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Get a Demo“Don’t let perfect measurement get in the way of good marketing.” How do Ridge, HexClad, and Jones Road each structure Black Friday, Cyber offers differently? Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge), Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty), and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) share how holiday marketing campaigns pull their ecommerce brands in completely different directions. Shark Ninja becomes the opening case study, spending big on creator activations without measuring returns. The hosts counter with their own tactics, mixing steep weekend deal drops with full brand rebuilds between sales. The riskiest move this season turns out to be a discount that costs a brand its most loyal customers. Cody dives into Winks, a fresh sleep brand he and four other 9-figure executives are building from the ground up, and introduces Operators Build, the show capturing the entire journey from scratch. Powered By Motion https://9ops.co/motion-runneth Haus https://www.haus.io/operators NeonPixel https://9ops.co/neonpixel Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel-mops Proppel https://www.weareproppel.com/operators Aftersell https://9ops.co/aftersell-mops Operators Portal https://portal.9operators.com/dashboard Operators Newsletter Operators Build Winks Chapters 00:00:00 Cody Talks Life After JRB 00:06:07 Meet the Operators’ Brand 00:08:53 Winks Persona Strategy 00:16:09 AI & Building w/o Devs 00:22:50 Shark Ninja’s Creators 00:26:07 But What About the ROI? 00:32:42 Measurement vs Marketing 00:37:35 BFCM vs Holiday Offers 00:43:51 12 Days of Deals Backfire 00:48:49 New Launches & Sub Risk 00:51:03 Early Access & Branding 00:54:43 December Retention Push
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All right. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Operators Podcast. No host today, just the 3, the 3 OG hosts. We got all of us here. Cody, you're out in NYC right now, right? What are you doing out there?
I just spoke at Grow and then just sprinted over here. Was a few minutes late, so I'm a little sweaty, but found a WeWork. I, you know, I decided when I was done at Airbnb that I would like do all the stuff I hadn't done in a while, like go on podcasts, like go to dinners and stuff like that. And it's been like a month of it and I'm done. I'm done. This was the last one I'm doing. I'm going, I'll see you guys at Postscript Cab next week. Yes. And that'll be fun. And then I'm, then I'm done.
Yeah. I mean, when we were doing horseback riding with, with Postscript, of course we got to go do that. Cody, Cody retired from JRB, came out of retirement on the dinners and the events, and now he's retiring from the dinners and events. But Cody, you haven't been, you haven't really been retired for too long. I mean, you got, it sounds like you have another slate of, of, uh, projects that you're going to be working on, mainly the build with Operators. Is there anything you want to hit on on that, or should we let that one rest for the time being?
Yeah, let's do it. By the time this one comes out, we'll have launched. So excited about it. You know, they, I can't claim any credit because they had been working on it a while. It sounds like for about a year, you know, highly recommend everyone should go check that out.
Who's they, Cody?
So Matt, Sean, Mike, and Curtis, who's, you know, a friend of Matt who's like the product guy and like really the main guy on this, had been working on this product for a year. So I don't know the exact origins of it. I know Matt told me about it several months back and he told me about it at the Meta Performance Summit. And I was so jealous because I like kind of knew I was going to be done at Jones Road and I was like, this sounds like so much fun. And I kind of like floated a few times. I'm like, hey, if there's any opportunities to help or get involved, like let me know. And then when I told him I was, you know, done at Jones Road, he was like, hey, do you want to get in on this? Like, we're looking for, you know, we're looking for, you know, you'd be perfect. We're looking for kind of some marketing help, marketing co-founders. I was like, this is like incredible timing. So yeah, I was fully planning to not dive into anything and just, you know, opportunity came knocking. It was kind of perfect time. But, you know, by the way, you were right on the episode with Olivia. Like, I am just throwing stuff out there. Like, I'm not doing most of this stuff. It's kind of more just like ideas and tweeting. I'm very much just like taking my time and, you know, was on vacay and enjoying things, but this was good timing. So we're starting to build. So it'll be really fun. Gotta plug the pod. So it'll be Operators Build is going to be the new show. It's going to be on the Operators channel. So highly recommend everyone goes check it out. But we're really just going to build this brand in public. You know, I don't know, like, if we'll share full financials and stuff, but we'll share, you know, talk about how much money we put in, the strategies. Like, it's fun because we're just doing like meetings and recording them and having friends come on. We'll have to have you guys on as well. So it's really fun and I'm excited for it, but happy to talk about it.
That's awesome, man. We're excited to see it go live and I'm excited to follow along. I think the idea for the show is really fun, so I'm excited to see how that all comes together. And on your point of like, you said most of the things you're tweeting about, you're not actually doing. I think there's something to be said about that. Someone I like and trust and respect a ton in the space is a guy named, I think both of you guys know him as well, Daniel Pearson. And he ran Bamboo for a very long time. And when he was like, he removed himself as an operator in that business. And instead of just like jumping right into the next thing, I basically saw him test a bunch of little ideas, kind of putting out feelers, planting little seeds over the course of like a year or so until he finally decided like the thing to go in, which is now his like AI editing production tool. that is apparently doing quite well. So I've heard. So I think there's something to be said about like when you close one chapter, not jumping right into the next chapter, but actually having this intermediary period where you can kind of like test the waters and see what you want to do and then go all in with a little bit more conviction on the thing that excites you the most, which it sounds like for you is taking a brand from like pre-revenue to and beyond.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll do a little consulting, but I was like, oh, let me do this like AI CRO implementation. And I started doing one and I'm like, this is a lot of work. I don't think this is that much fun. Like, I'm not going to do that. So that's like part of it, you know? So yeah, I just dabbling, but this will be fun. It's really fun because it's like, you know, it's, I feel like dumbest person in the room, like Mike Beckham, Matt, you know, Sean's involved a little bit. Everyone has a lot of really great experience and then I'm, we're able to just build from the ground up, you know? And it's fun because like we're able to use our network for for intel. And we recorded this week with Jordan Menard, came on and just gave us all his knowledge on subscription offers and launching. So I feel like we have a great leg up just by being able to use our network, but it's still going to be hard. We still have no idea if it's going to be successful. We launched ads yesterday. Connor McDonald, you know what it's like launching a new ad account. You've done it recently. It's humbling. Uh, I don't know. Pretty low. I mean, Meta doesn't let you spend very much in the beginning.
No, that's what I'm saying. Like, I think it's funny. It's like, you probably spent $300 yesterday.
Yeah. Yeah. $32 daily cap.
I'm like planning all these, these, you know, A/B tests on our site in my mind. I'm like, wait, we're not even going to have traffic to do these.
Oh dude.
Yeah. That's a luxury. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's humbling. It's, it's, it's what I want. Like, I, I want this phase. I like this phase, but very, very different. And it's been a while since I've experienced it.
Yeah, we talked about this months ago, 'cause like, I think we tend to take for granted the volume that we're at and how quickly we can run tests. And it's like, oh yeah, if you're, if you're only driving a couple hundred people to your site every day, it's like an A/B test is, if you're, if, if purchase is like what you're looking to measure, months, you know, like, like just like an infinite amount of time.
You won't hear me talk about incrementality for maybe a year.
Right. Which I'm concerned about from a, from a Marketing Operators Podcast perspective.
Uh, No.
So it'll have been announced. So can you tell us what the product is? And I'd love to know why you were excited to, you know, join this and take this on.
Yeah. So it's a sleep supplement. So it's a powder sleep supplement. It's called Winks, getwinks.com. I should have prepared like an offer and a code, but I'm sure check it out on Twitter. We'll probably do something for the launch. I'm sure Aaron will want to do something. So it's a sleep supplement. You know, Curtis is like the product guy. So he's like the one guy who's new to e-com. you know, co-founder of this, has a long wellness track record. So him, and then we brought in, they brought in a doctor to help formulate it, but it's essentially very high quality. So no melatonin, right? Melatonin, I think, is a hormone that a lot of people know it's not great for you. It's if you take it every night, your body produces less of it. And so it's not a great thing, but it's got a lot of the really good stuff, magnesium, you know, L-theanine, ashwagandha to help you get to sleep, but also improve the sleep quality. I've been taking it and it's been, I've been knocked out, been struggling with sleep. So I have got young kids that are always up. So it's really great. And then obviously, you know, I always said, you know, this is no surprise to anybody, but I always said, if I'm going to do D2C again, it's got to be subscription. Like we've talked about that a ton, you know? And so obviously had they come to me and said, hey, you know, we're doing a luggage brand or mattress. I'm like, oh, I don't know. But you know, it's perfect. It's a supplement. It's, you know, hopefully large TAM. We're going after, I'll say moms, you know, perimenopause, like, but it's really a family sleep, so it's safe for 4+. You know, definitely like fun branding, right? Not trying to be like the clinical like thing like that, but kind of more fun, but still very high quality ingredients. And I think the thing I'm excited about, like, who knows if there's product market fit and stuff, but, you know, like I'm very inspired by Mars Men. Like they're just putting on a masterclass in terms of execution on ad angles and concepts. And, you know, if you hear Zach talk about it, it's like, how wide can you go with your personas and attaching concepts to it? And there's really not a— bad sleep affects everything in your life. And so, I think if there is some traction with this, we'll really be able to scale it if we execute properly because you can go after mood, you can go after anxiety as long as your proper claims, you can go after stress, you can go after relationships, you can go after body composition. There's so much that bad sleep just makes it worse. So, I think that's the opportunity. So I think the opportunity is here, but we just, we have to execute on it. And we're, you know, we're a bunch of kind of, you know, it'll be interesting going from, right, kind of essentially boardroom CEO, you know, to now it's like me and Matt are building the site ourselves. We're building landers, we're building ads. Like it's very, very different. It's humbling. I think people will enjoy watching it and watching us get humbled a little bit. But the opportunity is there, but we obviously got to execute on it.
I think I'm excited about what it's gonna bring to our show. I think it offers a fun, fresh new perspective. I think it will hopefully, I mean, a lot of what we obviously have been talking about is like just what we're doing every day in our businesses, which is why we are able to record every week. But I'm excited about this fresh perspective that's gonna like be about the launch brand. And I think that's gonna be really relevant to a lot of different types of people compared to like the 9-figure stuff that we're sometimes talking about. So I'm really excited about that. I love that you guys took one out of the Groove playbook and went with the single page website. Let's go. I love it. No reason not to do that when you're a single hero SKU brand. I wanted to ask you a question about what you just said, which is like you have so many different wedges in terms of like personas and messages and problems and like Mars Men's the same way, Groon's is the same way. Really all these supplement brands are that way because, you know, one product, like you said, can solve 100 issues and it can appeal to 100 different types of people that have different circumstances. What's the— obviously you have to start somewhere, right? Like you have to create these hypotheses that are like, we think that this is the top 3 personas we want to go and attack first. Then you start capturing data and you can like adjust that mix. I was talking with a new brand earlier this week that's launching like a dog food product. And I said, it's the same thing. Like there's so many different angles, personas, arcs that you can go after. Like you got to choose the 3 you think are the the most likely to hit and create a bunch of ads around them. Set up your naming conventions in a way that's easy to aggregate that data and understand like what's doing the best and the worst, and then go from there. Like, how are y'all thinking about that from launch? Like, what are your personas, angles, messages that you're going to lean into early on?
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Exactly how you're describing it, which is like, you gotta take your top few and it's a guess. And so you should have some, right, founder intuition. Hopefully, you know, there's, there's, you've talked to people, things like that. Obviously, you know, for us, we think a lot of it are going to be, you know, the mom in the household. I mean, that's who makes buying decisions generally. So I think that's just a good customer to kind of have. And then there's a lot of reasons why, you know, sleep is not great, right? Obviously there's, excuse me, kids and there's stuff like that. There's perimenopause and, you know, cortisol conditions. So, and then again, if it's for the kids as well, right? Like that's who's making those decisions. So we think that's it, but we have it split. So like, I think one of them is named, you know, mental load, Maya, but that's like, just like the mom was just like, Exhausted, high cortisol, taking it out on the family. We have one that's a little bit more of the perimenopause angle, you know, and then I think you should do research on that. Never be, not that I've done it yet, but talking to customers, right? I think Matt and the team has, but obviously AI can be tremendously helpful here and crawling Reddit and stuff like that. And so that can be really helpful, but yeah, you gotta take your top 3 and you're not gonna get it right.
Right.
who Jones Road thought the customer was, one of them tended to be very different. We are going to go with Outer Signal at the beginning because that's the best tool I've seen for personas. So that'll be interesting to get from the beginning. But 100% test, come up with angles. But like, even there's a few angles, like for example, we decided not to go after moms for their kids from the beginning. We just think that'll be a tougher one and it might be an angle we have to crack or later on, but in the beginning, we don't need 10 personas. We got, we need one persona that works to start with. So let's pick 3 and hopefully 2, 2 of them work.
And I think there's a, I want to like summarize something that you just kind of highlighted. I think this is like a really helpful framework when you're thinking about ads, whether you're an established brand or a new brand. I think the, the highest level is like persona, like what is, who is the person we're going after? Then one level down, you have Angles, like you just talked about, you're gonna have a ton of different angles going into this persona. And then you have like the, the probably the, the next layer, which is like hook. And like you can set all those things up in a naming convention. It's like persona, angle, hook, and then you can aggregate your data on persona, on the angles within that persona, on the hooks within that angle, and just have a really clean understanding of what's working. So y'all are going super deep on one persona, the mom, and then you're gonna test a bunch of different angles, menopause. like kids are keeping you at, like all these different angles.
Yeah.
We'll consider the different moms different personas, like kind of like sub-personas, right? You know, because obviously mom is very general, but like there's different, you know, stages, different life triggers and stuff like that. But yeah, 100% agree, like of that persona mapping, persona angles and stuff.
That's awesome.
Cool.
Well, we're excited to follow along. It's going to be fun.
I'm excited to be a marketing operator again so I can, uh, you know, I can, I can have some stuff to talk about on the show.
There we go. Yeah, 100% back in the game. Um, do you guys think there's any good metaphors for you joining Winks? Because I'm thinking, you know, you've got the operators guys starting a new brand. Marketing is arguably all that matters in an e-commerce business. It's a very important function. They've got to go big game hunting. Cody Plofker's a free agent. I think it's maybe like Steve Ballmer buying the Clippers and then trading for Kawhi Leonard. That's what I think this— I, that's, that's my parallel for, for Cody joining Wings.
Yeah, but I just want to get some of that like Steve Ballmer on the side money, you know?
Exactly, dude. I don't even want to know what sort of deal you've got with these guys.
No, no, no, no. How does, you know, I've been so busy trying to get this, this brand launched that I haven't really thought about the metaphors, but I think I'm slacking there. I think I got a little work to do there.
Something for us to workshop more.
Cody, are you like, I'm curious, like, I want to guess how you're going about this in terms of like some of the— Hold on, hold on.
Can I, to answer to Connor's, I think I'm like, this is like when Kevin Durant, Paul Pierce, and like whoever it was, like maybe Harden, I forget, I'm mixing up teams, teamed up in Brooklyn. It's like the big 3, but like 10 years past their prime, probably.
Yeah, I like it. That's good.
That's probably a good one. Sorry, Connor.
No, no. 'Cause you tweeted about low OpEx, right? And you're really bullish on like leveraging AI to keep your OpEx really low, especially early on. So here's what I'm guessing you're doing, and I want you to like correct me if I'm wrong. Do you guys have this like really buttoned up design system built in Claude where you can basically go and just like prompt it now to design landers, design emails, design ads, and like maybe you're giving it some inspo, but like you're doing all this design work and dev work just like with Claude and Claude Designs. Is that kind of what you got going right now?
Yeah, so website, Matt had gotten it started. I had kind of, you know, I don't know if it helped him or not, but I taught him a bunch or showed him a lot of like design system templates I had. So he built V1 of the website. Him and I have been, you know, going back and forth on that. So like, we don't have a web developer team. Like it's Matt and I. We're launching, like, this is how cool AI is. Like we're launching with probably 10 different landers. Like we have 7 templates already built. We have a listicle, the, you know, 10 reasons why listicle, Enhanced PDP, like, and then like, you know, thinking about when Jones Road launched 5 years ago, like that wasn't a thing. You're probably paying like 10 grand a landing page then. So we have that. And before hiring anybody, right, we're like, all right, let's prove that we can't do it with AI. And so emails right now, we're planning to do it ourselves. I built, you know, an email design system. And so we're using Omnisend as a partner for, let's say, an MCP. So it's like, how How do Matt and I, we have, we've known place, we have my assistant from Jones Road is helping me and kind of stayed with me and working on it. But besides, it's just literally the 3 of us running this from a cloud. So we're pushing it as far as we can go. We're doing a lot of really cool stuff with static ads as well. So yeah, like I think our first hire will probably be like head of creator, right? Like we're going with like the Hudson method and Tribe. Like you can't use AI for that. But anything we can, we're like, let's figure out how to do it ourselves. Let's build an agent for it if we need to, um, before we hire somebody.
Yeah.
So that's the fun part. That's really fun.
It is nice, like starting from a blank slate, 'cause I'm, Connor and I are in the bucket of like, we've got to get big marketing orgs. We're trying to get the cat back in the bag. It feels like, at least I do, like trying to get these like very sort of human-based processes, like to become AI enabled. I'm actually super excited about the progress we're making at Ridge. And I know we've got a bunch of other stuff to talk about today, but I do, it would be really nice to be starting from square one today. And I do think we talked about this with Reza a little bit, Cody, um, from Motion when he was on, but like AI native companies starting today are at an advantage for some amount of time because from the ground up they can be AI first, whereas it will be a struggle getting 50, 60, 70, 80 person organizations sort of reformatting and reformulating everything that they do.
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But they're an engineering org, right? Like at the end of the day, like I think Postscript's mainly probably devs and I think devs are probably the, maybe like a really good dev is easier to get on with these like AI systems that are going to improve efficiency than like a marketing org and just an org in general that's got like a million different functions, a million different types of operators. I think that's a lot. It's like, it may be cleaner if most of your org's like centered around a specific skillset potentially. I'm just excited about, I remember like I'm a huge fan of Justin Mares and what he built, what he's built with Perfect Keto and the Bone Broth Kettle and Fire brand. He's got this NA wine brand and like one of the things that he really promotes in terms of like how to test product market fit is, and like test ideas before really leaning in, is to like build these test funnels, right? Like build a landing page, build some ads, build some search ads, and like see if you can get people to either like opt into the idea via a lead form or even buy it. And that whole playbook has gotten so much easier with Claude and all these different AI tools, 'cause like you can go and, you know, you can go and develop the brand, in Claude, or you could just have a designer develop the brand. But then once you have the brand developed, you can build this design system and you can, it's like never been easier to go and build a test funnel to go and test a product idea that you have. And instead of like going all in right away when you have a hunch, but you don't know if there's gonna be product market fit, like that to me is one of the coolest parts about what's happening right now is the ability to just like get stuff in market quickly and see if there's an idea there to like validate some of these things before you go all in. I think that's like really, really exciting. And that's like very empowering for a non-designer technical dev marketer to go and like do these things on their own and just like move faster without needing to like brief in designers, brief in developers, you know, go back and forth for weeks and weeks and weeks. It's like, no, you can get an idea out there pretty quickly in a low-lift way and get some signal.
It's like when you buy a car, you see that car all over. So now I'm like talking to a lot of people who are kind of doing similar things and launching brands, but you know, it's I think it's never been easier to do, right? Like you can source stuff, you can obviously drop ship it. But, you know, there's a lot of slop out there. Like I'm surprised in some of the ads I see, like it's just so much like clod slop. And I don't think all of them are successful, but there are a lot of, you know, one-person companies, two-people company, like that are having some success with this playbook. And so it's, yeah, it's a really fun time. I think obviously that creates more competition. So it's, I think Sean tweeted this and been thinking it like, it's never been easier to go from like zero to $50 million or zero to $100 million. I think it's harder to get to that next phase because now there's just so many more brands. But it's a really fun time to kind of just spin something up and start it.
Yeah, totally. Cool. Cody, appreciate the run-through on the new project. We're very excited to follow along and excited. We got the first big unveiling of GetWinks. So yeah, we're excited to follow along. Speaking of something you said, Cody, you mentioned like creator is one of the first hires you're going to make. 'Cause you can't really AI your way through that. I wanted to talk today about Shark Ninja. You know, Shark Ninja is like maybe arguably the best consumer brand in the world. If you just look at like what they're doing, if you look at their, like the value of their stock and how that's trended over the course of the last 5 years, like they are an unbelievable direct-to-consumer appliance brand. They just launched their, their like water filter product on like, I don't know, last week or something like that. And I have been absolutely blown away at the activation on social. Like, I feel like every third post I'm getting is someone talking about the new water filter. They have activated with like so many creators. They did, they partnered with Tom Brady on this. They have like, it was very thoughtful. Like, as I started seeing all this, I started to like go through the content and see if I could like bucket the concepts into into specific, like if there were like thoughtful briefs going out and there absolutely were, like they have this one consistent concept where people are taking like Gatorade and fruit punch and all these other like non-water products and they're putting it in the backend of the system and then they're showing it like filter out a, like it basically looks like water. Like they're putting in a red Gatorade or a red fruit punch and like water's coming out. So they have just like a ton of, it was very thoughtful about how they brief these creators and the types of concepts they wanted everyone to to promote here. And I just think it's really cool to see a, you know, you have Shark Ninja that's like, I don't know, what are they like $15 billion market cap or something crazy? And then you have brands like Cody talking about their creator strategy, like literally like just launched. I think it's fun to see like this strategy is like so relevant no matter what size you're at. And it's just like blown me away how aggressive they went on creator. Like I wouldn't be surprised if they spent mid-7-figure budget, not including Tom. Tom obviously was probably like a mid-7-figure budget alone, but I would bet they spent another like $5 million on just activating with creators. And it's been, it's been so impressive to see. Um, and you, have you guys seen any of this going on with, with Shark Ninja?
Only, only the examples that you sent over. Um, which I think are super interesting. One of my, uh, thoughts, and we've actually talked about this before, or like I've at least beaten around the bush around it. Do you think an activation like this, how do you think they are thinking about their ad dollars deployed via creators? I don't know if you want to call them ad dollars, but like the marketing budget deployed to creators, do you think they're looking for that to generate an incremental positive ROAS in the short term? Or do you think they're saying, hey, water filtration is a big category for us over the long term. We just want to go scorched earth on brand awareness. We want marketing operators talking about it. We want everybody seeing it all over their feed. And they're just thinking about it as a brand awareness play early on. Like, do you think they're— where on that spectrum do you think they're landing? Given you're like, you've done a deeper dive on it than Cody and I have, Connor.
I don't think they're measuring performance out of it. I think it's a pure, like scorched earth impression CPM art play for them. Now, I would hope they're also like a lot of this content is Definitely would work in an ad account. So I would hope that they're also looking at it from that perspective of like, okay, like measurement number one is how much did we deploy on the organic posting side? How much impressions are we getting from that? What's the CPM? And if that's like really competitive to what they're seeing elsewhere, like that's a win. And then I would also be thinking like, how much dollars are we putting behind this content in paid relative to how much we spent for it? And are we spending 3, 4, 5x what we what we paid these creators for it behind it. And that's like, to me, the two-edged sword that they'd be trying to unlock. But it does not look to me like they're doing any sort of like performance measurement on social. It's all very organic. There's not like people saying, and use my link for 10% off, anything like that. It's just like super organic.
What about TikTok Shop? Like, have you seen this activated on Shop? 'Cause I know obviously they're really big on TikTok Shop.
I'm not sure. I'm sure they are. I've only seen, I've only been looking on Instagram because that's just where I spend my time, but I would bet that they're, that they're doing it there as well.
My guess then would be both. I think from what I've known, like I met their, he's really cool. They're like VP of analytics at like the House customer advisory. Like they're very, for like a, you know, big brand, like they're very startup. Like I think that my guess is they probably don't do anything just brand. And if they do, it's like very strategic, like actually measuring. They're obviously a very omnichannel business, right? And so, you know, they probably, even though it looks more of an awareness thing, they probably have ways to measure, you know, some type of impact, whether it's MMM or some, I mean, not holdouts for creator, but like to look at velocity of how they're moving units for that. I would imagine that, especially if this is for a new launch, like they're probably just looking at, this is my guess, I don't know, but like total spend on, you know, creator concepts behind this launch compared to like overall sales of this. And then I just know that they're extremely creator obsessed to the point where they're obviously one of the largest TikTok Shop brands and they do product dev purely for, I don't wanna say purely, but like very thoughtfully about what is going to create attention on TikTok Shop, social, et cetera.
I agree with that. One, yeah, they are heavy house users. They're gonna beat Ridge unfortunately in running the most house tests this year. I've like, we're not gonna be able to defend our title against Shark Ninja.
Yeah, 'cause they have like more like product lines than you do even.
Yeah, totally. We think about Shark Ninja all the time at Ridge, and that's actually one of the, the points I wanna make. Every growth team defaults to the same metric, acquisition, not because it's the best answer, but because retention data is the one number nobody trusts enough to act on. So budgets keep going to new customers while your highest LTV customers sit unmeasured. That is the gap that Sarah's IQ closes. Brands like Momentus went from days to minutes at month end. Verity uncovered $1.1 million hiding in their customer data. Posh Peanut turned one customer segment into a 6x return, and Ridge and HexClad run on the same foundation. SalesIQ is the only tool in the industry that certifies data accuracy before an answer ever reaches you. Not certain? It says so. Which means when you finally look at true retention and LTV, you're not guessing. You're deciding with numbers you can trust. Starting at $19.99 a month, Live in a matter of days. If I had to start over and scale to 9 figures today, Sarah's IQ would be a non-negotiable. And at this price, it's a steal. Go to sarasanalytics.com. That's Sarah's, S-A-R-A-S, analytics.com, and book your walkthrough now. In the short term, I'm sure they're looking at full dollars deployed against revenue of water filtration and looking at it on a blended basis. To Connor's point, like, there's no way that they're looking on any sort of more grand— I, in my opinion, any more granular way of like, what's the ROI on individual creators? Like they're really spraying and praying early on. And then my point is going to be like, I would think that they're going to like essentially amortize the cost of these creator activations over a longer period of time. They've created thousands of pieces of content for the ad account. They've generated millions of impressions. If you just think about that on like a brand awareness, brand query basis, as well as like Over what timeframe will you get value from having the content in your ad account? It's like a very long period. They might not need to create another piece of content for another 6 months or whatever, and they have plenty to test throughout their ad account. So that's my point is like, they're able to enter this new market, go scorched earth early, and then sort of benefit from that over a longer period of time. And I think it's something that these like multi-product brands have an advantage in doing. If you're launching a water filtration product today, If you're Aurora or, you know, Jolie comes to mind or someone like that, it's like, you have to be more discerning about how you're deploying dollars unless you're going to raise a bunch of money. It's really difficult to take this like scorched earth brand awareness approach early on. Um, but when you're SharkNinja and you're a multi-billion dollar company and you do, uh, you know, hair curlers and you do vacuums and you do kitchen appliances, like when you go water filtration, it's just an additional line item within your business and you can go really aggressive really early on. Because you're essentially, you've got the cloud cover of having a much larger brand. I think Ridge is an example of that in many ways at a much smaller level. Obviously we've got 4 categories, we've maybe got 5 hero products, but you can see how you hit critical mass over time and it just gives you such an advantage as you enter new product categories.
Another few things worth calling out here is they have 300 reviews already on this product page. So they clearly had some sort of like seeding pre-launch product review request flow happening. I would be, a few things I would be doing if I were like helping orchestrate this launch is one, I would be setting up, I would make sure there's like custom purchase events set up so that way you could go into Meta and see like, all right, we've driven 1,000 orders on this campaign. Like how many of those are actually on the product we're promoting? I think that would be really interesting to see like, is this, is this really driving orders on the product we're promoting versus other things? And then I think setting up like a holdout test out of the gate here would be really wise just to see like how incremental are these ads for this very entirely new product category. I would assume it's very incremental, but I think that's like the level of incrementality I would be looking at out of the get-go. Um, but yeah, because they're doing all these activations on all these different channels, it's obviously very hard to like make sure every single thing they're doing is incremental because it's all, it's all blended together.
And yeah, I don't know. I mean, we should try to get the VP on so we could talk about it because part of me also goes back to, um, Jared Brody from Nectar saying like, don't let perfect measurement get in the way of good marketing. Something like that. Do you remember the line?
Yes, I do. That's exactly what he said. That, that one will always stick with me.
This totally, and this kind of feels like an example of that where if you're Shark Ninja, multi-billion dollar brand, you're launching a category that you obviously care about, you think it's strategically important. It's like, are you caring about incrementality in the first couple weeks? The other thing is, again, oh, I talked about this a few weeks ago as we launched chains, but when we launch new products early on, it's 70% return in customer revenue. We're also reactivating a lot of customers via paid. So it's just like really difficult to sort of like piece apart, like what is incremental, what's not, what's customer acquisition. You can get some like guiding sort of data points, I think, and develop a thesis as to like whether something was successful or not. But it's just one of those things where like, if you really want to do great marketing early on, I think you're doing it at the expense of perfect measurement, which I don't think I think brands can happily embrace at certain times.
That's something I've been trying to get better at, obviously when I was at Gens Road, but, um, for retail, it's like we would, we would have, you know, store openings and we would have different strategies. And if we're looking at it and like, we never spent that much, but like starting to spend more and do out-of-home and different, you know, activations. It's like, hey, if we put a lot into this and the store did well, like maybe there's some wasted money in there, but like, there is a correlation, you know? And so I, how am I to say perfectly, oh, this out-of-home is what drove people versus the social post. But like, you know, as long as our total efficiency is fine, like if we're seeing it drive, like great, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect.
This is where it just becomes a conversation around like brand lift, brand recall, brand awareness. Like that's, that really might be the KPI early on. You know, we just activated Tony Hawk for our sweepstakes and we've done extremely few things that my like friends and cousins text me about and say like, this is sick. And it's like when Ridge gets big enough, when brands get big enough, like it is advantageous to do more of those things. It might not be resulting in an ROI immediately over some short period of time that we're running a Geolift holdout on, but is there value in people thinking that your brand is cool? Like, no doubt. This seems like such an obvious thing, but I think we can maybe over-intellectualize or like treat marketing as too much of a science when you can deploy very strategically these like brand awareness moments, throw out a little bit of the measurement and just focus on, you know, being top of mind for consumers.
Yeah. Well, this is the connection I keep, I'm coming back to in my head right now is related to the CRO episode we had maybe 2 months ago where we spent a lot of time talking about this idea of like, Taking massive swings on CRO, like redesigning your entire homepage as an example, testing that big swing against the original version to like create this overall higher performing experience. Do you know necessarily exactly which section drove the first, the second, the third most lift? No, you don't. But you do know that you just created a better experience overall, and then you can kind of back into which sections are the most important by doing some more like incremental testing after that. And it's the same thing here. It's like performance just simply wouldn't be as good if they're like, well, we're going to do the influencer first and then paid and then the TV ad and then the out-of-home. It's like, well, no, marketing all works together. You should just launch the best experience you can and then do the best you can to back into which parts of it are driving the most performance. So there's a lot of like, I think CRO analogies here with this overall new product launch that they rolled out.
Yeah, no doubt.
All right.
If you're the, if you're the VP of marketing at Shark Ninja and you want to come on and talk more about the water filter launch, reach out. We want you on.
We totally get that to happen. He was on, he did the, he did the house webinar, um, a couple months ago. That's where he said that they were actually, he explicitly said they're going for the title of most house tests. And I was like, we're, we're done for.
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I'll lay out the way that we think about it at Ridge. One, and you and I differ here a little bit, we run a longer sale at Ridge. What we would call like our holiday sale is really like Black Friday starts. I also don't feel like it's all that advantageous to like hold back on the Black Friday messaging. Basically starting, uh, early November this year, it's gonna be like the 6th or 7th, something like that. And we run this through early December, roughly like 40 days or so. Um, we do a sitewide promo and for 95% of the items, this is the best deal you're gonna get during this period. And that's why I say I don't think it's advantageous for us to hold back on the Black Friday messaging. So November 6th rolls around, Black Friday starts now. We talked about this before. We always joke every year. I think Caraway starts it like November 1st. I've seen Mando a couple years ago started their Black Friday sale like October 15th or something. So some people get super aggressive. Uh, we start around this early November period. Um, and that is the crux of what we do. And one of the reasons we run it longer is because we are a great gifting product. We're also like a, I wouldn't call it an impulse purchase by price point, but, um, wallets are relatively innocuous gifts. They're great for your brother, your husband, your cousins, whoever. So like, we have a lot of like, um, demand creation and capture to happen within this period. Whereas you say at HexCloudb, you guys have like a month, many months long consideration period. So you might get away with having a shorter sale. So I'll make that quick distinction. So that's how we do our 40-day holiday sale. We consider that Black Friday for all intents and purposes. Then week of BFCM, we do what we internally call deal drops where, um, last year we did it for the first time. We're gonna anniversary it. So this isn't gonna be a surprise to anybody, but we do $99 gold and platinum wallets that typically sell for $200 plus. So it ends up being a really big discount on a highly, uh, or like a really narrow set of SKUs. Um, and we activate that just for BFCM weekend. This year it will be like Wednesday through Monday or whatever, and that becomes our like refreshed messaging for this, um, Black Friday period. We historically hadn't done this. We would historically more or less run the same offer throughout that period. We would still get significant lift because a lot of people wait until this time to finally be purchasing. They want to ensure that they're getting the best deal and we would maybe tweak some prices here or there. But by and large, it was like what was live from November 6th through December 10th was like more or less the same. And it's this like additional layering in of the BFCM deal drops that we've seen a lot of value with. Largely because we get to refresh the messaging. We do a slightly visual, uh, slightly different visual treatment. So it just like visually looks different, aesthetically different. I think that kind of makes that distinction that much clearer that there are new deals available and we might be reactivating people at a higher rate during this period.
And then lastly— Whether you are or you aren't, right? With the visual component. Yeah.
I think that just the visual refresh is like a value. Uh, just your emails looking different, uh, your site looking slightly different. People are ready to explore and figure out like, are there more things that I want? And that is just like an advantageous thing for you to do. Um, the last thing that you mentioned was newness, and this is another thing that we've layered in over the years. We launched our NFL license at the end of 2023, I believe, like during PFCM week. These were full price, $125 wallets that ended up being like a multimillion dollar category. So we have over the years, just from a merchandising perspective, had newness layered in in this November period. So you could be capturing the like higher end of shoppers who are less price sensitive, as well as the people who are looking for the best deals of the year. And that is more or less our, our promo strategy for the period.
A few things I want to like emphasize that you hit on is this idea of like, you don't necessarily need to switch up your offers a ton during these, these periods of time, especially when you have a huge catalog like you guys do and like HexClad now does. We're the same way. Like from the moment we launch our hero BFCM offers, they're going to be the same throughout the duration of the BFCM sale. And same for the holiday sale. We're not really changing it or adding in any newness throughout the sale because to your point, like people just wait. Like you don't need, we don't need to, like we, even though the offers that we run during BFCM are the best offers of the year and then holiday are our second best offers of the year, we still see these massive spikes. in December, because that's just like the trends that consumer intent follows. And that's my like word of advice to most brands out there. Maybe there's like some one-off cases where it makes sense to do it, but like, I think the days of doing, I just think being like, hey, during these 4 days we have this offer stack and then this next 4 days we have this offer stack and oh, over this weekend we have a special 3-day offer. I think that's not the approach here. Like put all your offers out, Right away. Give your customers time to shop and browse and be in, like, I don't think you want to rush people into being like, and then they're, and then in their head they're like, oh, well, should I buy now? What if they roll out an offer later that I like better? I just think it adds so much unneeded complexity to the whole stack. And like, that's something that we also don't, like, we don't mess around with that too much. Like we might do a little bit of newness, but it's more or less the same offer stack for both BFCM and holiday sale. I think the branding point is—
Oh, just quickly on the point of the consistency of offers, my, one of my biggest pet peeves, I see it less now, is the brands that would do like 12 days of deals or whatever. And I'm like, oh my God, just like logistically the work that your team has to do to support that. And I think it is completely counter to what consumers are actually looking for in this period.
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So we just layer in that deal drop on BFCM weekend, that like Wednesday to Monday. Um, I don't even really like changing it between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Like we will occasionally. And like, from an inventory perspective, sometimes we have to, but by and large, I'm like, it becomes 2 things. You have this base 40-day Black Friday sale and then you have the BFCM weekend deal drops that are just like additional layers on top of that.
We struggled, like, for some reason, like even New employees coming to our brand noticed it. Like we had such like an engaged community that like noticed everything. Like it's wild. Like we would like have a hidden PDP up for a minute and like they would find it. And so we got a ton of feedback if it's like dropping different deals and like, well, I just got this, right? Like they would, you know, people would get like very vocal about it. So we had to be like really thoughtful about our timing and like we're never really able to, it wasn't really worth it with how much we ended up upsetting people to like have different deals a few days apart, you know?
Yeah.
Kind of became like a CX nightmare. And so, yeah, for us, obviously in beauty, the, you know, we had, we had an anniversary kit in October that we actually moved up into end of September just to give it a little bit more room, but like that performed really well. But then we go into our holiday offering. Again, those are kits, but they always have new stuff in them. You know, they're discounted, but they're part of the kits. And that's like October to like early November, mid-November. And then, and you know, we're usually moving some pretty significant volume of those. And then for a while we just did Black Friday, you know, mini Miracle Bomb drops. But lately now we do a sale and so we'll drop that earlier. But I think even this year that the discussion was like, do we drop the mini Miracle Bomb set, you know, as, or now we're doing like a mini mini. So essentially it's like a bundle builder of minis and it's obviously discounted with, you know, thresholds and stuff. But it's like, do we drop that at the same time as the Black Friday sale? Or are those a different time to kind of get some of that excitement again? And to be honest, I don't, I don't necessarily know the answer. And then sometimes when you have some of that stuff, like this was a really interesting one last year and talking about how, you know, how vocal the customers get. We launched these kits, these holiday kits that are discounted, right? 20+ percent as part of that. But then when we launched our Black Friday sale, We discounted those kits as part of the sale that were eligible and people were pissed at 'em 'cause they're like, hey, we just, we just bought it. And so we surveyed them this year, talked to customers and they were like, no, like we don't want you to include them. 'Cause I thought it'd be better to include them. It's like, hey, bigger discount, but obviously anyone that bought earlier. So now we're just gonna go slightly more aggressive with the discount in the beginning and then just say they're not part of it.
It's the right way to do it. Yeah. I mean, the 2 things I would say is one, the deal drops that we do, the gold and platinum aren't really purchased earlier in the period. If we were doing a deal drop on gunmetal and carbon fiber, like our top 2 wallet SKUs, people, I think people would be more upset. The other big difference is we're just so new customer oriented. Like, I think, I think your customers are so much more engaged because they're purchasing multiple times a year.
Exactly.
We're 85% plus new customers. It's like, I, we're just onto the next, new person to acquire.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, totally agree. Where ours are like repeat and some of them are making like 3 purchases throughout this period.
Totally.
That's so in the same sale period?
Like throughout the quarter. Yeah. Like there are, again, it's a, it's a small cohort, but there are definitely people and these are the vocal minority, but they're also your, your valuable customers that are getting the anniversary kit. They'll get a holiday kit. They might get a holiday kit for a gift for somebody else. And then they might stock up for on their own for Black Friday.
I'm glad you brought that point up, Cody, because like, I think launching new products during this time of year is such an undervalued tactic. Like we did this last year with our roasting pans. We launched those at the end of October. Those really lend themselves to Thanksgiving meals. That launch crushed. And then like in between BFCM ending and our holiday sales starting, we launched our cocktail shaker. Same thing, like perfect timing, cocktail shakers. Like, there's no better time to launch a product and push a product like that than there is in like end of November through the end of the year. But we launched it at full price and then we included it as part of our sale. And then we're basically, whenever we do that, we're very aware of the risk of like pissing someone off that buys at full price and then sees it on sale for 15% off. So we're always just checking in with our CS to make sure that like the number of tickets we're getting isn't, isn't like worth worrying about basically. We've in the past when we've found that to be the case, we've like honored the, like the discounted price and have like provided them with some like sort of payment back, but like. It's interesting because we haven't seen as big of an issue with that. And I think Hectic Cloud probably falls somewhere in between Ridge and Jones Road as far as like reorder rates go. So I think we're like maybe slightly out of like, people aren't buying 3, 4 times in this 2-month window. So maybe we're getting away with it because of that. But it's interesting to see, we all agree that we should launch new products during this time, but Cody, you've taken a little bit of a different approach on the how you like price it basically.
And then like, to add in another type of brand. Now I'm thinking about subscription, right? And I was listening to this like really good YouTube video yesterday where they're talking about subscription offers and Black Friday. I'm like, you also have to be careful there, right? That's kind of like the pinnacle. Like, if Jones Road has a lot of repeat, well, subscription has even way more. So it's like, how do you— most brands will try to do an acquisition offer where it's like huge first discount, obviously get people on subs and retain, but like, then you can also piss off your subscribers pretty royally and have them cancel or just create a CX nightmare. So I think that's another challenge that I'll have to think through and we'll think through of like, what is the right offer for subscribers? Do you offer something to them as well if you're doing just a new one? So you're not just gonna piss people off and have them churn just to get it.
You'll have to let us know how you think about that coming up in the next few months here. I'm excited to dig in.
I will. Yeah.
One thing we've adjusted in our strategy in the last few years is having like a reason for being for like an early sale. Like we don't launch our full Black Friday offer until the, until halfway through the month. That's what we've done for the last like many years. And it's, and it's worked well for us. Now we're starting to do this like early access, but, but it's not just early access, same offers. It's, hey, we have this early sale and the collection of products are specific for these like big meals that you have coming up, whether it's Thanksgiving or holiday. So it's like 10 to 15 SKUs. Those SKUs are still available during our actual Black Friday and holiday sales, but we're rolling those offers out early so people can get them in time so we can give them like the focus in our marketing calendar that we need to and deserve. And last year was the first time we did that. And we saw, if you look over the entire period of November, December, we saw a massive lift year on year in the performance of those products because we pushed them in the right time. So that's been a new Like we technically will be on sale from early November, but we have this like phased early access. Then we have BFCM, then we have holiday. And I think I just like having a reason for being, if you are going to do a, like have a strong message around why you're doing that. So the narrative makes sense for your customer. And that's worked really well for us, but we also have a catalog that really lends itself to that. Not everyone does.
Yeah, I remember seeing that last year and I was like, oh, it makes a ton of sense. Like, It's not that helpful to get, especially like the specific SKUs that are related to turkey and stuff like that. It's not that helpful to get that Black Friday weekend. Like you really need that if you're going to use it.
Well, you have to buy it right away. It's like you have to buy that on day 2 or whatever. If you don't, you're not going to get it in time. And yeah, it's like literally roasting pans and carving knives and forks and cutting boards. Like these are literally the things you need for your turkey or your ham or whatever. So That's another good one. I think your point on branding, Connor, is like such, like so undervalued as well. Like even if the offer's the exact same, like you should create this visceral feeling, this like subconscious feeling that something's different. So we have like very distinct holiday Christmasy type branding. And then like our Black Friday branding is more in like the true HexClad branding DNA, like very dark black, like premium feeling. So that's another, like, we totally flip over the site, our ads, our emails, literally everything gets filtered into the, or funneled into this new branding and the offer stack's different. It's similar, but it just feels very different. And then again, like the intent is the intent, you know, you usually don't have to do a ton of cute things offer-wise to capitalize that.
I was also going to say, you know, worth noting Cyber Monday back in November this year.
Oh man. More, more weird year over year comps.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So we get that, that, that easy November growth.
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What do you guys think about How does this affect your retention strategies in December? Obviously you get into December and you have the largest recency of first order cohort you ever have had in your business. So we are very aggressive in December on our retention-oriented campaign sequencing because of that. There's just a huge, literally, Millions of new first-time orders are in your CRM now that you can go and extract LTV out of. Um, are you guys, is that something you think about intentionally when you move into December and like you're building out your, your own media?
We haven't talked about this in a while, but another sort of set of tactics that we've developed, we have our like acquisition offers. We have what we call our LTV offer. So during this Black Friday period, if you purchase from us, or if you're an existing customer, we have an additional offer for you that might be an additional 10%. Um, we've experimented with store credit in the past, just some sort of additional incentive to get someone back purchasing for a second time. Um, those are those, so that sitewide sale and that customer offer run in parallel in this period. And then we're acquiring, yeah, millions of customers. Uh, millions is a strong word. Um, but then afterwards we are then reactivating those people with an out-of-sale customer offer. So we can be more aggressive with this reactivation. once things are going back to full price. And that's sort of the like 3-pronged approach that we take during this period. And we've slowly refined that over time. It was first layering in the, the customer offer during a sale period. And then it was once that sale period's over, let's do a more deliberate reactivation, giving them another like great offer to, um, you know, get them to repurchase.
So is this in like January that you're, you're launching? And is this like, we, we call this internally, Dark funnels. So like often, like we'll do our monthly S&OP meeting. If we're over-indexed on a bunch of SKUs, we'll roll out what we call a dark funnel and we'll just push it to a retention segment and like, we'll, we'll get some volume on those SKUs going. Is that kind of what you're doing with, with the third prong here?
So that's a cool one. Um, we have examples of that. We call those like sell-down periods where we're like, okay, we identify what SKUs we need to sell down. We're like over-inventoried, whatever. Um, we'll also do like, this is when we would use cashback or something. We'll do 30% back on orders of $100 plus, something like that. Um, so it all depends on inventory positions and what we want to do. Something like the cashback is independent of inventory. We're basically comfortable with that offer across the entire site as long as we're at full price. And that's why we do it to reactivate customers post a sale period.
So to summarize, we're not getting too cute with the offers. It's for the most part the same throughout the duration of this period. We're on sale for most of November, December. Um, branding's different between the 2 periods. And then we just have some like certain like end of period tactics to make sure we're like really extracting all the LTV out of everyone that's new to the, new to the file.
You know, the, the other one that I love this exercise, actually, the other thing that we've like become, we've developed a set of tactics around is the, um, like last chance shipping period. So we do like, we'll do countdown timers and urgency around our standard shipping cutoff. We'll do free expedited shipping for another 2 days. We'll push people to Amazon for another like day and a half. And then like day before Christmas, we're like sending people to our store locator. So you could like shop at Best Buy or whatever. And like just trying to absolutely squeeze out all the juice we can depending on where our products are and how quickly they can get delivered. Yeah.
The other one that crushed for us is, uh, after Christmas, didn't get what you want, at least for our demo where like the husbands are probably the gift buyers. It's like actually crushes.
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We've done that. We've done gift card pushes. Like I think 2 years ago we ended our sale after Christmas and then went into gift cards. And then last year we just ran our sale throughout the entire duration of December. And it was like 10x, probably more revenue to just run the sale through. through the end of the year, even though it's past the actual like date, um, people still want the offer. And that, I think just keeping your, your, if you do want to run an offer through the end of like December and that like whatever Q5 period, like just keep your offer going. That's way, probably a way better option than, than doing gift cards. At least it was for us.
Totally.
The other, we'll do, we also do the, um, like we'll do a lot of like, as we get closer to like order by dates for the actual holidays, We'll do a lot of that, that we've tested into a lot of that PDP checkout messaging as well. So we'll actually like put a module below our cart button that says like order by date to ensure Thanksgiving or holiday delivery. We'll put the same thing in our free checking option or our free shipping option at checkout. And then we'll remove it once that date's come and gone, because obviously we don't want it to like work in reverse on us. And those have also been very, very effective CVR bump tactics.
I agree with that. That's great.
All right. The other point I'll make on BFCM is like, you don't have to, I think for us at least, BFCM and holiday have become these insanely foundational activations where like 2022 was the most work we ever had to do because it was the first time we were really building it out in like this fully developed way. And then like everything we're doing the year after, the year after is just like stacking on what we built and learned the last year. So like a good example, that I have is we have over the last 3 years, we've produced all sorts of like high fidelity CTV, linear TV commercials that are like time consuming to plan. They're expensive. You really have to have a lot of thought and, you know, money to develop these things and produce them. But now we've produced like, now we have like 2 different holiday spots. We have like 2 different Black Friday spots that we can now run in CTV and linear TV. And they performed well last year. Like we're not, we're not taking that data and saying, oh, we should go and produce more holiday spots or more BFCM spots. We're saying, hey, these worked. We've spent a lot of time the last 2 years producing them. Like, let's go and run these again with like the newest version of the overlay and the offer and all the things and just like go focus on newness in other places and not like redo that, which worked really well last year. And I think that's the other thing is like, Lean into the stuff that you've built in prior years. You don't need to rebuild this stuff from scratch every single year. Like a lot of your ads will work again. A lot of your like CTV productions will work for many years to come. So like to the extent that you can lean into those things again and then really focus on like what's the next 20% of things that are going to drive 80% bump in improvement, like go work on the newness there, but like just keep leaning into the stuff that that's worked in years past.
I totally agree with that. The biggest, the most important thing is that your products are cheaper during this period than anything else, right? Like, um, it's, it's like the best time to just anniversary content and strategies. Um, we've totally leaned into that over the years. And there's another thing, like, I remember hearing brands, speaking to them. Yeah, it was more common years ago, but they'd be really concerned about like, well, what did we do last year? It should be different this year, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, a really big thing. And I'm actually curious on your perspective here, Cody. For the Ridge brand being so new customer oriented, I don't think anybody really remembers what we did last year. We could theoretically run the exact same sale, exact same creative, and I think it probably does like marginally worse, but more or less accomplishes our goal. And I think like approaching it from that perspective is probably helpful just to properly scope the amount of effort you wanna be putting in. But Cody, do you feel like that's different for a customer or for a brand that's more returning customer heavy, that you do get more value out of changing things up year over year?
I think if you're doing a discount, it's fine. If you're, if it's a standard offer discount, great. But if you're doing some type of a drop model, right, if you're Supreme, you gotta be dropping new stuff. You know, if you're— if you're dropping new stuff. So yeah, for Jones Road, like we, we had to, we have to be putting our best stuff in it. 'Cause even like the strategies work less and less because as, you know, customer acquisition gets challenging and somebody has, you know, 6 mascaras already at home and whatever, like It's harder, right? To, they're like, I already have all of this. And now it's like, all right, this is $80. Economy's not great. I have a bunch of these things. And so it used to be where like we would need one new product, one exclusive product in a kit, and it would work. We could have a standard lip gloss, a standard mascara, but like this one new Miracle Balm shade and people would buy it. Now it's like last year in our anniversary kit, we had 5 new things. 5, whether we had one that was a net new product, And then 4 of them that were a new shade because we just knew, right, to make this work, especially for existing customers, like it had to be such an exciting offer to get 'em to spend $90. And then, oh, by the way, we're asking them to also spend $90 the following month on the next kit. So yeah, it's, you, for us, we had to, and it's a, that's why we plan these like a year, a year out. Like literally our teams will, the product teams are already working on them and then we'll do, you know, postmortem customer surveys right once we launch these so that we can kind of start getting some feedback for the prior year.