527: From $0 to $100M a Year Selling Products on TikTok & Snapchat | Hudson Leogrande [VIDEO]

Intro When I started in e-commerce we like bought everything before we even knew how to start the company. So I was burning through money that I really didn't have. We had zero idea what to do, no idea what was the first step and what was the last step. It really just a a complete shit show. People do not need time to make a decision, they need information. Go get a ring light, make the content that is authentic to you, be as relatable as possible and you will get the best results for your videos. When our creators start to do really well for us and showcase that they're an extension. Love my brand. It will do everything and anything for growth. Here are the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder podcast with Nathan Chan. Speaker 2 Hudson, welcome to the show. The first question that I ask people now we've changed it up is what did the 1st 30 days of your first e-commerce brand look like Purely white Deluxe? What did the 1st 30 days of your first e-commerce brand look like? So listen, first of all, pleasure. Pleasure to be here, Nathan. It is interesting because I started Purely White Deluxe in my mother's basement. So the 1st 30 days was was pretty interesting to say the least. We when I started in e-commerce and I got involved with Purely White, we had no idea what private labeling was. We didn't know anything about that. A manufacturer had an MLQ. We got a bunch of boxes shipped to the house and a bunch of charcoal because we were selling teeth whitening charcoal powder. There was a trend going on where people would brush their teeth with the charcoal powder, their mouth would turn black and they'd spit it out and that was the creatives that were going around on social. We would pack and put everything in the basement and we would like try to figure out a way to get the Poly bags and everything to the house so that we can ship products. But we had no customers. So the 1st 30 days was just no customers trying to figure out how to get a website up and running. It's pretty crazy because we bought everything before we started the business. Like we like bought everything before we even knew how to develop a website or how to start the company. So I think that I guess now would be a little bit different. But the 1st 30 days was just like it would almost felt like it just a complete mess. We had zero idea what to do. We had no idea what was the first step and what was the last step, and I would say we made about 15 bucks. We sold one item. Speaker 2 There you go. So then what happened next? Speaker 1 So with Purely White, the first few years were really interesting because I was still working a job, I was in the car business, I was a car salesman, and I was constantly trying to pursue having Purely White Deluxe be a success for me because I was so eager to get out of the situation that I was in that I was just trying so hard to see how can we possibly make this work with the company. So the first few years was really just a complete shit show and that was just us trying to understand how to even get the product marketed that people would be excited enough to make a purchase. My website looked like it was built with a banana, like there was literally nothing going on with the company that you would even trust to check out with our brands. So really, the whole thing for me was just trying to figure out every aspect of the business. So the first few years for me were just, like I said, in my mom's basement. I would have my brothers go outside and we would pour the charcoal into these little jars and I would spray them with a hose after because they would be covered in charcoal. And we were shipping out out of the house as well. I would have these big black garbage bags. I'll be walking up the stairs. I'd look like Santa Claus bringing everything to the front door trying to get it to USPS. We could ship out to customers when the companies finally started selling. But the the whole first few years I would say was just the biggest learning experience of my life and showing me every single time that I wanted to quit. The idea in my head was like, oh, well, this is where everyone else quit. So I might as well just keep with it because I know that I want to be an entrepreneur. So I would say into the third year was when we finally started seeing success with the company. Speaker 2 Yeah, OK. And So what kind of sales were you making for those first couple of years, man? Speaker 1 I would say when we were, I mean, every time I would hear a cha ching on my phone, I would freak out and it was the most exhilarating feeling of all time. We probably got two to three sales every couple days, and that was when we would do these influencer posts on Instagram. I would just send out a bunch of product and hope that people would post about it. And when a couple of them did, we'd get like one or two sales. And then that was, I guess, my journey into figuring out how to work with influencers and content creators. Speaker 2 Yeah. So what happened next? So third year, what happened? Like, like what was the shifting point? Speaker 1 So 30 year was where it got interesting. We discovered Snapchat and obviously I used that as a kid, but we had never seen a company before do Instagram. I mean Snapchat stories where they would post a story for my company. This is when, by the way, when we figured out, you know, we private labeled our teeth whitening kit, which was our best seller, still is one of our best sellers. And what we did was we took that product and we worked and recruited hundreds of influencers on Snapchat and throughout their day when they would post, they had no, they had no brand deals. Snapchat didn't have mid role programs where ads were running yet. It was very beta. So what we would do is we would take influencers on Snapchat, they would post a story and say and it would reply to comments that people asking how they get their teeth whitet and they would put a link right on that 24 hour story and I would pay them. And when I did it with a couple people just like to test because they were like hey man, I'm getting 500,000 views, 1,000,000 views a day on my Snapchat stories. I think this would be a good idea to post purely white on it immediately. We had no paid ads because paid ads never worked for us. We could not get Meta to work. Well at the time Facebook kind of get Facebook to work, Instagram to work. Nothing was working for us. Snapchat cold traffic. We were getting so many visitors. Our conversion rate was horrible. But we figured out that we actually broke into something a market that was untapped and we had about at our peak 1200 people a week posting for Purely White Deluxe on Snapchat about five to six times a week. Speaker 2 1200 people a week. Speaker 1 Yeah, 1200 people a week, we pay them every Friday on PayPal and we were able to build the business from zero to north of 10 million a year in sales just on a cold traffic. No Google again, Nathan, I didn't know anything. So no Google Shopping, there was no Facebook, there was no retargeting, there was nothing. It was just, you see us on Snapchat, you buy on the website and that's it. Speaker 2 Wow, and when was this? What what use this? Speaker 1 This was right. This was right as COVID hit. So right as COVID was starting to get into the States was when our company started really picking up in sales. Speaker 2 And so when did you launch Comfort? When did you launch Comfort? So comfort I launched it will be two years next week. Speaker 2 Yeah, wow. And we were introduced by a mutual friend, Greta Van Reel, and she said to me, literally, you guys got to interview the founder, like Hudson, one of the founders of of comfort. This thing is blowing up. They've gone from like 0, is it zero to 60 million in like 2 years or something inside? Speaker 1 We're going to do 100, we're going to do over 100 million this year. Speaker 2 Wow. Speaker 1 Yeah, And and I just want to make a point. I bootstrapped this company, so I bootstrapped purely white and I took the funds from purely white and that was how I started. I started Comfort with $50,000 and we were sold out probably four months in year one because we had no idea how to run a clothing brand at all. So yeah, it's, it's been a been a very interesting journey to say the least. Speaker 2 OK, So what inspired you? Why did you start Comfort? You had a an 8 figure business to start another one. Most people would just focus and double down on that one at business. Speaker 1 Yeah. So I'll tell you, we when we noticed how many customers we had, but nobody was posting about the brand. I had said to myself, like, imagine if everybody was passionate enough about my company to go and post and showcase that they're an extension of my brand because word of mouth is still the best way to advertise for a business. And no one really wanted to showcase when they're in there, you know, their personal space in their bathroom using the teeth whitening product. So it was interesting for us where we didn't get a lot of that posting, a lot of that social media traction. And we, I had when I was younger, I had struggled a lot with my mental health. I had a pretty interesting childhood and I at one point even dropped out of high school. So I dealt with a lot of anxiety and a lot of adversity early on where I wanted to create something through clothing where people felt like they were a part of the community. And when comfort came about, I had the idea to make slightly weighted hoodies that I didn't even mention to anybody that had to do with stress or anxiety, but just to make people feel calm. As soon as the company started picking up, which by the way, I started on Snapchat with that, people were raving about how comfortable it was and how it made them feel and how their anxiousness was lessened when they would wear it or how they wore it into a surgery or when they had a rough day at work. And we immediately started to see this community being built from the ground up. And the idea behind the brand was always to do something like that, but I did not know at that time that it was going to be as big as it is now. Speaker 2 For comfort, what did you take from your lessons with purely White to launch? Lessons from purely white Comfort Like what? What lessons? How did you have an incredible pre launch? Because you said you sold out in like the first week, right? Speaker 1 Yeah. So So what happened was we had already established great growth on Snapchat and all I did was plug and play. So I took my creators and influencers that worked with me on Snapchat for purely white. I prepped them, sent them products in advance, had them tried on, make sure that they loved it. They were part of the reason why we launched the brand so fast, because once they tried the hoodie, they were like, man, this is something different. Like I don't know how to explain it, but the way that it feels is just so comfortable that like I haven't taken it off since you sent it to me. And when we had everybody on board for that, their actual true emotions followed through with their ads. And when that started to happen, we noticed like day one, we were priced too high. We were, we were just too highly priced in the market for such a new product, but we still sold very well. As soon as I noticed that like the conversions were sold down, we drop price for all of our customers and immediately went through the roof and we were able to sell out within the first seven days. We did somewhere around like 150,000 in sales. Speaker 2 Yeah, wow. In the first week. Speaker 1 Yeah, in the first week of the business, which was, yeah, it was pretty crazy to watch that. Speaker 2 So you said that you noticed the conversions were down. How to get your brand noticed What kind of conversion rate would have you expected for a product like that? Speaker 1 We, we wanted to operate on anywhere from a 3.5 to a 5% conversion rate. We knew that it wasn't going to be that high because a lot of it was cold traffic, but it was less than A1 and that's very low. So we knew that there was something going on. The website wasn't great either. I mean, we have incredible CRO teams that work on our stuff now. We've we've done so many changes to increase conversion. But even with the website the way that it was, I knew that it wasn't a great site, but I knew that the price point was what was teetering people because they were like, wait a minute, this company has no history. They have no track record. We don't even know what this is going to be like when we get it. They don't even have a review yet. So that was kind of like to the Cus, to the consumers mindset. They were like, wait a minute, maybe this isn't for me because it's this luxury priced item, but we have no idea what it is yet. Speaker 2 Yeah. So a big part of your strategy was following the same model that you were using for purely White, but you took that creator like that creator influencer marketing model and then applied it to comfort. How to use Snapchat to market your brand I'm curious because most people would look at Snapchat and be like it's not that big anymore. Speaker 1 No, it's it's not. But so I guess I'll kind of again touch on like this point of we could not get ads to work. So like no matter what I did, ads never worked. My, my, my row as was was, was I was very unprofitable. I was burning through money that I really didn't have and Snapchat was a way for us to get our brand out there where there was so much awareness to the product. So the conversion rate was not good. Again, all cold traffic, but when you're throwing, I don't know, maybe we did 100 million views to a 200 million views a week. When you hit that, you have to convert for something. And that was my idea. Like all of it was like, hey, I mean, 200 million people are seeing this product. Someone has to buy it, you know, like someone's going to have to just say yes and just, you know, give it a shot and click by. But we broke into TikTok early, early with Purely White as well. And that was another big winner for us. Before every influencer had rates that were like they were, you know, starring in the next Avengers film. It was very, very easy for us to get a decent budget where we could allocate that to different creators and get a really good ROI. Well, that was very good for us In the beginning. We had a couple creators that we would pay, you know, $5000 to for a promotion, which was still a good amount of money, but they wouldn't they would make us, you know, fifty $60,000 on a video. So we were seeing huge success there. Remember, I'm not spending any money anywhere else. So all of that money is coming in house. That's how we were able to build up the bank account so that we could really start to try and test to see can we be profitable on TikTok? Can we actually make it work on Facebook? What type of ad creators are actually going to work for this brand? But I will tell you even till this day, comfort right out of the gate was killing it on Meta. It was killing it on TikTok, surely why it was still struggling purely why it still has problems on Meta, you know, but what we did with comfort was we we got into a market that has so much. The Tam is gigantic, right? So you have the total addressable market is huge. Everybody wears a hoodie. Now. If you can find a way to market your product, and this is for anybody in in any niche that you go into, as long as you can show how different your product is is from the rest in your marketing, plus your product quality is going to equal an incredible customer experience, They're going to share that with others. So comfort immediately out of the gate was resonating with people on an ad perspective with my creators, which I can get into, but also that was very profitable for us were we were able to dump all. I haven't taken a dollar out of comfort since I started the business. Every single dollar has gone back into my employees, my ads and my inventory. The way we want to take this thing is so incredibly huge for us and it's so I'm so passionate about it that like I'm, I'm just so excited about the future that we're just coming out with things at lightning speed for our customers. Speaker 2 Yeah. And so you haven't taken a dollar. That's interesting, right? Because if you're on track to make 100 million, most people would be looking at that going, wow, like, surely you would have taken something, right? Sure. You paid yourself a massive salary. You said, you know, off offline, right? You're living in Miami. Yeah, the lifestyle. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I live out of my my oral care brand and every dollar that comfort makes it has to go back into inventory and and adds at this scale. But there's no time and there's no money to waste on anything else other than the business. And I think that a lot of people in in, I guess you're saying in like in my position, they would maybe think otherwise. But I think that when you see what you can build and and you're so excited about it, you, you, it's so much bigger than me that I've taken myself completely out of the equation. I've watched our company changed girls lives that are in college that make fifteen $20,000 sometimes a week working for our business on TikTok through Commission ads. I've watched, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that become ambassadors with us, you know, be able to pay their rent. I mean, we've just been able to do such incredible things that it's not just me anymore. It's not just about me. It's about the thousands of other people that look at this brand as a way to, you know, take care of themselves and their family. And I think with where we want to go with this thing, it's just it's I just have the blinders on. Speaker 2 Yeah, I really respect that man, because so many people will be watching, listening. How to make money without taking a dime This gun man, even, I mean, $50 million a year, you haven't really taken a cent. Yeah, you haven't even paid yourself even. You don't even pay yourself a salary. Speaker 1 No, nothing. Speaker 2 Wow. Speaker 1 That's insane. I guess until the tax structure that we need to make work for the brand, it requires me to make a salary, which maybe it does. But as of right now, no. This is all all going back into the business. We launched a Comfort Paws, which is for dogs that where dogs are going to match their owners and hoodies. And then we have Copper kids launching in two months for, you know, anywhere from 4 years old to 13 years old. And, you know, that just requires all of our attention. So yeah, it's been, it's definitely been exciting. Speaker 2 Yeah, no, that's that's something to be admired. I know a lot of people watching this would find that very surprising. So let's round back to the creator's pace, because it's clear that there's somewhat of a blueprint or framework that you use. What makes a successful creator partnership? So what to you makes a successful creator partnership? Speaker 1 So the one thing that we've done is we've relied on trust. Every single thing that we do for my business is trust based. We DM the creators and we talk to them. So I'll give everyone kind of the play by play so they can go do this for their brand as well. We will send a message to the creators and we will schedule a call with me, myself personally. So with every single person that has joined my organization, even now till this day, I take phone calls. So I'll take time out of my day to schedule a couple hours where all I do is take calls with creators. And I make the introduction and I build the relationship and I start to find rapport with them. Because the one thing that we've noticed is when people feel like again, like they're a part of something bigger and that there is there's a lot of of growth and opportunity with the business, They're more, they're more keen to take it seriously. And that's something that we've noticed a lot. So right now we work with about 250 girls a week and maybe like 20 guys a week that make content for me on TikTok that we repurpose across Facebook, we repurpose across Pinterest and Snapchat ads and all these other places. But what makes a really good creator like you're asking is when. I don't even work with big celebrities. I work with people that are extremely relatable, that don't have a big following that actually will give you their honest and true. And not saying that bigger people don't, but they give this honest and true opinion where people look at them and they see that they only have a couple 100 followers or a couple 1000 followers and they can relate right away. And I have everybody make the content the way that they want. So I tell them, don't try to be anybody or not make the content that is authentic to you. And the people that watch these ads that are so desensitized to watching ads all day on TikTok and their dopamine scrolling, they're going to watch you and say, wow, this girl's really being authentic and honest about what her experiences with this company. We sell an emotion. So when they learn how to sell an emotion that's catered to them and what they feel people will like through themselves personally, it's done incredible for us. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's fascinating because you bring me back to I, I used to run an e-commerce brand and sold it was a time marked water bottle called Healthish. And when we worked, I never forget the first creator that we work with that really popped off. She was super relatable. And one of those reasons was was because she had her heart broken on The Bachelor in Australia and it was like a big sob story and everyone loved her. But she was a really, really relatable person. She was like an everyday person. She didn't prop herself up as this big time influencer creator. And that's something that I've always found from my experience, the creators that you work with that have a YouTube channel, always, always, always all the people that are posting constant stories and are vulnerable and have that relatability, there's just so much more trust, right? Speaker 1 100%, yeah, because they're used to being on camera and also being themselves as soon as the camera turns on. Especially for me, even like it, it almost felt like it was changing me for a second because I felt like I had to perform or I had to act because I was being courted. But meanwhile, if you're just being your authentic selves day-to-day, those are the videos or those that's the content that does the best every single time, no matter what. How do you find creators? Yeah, I agree. So how do you find creators? Speaker 1 Yes, a great, great question. So what we do is two different things. We will scroll through a TikTok shop, we'll see what creator that has a small following had a blow up video that did really well for them. We know that they got a taste of how much money can be made. And then what we've done is we've taken those creators, we've put them through an incubator with our business. We've explained to them how to make content and make it even better than what it is right now. And then we just give them all the tools. We use something called Notion dot. SO it's like a note taking app on steroids. It's a really good app to run your business. I mean, we run our whole business on Notion and we bring them through this whole incubator for a week and we teach them exactly how we feel content has worked for us and how they can kind of dive in and get dug in with themselves on how it's going to work for them. So we've done that. And then what we also do is when our creators start to do really well for us, they actually become the outreach. So we'll pay them on the side a portion or a salary to go and do outreach because they have had the results. So if I have a girl who makes $10,000 a week promoting my clothing brand and she goes to 10 other girls and says, hey, guys, you know, I found a way to make, you know, $10,000 a week myself. This is the company I'm working with. This is what they stand for. They donate to mental health charities there. We're a mental health brand at the end of the day, Nathan, like we donate to over a dozen different charities every month. We stand for something so much bigger that people again, they want to be bought into something that they feel they can build a community around. So these girls that have worked for me that reach out to other girls, the, the amount of responses and the amount of people that want to schedule a call after that it, it, it's tripled to just because of their personal experience with us and they get to share that with those girls too. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's that's really clever. And how many, how many creators might you have with a relationship like that working for you or with you? Speaker 1 So right now we have about 10 that we work with that do recruiting for us. We've, The thing is we've stopped a little bit because what happens is, you know, you want to give, we, we want to make sure that with the amount of people that work for us right now, ambassadors, we have over 5000 ambassadors that promote with their code and they get paid every month with what, whatever sales they get through their discount code. Shout out to Social Snowball because that's a company that we use for paying everybody all at once instead of paying everybody through PayPal. That takes five hours. So we've been doing that with them and, and the other creators that work with us on a weekly basis. That makes several videos a week for us. We do, we want to make sure that everyone gets trained properly and everyone has the best opportunity with us. So we will stop every now and then. And like for Q4 right now, we're ramping up already in August. So you know, we've seen a lot of growth. We had our biggest month ever last month, middle of summer for hoodies and sweats, which everyone thought was crazy. But we've we've, we've grown rapidly through the summer and a lot of people have been buying more stuff. So we're getting ready with new creators for winter. Speaker 2 It's funny you say you had your best month last month. So many people, you know, because the economy is a bit rocky, oftentimes people get scared around like whether they should start a business or like, you know, if your business isn't growing, well, it's easy to say, oh, it's the economy or now it's not the right time. But there's always companies growing no matter what time, right? And it comes down to your ability to execute the the quality of your product or your service, your culture, all these internal things that you have 100% control over. Speaker 1 100%, I think it's a great point, but you know, I'm in a group message where I always hear the guys talking about, you know, how it's a bad month or Facebook or this or that, and we've seen things happen. But at the end of the day, like you have to go back and look at your structure and your organization. How is your marketing like? Are you solving a problem? I would not start a business right now unless I was solving a problem. There's giant levers that people are learning to pull on. There's a huge problem lever. There's a bigger solution, bigger lever. And when you find those problems in the market and you're able to solve them with a better solution, I think that you're always going to be relevant And that regardless of the seasonality of a product, because that's what we've been hearing, it's a seasonal product. Obviously not. Obviously, it's not a seasonal product because we found a way to make it relatable to our customers throughout the entire year, whether it's middle of summer or dead in the winter when it's -5° outside. So it's really just, can you do that within your own organization? Perfect example is this new company we have coming out on. There's been a couple big players in there. It's filtered shower water. the United States has horrible, horrible water. The hard water in Florida, I mean, people were getting actually sick from how bad the water was. It's a huge problem because you're a Tam. There is everybody who's ever existed because everybody showers Now you fix their water and you do it in a way where they actually see results from it. That's a year round brand. So I've been looking at these things because of course, as entrepreneurs, we get excited about industries that are doing really well. And I think that you know when when you start a business now or even companies that are existing now that may be having a hard time finding a finding a problem in their industry and fixing it will be one of the biggest solutions to to become more profitable to grow your business. Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree 110%. Start with the problem. Sometimes no, Sometimes. Often times, aspiring founders, they get so obsessed with the actual product and fall in love with the product because you need to fall in love with the problem that you're solving. It's so critical, right? I love the concept of cell painkillers, not vitamins. Speaker 1 Yep, that's I actually never heard that one. Speaker 2 Yeah, OK. So just rounding it back to the creators piece, how many creators are you working with right now in total across all both brands every month? Speaker 1 If if we include ambassadors, we we have a little over 8000. Speaker 2 OK. So that's kind of a bit of AI guess a wrap around for what's required to build a business at your scale, how many creators to work with. So when it comes to I guess working with a well established creator versus someone fresh to the field, talk me through that. Working with a well established creator vs. someone fresh to the field Yeah. And let me also touch base on on that last piece for people who are watching that are going to say, well, that's that's just a crazy number. Go find 10 good creators that make great content for your brand and it will do everything and anything for growth. Find 10, find 10 and watch that happen because you're going to find 10 solid creators that make unbelievable content that know exactly what to do to make the ad go viral or for the hook to be long enough that people watch it to click buy. Those are the people that you want for your brand. The only way you're going to find that out is by going and actually testing in the market, finding a bunch of different people that do a bunch of different things, seeing which one hits and then finding that needle in the haystack until you get 10 of them. And then that's going to work really well. The other piece to to your point is when you are when I look at a well established creator, what happens is this, and this is not all creators, but a lot of people that have a big following dilute. They dilute what their brand is because they work with everybody and anybody that will pay them. And what that happened, what happens there is people like I've seen her or I've seen him, they promote every company under the sun. I'm sure this company paid her a lot of money to say that you lose that also not to mention you would be very surprised on an organic sales. There's a couple, there's a couple people that they defy the odds. Alex Earl, Livy Dunn, you know, people like that when they do a brand deal, their followers convert to turn Tony. He's one of these other guys we've worked with. He's huge on TikTok. He was on Forbes last year. He he has like a cult like following that will buy what he talks about because he doesn't work with so many brands. When you have a big creator that works with everybody, you're you're almost like throwing away your money, almost lighten a match to it. You have to be very careful when you have tight funds and you have to work with people that have now worked with a lot of companies that are so bought in with you that they're going to keep making content for you. My girls will go out and they'll be at college and people be like, wait, you're the comfort girl? Because they're associating them with the brand now because they've been with us for two years. Like we've kept, we have a 97% retention rate on creators, so they'll stay with us as long as the business is around. And we've kept that through through Purely White as well. And that is what makes a good relationship with a fresh creator. You find that they're good that they can speak well on camera. They don't sound like they're selling you something. They don't sound like an ad. But then what they're able to do is they take that content and they're able to put in an organic setting where people are just going to keep watching and keep watching it. And they pump out content where for a big celebrity, they're not going to pump out five videos a week for you. You'll be lucky if you get one a month. So that's for a new brand. You have to be very cautious of that. Speaker 2 And talk to me around TikTok shop, right? TikTok Shop Like how much is that playing into the growth of your brand right now or like purely wide or, or, or comfort? Speaker 1 So purely white, unbelievable. We have an impulse buy price point. So for again, anybody watching impulse buy right? Like anything under $29.00 on TikTok shop can do incredible from an organic standpoint. If you don't have the money to go and run ads yet, go put a bunch of videos on TikTok shop, send him to a creator, have her make or him make videos and post it organically on shops. And if you get enough people, you're going to get a couple blow up videos that's going to go. That's, that can literally change your business. There's businesses that I have been around like since I started my oral care brand that have been around with my brand that had no name. And now they're blowing up on TikTok shops and they're doing unbelievable numbers because they got in early and they figured out the method. So that's pretty interesting. Comfort is the number one clothing and apparel brand, apparel and fashion brand on TikTok in the world. So in, in regards to our niche, we're number one. And the reason why we're number one is because when you have so many people posting about a product and you're also driving like like paid traffic to those ads, it actually gives them a better a better way to go viral because you're already putting budget behind them. You're getting engagement, likes, comments, follows, then TikTok is going to see that that's working well and they're going to push it organically. So a lot of the time we'll have, you know, 50 sales on a video and then the girls will say, well, we did 350 sales today on this video. So the rest of that was all organic. So you're kind of just killing two birds with one stone by having them make videos on shops, putting paid budget behind it, but then allowing Tik Tok's algorithm to push that into the market. So TikTok shops is an incredible, incredible way to build your business. They also will put money into products that they see doing well, where the customer will get a cheaper deal on TikTok shops than they would anywhere else. And that's helped with a lot of the Amazon friction. You could see a product on from comfort on TikTok shops and TikTok may give you another $15 off or another 25% off. And all of a sudden you're like, I'm not buying it on the website. I'm buying it on TikTok shops. And then when you type in hoodie on search terms, we pop up first. So for any brand, it's like maybe you'll sell cheaper, maybe you won't be as profitable from ACPA perspective, but from an organic, you're going to get so much traffic, volume and sales that it's worth it's, it's worth doing it. I would say to any business, even if you don't think it's a viral product, go on TikTok shops. You'd be surprised. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's crazy. So you guys are the number one fashion clothing brand or #1 clothing brand. Speaker 1 We're number one in fashion and apparel in the United States right now. Speaker 2 For TikTok shop. Speaker 1 Yeah, for TikTok shop. Speaker 2 Wow, that's impressive, dude. Well, we have to work towards rapping, but we've got to talk about ads, right? What makes a good ad? Because you've got this, you've got, you've talked us through kind of your creator blueprint and you're working with a crap ton of creators, but then you're using basically paid advertising, Meta and TikTok mainly, right? Yep. To kind of pour gasoline on the fire and just really grow this thing. So what makes a good ad and what have you seen working right now for your brands? Speaker 1 OK, So what makes a good ad is this. There's three layers. There's your hook, there's your middle of the content where they're talking about personal experiences and why they love the product, why it's different from other products in the market. And then there is a call to action at the end of the video where they're talking about this FOMO aspect of they're always sold out or they're never in stock. These products are limited edition. There's so many things that are relevant to our brand because we do sell out so fast that when the girls make videos, they want to create that FOMO, that fear of missing out for the customer to say, you know what, I've been seeing this everywhere. Let me click by now. This is the key for everyone to understand is people do not need time to make a decision. They need information. So when you have someone who's watching your video, you TikTok is applauding long form content, a minute and a half, two-minute videos, keep them there, feed them with information, fuel their desire to purchase, give them a reason why they want to go by. And if you can do that through your hook, your middle of content and your call to action, you're going to have an incredible ad that that's really the that's the secret sauce to it. Speaker 2 Majority of your ads, like basically all of them, that's just UGC made, made by you, your creators, right? You don't create any custom. Speaker 1 You don't need to do that. That's a waste of money. You don't have to do you. It's a waste of money because it's not relatable. It could do well like doctor Squatch did a great job with with some of their ads in the beginning to bring their brand to to be what it is today. So I mean, I but you know, there's budget for that. If you have a big budget, go ahead, try some commercial style ads. But UGC would an iPhone, no professional camera be as relatable as possible and you will get the best results for your videos. So that's been a huge game changer for us is go get a ring light, stand in front of it. Try on clothing with, you know, a pretty blank background and showcase the product, the colors you, how it looks on you. What's the favorite color that you think you look the best in? You know, really allocate the products that you think will look best for everyone. Custom, right? So 11 hoodie may do well for one girl and another may do well for another girl. There's also things that we're doing outside of that. We do St. interview content where we actually pull this is legitimate random people off the street and we interview them about the clothing and then we give them a free set at the end. How to get your brand in front of the right people Increases watch time increases, click through by 6 by 6 X and people go and they buy there. It does incredible for us on Meta as well. And then you also have podcast ads, the same thing, right? People go on a podcast and you have someone who's getting interviewed that day and they go and they are wearing your product. And then they mentioned a little snippet about the brand and people want to listen to it, right? Everyone wants to listen to a podcast. And then there's other styles of that content too, where, you know, we have travel hoodies where we have six or eight different zippers between the pants and the hoodie, where comfort right now is one of the most worn sweat sets in airports. Like that's what we're known for. I get a text today where someone says, I was just in the airport. I just saw a comfort. We've become the travel set, right? And once you start to find that trend with your business, you double down on that. You come out with a travel essentials hoodie. This girl that I work with, Jen, she had with the idea for the travel hoodie and it was unbelievable. So, you know, you listen to other people that that are willing to, you know, tell you about your brand. They have different perspectives. All of that is done really well for us also. Speaker 2 OK, all right, interesting, interesting. OK, OK, so lots of questions here. I want to unpack you. You talk about I guess these creators that have to be relatable, they have to you know and you use that as ads and the content. How to pay your creators How do you work out what to pay them? Are you use, are you doing just like Commission based deals or like how do you work out that piece of the puzzle? Speaker 1 We pay 10% Commission and the reason why we do that and the reason why we don't pay upfront is the same reason that I explained to the creator. There's a big risk involved with us paying money upfront and it not performing well when we know it's quantity and quality matching each other. You want good quality, but how many times have you heard someone say that ads going to crush it and then it does horrible or you're like this ad's not going to do well, then it blows up. You don't know what you don't know. So when you explain that to the creator, the one thing we've done very well has been 100% transparent throughout the entire process of what we do, how we do it, why we do it. And when they understand that and they align with it, they're more they're more excited to make more videos because they know that's just more money for them. Also not to mention. Some of the girls that we work with that make money, if we paid them a base rate, they would make 95% less than what they make right now. So you have unlimited upside. We've been running a video right now from nine months. It's paid my creator over $300,000 in. Like how can you beat that? That's her whole, that's three years of her working. I'm at her job right now and that's one video that's been running. It's it's we did that were purely why too. We had a video do 4044 million views on it. It has never stopped running. You know, you have these creators that make these videos and they understand. Well, wow, if Hudson just paid me one time for this, I would have no upside potential in this. It's like what commercials do now. They used to actually pay you a percentage of the commercial. Now they'll just say, hey, we'll give you 1500 bucks and film it. Everyone understands that now and like what we think is like, I don't mind to spend the money because it's profitable for us. But on top of that, they're more excited to stay with you because they know they're worth more. And that just goes back to what we spoke about earlier is like they know their value with the brand is there and they'll keep pumping content for you. Speaker 2 And that's how. OK. And then if you take that piece of content, then you put ad budget. So OK, got you. Got you. I understand now. All right, awesome. OK, that that solves that one. OK, All right. So when it comes to the ad landscape, what's changed over the last few years? What’s changed in the ad landscape over the last few years? So what we've noticed is, I mean, I'll be honest, Nathan, I like I said purely white deluxe. We never really got ads to work that well for us in the last two years with running comfort ads. I mean, that would probably be the best testament and responses. Like we've noticed that buyers are smarter than they ever were and that they want to buy something that has mean it. If when we make videos that are just like there's like girls girl videos and stuff like that, that doesn't relate my demographics on Facebook or like the Facebook moms of the world. And they're incredible and they love us And and then our TikTok demographic is younger and they love us, right, But they love us for different reasons. There's there's ads that cater to certain people and there's ads that don't. What we've done is everybody that buys from us, every creator has a similar idea of what they want their content to be like, and it all relates. They keep bridging this gap where, for instance, they talk about how we're a mental health brand. They talk about what our hoodies feel like, how they feel like a hug. They showcase the fabrics, they show all these different things. Once we started to get more technical with our videos, we saw an incredible return from that on Ants from a regards to ads changing. I mean, yeah, at one point when TikTok shops came out, TikTok web conversions took a dump and then it came back up. Like all of a sudden we went from like a five row ass to like a 1.5. And I'm like, what did we do different? And then we find out TikTok shops just got rolled out and we're like, maybe we should get on this. So you know, that happens. Or when Advantage plus come came out for Facebook, like, you know, when they start to release these new betas in these new tests that you should always hop on them because odds are they're coming out with it because they know they're going to prioritize it. So those we've seen, the, the best advice I could give is always pivot because what happens is once you learn something, could we all feel like this? Once you learn something, they fucking change it. So like, I just figured it out. And then they're like, Nah, actually, we're going to go do this. And then you're like, how do we learn this? You have to be excited about the unknown and you have to be excited about, you know, just getting uncomfortable and learning something new. And with ads, that's, that's the key. The content will stay the same and get better, but testing what they're coming out with is going to be huge. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. All right. I love that because, yeah, we've always noticed that as well. New features that that goes from an organic standpoint as well, right? Any new features that any of these platforms bring out, if you use them, you're just going to get more reach because they want to push them, they want to get. So because they obviously know that these new features will keep people on the platform. OK. So we'll work towards wrapping up a couple of questions. Key tools for ecommerce founders You talked about Notion as one of the tools that you use within your business or any other key tools that you would recommend to ecom founders? Speaker 1 ChatGPT you have to you have to you and ChatGPT have to have a kid and like you have to figure out how how to it's it's the best copywriter in the world if you know how to use it the right way. You have to be so specific, ask it exact questions, but it's going to do unbelievable things for your business. We'll also help you with your business when you ask you questions about other industries and things that you're trying to learn. You know, between that between notion, I mean that that's really my top two. I also love to go on TikTok when I don't really use TikTok, but I love to go on every now and then and look at what businesses are running ads and why are those ads doing well. Go jump into someone's Facebook ad library. Go do it to mine. Go take a look and see how what's their oldest video running? They've been running it since 2022. It's probably making the money. You should find a way to bridge that and bring it into your business. So I always just use the resources of what's doing well. And also this is like one of the biggest things in the world. You have to find a mentor. My business me particularly like Davey Fogarty is is I would consider him one of my best friends. Now. He's good friends with with Greta, who intro to us. Davey has was my mentor. He didn't even know who I was. I would just watch his videos on YouTube, but I would take notes. And then one day we, we finally got connected and the first thing I did when we got on our call was I tried to give him value and instead of him just what he's used to giving everybody else to value. So I think that if you find a mentor and you show them that you're worth it and that you're, you can bring something to the table, you get this incredible return where they'll start to just plug and play you in with the people that they know. And I think that that's really helped my business as well. And I learned new things from people who have Notion. I've had Notion for years and I learn new things every day on it, how I can build and be more organized. So those I would say are the keys like that. That's really what I do. That's most of it. Speaker 2 I've got one last question for animal Wrap. What’s the most important thing when it comes to mindset for founders? OK, what's the most important thing when it comes to mindset for founder? Speaker 1 That's a great question. I believe in the law of attraction. I believe that thoughts become things, then that everything is created twice, once in your mind and once in the real world. Everything. This chair that I'm sitting in, the computer that we're on, this was somebody's thought and they turned it into reality. I think when you decide that you're never going to quit and that all you're going to do is work towards your dream, you have to be a little delusional, a little crazy. You have to see something that no one else can see. And when anybody else tells you no and and they say that maybe this isn't going to work, you have to understand a lot of that as projections of their own insecurities onto you. If you do what they say and you do what they do, you're going to get what they have every single time. So my advice is don't take advice from people who don't have what you want because if you ask a founder of a company that you aspire to be like, hey, I want to go do this, should I do it? Odds are, and nine times out of 10, they're going to tell you, yes, go follow your dream. That's a great idea and go get acclimated. Go get excited about it. When you ask the wrong people, they're going to immediately shut down your dreams. And that happened to me. I had to fight through even the closest people in my life to get to where I am. So I would say keep your strong mind, do not get flustered, keep the blinders on and just focus on the fucking goal. That's it. Speaker 2 Yeah, well, dude, thank you so much for being just so open, honest, giving and sharing just incredible experiences on how you've built these amazing brands. And look, dude, I'm excited to continue to watch your journey from afar. And yeah, thank you again. This is going to really help our community. Speaker 1 Nathan, thank you so much, Nathan. Speaker 2 Hey guys, if you love this episode, you've got to check out my interview with Davey Fogarty on how he finds trends in undercapitalized markets and turns them into multi $1,000,000. Speaker 1 Businesses, I'm generally looking for trends globally. We find trends that haven't been kind of capitalized in certain markets or in certain marketing channels, yes. And then we also obviously add our flair to it. You need to differentiate your product.