapting to that? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, TikTok, of course, I wouldn't say is new, but relatively speaking is, you know, the newer serious channel for DTC brands or omni-channel brands to be paying attention to. And TikTok Shop is even newer, right? Launched in the US only in 2023, which is crazy to think about the growth that they've achieved. I've always been a huge believer and proponent in the power of TikTok as a discovery platform. Measuring TikTok, you know, the way you try to measure meta ads, forget about it. Couldn't attribute a conversion to save its life. So that's where post-purchase survey in particular was incredibly valuable for showing what TikTok could do for the business, both from an organic perspective, from our influencers and creator partnerships, driving kind of buzz and virality. And then now adding on TikTok Shop as this perfect closed loop for our creator affiliates as well, pushing content from our brand handle on TikTok. Yeah, I've always been pretty TikTok first. And in fact, this Stanley straw tumbler craze kind of originated on TikTok. And so that just shows, you know, you can take a business, you know, 10X revenue in the matter of a year or two if you unlock something right on that platform. So it's always been a focus of mine, you know, even before Brumate, but for Brumate, Unlocking TikTok in the last couple of years has been pretty transformative to the business. Speaker 2: Quick break to say thank you to today's sponsor, Aftersell. Let's talk about control in e-commerce, because here's the truth. We spend countless hours mastering marketing platforms we don't own or control. One algorithm change or one policy update and everything gets turned upside down. That's why we started to focus on something we actually have control over, and that's our checkout experience. With Aftersell, we've built a conversion engine that's immune to platform change. We're capturing more value from every visitor regardless of what's happening with Meta or Google. Our average order value went up by 15%. On top of that, with optimized post-purchase offers, we're earning even an extra $0.50 per order with rock thanks. And on top of all of this, we're seeing better conversion rates, even with higher cart values. Let that sink in. Stop pouring all your energy into external platforms and start maximizing what you actually own. Try Aftersell free for 60 days. It's time to take control of your growth. Now, let's get back to the episode. I'd love to jump in a little bit deeper into like touching on the influencer and creator piece. You know, a lot of us sometimes look at it and say, you know, it costs money to send product. And I think for you guys, that cost is much higher than, you know, what we even sometimes find ourselves complaining about. I'm curious, give us a little bit about the identification of what gifting really means for you guys. How do you really back out those costs? How do you think about it? You know, we've had a few really good perspectives on this on our podcast of like, you know, we had someone like Joe Lee, founder who came, who just gives shower heads to people who like even have one follower because they're like, hey, if you can introduce one person to the brand, I've made my ROI. Then there are people who are like, hey, we're very selective and like only giving it to people who fit this criteria. Give us a little bit about what your guys' breakdown is, how you approach it. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd say first and foremost, it's an ever-evolving strategy and we try to just be data informed in making those decisions. A couple things specifically I'll call out. TikTok shop, you almost have to be willing, in my experience and in talking with other brands, you almost have to be willing to do mass sampling to achieve this critical mass where the shop can build revenue somewhat organically. Of course, you're largely paying affiliates for that, but also affiliates is a great model. Pay for performance is a great model. Like, we love that. So if you set your commission where you know you're meeting your contribution margin, you can scale that to the moon. It did take An upfront, you know, initial investment that we weren't totally sure. We had a good idea. We were hopeful it would pay back, but weren't totally sure. We consider our, like the product COGS and the cost of sampling really as part of our channel level blend or it's the contribution margin. So inclusive of all of our ad costs, affiliate commissions, product costs, and then as well like our platform selling fees, our pick, pack and fill, our landed cost of product all together to back into in as real time as possible. You know, what is our contribution margin or our, you know, per order profitability. And use that to guide just how much we can scale sampling efforts or maybe need to pull back trying to manage to this pretty real-time contribution margin target. I wish there was a better answer like for just organic influencers in general, whether on Instagram or TikTok. It's an iterative process of learning who a good creator is for your brand. You're probably going to take some swings and miss. Our product hogs isn't huge, but it's not insignificant either. So I'm not going to say we haven't wasted some money sending people that we're never going to see some value from. But if you know your brand and you're smart with data, you'll find the kinds of creators that work for you and know how to scale that seeding investment. But I would definitely say if you're not willing to sample your product to creators, to some Pretty extensive level. It's going to be tough to achieve, like I said, that critical mass on TikTok Shop or as influencer, as a channel driving traffic to Shopify and purchases through Shopify. It's definitely a commitment. One thing that I really like recently TikTok Shop unveiled, it's been a little while, but refundable samples. Which I'm really bullish about where somebody can pay full price for your product on TikTok shop and then you set a parameter for if they generate X number of purchases, they'll get their order refunded. From a risk perspective, you just set how many orders it's going to take based on your AOV for that sample to make sense. You can set that and just let it go. We've been seeing these refundable samples start to come in where folks are willing to take that risk on themselves, the creators, to push the product and earn it. If they want their order refunded, they've got to earn it. Speaker 2: I love that. Speaker 3: I want to shift to maybe more of the direct-to-consumer on maybe the Shopify side, right? You guys prioritize, and most brands should be doing this, but prioritizing first-order profitability, right? For something in the category that you guys are in, right? I would imagine it is difficult unless you have more of a robust strategy in terms of Figuring out AOV, you know, improving conversion rate and obviously figuring out how to create that arbitrage between media buying and actually selling a product, right? Would love for you to kind of dive into some of the strategies that you guys are leveraging to maintain first order profitability. Speaker 1: Yeah. First and foremost, it's trimming the fat, if you will. That's easier said than done, but A lot of businesses, especially if they're not using data to its fullest potential, are probably wasting money on non-incremental ad investment, right? So we have a rigorous process or operational process of incrementality testing. I spend a lot of my time focused on media measurements and incrementality. So I think the first thing is to be confident that your media mix is actually Triving incremental results and trim the fat like I said. If you feel confident that your medium mix is in a good place and that you've trimmed the fat there. Other things we look at, which is crazy, you know, the growth marketer is talking about this, a paid media guy, but we're looking inside the organization for operational efficiencies. Can we get better, you know, rate cards from shipping and fulfillment partners at 3PL? Can we improve our product cogs? Because at the end of the day, that just frees up dollars for incremental media investment. At least that's how we look at it. But then I think the crux of it, again, to talk about the importance of data, is we've spent a lot of time as an organization building, in as near real time as we can, a tracker that the daily level, the granularity of a daily level, what our first order profitability looks like. Ingesting all of that landed product cost, pick, pack, and fill, our current day CAC number, whatever it is that we're considering to back into, It's contribution margin, contribution dollars, but at the end of the day, whether you're making money or losing money on those acquisitions. And so if you're flying blind, that's going to be really tough to do. Or if the granularity at which you can pull that, say, first order profitability is maybe only monthly. It's tough to steer the ship within a month to know, eh, you've probably got a good feeling for the business, but to be fairly definitive about whether you're on track for whatever goal you've set. So it starts with data. It starts with trimming the fat, I guess, no. It starts with trimming the fat and then ends with having good data to back up what additional media investment you may have to meet your goal. I try to treat every extra few cents or dollars of profitability we can as then incremental media investment. Try to reinvest that in the business. I would rather, as a growth marketer, do that to try and grow the brand than to just stack a whole pile of cash. But I know different brands have different priorities, so they may treat that differently. Speaker 3: How about the actual funnel itself? How are you guys getting creative there in terms of trying to get people to shop for more than just one item or getting AOV up? Speaker 1: So the shopping for more than one item, AOV up, largely bundle strategy. Thankfully, a lot of these limited edition Colorway releases or print launches, folks naturally are purchasing more than one product because they kind of want to have this whole family. They want to have their water bottle. They want to have their, you know, coffee mug matching. Thankfully that drives a lot of AOV. But being smart about bundles and positioning bundles that are natural, like we have one called the Mini and Me bundle where it's a 40-ounce straw tumbler, but then our 12-ounce kids straw tumbler. So like very complementary products if you're a parent with a small child. So trying to find bundles that are very natural that don't even feel like a forced, you know, sell. As far as the funnel goes still, I think a lot of the traffic that we drive is through hero products. Like, I don't think we do a super great job at having a very diverse product assortment in our prospecting. It's still largely hero product driven, but then we try to do everything we possibly can once we've captured a phone number or an email or get somebody to download our mobile app or just through retargeting and paid platforms to expose them to the width of the product catalog as we're nurturing them towards purchase. And even post-first purchase then, the real focus on driving LTV is to get folks cross-category. We sell coolers. That's the ultimate goal is to get somebody to go from a $45 straw tumbler to a $400 55-quart roto-molded cooler. So that's, I think, a lot of our focus in building LTV and getting folks indoctrinated in the brand. Post that first purchase, where it is a little bit lower AOV, but we still make our money, we still try to stay Profitable to some extent on first purchase, so we know we're getting paid back, but then really ruthless focus and execution when it comes to cross-selling and other categories to building that lifetime value. Speaker 2: That's actually brilliant. Great insight so far, by the way. I want to touch a little bit on, we're talking about this first order profitability piece. When you're looking at channel expansion, right? I think there is, I don't know how you look at all of these different channels, whether you look at AppLovin' or you look at even, you know, Rock coming out with their Rock Dads product, or you look at Comcast offering, you know, TV credit. Like there's a lot of different ways you can go about looking at channel expansion. I know for you guys between, you know, DTC on Shopify and then obviously TikTok being leads there. When it comes to some of these other channels, given that you guys are first order profitable on Let's say TikTok and Shopify. Do you almost look at the other channels as like, even if we're not first order profitable out of the gate, let's go and test it and see what type of velocities we can get here? Or is your discipline really tied to no matter the channel, we're channel agnostic. This is our principles and practices. Speaker 1: It is largely the latter there of like really truly we need to show the order economics of this like additive piece of the media mix pretty much immediately. We've been toying with, like I said, the difficulty in transitioning from a pure play direct consumer e-commerce brand to an omni-channel brand is necessarily your media mix is going to have to adapt. And the measurement, again, is going to have to adapt. Like, I wish I had the silver bullet. We're going through this right now. It is difficult. I will take any, you know, tips, tricks, feedback as well, because this is something that I think a lot of folks are going through in real time together. But trying to figure out the right way to balance growth, which could come at a loss for a lot of brands, may come at a loss, and profitability. So some of these new channels, you know, if we feel bullish on, if we think they're a good fit for a brand, they offer a new, unique audience or a new and novel way to reach, you know, an audience that maybe we're not reaching currently. There is definitely a level discussion about, is this a risk we're willing to take? And at what level are we willing to take this risk? And I think we're going to see more of that. As we continue to transition into more of an omnichannel brand, but as a pure play, you know, DTC brand, especially if your channel mix is fairly simple, you know, not too complex, as you look at adding new channels to the mix, hopefully you can treat each as this I mean, they're not so siloed, but when it comes to treating, you know, your investment and your return can observe those things in a silo. And for us, that has been treating each with the same expectation of driving profitability on first purchase. Speaker 2: I'm curious, you know, if you can, and this is more going into now some of the methods that have worked for you guys and makes you guys stand out. Can you maybe touch on some of the more creative campaigns you guys have been able to explore and do? Going off the theme of being able to see the Dude Wipes founder and Liquid Debt team come on the pod too, they've talked about a few campaigns that really stood out, things that really work, that maybe are different from the usual ways that marketers are going about brand marketing and performance marketing right now. Anything that sticks out for you guys that you guys did that was really creative in the last 12 to 18 months? Speaker 1: Yeah. Like I said, the giftability of our product and the occasionality of our product really benefits us. We have a lot of opportunities to lean into beyond just like Mother's Day, Father's Day, you know, your holiday, like Q4 Moments. Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever. Other moments like right now, one of our top performing campaigns, and for the first time, we've tried it a few times, but have really tried to figure out how to How to See Success has been our wedding gift guide. Gifts for groomsmen, gifts for bridesmaids, gifts for wedding guests, and these pretty unconventional, they may be, sometimes they say the riches are in the niches. They may not be outwardly very attractive opportunities. They may be smaller campaigns, but they're really unique and interesting things that we don't see competitors leaning into. Some of our competitors lean really, really heavy into customization, laser engraving on products, and that's got to be a massive part of their business. It's one we'd like to figure out too, but I think some of our most creative campaigns have been Recently, like I said, wedding gift guide, but then we did produce what is a brand campaign with like TV spots. Late Q3, early Q4 last year that we called Undeniably Different as a tagline to differentiate our product, highlight the kind of suite of features and technology that we think really made us stand out. And I wouldn't say we're doing it like a new or novel way, but it is, like I said, for what has been a I'm a heavily direct-to-consumer brand reliant on your just meta suite of ads and existing for a fairly isolated audience without much unaided brand awareness aside from that. It's been really interesting to see what impact as we spread our wings into new channels and have this kind of brand investment. What impact we can measure on the business like growth and brand search as a proxy and some of these other things. So, honestly nothing huge and grand but some of these little campaigns that you can You can dial into and do something cool and unique. Speaker 3: How about brand collaborations? Are you guys doing anything there? Speaker 1: Yeah, so brand collaborations, we definitely do. Our most recent one was with an athleisure brand also based in Denver, Colorado where our headquarters is called Vitality. It's like a women's athleisure brand. And so I think the trick with the brand collaborations is trying to find what are truly synergistic from the audience perspective, product assortment, synergistic brand collaborations. We've done some really fun ones that I could call out, like Raising Cane's, where Raising Cane's had their whole Raising Cane's emblazoned roommate assortment in their flagship stores in New York, Times Square, and other places. Those are cool, but that wasn't necessarily something Brand new or novel, it was just skinning existing products with a new finish and selling them, but we definitely plan to do because we see the value in more and more of these brand partnerships. Like I said, the most recent was with a clothing brand. We felt like their audience was pretty synergistic to ours and we were planning to use Shopify collective to do expose products on each other's websites. We couldn't figure it out in time, so that's still It's a bit complicated when your organization is more than just Shopify, when you've got ERPs at play and all sorts of different integrations to worry about, but that was the idea, is to assort their clothing on our website and vice versa, they would have our drinkware on their website. Still some opportunity there and we've got some hopefully exciting brand collabs coming up later this year. I think the key to the brand collab from my perspective is again, what are they going to offer from an audience perspective that's going to be new to you. That's where the opportunity is attractive. If there's a super heavy audience overlap, it's cool, but it may not be driving growth. It's net new. So we try to look at who has an audience that It shares, is maybe in the same walks of life, shares some of the same lifestyle traits but probably or may not have been exposed to our brand through our own media investment. Speaker 2: I'm curious on shifting a little bit of gears into what you're looking at in terms of when you look at the ecosystem right now and how things are I'm kind of going around with market sentiments and consumer sentiments. How do you guys kind of look at that and how do you pierce through that noise, right? Because I think it's easy to look at and be like, oh, well, people aren't buying right now. And, you know, kind of look at that and say, well, that's why performance is where it is. But then, you know, there's also places where you guys are piercing through and growing and breaking through that noise and almost would make it seem like the market looks great. Tell us a little bit more about the day-to-day of that because I'd love to know, almost be a fly on the wall in your guys' org and see how you guys break through that because I think a lot of us, including our listeners, we're always thinking about how do other people tack this problem. Speaker 1: From pure play prospecting point of view, market conditions can definitely throw a wrench in things that you may not be able to entirely avoid. I'll touch on some things that we think we're doing to cut through. I'd say in times that may be troubling or less suitable for new customer acquisition, leaning on your existing customer base is Immensely critical to the health of your business. Usually that returning customer revenue is really high quality revenue, really high margin revenue, comes through channels that, you know, our own channels don't necessarily have a paid media investment the same way that, you know, Met ads do, TikTok ads do, Google ads do. A couple things that we've done in maybe some down times where we're not seeing as much success on the prospecting side of things, the new customer acquisition, like I said, leaning into those limited edition colorways and print launches, relying heavily on our own channels to communicate those things, push notifications to our mobile app, offering exclusives for our existing customers like through our loyalty program, earn points. You can redeem points for a product that you can only get if you're in a certain tier of our loyalty program. You know, different ways to lean extra heavy, if only for some amount of time, to weather the storm on your existing customer base and really focusing on the folks that built your brand to the point that it is and maybe taking a more conservative or cautious approach in prospecting. Something I do believe, though, that helps us cut through in prospecting is our focus on creative diversification, visual diversification in our creatives to help us reach new audiences. I think you most immediately feel the effects of macro conditions when you're fishing in the same pond as everybody else to say. And that is like meta purchase optimized campaigns, even if on broad targeting with the exact same creative you've been running from a visual perspective for months or years, trying to do something new, novel, different, should give you the benefit of cheaper CPM, should give you the benefit of new and unique reach on the delivery of your ads. And hopefully to some extent will help you cut down those maybe increasing CACs, might not help your conversion rate out initially as folks are genuinely very new to the brand, but maybe in the benefit of the auction liquidity that you've provided yourself and having that creative diversification, you could get cheaper CPMs, cheaper CPCs, more traffic that even if your conversion rate You know, maybe down, you've got more and cheaper traffic that can help you. So I think in these times, the focus is largely on creative diversification and being really, you know, the brand team doesn't always like to, you know, or the founder or whoever, see what is very visually different creative that may think is like, oh, this isn't super on brand, but taking those risks, I think, pays off. Speaker 3: In terms of the creative diversity, how are you guys trying to achieve that? Do you guys have, because you guys are pretty lean, right? So how are you guys constantly coming up with new ideas to potentially test? Speaker 1: Creators, creators, creators, largely. I mean, even the creative that we end up doing on asset copy or whatever in-house, enlisting our creative team, a lot of the imagery And video content that goes into the polished assets that we produce and put in platforms start with creators. Creator partnerships that we have, folks that we think are giving prospective customers a glimpse into the lifestyle like value add that a Brumate product may provide in many different walks of life, different scenery, different gender, age, you know, demographic attributes. And the creator partnerships are huge, huge, huge, not just for driving revenue, but for sourcing new and novel creative that doesn't require a robust in-house team to go do an expensive studio shoot or whatever, which honestly, It's probably going to result in a lot more of the same because these people in the organization are comfortable executing in one type of style and following the same kind of brand ethos. So let the creators tell the story of your brand, why it's interesting to them, how they use the product, giving them a lot of creative freedom and kind of Limiting or altogether skipping a briefing process and let creators create. Do what they know works for their audience and trusting them. I would say it's creators by and large that helps us do that. Speaker 3: For those who are trying to get into, you know, working with more creators, where's the best place that you guys are finding people to work with? Speaker 1: Right now, that's TikTok Shop. Incredible, the engine they've built for creator discovery, building creator relationships and TikTok shop might not like me saying this, but you know, those relationships you can take off of TikTok shop. If you see people that you think have a really cool way to represent your brand and promote your products, you can always ask them if they're open and willing to, you know, producing content for you that you can use across channels. I don't know who would say no to a little bit extra money. So, you know, usually that's good, but we today have over 150,000 I'm creators in our open collaboration plan on TikTok shop. And so the limitation is really our own bandwidth in trying to communicate with them and try to sort through that data. It's not a lack of potential. It's a lack of executional resources. So I would say if you have a TikTok shop, Use that for finding relationships, potential relationships with creators. If you don't have a TikTok shop, I would say get one going if you at all can. If that's not possible, we still rely on manual outreach, good old-fashioned manual outreach on Instagram, combing through people's follower lists, following lists, and doing a largely manual process there, but haven't found an alternative that we really think produces high-quality results. Speaker 3: This was awesome. I mean, you have a little bit of everything for everyone out there, given how mature the business is. But if you had to give one piece of advice to listeners and watchers, one thing to implement in their business starting today, what would that be? Speaker 1: For me, I think we're in a time where profitability is more important than ever. I've talked to a lot of my friends and colleagues that echo that sentiment. And for me, the crux of it is having high quality data to inform those decisions. So if you don't have some kind of near real-time or as near real-time as you can get dashboard that helps you understand the costs that come with new customer acquisition, your real-time marketing costs, your real-time product costs, your real-time fulfillment costs, anything else you consider to back into a contribution margin that you know you need at the end of the day. Week, month, year, quarter, whatever it is, meet your goal and maintain a healthy business. If you don't have that, that should be a huge focus for you because that for us has really provided a solid foundation for us to be able to grow on. Chew on that. Speaker 3: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.