The Real Cost of Perfection in E-commerce and How 80% Wins Faster

(upbeat music) Welcome to Customers Who Click, the podcast for DTC brands who care about conversions, not just traffic. I'm Will Lawrence and founder of a CRO agency that helps brands fix the leaks and turn more clicks into customers. Each week I chat with brand founders, operators, and growth leaders about what's actually working and the challenges getting in the way. Let's dive in. Peter, welcome to the show. Do you wanna introduce yourself, give us a bit of your background and how you've got to where you are today? - My name's Peter. I'm the head of e-commerce and digital slash growth for Sick Grilla, which is, I think, one of, if not the biggest men's grooming brands in the UK, especially independent. And my experience comes from ranging from start my career in women's laundry, and adult toys, moving on to gaming merchandise and rubber duck launches to now men's grooming. So it's pretty varied and. - Quite varied, yeah. - All e-commerce or DTC. - Yeah, I actually started in E-Com, 22 years ago. My first ever job was for a, one, probably one of the first online guitar shops in the UK. Very much ended at this time. And I was only 15, 37 now. - That's pretty cool. - Yeah. - Yeah, it goes back a while. - Yeah, I have some to shut up to someone, I think on the podcast the other day. And I was like, I remember when I did this thing, I was like, oh, that was 11 years ago. That doesn't sound, it didn't feel that long ago. - Yeah. - When you're working with people born in sort of mid to up 2000s, it's quite disturbing. - Yeah. So what are you excited about at the moment? I mean, we're, I'm not entirely sure when this will go live. I think it'll be end of jam, but night of jam start the year. What are you excited about in 2026? - From a slick gorilla point of view, where we're only really just starting to implement new tech and new website features and new ranges. There's not been a lot of work done before to really take it to the next level. So yeah, really excited to try new things. Obviously, Shopify is always bringing new tools and new features that make it more interesting. Obviously, AI shopping with chat GPT and Gemini. That's gonna be really, really interesting. We wanna be one of the first brands in our niche to be there. And yeah, there's just a lot, so much potential for the slick gorilla to keep growing in the new year. Really great time for us. - Awesome. Yeah, I think there's a lot of talk about chat GPT or like, just AI shopping in general. How quickly we're gonna get there as a thing that's actually really useful and valuable to brands and worth putting a lot of time in. I don't know, but given how fast AI has evolved over the last, like 18 months, it's probably quite reasonable to think, all right, we should be putting some time into this this year. Definitely, probably Q2, or Q2H2, making sure leading up to that Black Friday period next year, that could be a really crucial thing. There's actually looking at one of my clients analytics the other day to explore just this actually. And I think they're getting about 1% of revenue from chat GPT now, which is not a small amount, one percent doesn't sound much. It's not a small amount of money. So it's worth looking into. Yeah, I think it's just being ahead of the curve, obviously, up until fairly recently, really recently. There was a lot of talk about how to optimize for it. I can't remember the exact name of the file, but having a similar file to a robot's text or something like that, providing, I've forgotten the name of the extension on it, but that was meant to be your next portal and priority. But I think with Shopify's latest announcement, there's very much going to be based around, I think, tags, and just really optimizing your product information and meta fields for it instead of working on files. Yeah, I think from what I've heard, it's nothing different you'll really have to do, but it's just making sure that on that page, every single possible question is outlined, every benefit, every feature, every technical aspect of a product that someone might want to know is on that page. And the benefit really now is, obviously a lot of people don't scroll below, basically the add to cart section of a page. You're probably at 50% max at their next section and then it plummets again. But it's still worth building out basically a really detailed FAQ that all these tools can read and just go, "Cool, I get it, this is really clearly laid out." Your product has these ingredients, it does not have these ingredients suitable for XYZ. And you don't have to worry about being too marketing salesy in the way you talk about it. You're just giving the factual information to Chatty. It's a bit like SEO from 10, 15 years ago where you were writing for a machine, not for a human, and then it pivoted to human, not machine. And now it feels like we're going back the other way and writing for a machine and not a human. It just seems to change every kind of five to 10 years. Yeah, I've been interested to see how this develops. So what's the goal for Slick Guerrilla in this year, really? There's a lot. We're expanding our product range, so we're going into skincare, obviously still expanding our core range of hair products. Outside of that, it's really just providing the best experience possible on site. That's my main priority. We are very big on Amazon. I think the powder over sort of Q4, there was a period where we hit 30,000 units on the last 30 days. Obviously, profitability is much lower on Amazon. So there's a keen interest to kind of drive Shopify. Subscriptions, new loyalty. As we've just discussed already, much improved product listings, more information better FAQs. And yeah, really getting the most out of gorgeous as well. We just want, again, it's having those sort of basics in place to just provide the best possible experience for our customers. Then on top of that, you start building the exciting stuff. Quizzes, subscribe and save, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I know when we spoke last time, you're quite a fan of getting the fundamentals done, going back to basics, making sure all those fundamentals are in place and then worrying about the fancy fun stuff that everyone hype up. And everyone says, "Oh, this all increased your conversion, right? "About to 40% and stuff." But if the fundamentals aren't there, it's not really going to do anything because it's amplifying something that's not very good. Yeah, I mean, we already have a quiz, but when you look at the analytics around how it converts, it's not as high as you would like to think. It's more a bit of fun, but when your FAQ is only three questions long, that's much more important than a quiz. So yeah, it's the basics. It's really getting customers through the website, finding what they want, being comfortable and their purchase, and then getting them through the checkout process without any issues. I feel like it's kind of boring, but it works. Yeah. We are just going to take a quick break. Have you ever stared at your website reports and thought, "Where do we even start?" "You're not alone." That's why we built Priority GPT, a free tool that helps e-commerce brands figure out which ideas are worth testing and which ones to skip. Just plug in your idea, answer a few questions, and Priority GPT scores it for impact and give suggestions on how to improve it. It's how we prioritize growth for our clients, and now it's yours free. Grab it now at customerswhoclick.com, forward slash Priority Dash Testing, or hit the link in the show notes. Now, back to the episode. Because you've got, I've just got people who, I don't know whether I call them higher in 10, but it's the people who don't need us and not the information. They're kind of willing to just take a look at the products. Maybe they see that it's highly rated and whatever and they go, "That looks like it's for me. Call, I'll give it a go." I'm probably that sort of customer at certain price range. I get suckered in by a bit of a brand, some advertising. Take a look at a PDP and I go, "Yeah, this looks pretty good. I'll give it a go." But you've got other people who will say, "I want to know every little aspect of this product. What are the ingredients in it and everything?" And if that information's there, not there, they won't buy. Yeah, we have a very, an issue that is a good issue to have and why I wasn't really expecting it. We have a really heavy gifting customer base. So we have to tailor our products not only to men who are looking to find the new Stein product they want to use and alternatives for pre-existing brand that they might not be happy with, but also feeding into girlfriends, wives and parents and making sure that they understand the products and that it's what they want for their partner or what their partner is asked for. also is what their children want as well. We have quite a strong demographic of teenage boys, sort of that 15 to 18 age demographic is quite strong for us at the moment. So we have to tailor that content to fit both of them. So good problems to have. - Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of people don't think about this exactly. I mean, how did you figure out that you've got a big gifting audience? - The guy who started the company, Ari and Ash, and then Lee RCLO have always focused on that. We have had gifts sets in previous years. But this year, we brought our digital marketing in-house under me for the first time. And we just went really hard on kind of female targeting, free matter and ad words. Again, the basics are product feed. For the box sets, the content was heavily keyworded around gifting. And we just really, really went for it on-site provided to gift landing page. So we kind of had that seed that the guys had done it before, had a little bit of success, but we really went very hard on it this year. And it paid off massively for us. And yet the optimizing the feed was really big for us. About 70% of our ad rent counter sales in the US came through Google shopping. And not looking for Slick or a ad rent counter. We'd never done it before. It was more around male ad rent counter, male grooming ad rent counter, men's hair ad rent counter. So we also brought in a lot of new customer, and a lot of the purposes were female buying for partners or kids. So that was another kind of indicator very early on in September that we really need to focus on this. - What, sorry, did you say, was this your first time doing an ad rent counter, did you say? - Yeah, I think, I might be speaking out, Tony. We were the first men's hair cent centered ad rent counter on the market. So it was our first one this year. We launched it in early September on a pre-order with 1,000 units and we sold out by mid October on pre-order only. We had no stock left once. We actually had stock in warehouse. Yeah, just trying to be. At the point, so you had 1,000 units on pre-search pre-order, did you have those units ordered and kind of ready to go? Or was it, yeah, okay. So in that case, what led to the decision to actually do an ad rent counter? Because that seems, that's not just less put together a Christmas gift bundle and sell it as a bundle. That is an entire new product that needs some work. It needs to thought, I'm guessing everything was everything sample sized in there. I think there was one or two full size products. And then a lot of kind of accessories. So I think home, scout brushes, key rings. We did source new products and new lines, like the lip balm, which is now on the website. But it was actually all started and being sourced before I started. I've only been with the company since April last year. Well, may. So they would already start it on a. They'd been thinking about that for. Well, probably since, before Christmas, right? I'm guessing they saw. Because on the women's side, there are a lot of these advent calendars, aren't they? Like in the beauty haircare, skincare. So I'm guessing they just saw that and thought, let's give it a go. There's nothing on the market for men. So. We work. So what happens? The buying team and the owners work really hard and trying to be quite innovative. So, you know, an advent calendar for the most part is more around the packaging as the hardest part and designing it. But after that, you kind of on the easy street a little bit. Yeah. And it's also great. Another way to look at products like we do. And I've done in previous roles, is looking at it from a PR perspective. So that's something the PR. Like publications can easily hook into. So whilst you might not view it as a huge success financially, or the margins might not be where they are, where you would like them to be compared to full price, normal products, the ability for us to get extra press and advertising and new eyeballs and new customers. It's seen in the vast majority of the advent calendars as new customers. So now they're brought into the SlickGurilla ecosystem. We can now target them for Valentine's Christmas. You know, we did a whole bit around retargeting those customers going, you know, hope you enjoy the advent calendar. You know, we really think these products go well with that. Here's a discount code. So it's great for new acquisition and brand awareness. Yeah, I suppose all these media sites will be, they all do the top 10 gifts for Christmas, top 10 men, top 10 women, top 10, you know, whatever, different budgets, everything. If you're the only brand, you know, every men's grooming brand is going to say, well, we've got this gift bundle of our top products. If you're the only one coming along and saying, well, we've got an advent calendar. That obviously stands out to them as, okay, that's something different. That's something a bit more interesting. So I imagine a lot more are just willing to take that up. You know, yeah, straight up price point was, I think very reasonable. It was around 50, 60 pounds. Okay, which for a 12 day advent calendar, where you're getting hair products, body washes, champos, accessories, it was, I've, we thought it was, it was really good value for money at the time. Yeah, awesome. Something you mentioned earlier about, you know, encouraging the team to be really innovative. And I remember something you mentioned to me last time was around, I can't remember exactly how you put it, but I think it was like 90% done is better than spending ages trying to make it perfect. Yeah, basically. Yeah. I think you've explained it a lot better than that. (laughs) My model for working is normally sort of like 80, 90% perfect. Let's crack on. My career has been mainly in scale, up sort of startups. My previous role was with Juskeek, where you know, took that from 300 grand a year to within three or four years, it was doing six million. And I was a one-man team for the first sort of 18 months. And then you get a junior, that's exactly. So it's just, in startups, it's very much my train of form by working is, it's better to get something up and running and implemented. Just shy of perfect. Then it is to just keep handing backwards and forwards. Otherwise you'll never launch just nothing, you can't be perfect. There's always something you want to change, like tweak at a certain point, you've got to pull the trigger. And that's worked very well for Slick Gorilla over the last sort of like eight months of just need to get stuff done. A good example is sort of, we do multi buy at the moment, which is ran through an app on Shopify. That was a 20, 30 minute setup. And then you know, we saw sort of a 10, 15% increase in A/V off the back of it. And our margins are actually better. When someone buys a pack of free with a 15% discount, then one with notice count. And that was a half an hour project that was a big win for us. Is it perfect? I'm 100% happy of how it looked. No. But we're now working on a better model and design. I think it does tend to be the look that holds them back, isn't it? It's always technically this does exactly what we want it to do. But if it doesn't look right, you know, 100%, right? That's where we get, oh, can we make it a bit bigger? Can we make it a bit smaller? Do we think it looked better in this format? And it's like, well, because my experience is the same, right? My background was start-ups, scale-ups. I had a startup of my own as well. So I'm very used to that kind of MVP. Let's just get something that works and does the job. And no one's going to complain about the look and just get it live, try it. And then we can iterate from that because, all right, you spent 20, 30 minutes on it. You maybe could have spent another couple of hours to make it look a lot better at how you wanted it. That, all right, maybe you could have done that. But there are other projects where you can probably get it live in a day or you can make it perfect in a week. But that's a lot of working time towards something that you don't know is going to work in. And you don't know if it's actually going to do what you want to do. Yeah, so half of our projects now give us kind of proof of concept. So then now I'm working with developers to build a bit of spoke piece for us to fit in with a subscription model. So you've got multi-buy with one time or subscription purchase. Yeah, so we can fill both needs. And you're right, it's we're an incredibly small team. It's myself pretty much doing all the digital marketing, Shopify management and Amazon. Looking after Amazon with one staff member helping. Obviously we've got graphic design chips as well. So I can't spend a week focused on this one little thing. And yeah, it's all about the kind of quick wins, the 18, 90% perfect. In a previous role, I think we spent six months hyper focused on flows that never, never happened while I was there. Here we've got all flows and even more flows than you would think because it was right. They are 80% there. So we have flows out the box, but we've also got sort of, you know, 12 month, win back, re-planned reminders. You know, we've got really in-depth post purchase. And again, okay, I'm not, you know, depending on the product they bought, they get, you know, how to use the product. That's quite, it was a, it's a very big flow. Probably 80% perfect. The designs of the emails, but they were there for peak. And that was what was important. We want this stuff there for, for Q4. Yeah, 80% done is better than not having an email. At all and not getting any performance. I mean, the only caveat to those if you are a high end luxury brand, we have to be very pretty. And you say that, but I mean, depending on what you're sending, obviously for a flow, you probably can't do this as much. But depending on what you're sending, if you really haven't got time, do a plain text email, get something out from the founder. Yeah, that is played that or or whoever someone's seen you in the company or whatever's relevant to that email. I speak to Jeremy Horowitz. God ages ago. The first episode we did, we did with him. And he was talking about, you don't need to, no one cares about personalization. It's about making things personal. So what he was talking about was having, you know, like someone in the warehouse, just being like, oh, hey, hey Peter, I know, I'm just packing up your order. I noticed you've, you've got this product in there. That's one of my favorites. This product actually goes really well with it. If you, if you just click this link, I can get it added to your order before it goes out at seven o'clock tonight or something. And you can do it in a way and you can, you can automate that of course, but you can do it in a way which appears to be personal and also doesn't require the fancy design. And look for that email, the design probably wouldn't, it probably lose the impact because you'd think it's a marketing message. I mean, that's, that is the trend, isn't it? Move towards text only try and make it look human. Yes, it's obviously the fancy block banner design. It depends what you're trying to do, doesn't it? If you're, if you're trying to get someone to add another product to their cart, then, yeah, then that plain text works really well. If you want to educate someone about the product and how to use it, then you want the images you want. GIF linked to a video, whatever it is. Yeah. But people happily accept the marketing style email. Yeah. So yeah, as you say, the design, how to use our products has got, you know, different styles and then how to achieve those styles. Whereas, yeah, yeah, we also wanted it that way. I've seen other brands who all email you post, just with a text email saying, you know, here's how to get the most out of the brand. You click link and then all of the guides are on one page. So you've got to sift through to find your product. Whereas I was quite adamant. I wanted to see way. Yeah, I felt that was the two quicker win. That was more like 50% perfect. Whereas for me, I did, I did one in inbox, like viewing it there and then with accessories and extra product recommendations at the bottom of the email. So we're still still cross selling, whilst being informational and not giving the hard sell. Yeah. And if you've got a product which can be explained in an email, then explain it in the email. Obviously, some, you know, they might link you to a page full of manuals and stuff. Yes, of course. Yeah. And I suppose maybe part of that is is analytics. You know, they don't want to send everyone back to a to the PDP to be the manual because they want the PDP to be more of a purchase page. And so they say, well, let's get people to a, um, to a dedicated manual page. In, in which case, you probably don't want to build out a thousand pages. Yeah. One for each product with, with the manual for that. Yeah. We're very lucky. We've, we're probably ranges fairly small. So if we did have to go like a page by page level, we can fairly quickly. And also with, with the changes in Shopify is quite possible to build landing pages, putting from metaphils. So we do that a lot where trying to keep it as simple as possible. Instead of like our quiz landing pages was built previously as a landing page per quiz result. Whereas I've, I've rebuilt it. Whereas actually one landing page and then it pulls the elements as metaphils from, um, yeah, from metaphils. So I only need one page template. Everything's pulled dynamically. Um, so it speeds it up a little bit because I don't have to make a change to 10 different templates. Yeah. Yeah, because that's the risk isn't it you, you might be happy managing 10 10 plates for a while on your own. Uh, as the company scales up, that becomes 20 templates. Yeah. And then maybe you leave the company or it's no longer your role to look after the pages. Someone else has to and suddenly they've inherited 20 pages that they don't know how to manage. It's, it's a mix of, or, or no one picks it up. 80% perfect, but also keep it as simple as possible is like I think very much key to, to scaling. Uh, yeah. I've always I think you just get bogged down to heavily. Yeah. Yeah, it's where to do this build up because nothing gets completed and everything gets pushed back because. And I'm guilty of this. I have to plan out things in a lot of detail. And then it feels overwhelming. And I'm like, right, where do I start? Well, it's going to take me ages to write all these emails where actually I could just, I could just get on with it and write a few of the emails and go, okay, well, that's better than not having these emails in place. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Uh, so what do you see as the challenges for the business or what are the challenges or what do you see as the challenges in over the next year? Um, I think a general one is add costs. It's getting more and more expensive for us to acquire new customers. Um, during during gifting season, um, it's we do quite well because we have a much higher, obviously, AOV. Um, but I think for me, the challenge I'm seeing nine months out of the year is the acquisition of new mail customers who are the actual users of our products. Um, so that's a big one and a big headache for us at the moment is just sort of getting those add costs down, but whilst also getting AOV up. So we've done a lot of work again, a lot of very quick work to get AOV up, whether it's checkout exclusive offers, um, product page exclusive offers in pop up form, which have really helped. Um, yeah, it's definitely our cost and then that's a lot of people have probably find as resources. Um, you know, companies are kind of cutting their hiring budgets. Um, you know, so it's, it's a resource thing and how we get around that. Um, that's the main ones, but I feel like that's a lot of people. I think heads of ecoms and ecom managers are given a lot more to do than 10 years ago. You are also a handling the three PL, your handling email marketing whereas before you pretty much just handled a website and a bit of ZRO from my experience. Now you're everything. Um, yeah, that's, but I feel like that's a lot of people. It's not just not just us. Um, yeah, I mean, you see, I mean, I think you've seen it for a long time. Really the job, the job, um, job specs, which are like header marketing, header, ecom, but you're actually literally running the entire, basically the entire business on your own. Yeah. And expected to do everything. That's like, well, one person can't possibly do that. Yeah. Um, it's, and also for a lot of people, whereas they're experienced best, you know, there'll be a lot of head of the heads of ecomers, head of marketing who quite possibly haven't touched ads for quite a while because it's not been their responsibility. They've had an agency or they've had someone doing that. Um, and, and yeah, maybe you can get to that 80% on a lot of stuff on your own, especially with YouTube, chat, you, T or everything out there, but still a lot of time to figure this out. Yeah. I mean, we're outsourcing where we can for standalone projects to help kind of get a strong basin, um, doing a big project at the moment on gorgeous for automation, macros, AI chat box set up. Um, you know, that's, that's a project we do outsource. But it's just kind of then working the budgets to make sure we can actually justify it really right now. Um, and another challenge is obviously the appearance of TikTok shop. Um, and trying to be successful now with our, um, not damaging the brand, but still keeping our brand identity. Um, a lot of, I'm sure a lot of brands are struggling with TikTok shop. We've competitors coming in who are sell it low and sell it fast, you know, 700 affiliate videos a day. Um, whereas a brand like ourselves, we don't want to do that. We need, we want control of who is associated with the brand. So yeah, take talk. shop is another. Finally, what are you most looking forward to in 2026? Personally, professionally. Professionally, we, the new brand, the new website, subscriptions, the new range, all happening in the same month. So I'm quite excited to actually just get January out the way. It would be nice. Just so I can start actually logging off on time. Outside of that, we, there's a lot of changes coming from an operational perspective internally, you know, everything's being revamped, you know, from fulfillment to customer service. Everything is being looked at and we just want to be a well-oiled, optimized business. And we have a lot of really exciting partners in the US and UK boots, ASOS and then in the US, we're in CBS and Walmart now. So it's just, it's just really exciting for the brand to be entering these new retail partners, which only has a knock on effect for the business in general. Yeah. It also has a negative impact on the website. Slightly, it's really hard to see returning customer rate because especially in the UK, you can go to Am, you can buy from us directly, but then you might go to Amazon, you might go to boots, you might go to ASOS for your second purchase or your third. So that is one of our challenges to sort of seeing where it's trying to gauge a retention rate. But it also helps because people see it and boots buy and boots and then come direct the next time. So it's, you know, mixed issue. Yeah. And I suppose, but also the expanding that retail side, add to big workload, right? And so you can't keep, if you're adding more and more workload on, then the options are, you bring a more resource to handle that workload, or do you find ways to make that workload much more efficient and automated, ideally. And it's a mix. So there we are increasing headcount slowly and kind of quite methodically, but also looking at where we can utilize automation and AI. So I think customer services are a really good example of where that can be achieved. We, you obviously can't just not have customer service. You still need someone monitoring it for the, for the slightly random questions you might receive. But yeah, we're doing a mix. So we're doing a heavy amount of automation with gorgeous, still have someone looking after it, but then they can also expand into other areas of the business, because they'll have less time spent on tickets. They can come and help, you know, every morning, I checked the free PL, see if anyone has got stuck that would then you can move that someone else free my time up to use my expertise in SEO ads, Shopify development, some of that. But yeah, we're very careful with increase in headcount and just kind of keeping it quite, quite a lean business, which also allows us to move really fast. The less people we have, the quicker we are to a certain degree, we're making decisions, but then yeah, you hit an inflection point where then there's so much going on, you can't, you could make the decision, but you can't act on it. Can't even move on to it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a fine balancing act. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Peter. If anyone wanted to reach out to you, what's the best way of doing that? LinkedIn, I don't, I don't use any other social media, which is quite strange. But yeah, I am only on LinkedIn, no Instagram or tick, definitely no tick, top of my age. All right. Awesome. Thanks so much. No, thank you. That's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe, leave a quick review and share it with someone who will find it useful. And if you're looking to help with landing pages or website optimization, you can find me on LinkedIn. See you next time.