500% Growth: Inside Cadence’s DTC and Retail Playbook

Today we have Maddie Martin, Head of Marketing at Cadence.

We launched in the UK first in April 2024. 2026, we're looking to grow 500%. This year we're ahead of our forecasts every single month so far this year.

What has driven the over-doubling of your first order sub rate? What tactics have you guys implemented to do that?

I'd say the free gift mechanic is a massive one.

Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Operators Podcast. Today we have Maddie Martin, head of marketing at Cadence. Cadence is one of the fastest growing brands in the performance hydration space. Since launching in 2024, they have scaled quickly to multimillion dollar revenue, breaking into a category worth over $30 billion globally, and they're planning to grow 500% this year and are on track to hit $100 million in revenue by 2027. We're talking about how Cadence created their packaging after hundreds of iterations to drive incremental revenue. What Cadence's approach has been with Facebook ads and how the brand is expanding into retail this year from the measurement and marketing lens. You guys are going to love this episode, especially if you're trying to disrupt a competitive and crowded category with lots of legacy players. Maddie, where are you calling in from? Are you in the UK?

Yeah, I'm in Manchester at the moment. I say at the moment, I'm always in Manchester, but yeah, come over to the States every now and then, every few months, see the team in New York. But yeah, our team's all over the place.

Like, just quickly on that point, because I've been thinking about this a little bit more. When you say all over the place, is it really like global?

Yeah, so I mean, we have, uh, I say that we're across the UK and US. So like, we've got people, you know, in Scotland, um, in London, Manchester, Leeds in the UK. And then, um, US, it's, it's typically kind of just East Coast or West Coast. Got a couple of people on Mountain Time, um, but it's good because I mean, I'm, I, I'm the kind of guy who will pester someone at all, at all hours. So You know, if there's always someone online for me to, for me to peck the head off. So, um, yeah.

Well, it's true. And that's what, that's what I was thinking about just this week. We're like, we're equally global. We don't have many people in the UK specifically, but like a lot of Eastern Europe, Spain, obviously I have a big team in the Philippines. We have a lot in South America. So we're just like spread out over time zones. And I think the thought that I had was actually working PST really is at a disadvantage, more and more of a disadvantage. I think EST hours end up feeling like you just have better access to your like global workforce if you can kind of swing those. That's why we're recording now at 7 AM PST. I'm like, I'm getting my morning started early.

Yeah, that's it. Honestly, like I, because I do not mind working late, honestly, but if you were to get me up at 3 o'clock in the morning to start work, it'd be a different kind of kettle of fish. So it's one of those, I tend to enjoy the morning kind of call-free. That's really the time to really lock in and kind of dig into things like especially especially with my performance marketing manager also being in the UK. It's good to kind of like dial in on the performance side, a lot of the metrics there. And then afternoons tend to just be, you know, 2 PM onwards for me, just like full. Um, and then, you know, typically have a bit of a break kind of like 7 till 10-ish, and 10 PM onwards is like locked back in again. So yeah.

And then what's the one thing I think is really cool about Cadence is at least from my perspective, from the outside looking in, is like you guys seem to really hire people that, uh, live that lifestyle. Like I've never seen you, I've never seen anyone at Cadence that's like not into training and health and wellness. And it seems like you guys really like hire people to not only, not that are not only talented at their roles, but also fit that, that lifestyle and that ethos. Like obviously I know Ross is an athlete.

I know, I think you're a runner.

Is that, do you guys like, when you're hiring, are you filtering for that type of person that's like into the same hobbies and lifestyle that, that the Caden's brand represents?

Yeah, at, at the beginning the team was very active, very into running, like especially cuz we were super, super brand focused. You know, the marketing team when I started was essentially myself, two partnerships guys and a couple of content guys. So, you know, when we are thinking about our content, especially be leaning so hard into, especially the running, like you kind of need people who, who kind of get that world. And then again, same on the partnership activation side, like we need people who are, who are deep within those communities already. Um, it's definitely not kind of a prerequisite as I've built the team out, especially on the performance side, like it literally doesn't factor in at all. Um, for me it's more, for me honestly, it's more not just experience, not just WaveWorks, but just like someone who's seen what zero looks like and seen what greatness looks like and is actually kind of scaled that up. So yeah, so the team is now very much like a mixed bag, I would say. Like, not everyone loves running, not everyone loves kind of, you know, working out all the time, but I'd say that everyone really does live for scaling and growing this company, um, which I think is the most important thing.

Yeah, well, I want to, I want to start there. Before we do that, thank you to the sponsors: Motion, Richpanel, Aftersale, Revo, Impression.

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So there's a lot, I got a lot of questions here. I've been following the brand pretty closely for the last 4 or 5 months. I've, I've brought it up a handful of times on other shows with Connor and Cody. Um, so I wanna ask you some, some stuff about that. I saw your, your tweet about like you, how, how much you enjoy watching your cohorts for sure. Like that's totally been me in the last 4 months. I think I've placed like 5 or 6 Cadence orders. You know, I got the, I start my day every morning with, with a sachet and then, and then a scoop of Momentous creatine. And that's been my, my morning routine every day for the last like 6 months. And it's great. So I wanna, I wanna dig into that a little bit later, but I wanna keep on going down the path that we were just going down on team. So you said you started off with you kind of leading the charge on marketing, uh, 2 brand partnerships people and 2 content people. So like maybe, maybe taking one step back first, first, what functions do you oversee at Cadence? And then can you, we don't need to speak to like every single role, but like just generally, how do you have the team structured to support all of those functions?

Yeah, I mean, it, it's, it's developed a lot recently, honestly. Um, so, you know, I started working on the brand. February 2024 before they launched. I was essentially brought on to kind of like launch it essentially. So I built the website. I came from an SEO background, so, you know, very familiar with just like organic and websites and just like how to sell online organically. Um, you know, we were very brand focused.

So like, wait, can I ask you a question about that? So you said you built, you built the website. What is it? What, like, like you designed it, you developed it? Like what, you were Driving that forward.

Yeah, so I mean, um, essentially nobody else touched the Shopify until about August of 2024. Um, so I built the site on Shopify before the first launch, and then I was the only one really in the business who really knew how to work the Shopify, to be honest with you. So, um, like I said, it really was kind of having my hand into every single function other than probably, you know, shooting on a camera. Um, until, until relatively recently, honestly. Um, you know, I was still doing customer support until June last year. Um, you know, I still send every single email that we put out. Um, I would say I oversee the entire marketing team and the entire marketing function as a whole, managing the team. Um, but I, I really kind of focus on retention channels myself more so just because we've not really got anyone in that. I'm very much— I am very much a generalist. You know what I mean? I'm kind of okay at everything, but like not really a specialist at anything other than SEO, which I'd say is actually the one thing we focus the least on in terms of marketing channels in kind of a short-term scaling. Um, so yeah, I mean, like when we started the company, we were very like brand focused for, you know, the first kind of year to 18 months, I'd say. Um, we didn't have anyone on our channels until kind of late October 2024. We've only just hired into influencer. And like I said, we were very like, you know, grassroots activation, building the brand, building the, you know, affinity to running and to runners. You know, content is something that we've always kind of had at the— it's kind of a bit of a heartbeat of the company. If you look at the Instagram, it's very— I wouldn't say minimalist, but we don't post a whole lot. It's not really used as kind of like a big performance channel for us. It's very much like the DNA of the brand. People I mean, I will admit, like, I think our Instagram is kind of beautiful. It's something that we really focused on early. Um, and you know, every kind of touchpoint from there, whether it was an athlete, whether it was the Cadence, whether it was, you know, um, whether it was Instagram, email, whatever, we've really focused on it being very, like, beautiful and aesthetic to look at. Um, so yeah, I mean, for us, like, building brand, especially within the runners world, was, was very important very early, and, and Like I said, I kind of just handled a lot of the performance channels myself until we kind of decided it was ready to really ramp things up on the scaling side.

So are you still like buying the media or like what are you still hands on keyboard with? And then if so, that's question one. And then question two, could you just like rapid fire what's your team and like the functions they're focused on?

Yeah. So I have Jack who's on paid, handles paid channels. He came in in October. I've got Amr, who handles all things creator, athlete, and influencer. He started 2 weeks ago. Um, got, uh, Alex, who leads all things creative. He's creative director, so, you know, really managing our shoot and our shoots and how we show up across, uh, social, um, YouTube, wherever else. Uh, we've got Herc, who handles all things brand partnerships and kind of activation. He's split across the UK and the US. You know, he himself is a very active ultra runner. You know, he's running across Greece next year.

Here.

So he's quite big in the space himself, um, you know, he's very plugged in, especially when it comes to, you know, he's sponsored by a lot of these brands that we partner with. So it makes entry into those relatively easy. And then we've got Sam, who handles, you know, predominantly social but also kind of brand elements, kind of developing our brand voice, which is something that we've really focused on as we've gone into retail especially, and, you know, developing it so it's not just speaking to the athlete, which is You know, we, we used to do a lot and we used to kind of talk, when we talk about the product, we talk about things like the sodium, the, you know, the electrolyte content and things like that. And like, as we've gone into retail, obviously we, we are not just focusing on, you know, the, the guy who runs every day in New York and LA. We've gotta be focusing on, you know, the mom in Kansas who shops for her, her kid who, you know, goes and plays football at the weekend kind of thing. Um, so yeah, that's the team structure. Um, I'd still say it's very kind of brand heavy. Um, but you know, I think we— I think you can do a lot with relatively few people on the performance side, especially if they're hungry enough. Um, as we ramp things up on the performance side, I think it just becomes kind of increasingly important to maintain, um, maintain the brand voice, maintain kind of the brand elevation, and to build that alongside it as well. But yeah, in terms of what I'm hands-on with, like I said, I, anything that goes on the website is put on by me. I do work with a CRO agency now who are fantastic. So, you know, I'm not a developer. So anything that I can't do, they will ultimately do for me or with me. You know, I'm, I, like I said, I send every single email that we send out as a, as a company. That's something that, you know, I would like to kind of offload eventually. But for me, it's just something that I know our customer, I know what resonates with our customer and with me being so, I think, I think developing, developing subscription program especially is kind of meant that I don't want to say we don't need to be super hard on the email, but like, you know, it makes retention a little bit easier.

Um, when you say you're sending every email, are you like, who's writing it? Who's designing it? Who's scheduling it? Is that all you, or do you have like—

yeah, you're doing all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we do have a designer in the brand as well. Um, he, he used to help me design every single email, but now, you know, he's, he's very in the weeds with a lot of, you know, like not that long ago he redesigned the can, which he's redesigned across kind of the entire product portfolio. So he's very in the weeds with other things. So I've kind of taken— I've got my— I know my way around Figma pretty well now, so Yeah, so now, yeah, like I said, design, writing, scheduling, that's all me. I love it.

I love the scrappiness. So you're starting to build out the team though, but still no retention lead, no, no like website e-com manager lead. So maybe those are the next ones. All right. I want to, you talked a lot about, you hit on like brand and like brand equity and the brand image a lot in, in your, kind of the first 10, 15 minutes here. So I want to transition to a question that I think will be somewhat controversial with our audience because our audience is a bunch of nerdy media buyers that are talking about like the latest and greatest, you know, setting in Meta, like incremental attribution and like the media buying hacks of the world. I, so I listened to the Open Residency podcast with Ross and I think one of the quotes I heard, not necessarily right from that podcast, but I think it was Mark, uh, had pulled this quote from somewhere. And I think the quote was something along the lines that like Cadence hates Facebook ads. Um, or like maybe it was Ross hates Facebook ads, which I think makes sense. Like hearing you talk about brand and Ross talk about brand, people think about Facebook ads as like the antithesis to brand, right? Like making these big bold claims as a hook and like they're kind of wishy-washy. So from a paid media perspective. Do you guys have any no-nos at Cadence that most DTC brands do regularly? Like, what's your overall philosophy and approach to Facebook ads and, and just maybe like demand generation ads as a whole?

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I would say like we definitely don't hate Facebook ads. You know, Meta is our main acquisition channel, like by far, like, you know, we essentially lean into Meta as much as possible until, you know, we reach that cap, at which point we'll kind of look to diversify a little bit. We do do well organically though. You know, we probably over-index on organic acquisition. What I would say is that we're not the type to kind of lean into trends. Quite so much. We're not the type to, you know, approach every angle. Obviously with electrolytes, there's so many angles you can hit. You know, the one that comes top of mind for me is kind of the hangover angle, which seems to be like a winning one for pretty much everybody. What I would say is we, we put guardrails up as to what specifically we can use and implement to get our audience. Um, you know, we do We do try and keep everything that we do related to athleticism, sports performance, and that kind of thing. I think there's a lot of value in producing ad creative which really speaks to that audience, especially when you know they can go to your Instagram, they can go to your website, and the rest of your total kind of brand ecosystem like really speaks to that, you know what I mean? Like if we started speaking to, um, to, to the hangover angle, for example, and then they come to our website, and regardless of whether they go to a lander or whether they go to a product page, um, the whole experience is related to sports performance, athletics, and whether it's our offer with our free gifts, you know, I mean, someone looking for a hangover cure and then they're greeted with an offer for a free running cap with their first subscription, it's probably not going to be quite as efficient as if you bring in someone in who, you know, is like in that world. Um, you know, we look a lot to, to Gatorade. It's kind of like, I guess, the, the legacy version of what we're trying to do with Modern Sports Hydration. You know, they grounded themselves in sport and athleticism and performance for, you know, 60 years. Yeah, 80% of, um, Gatorade is actually drank outside the home, or Sportsdrink generally is actually outside the home, outside of sport, or at home. Um, so, you know, there is something to do with kind of putting all our wood behind one arrow. Um, you know, we, we focus super strongly into running for quite a long time. We are kind of looking into more kind of adjacent sports now. So say, for example, cycling, Hi-Rox, uh, Triathlon, and speaking to those customers as well. And you know, there's enough people in the world who are getting into sport or who are already in sports, have a big enough time to have a fantastic business. Um, and again, I think there's something about, you know, speaking directly to those audiences and being the brand that's made for them, uh, which makes you kind of the, the obvious choice for them. And again, I think just when we look at, you know, especially our team and our resource being relatively small. When it comes to having every single touchpoint following the purchase, again, whether it's your offer, whether it's your post-purchase flow, whether it's your loyalty system, whatever that is, you know, having everything kind of dialed towards that customer, it makes our retention, it makes our LTV very predictable. So yeah.

Well, I mean, this is, when hearing you talk, I think about Justin Mares and Kettle and Fire. Like the whole reason he launched Kettle and Fire was 'cause he was in the CrossFit community and he saw these CrossFitters like wanted a, like a low calorie, high protein drink to have that wasn't, that was healthy. And he was so specific on that audience early. And now Kettle and Fire's expanded, right? And I think their marketing's expanded. And like you guys, I feel like are in that, that equivalent phase of Kettle and Fire when they were like, this is the drink for CrossFitters. And like, I eventually, I'm sure you'll expand, but like I think the, the playbook is be niche. Be specific, have a purpose in terms of audience. And over time, you'll grow that TAM to, like you said, the woman in Kansas or Kentucky whose son plays football and she wants him to stay hydrated, but he's not going out and running 20 miles on a Saturday morning.

Exactly. And it's something that we are kind of leaning pretty aggressively in now, that kind of like expansion with the retail piece. You know what I mean? And again, that comes down to how we communicate the product. Like I kind of mentioned, we used to be very forward with, you know, 500 milligrams of sodium. Like, that's our differentiator in our, in our canned beverage. You know, there's nothing else out there like, like it, which has that. You know, when you're speaking to an athlete, they understand the benefits of that. But when you're speaking to, again, the mom who shops at Walmart for her, for her son, like, you know, that, that doesn't quite resonate the same. So yeah, I mean, like, when we just look at who we are as a brand, we're not necessarily like the hydration solution for athletes anymore. Like, what we are now is modern sports hydration, you know, and that's very defensible. It's very, uh, comparable, especially when you look at kind of legacy sports hydration with the likes of Gatorade. And if you look at what's going on with the category in general, with, you know, Poppi and Olipop being the better-for-you version of Coke, um, you know, Bloom essentially coming after, um, Red Bull and kind of legacy, um, energy drinks. Like, nobody's really doing that with the sports drink category, um, in retail. And like, you know, when we think about what we lead with now, we think about what is different between us and the likes of Gatorade with our communications. So Gatorade, you're getting a little bit of electrolytes, but don't necessarily lead with how much of each electrolyte they're getting. But you are also getting a load of sugar, you're getting a load of artificial colors, flavors, ingredients. So it's those differentiators that we do lead with now. So we're modern sports hydration, zero sugar, zero artificial colors, flavors, sweetness, and then kind of the, the 500 milligrams of sodium kind of comes in a little bit later. But we are, you know, we're an electrolyte beverage and you can tell that from the front of the can anyway. You know, I think when you look at retail, you've got, you don't have a time to educate, you know what I mean? We've got, it was, it was something that we saw with our old can where, you know, it was essentially a plain white can with Core 500 written on the front and nobody really knew what that meant or what, or was. We don't have time to educate. So now all we lead with is, you know, daily hydration, complete electrolytes. Um, and that's—

yeah, I, I'd love to double-click on, on the packaging quickly. I was at a conference years ago and I remember being blown away by how— I mean, it's obvious, but how important packaging is for like CPG goods. Ridge, we have nice packaging, but like if somebody's seen the packaging, it's 'cause they've already bought the product and they're getting it at home. And it's like, it's never been like a key sort of strategic function for us. Um, what does that look like for you guys? You said you just redesigned the can, so I'm just curious, like, what is your experience as you expand into retail and how has that influenced, like, the way that you're packaging your product?

Yeah, so I mean, if you look at the first can, it was a 250ml white can which just said Cadence on the front with a little citrus bar at the bottom. It was beautiful, beautiful on sight, but it didn't really communicate anything. Um, then iteration 2 came along. It was a 350ml can, and we tried to build this system of kind of core, race, and recover. Uh, you know, we built that out through the sachets, we built that out through the cans. Like, we had a race can at one point, and that was essentially your core with your, you know, your electrolyte formula. The race was with caffeine, then the recover was like, like the sleep sachet, for example. So we went with Core 500. It looked slick, it looked slick on site, and again, You know, if you were an athlete, you could kind of guess like Core 500, 500 milligrams of sodium, like, you know, that kind of thing. Um, ultimately though, when that went on shelf in GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, the feedback we got was one, nobody can tell what flavor it is, and two, nobody can tell what the actual function of the beverage is. Um, so, you know, Matt, who's our design lead at Cadence, um, known Matt for many years, we worked together at Represent. Um, He came on board and he essentially took over the, the redesign of the can. And, you know, there were many nights where we, myself, Ross, and Matt were on a, on a call just like workshopping it late at night. There was probably over 1,000 iterations made, uh, before we, before we landed on this one. Uh, we're still actually developing this, so, you know, this has changed to daily hydration from core, um, and then eventually we're actually going to get rid of it, but flavor is like your number one. Like, you need to have someone stand 6 feet away from a shelf and be able to know what flavor it is, being that— being actually the main purchasing decision when a customer is at the shelf. And the second thing is they need to know what it does. So, you know, just writing hydration in large text on the front of the can has been a game changer, and it actually made a significant difference in our sales at GNC and Vitamin Shoppe. We ramped up to the fastest growing sports drink or other hydration drink in, in GNC. We have expanded the category by the most within the, within the retailer as well. So yeah, it's, it definitely makes an impact.

Yeah, because you say, I mean, you have to be able to articulate flavor function. It also has to look really cool. Like at the end of the day, like you can't lose like the, the original differentiator, which is like this beautiful sort of modern hydration brand. So yes, super interesting to kind of hear you talk through that.

And it happened in a short period of time, right? If I remember correctly, this all happened, like, I think there was like 3 or 4 iterations of the, of the can design all in like a 6-month window. Is that accurate? Am I, am I remembering that correctly?

In 2025, we had 3 different cans live. So January to April, we had our original can. April till about November, we had the second can. And then from then onwards, we had the current can. And again, like I said, we still kind of iterate on it a little bit now. Um, yeah, I'd say those three are the main, like, dramatic changes. So we probably won't change it too much now.

And I'm also curious on, like, you breaking down that timeline a little bit further. Like, if you want to make, if you want to roll out if you said today we need to design a whole new can, how long does it take to actually get it manufactured? And like, when would it be in a retailer's stores?

Pretty quick in the US, honestly. US retail moves very quickly, it seems. Um, you know, I— lead times, I don't quite know off the top of my head. Um, you know, there isn't— I'd say the, the kind of longest process for us is just making sure that QA is QA is in in the right time, because Matt can make a beautiful can, he can make a fantastic can which, you know, says everything it needs to say, but then QA can come in and just be like, right, can't do this, can't do this, can't do this. So I'd say the collaboration with QA from the start is probably the, the best thing you can do to kind of ramp up on speed to get in the can produced. Um, you know, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what the lead time is on getting it, uh, produced into a retail, but the point being you can theoretically iterate on it pretty fast.

You said there were 3 cans live throughout 2025.

100%. And like, even now, you know, like between production runs, we can, yeah, like we, we essentially only did one production run with this core hydration on the front before we changed to daily hydration, which is what's kind of rolling on, on online and in retailers now.

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Okay. And we're like a little bit in the weeds here, but I'm, I'm curious about this one too. And this, this might be, if you don't have the answer here, no big deal. But I'm curious if you guys are in the mindset of, hey, we need to be iterating on our CAN frequently in 2025. Like we know we need to improve improve our packaging. We've got this feedback from GNC. Does it affect the amount that you're ordering? Like, now that you feel comfortable with the can that you have, you've seen the lift in retailers, are you able to say, hey, we're gonna be— we're gonna buy this deeper and we're not going to be able to iterate as quickly, but we are more comfortable with, you know, the product that we're putting out?

Yeah, and, you know, there's always going to be kind of a mixed bag of cans that are out in, in the market anyway. So it's something where, you know, we, we do put in large orders of cans, and it's something where, you know, for a period of time, even on our website, we were selling like old design, new design. Like, um, it's, it's something that's just kind of the nature of it, and you can't really prevent, um, having— you can't really, you can't really stop it, you know what I mean? So we just do what we can, but we press on, do as we ordinarily would, don't really worry about the design.

Okay, then my last question on packaging, and then Connor, we could go wherever you'd like to from here. It also feels there's been a really interesting couple years with people like really innovating and differentiating via packaging. I think of Graza, I think of Okra, who did that very cool like glass bottle. I'm curious if there's anybody in the space, like old or new, that you guys look to for inspiration or you think that they are doing package innovation, um, particularly well.

Yeah, interesting one. I think, um, IQ Bar, uh, excellent. I think Jacob Bar is excellent. I think the, I think the entire bar space is is very strong. I actually think even when I look at, you know, just supplements in general now, with a lot of kind of going more towards the minimalist, clean, premium look, uh, Connor, you mentioned Momentus earlier. I think they do a fantastic job, you know. I think it gets to the point where like less is more and that's your differentiator, you know. You're not really getting many supplements, especially now being like, you know, 'Triple Max 3000X' on the front, you know what I mean? It's kind of meaningless. And like, I think consumers are becoming more switched on to like, you know, seeing through bullshit a little bit. So I think, you know, the more transparent you can be, um, especially in the better-for-you kind of category anyway, um, the, the better. So yeah, totally.

RXBAR comes to mind when you say that too. Like, they were, they were so unique with just 4 ingredients on the front of the bag.

Oh yeah, it's killer. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Yeah, we talk a lot about, I mean, we, we, we talk a lot about incrementality on the podcast. I talk about incrementality and having like a incrementality-first approach to my team at Hexcut all the time. Talk about a cool, a cool use case in incrementality here, like packaging design, how you guys have proven how incremental your packaging design can be. I mean, you literally 3x sales. Didn't change a thing except for how you were messaging your product on the packaging. Like that's a, that's a pretty big incremental lift that, that, uh, you guys drove, uh, that didn't have anything to do with, I mean, I guess you could technically say that's marketing, but it's more like branding design than anything else.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's class.

So I didn't know that you were at, you were at Represent prior to Cadence. Obviously I know George and Ross are, are close. Well, how did that happen? How did the whole, like, transition from Represent into Cadence happen?

Yeah, it was a good one. Um, so I was essentially an SEO manager at Represent. I started there in 2022 to kind of, like, kick off the, um, kick off the channel. Um, you know, and whilst I kind of started that, I saw a real opportunity in PR. Like, we had this fantastic brand that wasn't getting any coverage, so, you know, I thought I'd get into that. Um, 2 years into my time there, um, you know, it kind of came out that George and Ross were starting this business together, um, and it's Cadence, and it's a, you know, it's a premium electrolyte drink designed for active, active individuals and fitness people. Um, you know, I put it this way, when I was 15, I, you know, watched the growth of like, you know, Gymshark and Myprotein, all these brands kind of operating and kind of scaling in a very interesting way, um, in the fitness market. I wanted to be a fitness influencer, um, realized very quickly I wouldn't be able to do that. So I got my first job out of uni at Myprotein, um, then I moved to Represent because it's my favorite brand. So when this opportunity came around to even be involved in kind of the first month of launching this brand, and that's kind of what it even started as, like there was a couple of us from Represent who were brought in to help launch it. Like I said, I, like, built the website, um, that was kind of my job in this. And then it was very much going to be, you know, we'll launch, we'll launch the brand and then that's kind of your role done kind of thing. Um, you know, the brand is a separate brand, so they'll, they'll build the team separately. Um, and yeah, I mean, I just quickly, very quickly became obsessed with, you know, the ownership I could take in this. I kind of treat it as like a full-time job on top of my full-time job. Um, I was always doing kind of freelance jobs anyway and that kind of thing, so I was very used to working over weekends, late at night, whatever else. I just kind of saw it as like a project on the side to really just throw myself into at a very early stage. I saw the potential of the brand, you know, saw the white space of the brand. I saw ultimately what a great leader Ross was and like, you know, how hungry he was to take this to the top. So, you know, I ultimately worked on the brand, um, I guess just helping out for about a year before I came on full-time. And that was February last year that I came on full-time. I'd say during that year, it was probably the year that I learned the absolute most because like I said, I was kind of in charge of being in the weeds on every single kind of non-brand-focused channel. Like I said, I was doing the customer support, doing the email, you know, running the ads. Reaching out to the influencers. Like, you know, it's something that I, that I've kind of, I've kind of done every role in marketing other than hold the camera. Um, so yeah, I mean, I wanted to be a part of it and throw myself in it full time. So best move I've ever made in my life, honestly.

Nice. That makes sense. Okay. Let's, let's, I want to like talk a little bit about Cadence, uh, more zoom out a little bit and just talk about trajectory here. So whatever you can share. Um, like, A, when did Cadence officially launch? I think you said it was like 2 years ago. And then, you know, like any, any kind of indicators of how large Cadence is and sort of what the growth rate has been from launch to now and any milestones along the way, you know, what does that look like?

Yeah, great. So I mean, we launched in the UK first in April 2024. Uh, we then launched in the US, uh, a few months later in July 2024. Uh, they were both hosted on the same Shopify, same site, you know, uh, we ultimately had one product, which was just the can, which doesn't lend itself very well to D2C until September 2024. That was a 24-pack as well. So very heavy, um, very difficult on the shipping. Um, you know, we launched our sachets in September 2020— launched our sachets in September 2024, which were naturally a more D2C product. Uh, and then we weren't really spending on ads at all until, you know, April-ish 2025. Pretty much all growth was organic or through Founder or through affiliation with other partner brands or, um, you know, I'd say athletes really. Um, and then yeah, last year that's when we really started to ramp. And, you know, I think again, we almost had this element where So many people were posting us organically because we'd built that kind of affinity and we were essentially the sports drink or the supplement brand or the hydration solution for runners. Like, it meant that we captured that kind of audience very quickly, you know. I'd say from that first kind of 3 or 4 months, we'd have hundreds of people in our DMs, um, you know, sharing a photo of the can on their story. So it grew very quickly organically like that. Um, and then like I said, last year, that's when we really started to spend on Meta and kind of, uh, use that paid channel to acquire customers. Um, 2026, we're looking to grow 500% this year. Um, you know, I think we're more than on track to do that. We're ahead of our forecasts every single month so far this year. Um, predominantly because we've scaled our, uh, subscription uptake like much harder than we thought we would. We're currently at a 75% subscription at checkout rate, which, you know, for beverage especially is pretty, I'd say, exceptional. You know, 6 months ago that was at 30%, so we were kind of modeling our growth of 500% based on that, essentially. So yeah, we're growing very quickly this year. And then yeah, I think within the next couple of years we'd hope to do 100 mil, honestly. Probably 2027. Wow.

That's awesome. What has driven the, what, over doubling of your first order sub rate? Like what tactics have you guys implemented to do that?

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I'd say the free gift mechanic is a massive one. You know, like I kind of mentioned before, you know, we have merchandise that we essentially just reserve for subscribers. So for example, you know, You can't get a hat unless you subscribe. You can't get a towel unless you subscribe. You can't get a sachet holder unless you subscribe. So, you know, everyone that subscribes gets a cap, gets a Cadence running cap from us. I'd say that's been the biggest lever we've had. We first implemented that for our Black Friday promotion in 2025, and, you know, that was just off the absolute charts. So it's something that we brought in full-time. We restocked the caps as fast as we could and brought that into our kind of always-on offer. Um, you know, I think free gifts and merchandise in general, you know, I know people have mixed opinions on it, but I think ultimately you need the brand in order for it to work. You know, you've got to have people to actually want your free gift. Um, you know, and I think especially when you've got a consumable product where, you know, most of the time it's taken at home or kind of in private or you know, even that you've not got to wear, you know, you've not got something on you. Um, I think having merchandise that you give away is like honestly, again, one of the best marketing tools you've got. Again, I worked at Represent before, and I'd say that— well, I know for a fact because the, the biggest kind of factors of their growth was to represent owners club collection, where essentially it's just got Represent written across the back of the hoodie. Um, so, you know, if, if I could do anything to get a Cadence logo on people when they're out and about wherever they are, um, I would do that. And, you know, again, I think, um, we do do a first order discount as well. So, you know, first subscription order discount kind of is more of the finishing piece of like just making it a no-brainer on price. Um, but yeah, I'd say our main mechanic is, you know, implementation of free gifts, essentially getting people to month 4. 'cause month 4 is the point at which if we get them to that point, then they're pretty much with us for, you know, a year. So I'm curious to hear you talk through it.

Sounds like you guys have done a number of different types of, uh, gifts with purchases on that initial order. And do you find it's better to be offering like items that are functional? I think you mentioned like a sachet holder, or are people more interested in like some sort of t-shirt where I can rep the Cadence brand because I'm, I'm bought into the, the lifestyle of it?

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we've done whisks before, but that was only when we went out of stock of caps, and it's, you know, it is nowhere near as strong of an offer. I think giving, giving something people can rep and kind of like, you know, we kind of describe the cans like a, a $2 luxury, right? You know, I mean, if you can give something, if you can give something to someone where they can kind of use that as part of their identity and like tie themselves to the brand and like especially if it's something that you, you know, teased for well over, like, you know, a few months. Uh, you know, we had, we had our founder wearing the cap, we had our athletes wearing the cap, we had people wearing the cap for a good period of time before we even, like, made it available for anyone. So then when we did make it available and make it— may only made it available on subscription, like, you know, I'm sure initially a lot of people were just subscribing to get the cap, but You know, and then they save for the product.

So, and then, and then do you guys do multiple? You said trying to retain people to month 4, because if you get them to that point, they, they, they stick around for a much longer period of time. Um, are you doing multiple gift with purchases over those first 2 or 3 rebills?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we do month 1 free cap, month 2 free bottle, month 3 free sports towel. Um, that's kind of the offer that we've had landed on for, you know, since January this year. Um, You know, it's very strong. And then we have, you know, products which are available only to subscribers in the backend. So, you know, for example, this sachet holder, if you go on our website, you won't find that unless you're a subscriber. If you logged in as a subscriber, you will be able to buy it. Um, you know, we're going to be doing the same with actual merchandise. We said we'll never do clothing ever. Yeah. However, the team's been repping clothing for, you know, over a year. Uh, we've had our athletes, our influencers, you know, a couple of ambassadors wearing it and, you know, everyone really wants it. So that's something that we're going to build in for subscribers only. And we're going to tear that out within the loyalty program as well. So yeah, there's kind of multi-layers to it.

I love my cap and I love my Cadence bottle. I use 'em both, both every day.

Are you a subscriber?

I am. I am now a subscriber. I used to just be buying it one-off and then I finally got the, the sachet subscription cuz I, it's, it's one of the few products I subscribe to that I, I always, and I'm just like the worst subscriber. Like I end up with like 2 boxes of Olipop sitting in my pantry or whatever. But with the sachets, I use it every morning. It's like one of the only, products I subscribe to that I use ritualistically, so it made sense for me to, but I, I, we do a lot of gift with purchase at HexClad and it's, it's great for the consumer, but on the, on the backend for the brand, the unit economics on gift with purchase often work so well. Like if I'm gonna say, hey, here's, here's $20 off our 12-inch pan and lid, that, that margin drop is not that much. Less than me saying, hey, here's a gift with purchase if you buy our 12-piece set, and the gift with purchase product's $150 product. Like, the, the unit economics of those two offers— and we'll often run those side by side— and the reason we see so many people go into the sets is because the perceived value is so much more than that individual pan discount. So like, the economics of these GWPs work so well for the brand, and they're— the perceived value for the consumer is also so good. It's just like such a perfect storm of an offer for most brands, assuming you have like really good product COGS. And like, I think I can't imagine that hat costs more than a few dollars to, um, to make, but like, you know, you could probably value that at what, $30, $40, $50? And like the consumer loves that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's exactly the case for us where, you know, I rarely send out a discount. I rarely send out kind of a, a dollar-off amount discount. It's really kind of usually a last resort for me. Um, in, you know, pretty much every case, um, a gift with purchase is, or a gift with subscription, you know, I quite often do like an extra gift for subscription. So like I'll send an SMS out, you know, every subscription today also gets a free whisk, you know what I mean? And that's actually cheaper to us than giving any kind of discount amount, which is, you know, meaningful to the customer. And again, you know, it's something that is tangible to them, like they can keep it in their home, whereas that discount, they just forget about that as soon as they've bought the product. Typically only use discounts or dollar-off amounts when it comes to win-backs. It's quite often someone's already had the opportunity to get the free gift anyway, so.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right.

So I want to, I want to shift a little bit here. I want to talk about your expansion into retail. And, you know, Ross talks a lot about it from a, um, value, like positioning the value proposition to retailers in the sense of, hey, we have this audience over here that, that y'all do not have. By selling our product, we are giving you an incremental new audience, which makes complete sense. And, you know, he also talks about how the upside on your product category is so much bigger in retail. So it makes sense that you guys are, you know, you found product market fit. On dot-com, and now you're using that proof of concept to, to sell the, the idea to retailers, which is going to grow your TAM, um, in a massive way. But I want to talk to you about, like, marketing measurement are the two things I'm very curious about. So as you guys shift more and more and more of your business into retail and away from DTC, two questions here. A, let's start with measurement, because I think that's the trickiest one. Like, You're, you're, it's a lot harder to measure an omnichannel brand when you have, you know, retail distribution and D2C distribution. And then you throw in the added layer of not only do we have these two different distribution channels, but we're actively trying to shift away from the one that's easier to measure into the one that's harder to measure. So let's start there. Like, how are you, how are you thinking about measurement through this transition period as you, as you shift more of your business to towards like brick and mortar retails?

Yeah, so I mean, ultimately, like, the end metric that we're looking at is, you know, units per store per week. That's ultimately the only one that matters to the retailer, so therefore it's the only one that matters to us. It's the only one that by which we're kind of measured on success. I think, you know, as you launch into the retailers, you've got to be ready to over-invest, um, you know, whatever channel that's in, you, you've got to be ready to over-invest and You know, you're not necessarily getting a lot of these feedback loops on too much of a frequent basis. You know, you might get a weekly kind of uplift report on your units per store per week, but you know, when you're looking at kind of changing things potentially daily, making little tweaks, like it's hard to really measure the impact of those. So, you know, uh, one of the things that we like to do is to kind of run our own kind of promo digitally. So, you know, for us, like, we use a program called ILE where we can essentially just run our own promos. So, you know, we essentially run all of our ads towards that page. And, you know, it means that whether we're putting more whitelisting in the account, whether we're changing spend, whether we're changing the kind of conversion goal, like, you know, we see pretty dramatically, like the impact that that has on, you know, whether it's signups or redemptions.

Can you explain Aisle real quick to the listeners? Like, how does Aisle work?

Yeah, sure. So essentially, Aisle is a— you can choose what kind of promo you want to run. So for us, it's a buy one, get one free. Essentially, a customer will sign up on your site with their phone number. They'll get a message from us. And then ultimately, they just need to go to the store, buy two, they'll text in their receipt. and then they'll get Venmo'd or PayPal'd their money back for one can within 24 hours. Um, you know, you have a, there's a lot of customization you can do there. You know, you essentially build flows within the platform so you can essentially hammer the customer as often as you want until they, until they make the purchase. You can have follow-up, um, you can have follow-up campaign, uh, can have follow-up flows as well, so they can redeem it twice potentially. And then ultimately we send everyone who's redeemed twice back towards a subscription on our website. So we're pulling them back into the DTC ecosystem to then remarket to them as well. Honestly, it's a phenomenal program.

You know what, it's funny you say that because I was just at a, I was at a DTC event with some pretty large, uh, founders and operators of some large CPG food brands that are, that are kind of doing the similar thing. And they had, they did not have great things to say about aisle. So I think, I guess it does, it depends on the product and the category you're in, 'cause clearly you guys are, are obviously leveraging a lot. Do you then, so do you, do you have like distinct funnels for retail and like the aisle funnel? For lack of a better term, and then you have a, then you have kind of parallel funnels for DTC, but then ultimately what's cool about aisle is you're getting that first-party data because they have to interact with your brand and you're seeing who converts. So like, do you have a blended acquisition cost goal then across both channels because you're leveraging aisle? Like, how does that, how do you think about that?

We essentially treat, um, retail-focused ad spend as a separate budget, which, you know, it's bucketed into, say, essentially influencer and paid ads. Like, that is just a separate budget we treat completely differently and we exclude it from all our kind of calculations. The only thing that we blend is between Amazon and D2C, just because we've seen such a large, I'd say, bleed over from our Meta ads scaling and then kind of a pretty linear growth with our Amazon. Um, which is honestly, that's been a kind of key unlock to our scale over the past few months, especially. Yeah, we treat, um, retail investment completely separately.

So then as far as, I mean, you know, I'm sure you guys have obviously like revenue targets, of course, as all brands do, but as far as your efficiency metrics, and I think every brand has a version of this, whether it's CAC or media efficiency ratio or like an LTV to CAC, whatever it is. How, how do you think about, like, how are you thinking about your efficiency KPI that you make decisions off of for your, your online funnel? And then how are you thinking about your efficiency KPI for your retail funnel?

Yeah. Okay. So for online, we really look at CAC, CM2, and LTV. Um, we look at CM2, contribution margin 2. So it's essentially, yeah. So we essentially measure CM2 to get our payback right. To understand when we're paying back, when we can afford to pay back on kind of a cash flow perspective. We look at LTV to understand how aggressive we can be with that kind of payback on that CM2. And again, when you're looking to blend with Amazon, that's when CM2 kind of really comes in because, you know, we have a stronger kind of early CM2 with our Amazon business because, you know, most people aren't subscribing, most people one-time purchasing, but high-intent traffic. Most of the time. So, you know, earlier on, the kind of month 1, month 2, month 3, we have really strong CM2 across Amazon, whereas a longer tail LTV on our DTC businesses, uh, is much stronger. So that kind of balance of the two is allowing us to kind of, you know, push the DTC payback out a little bit on the understanding that the, the Amazon kind of side of the business kind of pulls it back to like a manageable level. Um, So again, like I said, that's kind of that interplay between Amazon and D2C has been kind of pretty, yeah, pretty helpful, honestly, and just kind of how that buying behavior works, essentially. When it comes to retail, again, it's something that we are constantly developing, I'd say. Like I said, we pretty much have a set budget going into these launches where, you know, we understand that for the first 2 or 3 months especially, we're going to have to over-invest. We set ourselves a budget for it then, so, and we try to, try to stick to that as much as possible. I must admit, like, you know, um, it's very heavily leaning to influencer and creator, um, you know, investing pretty heavily there. I must admit though, like, since our Since I brought on the, um, my influencer guy is a killer, put it that way. You know, he will sit there and he will outreach as many micros as it possibly takes to get some kind of traction on, on TikTok, Instagram. Um, and I'd say again, I'd say it comes back to the brand affinity. We are getting people to post about us, to come into our network, into our Discord, and continue posting about us and give us content to whitelist for an extremely beneficial to us, right? Just because people want to be associated with the brand, because we probably never lean too heavily into affiliate and micro creator. And, you know, we've almost built that prestige of being affiliated with Cadence through the higher tier 1 athletes up. So then, you know, as soon as we started doing the outreach to the influencers and the creators, like, people just want to be a part of it. Um, so yeah, sorry, I've got a bit off track there with my answer, but no, that's helpful.

Have you discounted, as you've scaled into more retail, have you guys made the decision to allow for a higher acquisition cost knowing that that bucket's just getting a little bit leakier and you're like, hey, we're in 2x the retailers we were this year than last year at the same time. Like I'm comfortable letting our CAC drift a little bit up because it's going to grow top line and we know that we're just not picking up some of the conversions that are happening in retail? Like, or are you staying strong on your dot-com online unit economics?

We're staying pretty strong on the understanding that, you know, the people who are most likely going to be buying, you know, going into a Target and buying 20 cans in there, uh, you know, they're our customers. So like, we try and stay pretty diligent with, um, you know, economics on, you know, sorry, efficiencies on, um, on D2C. Again, it's something where, you know, we launched into Walmart on Monday, we launched into Target one month ago. I'm sure it's something that, you know, we will kind of change and develop as time goes on and we start to see how those launches play out. Um, but for now we are almost treating them as completely separate channels. Um, but yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of a very different marketing approach to both for us.

To, to clarify, did you say, um, people aren't going into Target and buying 20 cans and they are like—

they are, they are. Like, like, the people doing that are our customers.

Like, oh yes, okay.

Yeah, like the subs, you know, we, we, we market pretty heavily to like our subscribers on retail especially, because like we try— we tend to leave our subscribers alone most of the time, honestly. You know, we, we will, will communicate with them when we've got a value for them. So say, for example, when our head of nutrition has something valuable to say, whether it's, you know, um, training for your first marathon or loading up for your first marathon or whatever. But then as soon as retail turns on, we're telling all our subscribers to go and buy from us in, in retail. Um, and yeah, we, we leverage giveaways quite a lot as well. That's what's another kind of strong mechanic that we use. Um, You know, I think giveaways are a fantastic tool, primarily because of the legalities of it. Like, you know, we essentially typically use two methods of entry. It's either, you know, send us your receipts, show you bought a can, or the free option, which is, I guess, the way we keep it legal is to share online. And then either or entry you can do, or you can do both. And you can enter as many times as you want. So, um, that's another— sorry, go on.

I wanted to backtrack just a little bit. We were talking about the omnichannel approach, and I think it's interesting. I could be off base here. I'm not as familiar with the CPG spaces as other people will be, but Cadence launching with an RTD beverage seems relatively unique. It seems more common for like Element launches with the, the single-serve packets, and then now they're rolling out an RTD beverage. You guys going straight RTD beverage with it being such a difficult D2C product is an interesting, like, uh, uh, starting place. I'm curious. Yeah, totally. And then you said, uh, the, the sachets came like a couple months after that. I imagine that's what a lot of the subscriptions are built around. Way better, stronger D2C product. Has, was that always sort of the product roadmap? And I'm also curious, as you guys have expanded products and as you've expanded channels, how has that influenced your product development roadmap?

Yeah, honestly, like a lot of our product development is, you know, we are building for the athlete again, like at kind of mentioned earlier, like, yeah, we launched with the can. Very difficult to do the can. We realized we needed a D2C native product really to scale up and get the can out there. So, you know, we launched the sachets. We launched the sachets with a very unique proposition. Like, most people out there are essentially, you know, it's either a load of sodium and like not much else, or not much sodium, it's more of a kind of like juice lifestyle type drink when you mix it. Um, we launched with 3 sachets, so the Core, the Energy, and the Sleep. So I think already that was quite a unique proposition, you know, it's like our sleep products, honestly, probably our like best product in terms of actually feeling it straight away. So we launched that product with, that was a unique proposition in itself. Um, as we leaned more heavily into athletes, you know, what we essentially wanted to build for is the night before someone goes for a marathon and they take a picture of all the kit and put it on their Instagram story. We wanted everything that used to be Cadence. Um, so, you know, we built the, the gel, the fuel bar. Next month we're going to be launching a carb powder. And, you know, these are all things that are almost— a lot of them are great D2C products, honestly, as well, because they're light and quite cheap to produce. But, um, we want to be known as, you know, the choice for the athletes with that. And there are as much positioning plays as they are kind of like revenue drivers for online.

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Now, what you just said around really aggressive product expansion, gels, bars, things like that from a digital— I imagine there's a lot of retail shelves that need energy bars or protein bars or whatever you guys are working on. So like, I, I understand the fit there. Especially like as you get the beachhead with the RTD beverages. From a digital perspective, do you see the bar customer being a brand new customer or is it a way to like generate additional LTV from existing subscribers?

Yeah, we, we don't acquire any new customers through the bar. We, you know, and it'll probably be the same with the carb powder where we've gotta, we've gotta really pick like what, what's the most used what is the most— what are the most used things, right? It's like, at the moment, a lot of people getting into running, like, what's the first sexy product that everyone reaches for when they start running? It's most likely a gel. So we acquire a lot of customers through the gel, and then that gel buyer that will then buy into, you know, the bar, they'll buy into the sachets, uh, and they'll buy into the cans as well. Um, you know, it's kind of been a lot of experimentation, mainly looking first at margin. Like, that's kind of the first thing we look at, really. Like, what can we afford to acquire customers with? Um, and yeah, I mean, like, ultimately, like, we, we're in a position where if someone comes in for the gel, they're likely to buy into the rest of the, the rest of the portfolio. Um, you know, there's a few things that we're working on this year. We're developing an app, we're developing a fueling app. Um, so, you know, for us, that's probably going to be a big one for, again, like, leaning super heavy into the, the athlete, the athlete, and, you know, the athletic person. And, um, again, it's, it's one where we'll be able to recommend— it's, it's going to be crazy, guys, honestly. It's going to link to your Whoop, it's going to link to your Garmin, it's going to link to your Apple Watch. It'll tell you how to fuel, how to hydrate, and exactly what products to use to do that.

So I've got, I've got one more for you, really in the weeds here. I was speaking with the subscription brand recently, and their revenue split was like the majority of revenue was from subscribers, and then they had new customer revenue, and then they had an extremely small percentage of revenue coming from non-subscriber returning customer revenue. And I'm curious if you guys have different approaches. You obviously have the really big subscription business, but there's also the athlete or the mom or whoever who doesn't need to be taking the sachets every single day. I don't need to be subscribed, but I need to be purchasing frequently, frequently from Cadence. Do you treat those people different? And like, what do those mouse traps look like?

No, I mean, we, we, to be fair, we do favor our subscribers the most, but I mean, our most valuable customers by far are those who've trialed through one-time purchase and then might not gone on to subscribe. Like, that is the cohort that's, you know, like, they're gold dust to us, really. Um, you know, some, some products do, we've kind of looked at through experimentation of like, you know, for example, our main acquisition product is our Starter Hydration System. So, you know, that's where you're getting 2 cases of cans, you're getting a pack of sachets, and you're getting a bottle. You know, that customer does not stay on that product though for 12 months. Like, it's, it's very much a trial type product. So whether they come on and they subscribe or they get it for one-time purchase, like, we want to get that customer onto whatever they prefer like as quickly as possible after they come off that. And we do see, you know, that is a great product because someone comes in with that, they either buy it once or subscribe, and if they subscribe, they very quickly move to either, okay, I'm going to get, you know, the Core, the Energy, and the Sleep sachets as a bundle and subscribe to that, or I'm going to just stay on the Sleep sachets and subscribe to that, or I'm just going to come on to a canned subscription. So, um, yeah, like there's definitely value in like someone just trialing a product, but like I said, right now we are super honed in on subscription. Like we don't, um, Yeah. Yeah.

I like, I love your, your influencer strategy and like really it's, it, I've heard it called like it's an athlete strategy. Like you guys were trying to, trying to create this, this ecosystem and it's like everyone you partner with on this more like macro influencer level really just like lives the ethos of the brand. And you also said something earlier in the show that all these micro creators, they're so willing and, and want to engage with with, with you guys because you have all these athletes on your team that they aspire to. Like, that's how Hexclad is with Gordon. Like, that's the reason our product seeding program works so well. We can send out hundreds of products a month and get literally tens of millions of impressions. And I think if you take Gordon Ramsay out of the equation, I would bet that we get half the, the hit rate on product seeding because people want to associate with him and like be a part of the zeitgeist that he's leading the charge on. So So how, like, what are your, your athlete activations typically include? Like, do you have deliverables they owe you? Do, is it, is it more kind of, um, just agreed that you're gonna start showing up in their content because it's such a part of their lifestyle? Like, how are you, how are you structuring these, these macro deals that you do with these like bigger profile athletes?

Yeah, so I think like the first, there's a couple of things to understand with the athletes. Like one is like they're not creators, so like if you're expecting like crazy deliverables on, you know, um, you know, crazy reels or fantastic cool like stories or whatever, like you're probably not going to get that. What you're likely to get is a sachet on a table. Um, you know, what we've tried to do is, um, they do have solid deliverables when it comes to posting, um, posting stories, posting on their YouTube, posting on their Instagram, whatever else. We try and tell them though, like, be as educational as you can. Like, they're our education drivers, you know what I mean? Because people actually want to listen to what they've got to say and how they, how they fuel. Best example of this actually is, uh, Charlie Lawrence, who we've got on the team. He's the 50-mile world record holder. Like, before he goes out and runs, he'll post a picture of, you know, all the gels he's taking, the carb powder, and add up, you know, how many carbs he's having exactly and how much sodium he's having. He'll tell you what what his run is gonna be. Um, so, you know, if he's telling you he's having 400 grams of carbs and 1,600 milligrams of sodium, then like the average person can probably look at that and think, okay, well, if he's doing that for a 2-hour run, then, you know, maybe I, I'm good with having a sachet every day or a can and a sachet every day. Um, so yeah, we do attach deliverables to it. There's an understanding there as well that like, athletes are honestly like, they do— if you give them a code, they don't really convert. Like, we've been down that pathway, we expected them to convert and they just don't. But there's other benefits to them. Like, for example, when you're looking at specialty retail, being attached to, you know, a name like a Charlie Lawrence or like an Alex Yee, like, you know, if you tell them they're using your product, then, you know, when you're looking to get into the feed, for example, or, you know, Run Limited in London or Brooklyn Run Co, like, in New York, like, they take that pretty seriously because that, that is what gives the credibility, uh, for those stores. And I think there's almost like a secondary benefit to where, you know, even if someone doesn't know who the athlete is, the fact that they've seen that association with the athlete and they know the athlete is, you know, whatever it is, whether they're a double gold medalist in the Olympics or whatever, like the fact that they have that in the back of their mind that this kind of person is using the product is— they might not use the code, but, uh, they might not even know who they are, but there is an element of, you know, helping get that sale over the line. Creators and creators and influencers is something that we've only just really started to go down, and it really has been, you know, for that mass awareness at retail. And I think honestly, it's going into retail, it's probably the best thing that's ever happened to us in terms of opening ourselves up to that channel and the idea of using that channel of micro creators. Honestly, getting that flywheel going, you know, I know it's been mentioned on Twitter, like our ad account is mainly statics, there's not many videos. And to be honest with you, fast because, you know, we've never really had that person to be doing that, doing that outreach on the, on the, um, on the influencer UGC side. And, you know, doing a lot of statics gives us a, a good base to iterate and move fast on concepts and get the angles that we want to run and find out what angles are winning, and then we replicate that over to a video. Um, but yeah, now we're getting that flywheel moving on the micro creator side, like I said before, everyone that we're outreaching wants to be part of this brand. So they're willing to give us the videos to whitelist, they're willing to do more for us for very beneficial rates for us. So I'm looking forward to see what we can do in the channel over the next 3 or 4 months, especially.

I'm excited to follow on. That's going to fly. I like your note about like influencers does not always equal creator. Sometimes it does, right? Sometimes these people are great content creators and And we've learned that a lot as well over the last 2, 3 years. And now we are very intentional about how we write in our deliverables based on that. So if they're truly an influencer and we know we want to make ads with them, instead of saying, hey, you owe us this many like ad deliverables per quarter or month or whatever, we say, no, you owe us this many shoot days per year or quarter or whatever. Because like some of our best ads we've made in the last year, our new ads at least, have been not with creators, but people that are very influential and people that are really good in front of a camera. They just don't know don't know how to shoot themselves, but we bring them into our studio, we shoot a bunch of really good ads for 8 hours, and now we have ads to put spend behind versus, uh, like, uh, I don't know, you know, any, any like chef creator that's shooting a lot of their own content, like, I don't need to like bring them into our studio. Like, we can write them a brief and they can shoot it on their own time. And like, both work well, um, for different reasons. Um, do you do— like, are you bringing in any of these like tier 1 athletes that you're partnering with? Are you shooting many ads with them?

That's, uh, yeah, it's something that we really just kind of started doing with, um, with Alex Yee, who we just announced. You know, he was the gold medal triathlon winner at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Um, it's like when we, when we do the kind of, when we shoot the announcement post type thing, um, we always typically, you know, we'll film like a more kind of movie slash documentary style thing with them, and we'll film the ads with them as well. So now we try It's almost like we have this, you know, creative process where, you know, Alex, who, who's the shooter on all this stuff, he'll have a meeting prior to going out to shoot an athlete. He'll have a meeting with Jack on the ads to figure out what we want from— for the ads front. He'll have a meeting with Sam to figure out what we want to do on the, on the social announcement front. And then ultimately, he'll take the lead on kind of creating this like documentary-style movie on them as well. Um, So yeah, it's, it, we've, we've developed that into a much more efficient process for us because we've been there in the past where, you know, pretty early on we were shooting with a, with an, with an athlete once and then we realized we don't have any ad content with them and nothing to use over the course of the year.

So that's a, that's a tough one to, to get through a big deal on. You're like, oh crap, we don't, we've, I mean, we've had those same growing pains, but I think about how I consume like this style of content. And like, I'm spending time watching these like 15, 25-minute YouTube videos, you know, from like George and Ross and like Ian Fonzian. And I just think, I think YouTube ads, like those like higher fidelity, more story brand forward YouTube ads that you're kind of is like where my head goes when you're talking about this. Just knowing that I think the, your audience is already spending time watching long-form content there. I think those like pre-mid-roll ads are going to just absolutely fly for you guys.

Yeah, awesome.