Five Black Fridays in One Week at Montana Knife Company

So the point of this podcast is primarily to talk about Q4. When I said we're going to talk about holiday, you let up. You're like, oh, we have a really unique strategy. I want to talk about. So what is it? What are you guys doing for Q4 and holiday? So I live for Black Friday. And like in the past, you know, 10, you know, 15 years or however long I've been doing, this is like everything's been about Black Friday. And, you know, what we, and so the thing about Montana and I company is still six years in. We still have never discounted life really. So now one time we're here with Lucas Pactyr, the founder, CEO of Tribe. So for those that don't know, what is Tribe? Tribe is like TikTok shop or direct to source sales. So TikTok shop was genius at democratized content. They made it so any average person with a TikTok shop account can sell a product. But it's only limited to e-commerce and it's limited to people that have access to a TikTok shop account. Tribe is that. But instead of posting the video on your page, you're just making the video. You're sending it to the brand. If they accept it, you get paid or you get a percentage of whatever revenue it generates. With Tribe, what we've been able to do is go from 500 to 1,000 or 1,000 or 1,400 at a lower total cost of production. The data is the most important part. If you give your creators the ability to see what ads are working in real time, they're going to go make the magic happen. So, dude, where could people if they want to check it out? Where do they go? It's just jointrive.com. Check it out, jointrive.com. I'm excited for this opportunity to connect and for you to share a little bit about what you guys have going on with Alia, I have seen all over the place. How you guys are transforming something that I think most people don't perceive there to be that large of a potential impact in. So, tell us a little bit about what that is and how you guys make it happen. And Sean, co-foundancy of Alia. What we do is super simple. We just do pop-ups. To be integral, we see is like, we'll see, you know, two acts of operate and then we'll see something like a 1.8X increase and welcome the revenue. So, then that's the key magic to track here. Of course, we want revenue to go up as a whole, but like, there's only so much a pop-up can do. I think the best thing about us is that we offer 30-day free trial, no strings attached, like you can cancel if it's not working for you. During that free trial, we'll manage the pop-ups for you. We'll give you kind of the outcomes that, you know, we promise we'll give us. - There you go. So, where do people go to side app and try it? - Yeah, so, alia.pop-ups.com. A-l-i-a-a-pop-ups.com. - Every few years, a new platform earns its place at the top of every smart advertiser's media plan. Apploven just had the most remarkable run in AdTech history and now they've opened that engine to e-commerce. Apploven gives brands another way to reach more than a billion daily users through full screen ads in the mobile games they already love. With Q4 around the corner, smart data-see brands are moving fast. Dr. Squatch, Ridge and Tumble, all made Apploven part of their strategy to reach their Q4 growth targets last year. It's super easy to launch, and brands have been able to scale to 100K per day in spend within days. Q4 waits for no one. Apploven is offering 5K in ad credit when you spend 5K. Just go to apploven.com/ctc to set up your first campaign. - Welcome back to another episode of the e-commerce playbook podcast live from commercial on table. That's not AI. This is the real San Diego skyline here behind us. And I'm joined by Brandon Harjo, the co-founder and CMO of the Montana Nice Company. Bro, low key, one of the coolest brands in the space that you guys are pretty off the radar though. Like, are you on the socials? Do you get out there and build a personal brand at all? - You know, that's the thing. It's like, I'm not on X. - Yeah. - I'm not on LinkedIn. You know, like, my background is in, like, I'm a fine artist. - Okay. - So, you know, and that was in graph design and photography. So, a little bit bigger on Instagram. - Yeah. - Not like, not from the brand-goating, like, marketing side, mostly just from kind of like the art side, but no, pretty low key. - We were sitting last night at dinner, and it was you guys, we had the zip string guys. You've seen those things, the toy, a guy doing like a kimchi cracker. Like, it's just, what I love about this industry is there's just so many random niches of really cool businesses and people doing awesome stuff that you can always discover. And you guys are certainly one of them. So, my partner, Sukkori, was employee one at CDC. He's been with me since day one. And he is the outdoorsman and is a huge fan. - Yeah. - So, he knows you guys well and I'm learning and getting caught up. But once you tell us a little bit about Montana Life Company. - Yeah. So, Montana Life Company's wild, you know, it's, you know, it started during peak COVID. Like, I'm talking, I met Josh, my business partner. He's the master bladesmith. He's the guy who understands how to make the perfect knife. You know, he's been making knives for 30 years. - Cool. - So, he started making knives at age 11. - No way. - And then it became the youngest master bladesmith ever. - But that's like a certification or like, what does it mean to be a master bladesmith? - Yeah. - So, master bladesmith. So, there's only like 130 of these guys in the world. - What? - Yes, in the entire world. And it's, so you have to become a journeyman first. - Okay. - And then you have to build a set of knives. And then you have to fly to Atlanta. Remember, this is the 90s. He started 11. I think he became a journeyman at like 15 or 16. You have to fly to Atlanta. You have to present your knives to a panel of master bladesmiths. And they rip you apart. Like, he's 16. He's like, it was like one of the hardest things I've ever done. - Wow. - He passes a journeyman. And then, then he goes home for three years, builds his next set for master bladesmith and becomes the youngest master bladesmith ever at the age of 90. - I never heard of this. - No, it's wild. And like, all these knives, you know, like are, you know, it's something that you have to, like, then they're very specific on what you have to do. And there's different styles. And it's like, you just can't freestyle. - It's crazy. - Very specific. So he did that. And then he became one of the top knife makers in the world. He was making $30,000 swords for cheeks. - Cheese. - And they were flying over to London to go look at the different exhibits of historic knives. And then they were bringing them over like to, you know, the Middle East and stuff like that. And then, obviously, then, you know, where this is all kind of getting to is and like, you know, he's become this master bladesmith. He knows how to make the best knives in the world. And then 2008 happens. And, you know, he was a full-time knife maker at the time. And in 2008, everyone's knife budget kind of dried up. They're $30,000 swords and stuff like that. So he's like, he's like, oh shit, I have to go get a real job. So then for 10 years, he was a line. So a blue collar line, a great paying job. But he's always in the back of his head. It was like, I'm a knife maker. I'm always wanted to start this company. And he actually registered Montana knife company for 20 years. His mom helped him trademark the name. So he's just been sitting on it and just stewing over this company. So then in 2020, Josh and I met, he was like, you know, he started getting that fire and he's like, I need to find the marketer or the guy that can help me set up the website and do photography and handle all this stuff. And just my background is like, I've always been like a one-man marketing team for companies. So it was like real easy for me to turn key a company. Like, pretty much like overnight. Like, let's turn this on and then see what happens. And it just turned into what it is today. It was amazing. So how did you guys meet? Like, what was your relational foundation? - Yeah. So we actually met through Bert Soren at Sorenx. - Okay. - You know, lifting equipment company. They do all stuff like UFC and Yankees and stuff like that. They're created, Josh was talking they're a creative team at an expo and they're a creative team new of me up in Montana. He's like, hey, you guys should meet DM'd. And then it literally was just history from there. - Crazy. So tell us, what is MKC today then? What is the mix of the brand and what are you guys selling? What is the, what is the approach and strategy that you guys are after today? - Yeah. So Montana and I company is we're 100% American made knives. We're one of the only, you know, companies that do it 100% American made. And we're also going to be one of the only companies that we do everything under one roof too. So, you know, five years ago or six years ago, you know, it was two guys in a garage. And then we expanded to 12 people in a 10,000 square foot facility. And now we're in a 50,000 square foot facility with 160 employees. - Oh, and Montana. - All in Montana. - Oh, and we have a couple of remote guys on the marketing side, you know, engineering side, but almost all in Montana. - Amazing, and you guys, we were talking last night. You've gone from fixed blade is the primary place that you started in to now foldables at the category we call it and picking up the language here. And then culinary now too. - Right, yes. - And we were talking a little bit about how the market for knives generally like I, that was new to you, like how big is this market, like where and what are the different industries that you guys serve with knives? - Right, so that's the thing I love being proud of being the most wrong I've ever been in my career. So when Josh and I kind of wrote out the original business plan and tried to figure this thing out, I was like, you know, we really look up the yet. And we're like, okay, we'll be like the yeti of the knife world. Like we're gonna create the one knife that we can handle any hunter going on anywhere in the world. And that's all they need. What I did not anticipate is the collectibility of our brand and like how many, our return customer rate. So what's wild is for the first five years, one of my KPIs was to actually lower our return customer rate and to get new people into the funnel because our return customers were buying all that story. - Yeah, which is crazy to hard goods business. Like I never would have guessed. - No. - If you told me knives, I'd get out to you giving, no, no, you're wrong. Like that's incredible. - Trust me, it is, like I've been in the back and there's so many businesses and I've never seen what's going on like here. It's just, it was, and it's so many things. It's just not Josh and I, it's team we built, it's the timing with COVID, the timing with America made, the timing of, and then also it's just the timing in the industry, the industry we're in is like, all of our competitors are 150 years old. There are multiple generations in. So I'm not saying that like it's kind of like, you know, we're kind of the young, scrappy, you know, both Josh and I came from a very, very, like very basic means of like families and stuff like that. So like we have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder where a lot of our competition, you know, their third, fourth, fifth trust fund generation, you know, and I kind of see that happening. And then, you know, as a marketer, it's like, I mean, what other industries are there like that? - Yeah, I'm not going to dominate these people that have moved on. - Brands like Wayfair, Kitch, and Ridge are already scaling on Apploven while most of their competitors don't even know what it's like. assists, a billion daily users full screen attention and a model that optimizes purely for your profit target and nothing else. Medium watch time is 35 seconds that's longer than a standard TV commercial, giving you enough time to tell your story and build real interest before the holiday rush. You can get up and running on app lovin' in under an hour using creatives you already have. D2C brands have scaled to six figured daily spend within days of launching. Don't wait until peak season to add a new growth channel. You'll get 5K vad credit when you spend 5K just go to applovin.com/cdc to get started. But so like I'm scrolling the website right now and the culinary section, everything's sold out. Right. Like you guys are just flying through this mess. Even in this space too. Yeah. It's just insane. And these are. They're not cheap. No, they're not. We're talking about $1,300 kitchen nice sets. Gone. Just can't keep them in stock. So and that's the wild thing is, you know, as we sort of expanding our line, you know, we start with hunting. And then we're just like, well, let's just like, let's do first blood to last bite. So the idea is that we have a hunting plan for in the field. We have a crossing knives for the garage. We have your chef knives for the kitchen and we've steak knives for the table. So our goal is to do that. But what we totally underestimated, like the demand for a culinary and we're on the highest end of, you know, non-custom, you know, produce knives. Yeah. You know, like there's obviously a bunch of Damascus, you know, custom chef knives. You can go buy from amazing creators and you're going to spend anywhere to a thousand of $5,000 per night. But like ours are, you know, ours are just mass produced, but our culinary is so good. Like that's the thing. So I can hand our culinary knives to a, you know, a one star Michelin chef or two star Michelin chef. And they're like, no, I would use this every day. And it's because the people who designed them, you know, you have a master blade Smith. And we also went out and reached out and worked with one of the best chef knife designers ever. So there's a lot of pedigrees that goes into our product. So obviously one of the challenges that's unique in what you face is that you sell a product that can be cataractized as a weapon and creates limitations. So in our world, we talk a lot about Facebook advertising and other things. Talk about some of the challenges you guys face and then how you've gone about building distribution for yourselves in line with those challenges. So this is the thing that like, you know, I talked to a lot of brands about it and a lot of brands in our industry reach out to me for advice and stuff like that. And it's like, I pretty much look at it as like, like our marketing stack is a, you know, is a, is a golf bag, like pretty much from year one, two, three, and four. We weren't able to run med ads, so we deployed driver out. And then we had to, like literally, and then we couldn't run Google. So all right, take our three wood out. And then we couldn't like, and then, you know, so it pretty much like, okay, we can't do performance stuff. So we just have to lean really hard on organic. We to lean really hard on collaboration, we to lean really hard on brand building. And those are the fundamentals for the first, you know, four years of the business that we, we just had to do out of necessity. But now that we're in the year five, six and seven, like, it's built such a strong foundation. And I was telling this to dinner last night is like, because we had to go do all the hard things first, right? Like I will put our bottom funnel and our retargeting and our retainment against any company. So that's just pure out of like pure reps. Yeah. Like we just had to do one of the things that I'd say is brands will evolve the traits that they need to win based on the attributes of their products. So it's like, if you are a business that has no LTV, you're going to become world classic customer acquisition because you have to go get it. If you are a subscription variant, you become great at retention tactics. And so for you guys, like having to build that organic foundation, it's just an evolved skill that you had to have to survive. Right. And so you went and you got it. And all of a sudden now that foundation props up so much opportunity. So what advertising can you do? So you can't be on Meta, can you run CTV? Can you run like where are you guys able to actually leverage on the top of the phone? Yeah. And like over the past year, like we've had some of our biggest breakthroughs. And we're able to run Meta ads, but we're not able to run like, hey, this is our black foot, this is our number one selling knives knife. It has 15,000 five star reviews. It's like, no, here's like a brand anthem that looks like Yellowstone commercial. Right. And it goes to a landing page. They can't have a knife on it. Yeah. Google, like we're finally meeting with Google and getting some things like actually in their, you know, compliancies, changed some more us to be more of a tool company. Okay. Or seeing some growth there. Yeah. You know, we've done things through Chattari. But that's really cool wins with them. You know, some of those remnant buyers were like, one day we're just sitting there and like, we had a, you know, an MLB's like semi final, like playoff commercial hit. And I'm like getting blown up by all my buddies, like they've never even knew, like new the company. Yeah. Like that. And then, you know, some of the CTV stuff, like we're trying everything. If like we've snapchat will let us, we're going to let us like scale and advertise. We'll work with anyone that wants to work with us. Yeah. That's cool. When I said we're going to talk about holiday, you let up, you're like, oh, we have a really unique strategy. So what is it? What are you guys doing for Q4 holiday? Yeah. And like in the past, you know, 10, you know, 15 years or however long I've been doing this is like everything's been about Black Friday. And you know, what we've, and so the thing about Montana and I company is still six years in. We've still never discounted a knife. Really? Not one time. Not like we've never publicly discounted. Wow. We've done some insider stuff and things like that, but we've never ran a sale on the knives. We'll run it on peril. But so Black Friday is like always like how can we just create the most excitement? And like how can I have a reason to text an email? My customers multiple times a day for a week straight. Without. It's exhausting. Yeah. And without promotion. So what we do is we actually, we look at our Black Friday week. And I started on the Tuesday before and it ends Cyber Monday. And what, and we've kind of, we almost did this by accident, but it works so well is that because inside of Montana and I company, we have so many personas. Okay. So we have a corp biller that is hunting. Okay. And we have a color that's culinary. We have a core color that's blue collar EDC. And then we have a cool, a core pillar that's tactical. So what I do is that week, I set up a Black Friday event that is the most exciting event of the year for each one of those personas. So we technically have five Black Fridays in a row, stack day to day to day. And you have like a CDP that segments customers into those personas or how are you actually mapping that communication? So what's wild is that during this Black Friday event, I don't segment. So everybody gets all of them. So everyone gets it. So, so like, like, you know, it's, people who fall or brand are going to like, they kind of know what our Black Friday is going to be. But, you know, like our biggest, our three biggest days up until we launched the folder was always our culinary drop. Okay. So they're always sold out. But then Black Friday will release a couple, you know, a ton of sets and they sell out. So, so we always do a culinary and the people who want culinary know that that's going to happen. And we're going to have a, you know, a, a pocket knife drop and then we're going to attack. So that's so rather than promotion, what you do is you release net new availability of inventory. Yes. On those days. Yes. Exactly. Yep. Yep. So that you have all this pent up demand because right now you're out of stock because of all of that. So, will you actually with keep that out of stock intentionally all the way up until that moment? Or like, how will you think about balancing now and tell them right to maintain and map that demand? So like, that's like that's the part that I love is everyone's like, oh, you're building false scares. Yeah. I was like, if you knew, if I have, like if you knew how many, like open cards we had for our last forward folding night drop that we could have been like product to like, oh, like, so like we gave up a lot of opportunities. We gave a lot of, yeah. So like, we're still manufacturing in house. So there's like my office and the wall behind me, they're making the knives crazy. So the, so our stuff isn't even done. Like, we haven't even made the stuff for Black Friday yet. It's on the schedule and we're going to make as much as we can. But like, it's still like, we're still catching up. And eventually we will, like, this is this is the first year we're moving into a big facility. Yeah. And we're already certain to see they're like, hey, like that our production team is kicking ass. They're crushing. They're finding efficiencies. They're doing all these things on like that side of the business. And that that's what gets me really excited about 2027 because like the marketing is going to change a little bit. It's going to be more of like, hey, this is what's in stock. It's bringing new customers in the funnel, selling what's on the website. It said they're trying to get them into that whole drop key. And so we run it. Okay. So after that, all of that energy of the week of Black Friday cyber Monday, we still have 19 days of right thing in Christmas. How do you keep that energy going for your rent? Right. So like that, that's what's like, we have to engineer that and keep that energy moving. And like, that's like one thing we noticed like the first couple of years is like, we did this big Black Friday. We sold out of all of our products. And we literally would have, there was first couple of years, we literally have nothing in stock going through Christmas and we got people calling us and all this stuff. We're just like, we just can't make it. So we now we're like, we're very, very specific about how we plan those remaining weeks. So we have our big Black Friday week, we have those big five moments. And then like that next Thursday, we like purposely plan like, we'll drop the new product or we'll drop a limited edition, something that is like curated for our current customer base that they just can't say no to. And like, so we'll do that for like sometimes we'll be able to squeeze in two to three more Thursdays before that lighting up the calendar, exactly. And like I like those big, those big months with four or three days or five Thursdays and versus a Thursday, it's going to be a good one. It's going to be good. Yeah. Yeah. So that's great. So where do you guys go from here? Because it seems like right now you've got this like demand that exceeds supply. Yeah. Right? At some point, I imagine the goal is to hopefully have to go generate some of that new demand out in the world. Right. Like, how do you think about the next few years for you guys? And where do you think you are in your capacity to go out and exceed that threshold? And how will that change this approach? Because it seems like right now, a lot of this is emailing SMS driven? Yes. What happens as you move beyond that to like now having to go find that new customers who don't know who you are yet How do you think about that change in the coming future for you right? Yeah, so it's like this is a question that like keeps me up at night I mean this is the big one, you know, and and understand like a little bit about our company is that you know So we're a hundred percent American made knife company. We're on the higher end of the price price scale And also too for the past six years we have sold the hardest night possible selling the mark Which is a hunting fixed blade knife smallest ham most and like our competitors are 30 dollars 20 dollars free with gift You know, so like were this premium product when like a lot of companies are getting the knife away when you buy a magazine Yeah, and it's crazy. We've done it with that We've built a company to this size there now that we're getting to the pocket knife the folding knives You go look at any of our peers and the guys have been around for 150 years. They sell eight pocket knives to one fixed blade Yeah, so I so everyone's like hey, like I think it's time for you guys to start getting in the retail or channel expansion I still think for the next two years We still have a lot of just product expansion Mm-hmm ham expansion and like what we were talking about last night dinners like yeah There's only two percent of America has a hunting knife. Yeah, but a hundred percent of America has a kitchen So all of us yeah, you know, so like so the culinary knives to me like if we can understand how to manufacture those at scale and keep the quality That's the key is like if we can manufacture at scale and keep the same quality yeah, like that there could be its own business in itself So I want to squeeze as much like hand out a D to C before we start getting into like super omnichannel because it seems like There's got to be some Dialogue all the time about what is the ambition and what time frame because it seems like what you guys have right now It's a platform that can actually allow you to extend maybe even beyond knives like that yeah Like the brand is strong enough that you use the Yeti example Yeti makes a lot of things now they do North Face started in carabiners And now they make a lot of things. Yeah, like how do you guys think about the brand that you're building in terms of Does it extend the on knives in your mind? Is it like right where how far does this go and what do you guys want from it? Yeah, and and that's like we're you know like Josh. I never always talked about that and we're and we're trying to do a little bit of delayed Like grab vacation because we're feeling that. Yeah, we're like well. We could probably add this, you know Thing that's like kind of like a venn diagram right over on the side and stuff like that and it's like That's the plan like our apparel. Yeah, I was gonna say how is a peril for you? It's insane like I mean, I'll just like give some numbers out. You know We'll do it anywhere between eight and ten million dollars of just a peril, which is nuts Right, and I came in the peril industry and I'm like That's a real business. Yeah, that's a real business and so like you say like there's there's some stuff there And like that's all been like logo where there's been some small cut and so stuff You know a lot of hats a lot of t-shirts a lot of hoodies But like we're starting to see that our customers like hey, we trust how well you make knives like What what if you what if you guys did start making technical apparel? Yeah, like what if you guys made hunting apparel or venture Venture gear and stuff like that. So we're gonna start slowly getting into that trying to do that right the problem is is like doing That a hundred percent America made is is it's nearly it's nearly impossible So like our customers is gonna understand like we're gonna do our best. Yeah, but like we this is they're not gonna be on the same line So so that that's another challenge with us like our ethos is so America made cuz our knives are literally made in Montana That like a lot of those accessory items become limited in capacity. Yeah, yep. So as a branding guy I'm curious do you think about the mkc mark moving forward to Montana knife and the phrase like how do you think about That being the platform to expand that so so that's why so Just this year we we actually updated our low for the first time ever in six years and it's like the logo that like scramble together on like I remember being like in an airport and like setting up the original Shopify and I'm like just Just in the kerning and like that stuck for six years and I've always been like there's things off about it So we we simplified it used to be like mkc Montana knife company inside the state We simplified the state now. It's just mkc We actually went and bought mkc.com. No way so like really letter domain dude trust me Like as like an econ like marks her as like like people like No one of my business understands like how rare that is Those don't exist. There's that exist and like so like it's been parked and like I would DM I would email this guy like every six month be like hey man just check it It was multiple six figures and then I don't know I email them one time. You mustn't need to money Got it like half of what it was listed and like I you know I had to tell like my business like if I see a phone with you Matt and so I was like listen Tries like this is a big number, but like extrapolate over the legacy of the brand. It's worth having It's all credible. Yeah, and also your emails watch shorter. He's like email be shorter. I was like I mean, yeah, it's like deal Montana knife in a very simple. So yeah, so like the mkc I think like I think I think I think eventually like more people are starting to understand mkc more than Montana knife company And that's where I think it's gonna allow us to get into the gear or get into accessory something's like that Yeah, it's really cool, man I think there's so much this in our industry is such a microwave industry where everything has to happen overnight and I think that There's a the lessons of building through the organic having to create the organic demand having to move slow and Manufacturing in some ways those limitations become the kind of thing that allows you to move at the pace to build real meaningful Connection and quality and product and all the things that actually are the foundation for a thing that could last 50 100 years and so sometimes those limitations become the superpower in the end and so I see you guys are doing super cool stuff I appreciate you job in any anywhere. So Instagram is that the best place to find you? Yeah, yeah, Instagram just by name Brandon R.O Also to like just the Montana company Instagram mkc dot com. Yeah, no, yeah, mkc dot com like I'm crazy. I'm still not even you saying that I know it's so new But yeah, those those there like you'll find us and stuff like that So and it's cool because if you watch us on YouTube We're extremely transparent about our brand but you can like and we actually put out a vlog every single week for the past couple of years You can watch us building this from the beginning of that and it's it's a really cool evolution You know what I just realized too. I think that I actually have one of your guys's knives that was a part of Did you do a collaboration with born primitive? We did dude. I had so bear sent me yeah So we've worked with born for ever bears my dude and they're like it was like the veterans day launch or one of the things They did and I'm just I was scrolling and I was like dude I actually have one of these that I got so that's so that's all that's awesome doesn't surprise me that you guys are kindred spirits So amazing stuff go check it out mkc dot com. Thank you [BLANK_AUDIO]