This Channel Increases ROAS and is ACTUALLY Scalable

This Channel Increases ROAS and is ACTUALLY Scalable Speaker 1: We were one of the first few advertisers on AppLovin that really tested. We were very impressed with the result that we were getting. ROAS looks really good. Speaker 3: Where would you rank it in terms of your level of spend? Speaker 1: It's either second or third after meta right now. So it's a pretty big channel for us. If you're just starting out on AppLovin and you see performance is really strong, push more spend towards it and see how performance changes when you scale up spend. We are seeing really good results and that's why we were able to continue to test it last Q4 and still spending on it today. Speaker 2: Welcome to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have a series where we're diving into how you're going to diversify your marketing channels. This is a special series brought to you by AppLovin. Today we have VP of Growth from Kitsch, Yingying, joining us who's going to be talking about how she's diversifying her marketing channels and And how that's helped their brand grow into the size they are today. So first of all, before we get started, Yingying, thank you so much for joining us. We're super excited to have you here. For the few people who may not know about you, give them a little bit about your background and a little bit about your role at Kitsch. Speaker 1: Yeah, so I am the VP of growth and e-commerce at Kitsch. Kitsch is a hair care and hair accessories brand. We sell everything that you need to take care of your hair from shampoo and conditioner bars, satin pillowcases, heatless hair curler. We are also launching into a very exciting new category actually next week. And yeah, I've been at Kitsch for going to my third year now, just hitting my third year. We have been growing, you know, very quickly, almost over. 50% year over year just on the DTC side in the last three years. And before Kitsch, I was at another haircare brand for four years called Function of Beauty. I was their second marketing hire at the time, has done everything on the marketing and growth marketing side. That brand also grew very quickly. We hit $100 million in Less than four years just on DTC. And then I spent a year and a half at another direct-to-consumer only brand called Blueland. They sell sustainable cleaning products. So Kitsch kind of, you know, it was like the perfect opportunity marrying like that sustainable and eco-friendly products in the hair care space for me. Speaker 2: It's incredible. It's a hell of a journey, so I'm excited to crack it all. Speaker 1: Doing DTC for a very long time. I was buying Facebook media when CPM was like $2 back in the day. I don't know if I'm aging myself, but yeah, I've been doing this for a while. Speaker 2: You have a perfect person next to you. Speaker 3: Who will understand. Speaker 1: It's just like, remember the $2 Facebook speed. Speaker 3: You can put in a dollar and make $10. Exactly. Speaker 1: And like, people thought that was like really expensive. Speaker 2: No, it's honestly a perfect segue because I think, you know, so much of what the foundation of this series and why We've been working on putting something together here is I think so many marketers have been bucketed into not even being called marketers, just Facebook ad buyers. And I feel like that shift has happened more than ever since COVID and a little bit before COVID where it really wasn't like you never really met a marketer. Most people you met were like, yeah, I know how to run ads on Meta really well. And I think it started to get into the point of like, oh, well, I'm starting to become over-reliant on meta. And then people are like, I'm dependent on meta. And now you have people who are living and dying by meta, literally. You have brands that can't survive because they're like, I can't make the ads work. And so much of what we wanted to do with this series was we want to talk about why diversifying channels is important, but also just Why you need to think about how to diversify even just marketing in general, right? And think about all the other ways we can grow. So I think starting there, I think it would be great to understand Kitsch, obviously, nine-figure brand, great amount of growth. You guys have Obviously touched on this diversifying piece really well. Maybe give us a little bit of a journey of what platform you kind of grew into as the years went on, especially in your last three years with Kitsch. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So we're still pretty heavy on meta. So I think in terms of channel diversification, I think the way that we like to think about it is how can we make sure that all of our channels work together. You know, from a creative messaging standpoint, if people see an ad from us on meta, But they change to TikTok or, you know, Snapchat. They see us there having a multiple touch point and, you know, being always like top of people's mind, top of people's feet, just hitting people where they are looking at content, right? It's really important to us. You know, Meta is still a huge channel for us, but we have, you know, a lot of media spend going into influencers and affiliate. We test it into podcasts. We are on all the paid social channels like TikTok, Snapchat, testing into Twitter. Pinterest as well. So anywhere you can see an ad like we're probably on at this point. We also tested AppLovin last Q4 and has been doing really well for us too. And that has been a huge unlock. You know, we are also actually launching into TV in a couple weeks as well. So from a channel diversification standpoint, we really just want to hit, you know, different type of customers where people are consuming content, where they are You know, getting information or buying things. Speaker 3: When it comes down to the content side of things, right, each platform may be a little bit different from each other, right? What you run on Twitter isn't necessarily going to be the same thing you run on Snapchat or Meta on TikTok, right? So how do you guys actually get into the creative process of, well, Here's an idea. How do we deploy that angle or concept across multiple different types of channels and formats? Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say we still test everything on Facebook first. I think it's still kind of the lowest risk and easiest to test type of channel. So if we have a new messaging that we want to test, we make like four to five iterations. We test on Facebook, find a version that is working and then adapt it across all different channels. Change something for TikTok, change something for Snapchat, change something, you know, for Twitter or even AppLovin as well, right? I think for us, that's like the easiest way for us to test through a lot of content at a very low risk. We're not going to like test a brand new concept going into TV and spend, you know, with bigger commitment there. Um, that's how we approach testing. Yeah. Speaker 3: So you have the creative testing now audiences. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Um, obviously for, for meta, everybody says go broad, go broad. Um, does that carry over to the rest of the channels? Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say, um, Because we are so broad, we are, I would say, 85% of our spend is going towards ASC campaign. We are very, very broad on meta now. But where we find we can get that audience learning is really through the creative messaging, the creative concept. We will have like all the models working, like hear growth and hear loss as messaging that's working. That tells us we need to target a more mature audience on different platforms as well. So that's how we like target different audience through like creative concept. Speaker 3: Creative messaging. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: So creative, everything is doing the targeting through the actual creative and messaging. Audience, we're going broad and letting creative find the right person. Now, actually tracking results across multiple channels, I find that to be extremely challenging. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: So I'm very curious how you guys are able to do that because for me, it's like, I'd rather just stick to meta and slowly, you know, add in everything else. But I mean, you guys are running across so many channels. How are you guys determining if, all right, well, we're running meta here, but Snapchat and Twitter is getting added here. Is it incremental or not? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think incremental testing is like a huge topic. I think since last year, like, are these You know, new channels really driving incremental value, new customer for us. The way that we look at it is each channel has a little bit different KPI, right? We know, for example, TikTok, right? People interact with content very differently on TikTok versus Facebook, right? It's not very like a click. driven type of channel. We still can track a lot of sales, but we understand that we are losing like X percent of attribution, right? Like I know different brand is very different based on their You know, purchase cycle, like for us, we have a pretty impulse purchase type of product. So most of our customers actually buy within the same day they see the ad. So we are not selling like $2,000 mattresses, like you don't really have to like think about it for a very long time. So for us, we look at that Click ROAS on what it is and understanding we are losing, you know, let's say 10-15% of attribution from that. So we can aim for a little bit lower ROAS for a channel like TikTok. I think for us it's about how close can we get that ROAS to Facebook or beating Facebook and then we can scale from there. Speaker 3: So do you guys look at also the blended numbers on a day-to-day basis? Speaker 1: Yeah, we optimize based on MER for the daily. For weekly, daily, we look at what is our MER look like. Are we profitable in that day? And then figure out if we have room to scale up budget on certain channels. Speaker 3: And how do you determine where to kind of increase budgets and take away? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where we kind of like a look at the performance on the channel level, right? If let's say Facebook is really crushing it that day or that week. From a ROAS perspective, we have a pretty one-day click attribution window. So if it's crushing it from a ROAS perspective and MER looks good, let's increase there. If it's AppLovin, let's increase there. So it really depends on, you know, how MER is looking on a daily basis and then what, you know, that one-day click ROAS look like and then determine in increasing spend on a certain channel. I think with page social it's easier. I think other offline channels like influencers or podcasts is a lot harder to just like click on a button and increase spend. Sometimes you will have like influencer like at like a 1.52x ROAS and we were like can we scale Like two weeks to spend, but then we are like, we can't just go off and book, you know, 25 more influencers on the next day. So I think different channel works very differently based on if it's like offline or online. Speaker 3: Do you guys use an attribution tool? Speaker 1: Yes, we do. We use Northbeam. Speaker 3: I feel like when you do grow beyond the two or three channels, you definitely need some sort of attribution tool, whether it's a Northbeam or a Triple Whale. At least for us, when we tried to expand into, say, Pinterest, I don't know what your experience with Pinterest is and we didn't have the greatest one because they told us that we had like a 4x return on a 50,000... In platform. Speaker 1: In platform. Speaker 3: And there was no other source of truth saying... Speaker 1: And then you look at like your clicks. It's like we got like three clicks. Speaker 3: It makes no sense. So I agree. I trust Meta to a certain degree. I kind of trust TikTok. I don't trust Pinterest and I don't trust Snapchat. Speaker 1: Honestly, we don't trust any in-platform tracking. I never trust any in-platform tracking. I mean, it makes sense, right? Meta is going to want you to spend all the money on Meta. The same for TikTok, every single channel. We really need a second source of truth to look at that data holistically. It's also like comparing apples to apples, right? As a media channel, we can look at meta on a seven-day click and then TikTok on a seven-day click plus a one-day view. Of course, it's going to look better, right? So that's why we have our one source of truth on NorthBean. Speaker 2: I think we can go into, you mentioned starting Q4, you had started it as AppLovin. And I think there's been a lot of buzz around it because they kind of came into the space and Incredible offer. I think they were giving brands $10,000 to test the platform and I think that's a really good incentive because at least a test and even at a neutral ROAS, you're kind of getting something there. But we've heard from many brands that it's working well. It's starting to become what some people started to coin as the second meta and something that can actually be side-by-side to meta. But maybe you can walk us through a little bit about when you started testing it What you've seen and maybe the setup because I think people still don't understand what it is and why kind of it's come about and yeah when you break it down you're like oh it's those ads on those games. It makes sense. Speaker 1: It's in mobile games. It's addicting and then you spend so much time on these mobile games right and then you see kind of like the same ads like 15, 20 times and you're like, I have to buy it. So the journey, customer experience journey really makes sense. I think we were one of the first few advertisers on AppLovin that really tested. We were in the early stage beta. We got the credit. That's how we got started and I think we were very impressed with the result that we were getting. ROAS looks really good and from a spend perspective it looks like we are able to really scale. It's not something like oh we're just spending like $200 a day like it does nothing type of thing. It's like really at a significant spend level and we are seeing really good results and that's why we were able to continue to test it last Q4 and We're still spending on it today. Speaker 2: It's incredible. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Where would you rank it in terms of your level of spend compared to the other channels? Speaker 1: I would say it's either second or third after Meta right now. So yeah. So it's a pretty big channel for us. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think what would be really helpful is, you know, as we're talking about these other channels and you've literally tested or are currently testing all of them or most of them, I'd love to maybe go through all of them one by one and just maybe you can give either like a small tip on something that's working, even if something's not working, like what you learned not to do, and maybe we can start with something like Twitter, right? Like you mentioned you're spending on Twitter. How's that work? What do you guys look at? What are you seeing there? Speaker 1: It's very up and down. When it launched, it does really well for like a day, and then it completely dies down. Speaker 2: So run Twitter for a day. Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know if you guys have seen a similar trend, but that's where Sometimes a lot like that happens a lot for channel testing. You're like out of the gate when you spend $200, things looks amazing because you only spent $200. Can you stress test that and then spend like $2,000 and see the same results, right? I think the hardest thing for channel expansion, it's really, can you scale on those channels? It's not like, hey, like everything will look good if you spend like $500 on it, right? But can you spend, you know, $500,000 and still see results, right? And for us, because we still have a smaller team, we can't spend a lot of time On, you know, channels, that's just not worth it for us. So it has for us like channel expansion has to You know, be able to scale to a certain level of spend for us to continue to invest in it. So Twitter is very small. It's not a huge scalable channel for us. I wish it can be. Speaker 2: But you're there, you're present. Anything on like creative the comment or just whatever is kind of working? Speaker 1: I think static does better on Twitter. Yeah, at least for us, static did better. Speaker 3: Is it just a Would it make sense for maybe smaller brands to be on there from a sense of just retargeting or is it kind of just cannibalizing what everything else is doing? Speaker 1: I think it really depends on your budget. Is that the right audience for you? I think for us, the reason why it didn't do so well is because it's a more male-dominated audience on Twitter. I think that's what Twitter has been telling us also as well. There's more guys that are using Twitter. Fair point. I think that's why it didn't do really well for us. Speaker 2: Maybe we can move to Pinterest now. How's that going? Any learnings? Any key tactics there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I will say from a last-click attribution perspective, I'm sure you guys have seen Not Doing Great, but I have heard other brands. The reason why we are testing it is we heard it from other brands that it's a much longer play because it makes sense. When I use Pinterest, I save things. It's how people use the platform to save things that they like and then purchase later when the time comes. Speaker 3: If brands are going to launch on AppLovin today, what would be the advice you give those people? Speaker 1: I would say start with your top performers that you try, like the try and true top performers that you were in on page social for like years. Speaker 2: It's all video, right? Speaker 1: All video, yeah. Even if a creative that has been fatigued on like meta or TikTok, like try those out. It's pretty easy. You know, you don't have to, you know, do creative just for AppLovin. I think that is also really great for us because we don't have to invest a lot of creative resource to it right now, which has been really helpful. We are just testing on what's working on Meta and then push those into AppLovin. And the AppLovin team has been great on You know, working with us on creating different end cards to test, different offers to test. Speaker 2: Can you explain the end cards piece for people who may not know what that means? Speaker 1: Yeah, so after you see a video, there's like a Three second, three to four second, um, and card that is, um, that is created by oblivion. Um, basically, you usually have like an offer, um, CTA, um, and then the drive to land. On your website, we have been trying to make more of like a gamified style type of end card. Yeah, so it's more native to the experience when people playing a game, right? So for us, like we have ads that it's kind of like this build a bundle type of ads are doing really well. And we can kind of like gamify that build a bundle experience that Looks more native for AppLovin. Speaker 3: When we initially started with AppLovin, the way that they told us to set up ads was like, make as many ads as you can and just toss it in here. That felt very interesting to me because at least on meta, it's like you're testing very methodically, right? How are you guys kind of setting up creative tasks? How are you guys scaling on the platform? Speaker 1: Yeah, they basically told us the same thing. Like, don't even, you know, overthink it. Just use your top performer and then we'll test and then we'll see what's working. And that honestly has been doing really well for us. Like, we don't have, we haven't have to think about like, what different persona to create. You know, Different Creators 4 on AppLovin, at least right now, I'm sure we'll have a lot more data as a platform evolving in the next few years, because it is still in the pretty early stage. I think their team is still figuring out what is the best way To work with us on like creative testing is that for us is really focusing on end cards right now. I think they are still kind of like figuring out like what works best like with their team, our team, and then collaborating in that sense. Speaker 3: And scaling budgets here, is it similar to meta where maybe 20% bumps here and there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I will say they are a little bit less sensitive on, you know, when we increase budget by like 30, 40, 50% you see less of like a fluctuation. In Q4 we were spending, it's our biggest time of the year. We do really well on gifting. So we were just like pushing as much as spend like we can on channels that is working. So for us it's like how can we just capitalize on what is working and spend as much as we can at a very good ROAS. I would say it almost feel like. Like the early meta days when CPM was like $2 and then you, you know, 10x your spend and you don't see any decline on performance, which is really crazy. So I would say from, you know, if you're just starting out on AppLovin and you see things are working really well, performance is really strong, you should push more spend towards it, see like what the impact is and And see how performance changes when you scale up spend and really stress test it. Speaker 3: I do want to move to something that's been on everybody's minds, especially when it comes to platforms like Meta, right? We've seen this personally where, especially with the adaptation of ASC and them moving towards kind of automating the media buying process, right? It's like this black box of whoever they want to target, you kind of give them all your creatives, they'll go do what they need to do, right? The concerns here is that is meta going to go after kind of like the lowest hanging fruit first? Is it something that is scalable? Is it going to introduce new people to the funnel? Because obviously your top of funnel audience is going to be the most expensive, right? And their goal is to get you to spend the most money possible, and the only way for them to do that is to show you, hey, we have a great ROAS that we're providing, right? How are you guys, especially, you know, kind of investing in multiple channels here, how are you guys able to continue to drive top of funnel awareness, brand awareness, and actually drive net new eyeballs to the brand? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question and that is why we are launching to TV in a few weeks, right? I think the way that we think about channel diversification really is how can we have, you know, upper funnel, more brand awareness type of funnel that can still drive sales, that is still direct response. Our TV ads are like fully direct response for us. We want to Get that sales, but we know we're going to reach like a different audience, right? If people have like, people might not have like TikTok, Facebook, but they watch like TV eight hours a day, like they're going to see us there, right? So our hypothesis on going into testing into TV is one is going to like drive sales on its own, but also lift other channels like pay social. You know, it's gonna help meta, right? Like it's gonna get more people into our retargeting funnel to be able to get them convert in this like mid to lower funnel type of channel. And it's going to help our overall media spend. Speaker 3: The one thing that you said was, how do we help meta? Which in my opinion, honestly, it's a Meta is more of the amplifier than anything else because I do think they're really good at looking at an audience that is visiting your website, engaging and converting, and then potentially finding more people, but only if we give that information to them. Meta is not going to go out and explore by themselves, right? Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 3: So outside of TV, is there any other channels that you utilize to help Meta do better? Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say channels like podcasts and influencer. Influencer for us is interesting because it kind of like goes into the meta ecosystem, right? Like we use like whitelisting ads from influencer that's going to like drive direct sales on meta. We run a lot of whitelisting ads and all of that. It's going to also help our meta performance. And I totally agree with you. I think we have to find those people who visited our site and then funnel into if they visited our site and then they see a better ad, they're going to convert, right? So it's that like multiple touch point with a customer or new customer who haven't heard about us is like really important to us. That's why we want all of our channel to really work together. That's how we optimize our media spend. Speaker 3: The one buzzword that comes and goes every so often is whitelisting. It's not a new concept, right? It's definitely not a new concept. It's always worked. But I think the reasons why it's making a comeback in the sense that it's becoming more popular now is because of what you just said, which is whitelisting through the influencer's profile, whether it's on Facebook or Instagram. The initial touchpoint for when you're running those ads is to target that influencer's audience first instead of just whatever you set your parameters to be, right? Broad or whatever. If by forcing meta to go and actually hit these new audiences, It allows the platform to now, okay, all right, I can move away from my core audience. Let me try and, you know, hit this influencer's audience and then use that as a new way to find even more new people, right? So yes, the benefits of using an influencer for their content, for the reason of it looks super native to the platform, that's one reason. But I think on an audience level and based off of these algorithm changes, You're almost recalibrating the algorithm every so often when you launch these new whitelisting influencers. Speaker 1: It's definitely finding new audience for us. Speaker 3: So my question for you guys is, because you guys run a lot, is there a good process that brands who are not necessarily doing this just yet, but how can they kind of increase their efforts there? Speaker 1: Yeah, so for us, it starts with our pay influencer efforts and affiliates efforts. It really, if an influencer, when her Instagram story goes live, is driving like a 2X4S, We know that content works, right? That piece of content works already. So that's how we saw the process of working with that influencer through whitelisting her content. And a lot of influencers loved working with us because, you know, we are also showing ...them and their content in front of a lot more people through whitelisting, right? So it's kind of like a win-win between brand and the influencer for us. And, you know, the reach is, you know, just much bigger when you put budget behind that piece of content to continue to reach new audience on the platform. So that's like one way that we have been doing it. And we also have a roster of, you know, in-house creator that we work with and we whitelist through their handle as well. These are smaller content creator who might be, you know, just starting out and, you know, newer to creating content, but they create like amazing content and has done really well for us. So we I want to whitelist with them too. So there's, and then there's, you know, smaller affiliate type of, you know, micro creators, right? And which we work with to create ads, mostly for like UGC type of content. And now just like start whitelisting their content. And then we also have like different pages that we create on our own. And then we use those for whitelisting as well. Speaker 3: So for the influencer side of things, it sounds like there's a three-part process here. One, you guys are probably seeding to a lot of creators, seeing who kind of posts, who actually drives some results and traffic, and then kind of furthering the relationship there. The second one is actually working with just creators who may not have an audience but are really good at making content, which is a no-brainer. And then are you guys doing like paid promotions with Bigger? Speaker 1: Yeah, we are. Speaker 3: So my biggest thing for that is, because I'm scared to start investing there, is how are you vetting the right people for those? Speaker 1: Oh, we have a very, very strict CPM and CPV guideline. It has to be under, let's say, $10 CPM or under like one cent CPV for us to, you know, for the math to back out. It's not the most fun way to look at influencer marketing. I always tell, you know, people who want to do Influencer marketing, because it sounds really fun, like you're working with all these fun influencers. I was like, you're just doing math all day. You want to find a creator who can hit that, like, under, like, one or two cent cost per view. Speaker 2: Are you proposing these deals to them when you talk to them? Like, you're saying, like, hey, this is a deal you guys have to stay within? Speaker 1: Yeah, these are a budget, like, These are how much like we are going to spend on the incidents. Speaker 2: Because the ones who walk away either don't have the confidence to hit it or don't value it. Speaker 1: Yeah, and then we'll have to find like other creators. Yeah, yeah. Because there are so many creators out there, right? Like there are so many who will meet those like numbers that we feel good about hitting. Because at the end of the day, it's kind of like running ads on meta, right? You have to hit certain click-through rate, conversion rate for the CPA to back out. It's kind of the same thing on how we run influencer. It's like this influencer, this post have to drive X amount of view at this cost at like 3 to 5% conversion rate, it will back out. So it's kind of like become a math problem for us, yeah. Speaker 3: So are you just taking, say, maybe the average views over the last like 7, 10 videos and saying, okay, well, if this person averages 10,000 views a video, I want a $10 CPM and whatever that math is. Here's my budget. Take it or leave it. Speaker 1: Yeah, basically. Speaker 3: We should start doing that. Speaker 1: That is the process. And creators these days are actually really good about sharing their Um, you know, how much view would they get from your stories and all of that as well? Because it's like, yeah, I give brands like us like more confident to work with them. Speaker 3: Yeah, I was just talking to somebody yesterday. We're trying to get more like people in the medical field just to instill that that confidence. And there was a nurse who I believe quoted us like $2,000 for a post. Her videos average 2,000 views. So I was like, you want me to pay you $1 per view? No, thank you. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. But it's all part of the negotiating process. And if you add like the waitlisting, Part two is kind of like added value that you're getting as well. You can use this piece of content and whitelist through the ads. It's all about the negotiation with influencers. Speaker 3: I agree. I mean, if you perform, then by all means, I'll give you whatever you want to whitelist, right? But at least just show me that there's some life here. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Because I don't know anymore. The creators out here balls you with their quotes. Speaker 1: Yeah, we are lucky. We're pretty lucky that we have found like a lot of really good creators in the past few years that have done really, really well for us. Speaker 3: I think it also comes down to the product too. Speaker 2: And brand and prestige. Speaker 3: And brand, right? It's like, oh, you know what? I really want this product. I really want to try it. I'll do this. Speaker 1: Yeah, and the product has to make sense for the creator too. Like it can't come across as like I'm hard-selling this product. So yeah, and a lot of creators honestly don't want to do that anymore. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: So the one thing before we move on from this topic is how important is that experience that you give the influencer when they receive the product? Do you guys do anything special for that? Speaker 1: Yeah, sometimes we do gift box and we always send like a branded gift box and like extra products for them to try. We really want them to love the products, right? Like again, like we don't want them to sell something that like they don't even like. So we let the influencer pick the product as well. We have a pretty large product catalog. So they can pick from like shampoo and conditioner or sun pillowcases or heatless hair curler or any other products that makes more sense to them to promote. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: I'm curious. I mean, you've been giving so many great tactics. What are some either learnings or mistakes you've made or some challenges you've come across over these last few years as you've diversified, right? Like, you know, As you're testing these new platforms, you talked about some of the challenges of attribution reporting, but maybe you can talk through some of the challenges you're facing so maybe that people can relate to and see how you navigated across it. Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I think when it comes to channel expansion, I think Don't try to go into other channel too early when it doesn't make sense for the brand to be TV, for example, right? We are spending a lot on meta. So we feel like right now, at this point, it makes sense for us to test into a channel like TV. It's much bigger of an investment, larger risk, like you have to invest in creative first, making all the creative, and you have to really give the channel time to test and learn. It's not something like we're going to run for a week. If it's not working, we're going to pause. We're going to commit to running like an eight-week test and then look at the performance and then see how we can optimize and scale. So the investment is much, much larger and we have to commit to certain spend up front, right, with that test. So I have done this. I also have seen brands done this, is go into like an offline channel like TV, podcast or direct mail when they're only spending like $5,000 a day on meta. I think if your spend on meta is still like very small, there's so much room you can optimize, right? From a creative perspective, You know, even audience testing perspective, you know, you can get really, really good at optimizing metaphors before you go into other, you know, bigger risk, bigger investment type of channel. So channel expansion is great, but I think you really have to like do it very thoughtfully and strategically on what channels to go into. Speaker 2: That's great. Speaker 3: For the rest of the year, outside of TV, is there anything else you guys are trying to maybe double down on or expand into? Speaker 1: Yeah, we are launching into a completely new category. I can share we're launching here fragrance because it's already in Ulta. It's a very different category than what we have. And for us, we really think it's a very scalable category as well. And with a new category launch, it's kind of like starting a new Like business on meta or on like influencer, there's so many new things that we can do and we can test. So I think one thing we are tapping into this year is how can we leverage product as a growth lever to scale different new products. Rather than just really focusing on changing our creative, changing our landing pages, really use new product as a lever for growth. Unknown Speaker: That's really cool. Speaker 2: I know we're coming up on time, but I'm curious in terms of when you're looking at the macro environment and you're looking at what's kind of going on, I know there's a lot of different Viewpoints on how people are trying to navigate through what's going on. I'm curious, like you guys have always, it feels like you kind of soar through it all. Like you look at the noise and you're kind of still chugging along and pushing along. For those people who are like, oh, it's just kind of tough times right now. The market is tough, this and that. What's kind of the viewpoint you have on it and how do you guys kind of power through it? In some ways, some people would say maybe you are a premium product. Some people may look at it like, hey, it's a good price point. And at that point, when you have that type of elasticity, you kind of also can say, well, we can have a lot of point of views. How do you kind of fight through that and just say, hey, we're just going to keep chugging along? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think for us at Kitsch, we always like to say like the high is not that high and the low is not that low. Like DTC is really hard. I've been doing this for almost 10 years. I feel like when you are like crushing it, sales is really great. You're just like, oh, it's another day. And the same thing when sales is rough, right? I think really just You know, staying focused and, you know, do the things that you're like good at, like focusing on, you know, creative, making really, really great content, right? I think that's a huge lever for us. And also for us is really making really great product that consumer wants to come back to buy. I think it's what really separates us from other brands out there. I think for us, focusing on those things and what we always do as a team and do really well, it's how we continue going. Speaker 2: What was that? Speaker 3: I mean, this was super tactical for those who are obviously trying to not get away from meta, but just trying to level up and spend a little bit more, a lot of notes to take away. But in that same breath, what would be one thing you want viewers and listeners to take away and implement in their business today? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a tough question. Yeah, I think there, like you said, like there is a lot of noise out there. I think I would say really test and learn and see what works for your business. There's always going to be a new channel that's like, you know, everyone is saying it's going to do really well. But you really have to test and see if it works for your business. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. It's sometimes like a, you know, different channel just doesn't work for everybody. So Yeah, I would say test and learn and focus what works for your business.