HexClad + Ridge Reveal Their 8-Figure Celebrity Sweepstakes Playbook

All right, we're back for episode 132 of Marketing Operators Podcast. Excited to be back. I've been gone the last couple weeks, so I'm coming in refreshed, recharged, ready to jam on some D2C e-com marketing with Connor McDonald today. Connor, how you doing?

Doing good, dude. Where have you been?

Well, I was in, uh, girlfriend's 30th birthday. We had a South America scuba trip, so we were in Honduras for that for a week. And then our Hexacloud executive offsite Just so happened to be starting the day after that. So I went right from Roatan, Honduras to Tuscany, Italy, which is a weird, a tough, it's tough to get from Honduras to Italy, but we got there and yeah, it was good. A lot of, a lot of good stuff coming in 2027, which was the main focus of, of the offsite. So it was pretty cool. Let's get into the, the episode today. We're talking all things sweeps. You guys just wrapped up an awesome sweepstakes. We are about to launch ours in the next few weeks. I think by the time this episode goes live, that our sweepstakes will be live. And we have a bunch of differences happening this year that we can chat through a little bit here. Connor, you put out a big tweet the other day, kind of really doing an awesome breakdown on your sweepstakes. You said that you described this as Ridge's first multi-eight-figure sweepstakes campaign. You know, we run our sweepstakes, we run it the last 2 years. The first year was a culinary trip to London. Last year was a culinary trip to Paris. And this year it's a culinary trip to Italy. Can you just like Just to like, before we get into some of the details, can you just give us a lay of the land? Like, what was your offer this year? Like, yeah, what was the offer this year? Because you guys do really cool stuff and it feels like you, you continue to expand on how awesome your offer is and just like to get people more and more excited every single year. So yeah, what was the offer this year? Like, what were you giving people?

Well, totally. Let me take an even bigger step back quickly because this is our, this was our 6th annual sweepstakes. We've done it every year. The first one was very small. We turned around really quickly. Uh, Sean Frank, the CEO, and I like drove this Jeep out to the desert. We did some off-roading content and then we were giving that Jeep away, like probably 5 weeks later, like really sort of by the seat of our pants sort of execution. Um, but we saw early on that there was an opportunity to really build this up as a, as a tentpole moment for Ridge. We really have 4 tier 1 non-product launch campaigns. We have our anniversary sale in March. We have our Father's Day sale in, uh, May and June, and we slowly rolled Memorial Day in. to that as well. We've got sweepstakes in this late July, August period. And then we've got obviously our holiday sale in Q4. So we wanted to create this moment in Q3 that could sort of stand up the quarter because otherwise it's not seasonally relevant in any, any other way. Back to school is not a big period for us. Um, wedding bands for fall weddings has become like a little bit more meaningful, but otherwise there's been no like large commercial moments. So we wanted to sort of build a campaign around that. And how do we like sort of manufacture our own demand in a similar way that we do for the anniversary sale? Anniversary sale, we really do via promo. Like, that's the reason you're buying in March. Father's Day holiday sale, there's a natural seasonality, there's natural intent that happens as people need to purchase gifts. Um, sweepstakes is another manufactured moment where there's really no other seasonal reason to be buying from Ridge. Um, so that's why we do it. The one thing I'll call out is it's largely a full price period for us, which is also really nice to sit between the Father's Day sale, which is a pretty long promo period for us, and the holiday sale. The fact that we've been able to manufacture this moment without it needing to have discounts associated with it, I think has been like an added benefit that maybe we didn't necessarily foresee. So that is why we started doing this. Um, and then each year we've tried to raise the stakes. I said early on, 6 years ago, we did a, this like souped up Jeep Wrangler. Um, then for 2 or 3 years we did, uh, Hennessey Velociraptors. So Hennessey's a Houston automotive house that just like does these crazy things to, to F-150s and Ford Broncos. So we gave away a few of those. We partnered with them, which was really cool and sort credibility building. Um, and then we've slowly tried to like raise the stakes even further. So 3 sweepstakes ago, we did a Cybertruck. We had one of the, um, Foundation Series, a very early model of the Cybertruck. So we did the Cybertruck or a Hennessey Velociraptor, the souped-up F-150. And that was a very cool sort of juxtaposition of a campaign. We ended up having the opportunity to 24-karat gold plate the Cybertruck throughout. So it ended up being a gold Cybertruck and this, and this crazy F-150 that was just like a really sort of striking and polarizing And what we were describing as the time as like buzzworthy or like at least worthy of being commented on. It drove a ton of social engagements. People discussed which one they would choose between. Nobody on the internet really likes a Cybertruck or the vast majority of people. So it was more of a one-sided argument, but like good engagement nonetheless. And then this year, well, actually I'll back up quickly. Last year we added a $300,000 Lamborghini or a Velociraptor. So same sort of choice, but higher-priced car. And then what we've tried to do every year is just continue to raise the stakes. So this year, um, we did another $300,000 Lamborghini Sterrato, which is a really cool off-roading Lamborghini. We did another Hennessey Velociraptor. We wrapped both of them. So they both look like visually striking. Um, and then you also had the ability to get a, uh, a Ford Bronco, but it was GT paint. So it's just this like very bright blue and orange. So like extremely visually striking cars. And then the real way that we wanted to continue to raise the stakes was to get some sort of celebrity endorsement. So this is something I brought up last year as just another lever that we have to make these even more sort of noteworthy or more of a moment. So we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast, but months ago, we're talking January and February is when I was having these conversations, but we go to all the talent agencies in LA, UTA, CAA, WME, to just begin discussing like, what would it look like to engage with all different types of celebrities? We were talking about athletes, we were talking about female models, we were talking about actors, et cetera. Um, and we ended up landing on Tony Hawk, which I was super excited about. He's great for the demo. Um, he's been doing more like commercial endeavors recently. People will see him on more commercials. He was just on My First Million, which I think is really cool. Um, I also think he's a sort of like kindred spirit of Ridge. He's purchased from Ridge before. We were aware of this. Our founder started this like really weird side brand a couple of years ago where he was doing headlights for Super 73 bikes. Tony Hawk purchased from that. So it always felt like, uh, there's this sort of like kindred spirit, like. relationship between Tony Hawk and Ridge, I thought it was a no-brainer. So we ended up going with him, ended up leading to, as my tweet mentioned, a fantastic sweepstakes period for us, multi-eight-figure. We were up over 50% year over year. And, um, there's many reasons for that, which we could dig into further, but really the escalation of it and this celebrity endorsement, I think really went a long way.

Okay. So I have, I got, I got 2 follow-up questions. One, you have 3 cars, 3 like multi-hundred thousand dollar cars that that people can choose from? Well, actually, I have 3 questions. One, who's the, who's like leading up that operation at Ridge? Like, who's the one that's responsible for like sourcing these vehicles, getting them wrapped? Like, who, who owns the car production operations? Is that you? Is that someone on your team that's figuring that out? Like, what does that look like?

Well, I think there's 2 parts of the car operation, which is funny because we're a remote organization that's largely just like moving pixels around on websites and things. Like, there are very few instances aside from like our ops team getting stuff shipped into the US. Like, we're really not dealing with that much like physical logistics. Um, choosing the cars is, uh, Sean and the founders of Ridge. They're very passionate about what cars we're getting and like what the wraps are going to be. So they actually own the like sourcing of and wrapping of the cars, something they, they, they love doing. Um, there's also a ton of debate every year. It's like, we joke that it's like the hardest decision that we make is trying to figure out what cars we want to give away. Um, so that's one. And then the logistics of moving the cars around, I owned more directly a lot. We used to have the cars out in Utah when I was living there and We had like people on the ground helping move the cars between shoots and creators, and we'd have to get a mobile detailer out and we'd do a whole thing. So we owned that. We had someone on the, we have a VP of special projects who stepped in and then an overseas sort of project manager who could help just like manage and coordinate that. It was quite a bit easier with more of us being back in LA this year. We kept them at the office most of the time. So that is a little bit of a wrinkle in the whole system is there are a lot of sort of, behind the scenes logistics.

Yeah. Okay. So you have a VP of special projects. That's kind of like a point and shoot person that you can just be like, hey, you're owning these things and that person's going to make sure they get done. Okay. And then—

And they do, like, for what it's worth, like, they're in charge of a lot of AI adoption right now, like kind of special projects as it relates to AI. They do corporate gifting and then they did like sweepstakes this year. So it's like, they're kind of all across the board depending on where we need them to shift their focus.

Sure. Okay. And then this is the first year you've had a I mean, obviously you guys have the Marques partnership, so like you aren't inexperienced with like how to activate like a, I mean, I guess you could call him a celebrity. Like what, this is the first year you've had a celebrity as like the face of the sweepstakes campaign. So what were the core ways you activated with Tony Hawk? Like obviously he was front and center in a lot of static imagery. Like I saw him on your website, but can you just talk through like how you activated with Tony Hawk and then if you have any Data on how that performed. Like we always shoot a hero video with Gordon to announce the sweepstakes and we leverage that in a lot of places. We put it in the second section on the landing page. So like right away, people watch a really engaging video of Gordon. They get a really clear, he just speaks so well. So they get a very clear understanding of what's included. And then everything else is just so much easier because we have this amazing video. Then we leverage that in paid, you know, we do paid cutdowns and that's always one of the top performing ads. So like, I feel like we've developed this playbook on how to leverage Gordon in sweepstakes. And I'm curious, what, what were you guys thinking about with Tony and how'd you activate Tony? And then what were like, did you see any data points showing that, you know, Tony's ads or emails or whatever outperformed like non-Tony ads and emails?

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And is that, is that just because Tony, like if if you're a credit card brand, there's so many credit card brands that want to be working with these people. So like the, the rate for a credit card brand to work with someone is just through the roof because there's another 4, you know, billion-dollar brands that are also going after the same talent. And you guys are like the only, you know, D2C brand, a 9-figure brand, but there's not other brands in your space that are like also trying to go get Tony Hawk to be the face of their campaign.

Totally.

Yeah.

And there's a, there's an aspect of exclusivity here too, right? Like if you get sponsored by Bud Light, like you can't just do a Coors next year. Like, that's, that's, uh, they bake those into the contract. So the fact that exclusivity is really easy and we're not gonna— for us as well as we're not gonna conflict with anybody else's exclusivity agreements just made it a little bit easier to deal with. So what we got from Tony, we got a day shoot, uh, we got name and likeness for the 6-week period, we got the ability to whitelist, we got 2 posts, 2 social posts. So that's all to say, like, we weren't really counting on Tony Hawk at all for distribution in and of himself. It came down almost exclusively to like, let's get the content that we need And then layer this out, layer this throughout the way that we were activating sweepstakes. So yes, where we placed it, I mean, basically everywhere. Like he was the hero banner on our homepage, him in front of the cars. We had, uh, TV commercials. We had a bunch of ads. He was on our landing pages. He was in a ton of our emails. Like we really sort of, and this was a goal from the beginning, was like creating a spokesperson for sweepstakes. Like who is the person who's really endorsing it this year? So basically wherever we were talking about it, we were integrating Tony Hawk where applicable. Um, and then it's funny you ask about performance because it was one of my biggest fears. Obviously the biggest, far and away the biggest production we've done, the biggest investment in content we've had. We've never really done anything like this before. One of my concerns was we were going to come out of this period and not be sure what his value was, just because that happens all the time. A lot of brands, and I talk with, with other CMOs and CEOs who have brands who work with celebrities more frequently, and they'll often say it's like, it's more of like a brand activation where it's like, yeah, you just, you want to be driving impressions. You want to be staying top of mind with people. You want people to have the reaction of, oh, hey, it's really cool that X brand is working with Y person. And a lot of people just earmark a bit of their budget every year, a few percentage points of the total budget to like those sorts of activations. That would've been fine. And frankly, with the initial reaction and like a number of people reaching out and saying like, hey, this Tony Hawk engagement is awesome, I would've felt good about it from that perspective. But what we ended up finding was, and I say this in my note, We basically find just a ton of winners with Tony across the board. Um, most notably something like TV, which I think makes the most sense. He's the most traditional celebrity we've ever worked with. Marques Brownlee hasn't made a huge impact on our ability to run linear TV ads, but Tony Hawk being included so that we can run in bars and at gyms and on the Fishing Network and things like actually really worked. Um, so we saw response rates basically double. It allowed us to almost double TV as a percentage of our total budget, which I thought was very exciting. And we are coming out of this period saying, hey, yeah, and it's not— that's not necessarily to say that every celebrity will lead to the same sort of efficiency gains. But in this case, this messaging with this person, with this campaign really seemed to click in ways that led to a lot of winning content.

Dude, I remember playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater back in the day, like when I was 8 years old. And like Tony Hawk for me is such a nostalgic figure. So I can imagine that. I mean, I don't know what your— I'm imagining like your core demo is probably like what, 25, 35, 25 to 45. Like I imagine that was just such a nostalgic person to activate for this that like really made people perk up and see and like be like, oh, whoa, Tony Hawk. You know, I think it is the perfect person. How was Tony in— okay, so you're shooting like full-on TVC. So like, this is like a big production that you did with him. So are you shooting— You shot a TV commercial. Are you shooting paid ads? Like full shoot day, like full on, like what, what kind of production scale are we talking here? Like, is this a 6-figure shoot day? Is this, is that what we're looking at?

The entire, the entire deal was multiple 6 figures. One of the things that included was we had to use his production company, which worked out really well because we were able to shoot at his warehouse in front of his halfpipe. So I'm sure we can link to a video in the show notes here, but, um, The hero video was basically Tony. We had another sort of hero figure who was speaking about the sweepstakes, which I thought was kind of a fun concept. We had the 3 cars in front of this like epic halfpipe. So we got to shoot that at Tony Hawk's warehouse. We used his production company and that the main deliverable of that was this like hero video that got cut down into social ads as well as TV ads. It's where we got some of the static assets that we could use throughout the site.

Okay. That's awesome. I wanna talk about, I wanna talk about like measurement a little bit here, 'cause one thing I, you know, it's like for us at HexClad, like we don't, you know, we position our sweepstakes like in a similar way as Ridge in the sense that we don't have like a ton else going on during the moments that we run it, except for the primetime sale, which for us is like a big moment, but it's like staring right down the barrel of BFCM. So it's not, it's like a fraction of what we're going to about to drive in a month. And then obviously we're trying to build our list a ton during like this moment, because then we go into our BFCM sale. And like, if you look at our, our like average days to first purchase is 86 days on our sweepstakes from 2024. And that makes sense, right? Because we launched this campaign in like the middle of September and then we activate BFCM in December and we're getting a lot of people to To buy. So this is people that's explicitly opted into a sweepstakes popup. So like for us, we see our opt-in rates go through the roof during sweepstakes. Obviously now the conversion rate is much lower than it is on like an evergreen popup. Now, at first I struggled with that. I'm like, well, is this really working? Like if our conversion rate's so much lower than our evergreen, like opt-in to order conversion rate, like, is this really strong? But the, but the opt-in rate bumps are so big. Even though like, it's kind of the, it's like the AOV versus conversion rate, you know, argument. And like, you look at the net dollars that it drives, like, okay, this is 100% worth it. Like, that's the kind of the ways that we're thinking about, like, is this working? Is this driving growth for us? Is this a worthwhile activation to do? Because we don't see, it's not like when we launched our first sweepstakes, we all of a sudden saw our revenue grow to like 100% growth. Now, did we see really good growth? Absolutely. But it's not like, The overall blended Shopify was like, oh, we were trending at 30% growth for the year. Now we bumped up to 60%. It was kind of, it was kind of roughly the same growth rate. Now I would argue that based on like the channel KPIs we're looking at, that we would've had a much lower growth rate had we not run the sweepstakes. But I just want to like dig into that because I think sweepstakes is one of those ones where it, you kind of got to dig a little bit to make sure that it is driving a bump in performance and it might not always show up. and your like blended growth rate? I mean, obviously that's the, that's the goal is that you can really spike your like Shopify and your Shopify growth rate really. But like, how are you thinking about measurement here? And how are you like thinking about, is the sweepstakes something that is worth it? I mean, you just said you did a multi-hundred thousand dollar shoot. You know, we're probably investing at least 6 figures into getting this campaign off the ground every year. You know, we're producing a ton of content. We do a shoot every year. We're activating with creators. There's a lot that goes into it. How are you thinking about measurement and like validating the cost and the ROI on a campaign like this?

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Yeah, no, it's a great question. Um, and I'm totally with you, especially if a brand's experiencing like relatively large growth over a couple years. It's really easy for things like this to get lost in the mix where it's like, what is the incremental growth unlocked by something like a sweepstakes campaign? Um, the way that we've looked at it in the past, I mean, we've run 6 of them at this point and there's really, I guess, 2 types of comparisons that we're able to look at to sort of help justify the existence of sweeps or validate that it is truly contributing to incremental growth. Uh, one was in 2024, we moved our sweepstakes up a week. And that's super, like, it's not, this is not rocket science, right? And we didn't do it for the purpose of measurement. Um, but launching it a week early allowed us to say, we've been growing at, I'm just going to use standard numbers here, 10% growth year over year. We launched sweepstakes. This week of sweepstakes is comping a week last year where we did not have sweepstakes. So if we're able to go from 10% growth to 50% growth, I think it's pretty clear that the existence of sweepstakes is driving incremental revenue. And the reason I bring that up is because if we've been running it 6 years in a row, it's actually really difficult to, to understand that, like, we have no holdout against sweepstakes. That's why I like this as an example, is it's like, We're looking year over year and we can treat last year's non-sweeps period as a sort of holdout. What does the last week of July look like without sweeps compared to this year's last, last week of July?

Oh, I see. And we, okay.

So that's like super, super simple.

Did you do that just, did, was that like a thoughtful approach literally just to get like for the sake of measurement or no, it just worked out that way.

We were thinking about, we extended sweepstakes actually. So there was a year where we went from it being like 5 weeks to 6 weeks or something like that. So we actually just pulled it up. So it was more a calendaring decision or a campaign decision around just elongating sweeps, but it gave us the ability to have this like very fair comp year over year. So that was one. The second one is as we've expanded markets, we get really clean reads. Last year we launched the UK and Canada, and those had no sweepstakes for the entire 6 weeks previous. The only caveat there is, and we've seen this now, actually, we were, we launched in the EU and Australia this year, and all the international markets don't respond to Tony Hawk in a Lamborghini in the same way that the US market does. So this isn't by no means a perfect assessment, but we saw 2 things which I think are interesting. We obviously saw extreme growth during the sweepstakes period, and then also extremely interestingly, because we have 4 internationals, we'll use the other international markets as a pseudo holdout as well. These are our comparison periods that received no sweepstakes and, and largely behave similarly. We don't see a lot of significant differences between growth percentages between our different international markets. So one, we launched Canada, UK last year. We're able to see this large growth during sweepstakes. Great. That is validating in its, in its own way. And we typically, it ends up being like 30, 40% growth, seeing something like that.

When, when looking year on year comparing to—

When looking year on year.

When comparing to did not do it the year prior to, this is the first year we did it.

And then the other thing that was really interesting for the international markets last year, and this is also very easy to sort of miss, is we saw a pretty significant sort of tail where we ended sweepstakes in Canada and UK. And then all of a sudden those markets continued to grow at a higher rate than the EU and Australia for the preceding or the succeeding like 6 weeks or something. So we saw this like very strong sort of halo lift afterwards. And these are all, again, like not particularly scientific ways of looking at it, but all point in the direction of like this driving growth in this period, as well as surprisingly, in my opinion, Some pretty like long tail growth in the international markets.

Yep. That makes sense. I'm honestly, I was so shocked at like, I thought our conversion rate on sweeps opt-ins were going to be like a fifth of what our like evergreen was. And it's actually grown. Like I'm looking now, we're only like net 5 percentage points lower in our first sweepstakes 2 years ago compared to our like evergreen popup, which is pretty darn good. I mean, this kind of attracts that type of person that might not buy. So it's good to see that over time we can convert these people. How do your, how do your sweeps ads perform relative to non-sweeps ads during, during your sweepstakes?

So I think all of the ads benefit from sweepstakes for the most part. We have a lot of like caveats and nuances and things like, and this makes total sense. We see sweepstakes play less of a positive role for our wedding band business. This makes sense. Like it's such a high-intent market. Nobody's, nobody's really buying a wedding band because they might win a Lamborghini, right? Like, like it's so high-intent. It's more about like, I've got a wedding coming up in September and I need a ring today. So things like tech or, or EDC seem to benefit more from the existence of sweepstakes, but I think all the ads benefit to some degree. And then sweepstakes-specific ads end up becoming anywhere between like 40 to 60% of total ad spend for those different categories. So we're, we're able to scale spend, right? Like we're able to drive incremental ad dollars that perform often better than our baseline stuff. Um, so that's another way that we're looking at like, well, how are we actually driving the growth?

And you're saying evergreen ads benefit from sweeps because they're going to your website, which has the sweeps activated there. So it's just like an onsite CRO play.

Um, I don't think there's any, like, the other way to say that is like, I don't think there's any downsides to having the sweepstakes on my website. If I'm just, if I'm running a wedding band ad and it's like, hey, you're getting married, you need a wedding band, come to my site. The fact that in this period you might win a Lamborghini. has no negative downsides and some incremental person is going to be like, okay, I will purchase today because this seems sort of interesting.

Yeah, totally.

[Sponsor Content] The other thing I would just want to highlight quickly, because you were talking about opt-ins, is the free entry is like a no-brainer reason to visit the website. And we have very few examples of this and that actually going into 2027, like to find, we're going to have another example later this year, but going into 2027, finding more examples. or more ways to do this. Um, what we're asking shoppers or just like, you know, social media users to do all the time is come to our site and purchase from us. Like, there's really no, like, that is, that is what we're doing 99.9% of the time during sweepstakes. We're saying, hey, just come here, enter your email for free, and that's all you have to do. And now all of a sudden we've gotten more people on ridge.com. We've gotten more emails. The value of those emails is obviously questionable. It's a very, It's a very unqualified lead that you're gathering at that point. But all of a sudden, I think there's like really a lot of like long-term benefits of simply having a no-brainer reason, a low-risk, no-cost way to get people to your site and engaging with your brand. And this is obviously like a super non-novel take here, but like that, that's, I think, a really interesting component of this entire sweepstakes. We see, you know, like quote unquote click-through rate from like partnership ads. like quadruple at times, 5x at times, because it's like, hey, don't go to ridge.com and use my code and save 10%. It's like, go to ridge.com right now, enter for free for a chance to win a sweepstakes. And all of a sudden there's just infinitely more reason to do that. And so that's how we think about this period as well. It's similar to what you're talking about where you drive in opt-in rate, you can drive up click-through rate, you can get more traffic to your site. The quality goes down significantly on like a per email basis or per user basis. But I do think that there's really long-term benefits to that. Before Q4 hits, the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking, how do we spend more? They're asking, how do we make every visitor more profitable? That is where AfterSell comes in. AfterSell helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor, contribution margin, and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments— cart, checkout, post-purchase, and even the thank you page. Brands like HexClad, Ridge, and Pela are increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero-risk upsells. We've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion. It's just more free money in your pocket. And with Rocked Thanks, you can offset your AfterSell subscription. No redesigns, no risky funnels, just better economics. Want to see how much money you can make with AfterSell? Go to aftersell.com/rocketrevenueforecast, put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts.

I think there's a balance too to make, like, as far as like entry merchandising goes, like we've thought a lot about this with Like the question becomes, what's the sweet spot between, obviously you're going to get higher opt-in rates and lower conversion rate on your opt-ins during this period, but is there a way to like filter a little bit? So for us, the way that we've done it is like just how many, it's just how we assign entries to those non-purchase events. So we're saying, hey, you can get 25 entries if you opt into email, another 25 if you opt into SMS. But if you go buy this $100 cookware set, you can get 100. If you buy this $700 knife set, you can get 1,400. So I think that merchandising also, it kind of somewhat deters the, like the people that aren't as serious about buying eventually, because if you're someone that truly, truly, truly is the person that goes and opts into every single giveaway, if you see that you're only getting 25 entries or 50 entries for email and SMS, but then you also see that, well, the 7-piece knife set is 1,500 entries. I think that deters some people and says, I'm not even going to do it because obviously people are going to have way more entries than me and way, and way higher chances. So Like I would never go and say, like, I guarantee you, if we were to go and make our email SMS opt-in 200 entries, we would get 50% opt-in rate. But I bet our conversion rate would go from 13% to 3%, you know? So I think there are ways to like not swing too far where with how you're merchandising the entries on the opt-ins, because otherwise you're just going to get like a terribly unqualified list.

I do. I generally agree. 2 of our winners, again, we've had, uh, there's a couple years where we've had 2 winners. So like in total we've had 8. 2 of our winners have entered for free. They never purchased anything from us. They just signed up for email, maybe SMS. They had like 40 entries and they won. Um, so it does totally happen. I also don't think people are being as calculated. Like, you know what I think is probably the more common path is someone says, hey, I'm gonna go enter for free. I'm gonna get my 25 entries cuz this YouTuber just told me I should. And then, hey, I'm on ridge.com and it's like, these, you know, pieces of hardshell luggage look pretty sick and I'm traveling next week. So like, I'm just going to get one. I think that ends up being like the way more common sort of buying behavior. And then they're like, okay, sure. Yeah, I'm going to get a couple hundred more entries for making this purchase. But that's just like, again, it's at the end of the day, I'm like, I don't need to, I don't need to have this perfect equation or like set of incentives necessarily. Like, Give me the no-brainer reason and the exciting, interesting, engaging message for why someone should come to ridge.com. And then our products and our imagery and our value props are going to do enough of the work that some of these people are just going to convert naturally.

I wanted to go back to the cars. So you have 3, you had 3 cars this year?

Yes.

And the winner selects one or 2 winners select?

We have 2 winners and they're sort of like stack ranked.

What do you do with extra cars if someone doesn't take the cars? Because either both winners each take a car and you have one leftover car. Or both winners take cash and you could have 3 cars not claimed. So like, what, what are you doing with these, these wrapped cars that don't get claimed?

Yeah, we know we got it. We got a ton of, we got a ton of different scenarios. Uh, 2 years ago we auctioned off the 24-karat gold-plated Cybertruck for charity on Doug DeMuro's YouTube channel, which was a super cool way to sort of like bookend the end of sweepstakes. Nobody wanted, surprise, like not all that surprisingly, nobody wanted the 24-karat gold Cybertruck. Um, we've resold the cars in the past. The Jeep Wrangler wasn't chosen. So like we resold that one. So it's just some mix. We've reused cars. The F-150 has made, um, an appearance in more than one sweepstakes. So like that is an option that we have. So it's really just a gut decision, but luckily, you know, cars are assets to some degree. So they do, they do cost money upfront, but, um, they do have resale value.

I want to dig into a few more things. One, One I want to dig into first is like your non, like some of the non-sweeps tactics that are really driving Ridge's growth this year. And if I had to, from all the conversations we had, if I had to like pinpoint one thing that is driving the majority of Ridge's growth this year, it's like new product go-to-market, it's new categories, it's new products within categories. And I wanted to ask you, I tweeted this at you, but I don't know if I, if like the, if like all the details of my question fully came through in the tweet. What I was wondering is, obviously you guys really ramped up your tactics this year, right? You had the celebrity endorsement. I'm looking at like the notes on your creative stack. Clearly you ramped up and improved your creative stack this year, but I also know that you probably had tons of new products available this year that you're promoting that you did not have the year prior. And that like setting aside all the sweepstakes tactics, that also would've driven some level of year-on-year growth, right? So If you had to guess, maybe how much incremental revenue do you think you drove during sweepstakes this year in new products or new categories? Or like, yeah, so new products within everyday carry or new categories like chains as a whole that you just didn't have available last year. And that's the growth driver. How much would you attribute to that versus your new and improved stack of tactics and strategies?

We have 4 categories. We have, for the sake of simplicity, our wallet business, our tech accessory business, our wedding band business, our luggage business. We had all of those categories last year. So like there are many periods of time over the last 3 years at Ridge where we have an unfair comp where all of a sudden rings are doing $1 million a month and they were doing $0 the year before. So that is like unfair growth, um, that we're getting. This is not really one of those periods. Tech accessories was a more nascent category. So we're getting larger percentage growth there, but wedding bands continue to grow. The wallet business continues to grow. And we actually had like a really difficult comp for our luggage business, like a bunch of reasons. We had Section 321 finally ending mid-Q3 of last year. So we had things on promo. We were like quickly trying to sell things out of the inventory that we had in Mexico and Canada. So we just like had this blowout sale for luggage last year. where that was like more or less flat year over year. So we got no growth out of a category that we've had for 3 years. Um, so it's really just a mixed bag. Um, what I will say is our oldest and most mature business, the wallet business, is growing at the slowest rate. And that's not going to be a surprise to anybody. It's like the biggest actual, like, 9-figure line of business is the hardest to grow. We're getting still single-digit to high teen percentage growth in certain periods. Um, But really disproportionate growth is coming from the, not necessarily new categories, but like still maturing categories.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's just the law of big numbers, right? Like your percentages. Yeah. Like you might grow 10% in wallets this year. Your net dollar growth is probably bigger than it was when you grew wallets 50% 3 years ago. Like it's just, it's just those can be misleading. So, but even so, even within the, like, wallets, for example, you have, I don't know how many new patterns, new colors, new designs you have this year over last year. Like within that growth, within wallets, like was a lot of that growth due to the, like, that's what I was kind of getting at. Like how many of these new wallets drove the growth versus like your hero gray, black, gold that everyone goes for?

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That's okay. So I actually didn't get that from your initial question, 'cause that's like a, a super interesting, um, distinction to make. Like when I think about when people often are like, oh, you guys are launching so many new products, what they're talking about is like the new categories that we're launching and like the really like net new, we would call those silhouettes, the like brand new phone case, the iPhone 18 that just came out last week. Like that's a new silhouette. The Duo case is a new silhouette. I, I figured that's what people are talking about, but then within.

Yeah.

All these silhouettes or within these product categories, we're launching a ton of new colorways and designs. And that's what you're talking about. And actually for this sweepstakes, it seemed we had a difficult comp year over year that we had more newness last year. And it actually felt like to some degree we were, we were coming out of a deficit. And that's like, this comes down to a merchandising question.

[Sponsor Content] Yeah.

Because they're not even necessarily new colorways associated with the sweepstakes campaign. But last year we launched a, uh, colorway called Kintsugi, which will come out again in just a couple of weeks at the end of October. And it's this Japanese porcelain-themed wallet. It's like black with like, uh, gold oil-filled cracks in it. Looks like super, super cool. That came back into stock in July. And no joke, it's one of those colorways that like sort of changes the face of the EDC business that we're able to spend more ad dollars on it. It becomes a big percentage of revenue. But as we promote that product, we sell far more gunmetal black and other colorways. Just the ability to spend that dollar is so valuable. And that was frankly, we didn't have as strong of a launch to comp that. So it actually felt like from a colorway newness perspective, we were coming out of a deficit for this period. Whereas if we'd had comparable newness, I think we would have even hit a higher growth rate.

I see. And then what about, uh, what about chains and, and like, is it, I think it's just chains. Like, how did that look?

Yeah, chains looked fine. We're waiting on, uh, more inventory to come in. So that hasn't been as big of a growth opportunity recently as it has been. That's another one in the month of October, friends and family, they're gonna go on promo. Friends and family sale, you and I have talked about, is how we're gonna try to like sort of activate people in the month of October. Chains will go on sale for the first time. And I'm really excited about chains as a gifting product through the rest of this year. Um, but not like really not a needle mover, um, for the sweepstakes period.

You know, one thing you chatted about, which this is one of the things I love the most about our sweepstakes, is it is a fantastic way to drive growth in your, uh, kind of some of your ancillary categories. Like, that was one of the best, the best growth we saw when we launched it our first year was like, you know, aprons and, and like non-cookware. Like, we saw really amazing growth in those categories and we didn't have to, we didn't have any margin drop. It was purely because we were giving people more entries for every dollar they spent in aprons compared to, to cookware. So I do think it's a fantastic way to drive some growth in those In those other categories in a way that doesn't reduce margin at all. We have some more new tactics coming this year where we're actually adding like a 4th tier to our entry merchandising with a smaller collection of products that are like, we just think we have the opportunity to drive growth in without discounting them. And that's, I think, one of the biggest wins for sweepstakes for us at least is like, we don't necessarily need sweepstakes to drive growth in cookware, but it has been a really helpful tactic for for some of these other categories. Um, do you have any that like as a percent growth really outweighed some of the other ones? I mean, I'm assuming some of the less mature businesses, right?

It doesn't end up actually being the less mature businesses necessarily. Uh, I said earlier, like wallets and some of the tech accessories do well. It's like an $80 to $120 price point. It's like relatively accessible. You can get some bonus entries. I know I just said earlier, like, I don't think people are all that calculated about it, but I don't think it's a, um, coincidence that people gravitate towards things that are like Accessible price points and give you a decent amount of entries. Um, wedding bands don't really benefit, as I mentioned. And then luggage we find difficult because it's such a high price point where it's like, if you want to enter the sweepstakes, a $400 piece of luggage, even though you're gonna get 800 or 1,200 entries, is still such a big dollar commitment. Like, you're not just like, oh yeah, the Lamborghini seems interesting. Like, let me casually buy this $400 hardshell luggage. So that's one that like really doesn't benefit as well. And then the other really interesting behavior that we were looking at, so I don't know how many brands are thinking about this, and part of me thinks I'm like way too in the weeds here, but what we've looked at is if we spend a dollar promoting wallets, we drive in an evergreen period, um, we drive the vast majority of revenue attributed to those ads is wallet revenue. It's like, it's not perfect, but it's like 88, 90%. It's really, really high. Um, and that's because like when we're promoting the product and someone clicks through on it, it's because they are interested in that product and therefore they buy it at a really high rate. It's like not rocket science whatsoever. What we see during sweepstakes, which is really interesting, and when I say 90%, in this case, 90% comes from wallets and let's say 5% comes from tech accessories and 5% comes from travel, something like that. Nobody shows up and randomly buys a wedding band. Um, what we see during sweepstakes, and my thesis here is because someone's clicking through for a different reason, they might be interested in that product, but they might be interested in what is Tony Hawk promoting? And they might be interested in like, how do I get the chance to win this $300,000 Lamborghini? When they click through that ad, even though we are thinking of it as a wallet ad, they are purchasing a much wider range of products, which I think is super interesting. And maybe kind of what you're describing where someone's clicking through on the 12-piece. But they just want to participate in the culinary experience in Italy. They want the chance at that. So they're actually going to convert on a much smaller pan set because they just want to be participating in some way. And that ends up like really sort of screwing with the way that we think about MER by category in this period specifically. We see this massive distribution of like cross-category buying. So that's another thing that happens here is like, it's not necessarily any one product benefits disproportionately, but like people end up shopping in a much more distributed way than they typically do.

[Sponsor Content] Yeah. The value proposition that people are coming in on is much more broad and general. It's not as product specific. We see, we see our individual product grow a lot during sweepstakes for, for that reason, right? People are like, hey, I want to buy something because I want to improve my chances of, of winning. But like, I'm, if, if that's the mindset, they're going to go buy a 10-inch pan versus a 12-piece set. I want to talk about Creative, because you guys did a lot of different things this year creatively that I think are very, very exciting. So according to your post on Twitter, you said that partner page ads and affiliate content accounted for about 40% of Ridge's meta spend, and it was basically zero last year. You guys launched 2,200 ads. You had 5,300 TikTok creators post, or sorry, 5,300 videos from TikTok creators. So you guys clearly shifted towards like this creator-led ad flywheel this year in sweepstakes, which I imagine paid off pretty well if you put 40% of your budget towards that content. So can you just speak to like, what was the thinking this year in that shift in creative and like operationally, how did you go and execute on this many pieces of content? All right. This ad is technically a job posting for Neon Pixel, but stay with me here. Neon Pixel is hiring performance marketers. People who actually get incrementality. They understand holdouts, they understand triangulation. And really that's the entire pitch because when you sign with Neon Pixel, these are the marketers that are running your CTV strategy. We've been with Neon Pixel at HexClad for 3 years now, and they really do work like an extension of our team. Live on real living room TV in days, helping with creative strategy, same-day end card swaps, and measurement read in our stack, not just some black box dashboard that we don't really understand or have insights into. And that's ultimately what a managed service looks like when it's staffed by real operators and real marketers. So whether you want to work on the sharpest CTV accounts in DTC, or you want that team running yours, go to neonpixel.co/careers to apply.

Totally.

Yeah.

So there's 2 things going on there. One is I would really like to be spending way more dollars behind single-handle partnership ads. What, like, people historically would have called whitelisting. This goes back to like, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 13 years, like promoting a very similar wallet silhouette. Um, we need to be reaching the same people in new ways. So a big chunk of that 40% comes from just partnership ads, not necessarily content created by partners, but ads run through new pages and they typically highlight those people. So this would be a lot of, uh, Tony Hawk partnership ads, a lot of Marques Brownlee partnership ads, which come from his page. And then we had a really big effort and we do for all of our sort of like tier 1 campaign activations, uh, with founder content. And we'll run some of those via like our founders page. So that's where a lot of those dollars go from, uh, go to is like, how are we just reaching people in ways that are a little bit more unique? They're not coming from our own page. They have a different angle. There's more people involved. It's more humanizing, et cetera, et cetera. So that's like one big chunk. That's been an effort all year. Sweepstakes with the addition of Tony Hawk, like benefited disproportionately from that. But this would be a trend that we would see basically any given month and it's accelerating throughout the year. The second thing, which we've talked a bunch about is I've been calling it TikTok shop, but really at the end of the day, it's like, how are we activating creators at scale? And we talked about this a few weeks ago, but we've really shifted a lot of our attention from being TikTok oriented, TikTok GMV oriented to Let's just get great ad content created by dozens or hundreds of creators. And that's where like, I'm beginning to blur the lines between videos getting posted to TikTok that might end up in GMV Max, but we have the ad rights. They make it into our ad account as well as Tribe creators who are producing content that's going straight into the ad account. That is what made up like of the 40%. I think it's like roughly half, something like that. High teens, something like that. But those are less sweepstakes dependent and more just us beginning to get the flywheel going of building great ad creative. with affiliates at scale. Um, which again is a trend that we're going to see even after sweepstakes, not sweepstakes dependent at all. I think going into October, November, December, like it's going to be an even larger percentage of our budget. We're going to start paying out. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the year, we're not paying $100,000 out in, um, like affiliate fees to either TikTok affiliates or Tribe affiliates. Um, so that is just a sort of a continuation of a trend that I think helped contribute to sweepstakes. Independent of like the increase in the prizes or the addition of Tony Hawk.

Yep. And like the ability to brief creators at scale via TikTok Shop and via Tribe is what allowed you to activate this many creators, this many pieces of content, right? Like this is not something that you were going and necessarily doing like on a one-to-one basis. Like that just probably wouldn't, wouldn't be practical.

Briefing's not even the right word. Like what we're talking about internally now is like creator coaching and education. We want to give them the loose tools and information they need to create good ads, but it's not about briefing at all. It's like, hey, here's the direction. Like, here's what has worked in the past. Now you go be creative, produce as much content as you want. And that has led to winning ads. And again, that comes down to like, it doesn't create ads on a high percentage basis. The winning ad per concept's actually really low, but the fact that it has basically zero risk to us, Upfront and the fact that we can produce so much of it just means that we can actually find winners at a pretty reliable and frequent rate.

Yep. Okay.

Well, no, so I was going to kick it to you independent of sweepstakes, or maybe you guys are thinking about as it relates to the sweepstakes that's coming up, um, just affiliates generally. Like, uh, are you guys, are you guys thinking about Tribe? How's TikTok Shop shaping up? Like, where does that all stand for you guys?

We haven't expanded to Tribe yet because we're starting with TikTok Shop. We've actually had our first TikTok Shop affiliate ad that like really took off. This actually happened outside of the activation that we did with T-Bar. We are just now getting our like Google Drive folders of literally hundreds of pieces of content from the T-Bar competition activation. So we're about to get those, those pumping in the ad account. I have been so happy with how TikTok Shop has been going. I mean, we have, Obviously we have a lot of brand equity at this point. So when we really started going outbound via Yuka with these competitions, we were getting like huge GMV Max folks applying to get our product. So that's really exciting. The, like the GMV Max as a whole has obviously grown a lot. Um, our, our revenue, or sorry, I should say just overall GMV, we're putting more spend into GMV Max ads now. Like, and now we're about to just like see how all this volume of content does inside of our Meta account. So. We might go to Tribe at some point. We just haven't so far because we're, we really wanna focus on TikTok Shop and see how this content performs. Also seeing a totally different distribution of products performing well for us inside of TikTok Shop, very similar to what you talked about. Like for us, it's a lot of the individual cookware products. It's like our splatter screens and steamer baskets are doing well. So it's, it's pretty cool to see that we're just like, we're able to push some of these other products that historically we haven't necessarily been able to on .com in a way that it's just, it has more breadth. Like there's way more product distributions, there's way more products being seeded to creators. And I think it's just like becoming this really, really exciting way to drive growth in a category that we might never build ads around. We're never gonna build Meta ads around like steamer baskets or a lot of these like smaller products, but It's giving us, you know, it's empowering that we can go and say, hey, this is like a C or B tier launch, but we have acquisition plays here now. Like we have actual like demand gen acquisition plays, not just, hey, let's merchandise this prominently on the website and it'll get picked up organically. Like it's kind of creating this whole new distribution channel for us on some of these smaller AOV, more niche products, which is really exciting to see. And it's just like very incremental. to one another, I think, is ultimately the conclusion.

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Yeah, 100%. And like, I think that's a, I mean, we've talked about it quite a bit and it's cool to hear you guys really experience it. The brands that I've spoken to that are big on TikTok Shop, it's like, it's a big catalog activation play. It's like, you never really know, you know, you guys didn't show up being like, oh my God, we got to hit TikTok product in the steamer baskets, right? But it's like, but because you have hundreds of people just kind of picking and choosing what they want with an idea of what content they'd create, like, it's just activation that you couldn't possibly create internally. And we've seen a similar thing, but the reason we've moved to Tribe is because I don't think we have as big of a catalog and as much opportunity to really activate from that perspective. It's like, okay, yeah, our tracker card product is like our hero product on TikTok Shop. We don't have like 6 of those. We don't have like 12 of those. It's a relatively concise catalog. The wallets aren't a particularly great fit for, you know, the problem and solution content, the storytelling content, the like, um, value-driven plays that I think perform so well on TikTok Shop. So that's why we ended up shifting a lot of our efforts away from Because what I'm saying here is if TikTok Shop is going to work, you are somewhat beholden to what can work on TikTok Shop. Brands with big catalogs, you have a lot to work with. There are many things that can work to a really high degree on TikTok Shop. For someone like us, it's actually, we'll do a couple hundred grand a month on TikTok Shop. We'll continue chipping away at growth there. Really, our biggest opportunity is going to come down to like getting more wallets sold. That's going to happen via Meta at a more effective rate. So let's just align affiliate incentives with that. But it sounds like you guys are nowhere near that point. Like there's a lot of meat on the bone for growing TikTok.

Yeah, not yet. And also a lot of what is working in TikTok Shop, it is still cookware products. It's just individual products. So what we need to see, and like, we don't know this yet because we just don't have enough data on running these ads through Meta, but like if someone, if we get like someone that makes a really good piece of content on like our high-sided pan, let's say, which is a very popular product line for us, like these are You know, like the 7-quart chicken fryer and the 5.5-quart high-sided pan. These are really popular individual cookware products for someone to like see an ad about the high-sided pan, which is still cookware. And then they go to our website. It's not that much of a gap to cover for them to be like, actually, I want to go buy the 6-piece set or the 12-piece set. Because at the end of the day, the value propositions on what makes our cookware unique is the same between a 12-inch pan as it is between a griddle, as it is between a high-sided pan. Whereas you guys, obviously there's a lot more difference between like your, your charging banks versus your wallets versus your rings. Like I think there's more differences here. So, and we saw this with our Japanese products as well. Like we're promoting these Japanese products that have been really successful. Those costs like $130. The AOV on those ads was like in the mid $200s up to $300. So clearly people are going and buying multiple products here. And that's what I want to wait and see is like, what's the AOV going to be on an ad promoting a griddle or a high-sided pan, which is a single product promotion. But I would bet that people are going to get to the website and opt in for a bundle because that's how we position to get savings during an evergreen moment. So I think based on what happens there, we may or may not need to go to Tribe and say, hey, we need you guys to promote the 12-piece set or the 6-piece set only. And, but, but I'm, I'm hoping that we can, we can, um, promote more new products, but not see AOV come down too much because of all the reasons that I, that I just mentioned.

100%. You know, it's a great, I love the point that like, at the end of the day, they're all cookware products. And what we're talking about is almost like the transitory value of like the brand awareness where it's like, yeah, if someone loves the High Side pan, when they see the 12-piece set on, on Instagram, like they are going to understand that connection. They're going to say, hey, like I saw this, I was interested in this on TikTok Shop. I understand how this, what I valued in it on TikTok Shop is like transitioning over to what I'm now seeing on Instagram. And if you guys were like, hey, we, we don't care at all. And we're just going to come out with a bunch of viral-ish stuff and we're going to sell makeup and hair scrunchies and whatever else. Like that has no transitory brand value. That's not going to benefit the 12-piece set in any way. So yeah, are you guys going to do, I'm super curious to hear about some sort of geo lift test that I'm sure you'll do at some point, because I would think that even though you're promoting individual products on TikTok Shop, that I could see there being quite a bit of spillover to Shopify and Amazon on higher value orders, just because like, I think people are more comfortable spending $200, $300 on those platforms.

Yeah. Um, we've had to, we're trying to get the GMV Max ads holdout test set up. It's not like an out-of-the-box solution, as I'm sure you know. So we're trying to get in touch with the right people because that is like the highest priority holdout that we want to run is a GMV Max holdout and see what kind of halo there is in Amazon and in Shopify. So that's, that's like number one on our list. We're just trying to get in touch with the right ads team at TikTok to get that set up on the backend and then we'll run it. I think we might also do the same thing, but just do a holdout on the TikTok Shop affiliate content we're running in Meta. Now, I don't want to do that right away. First and foremost, I just want to launch these ads and see like what the performance Northbeam metrics look like relative to other ads and the AOV and all those things. And I think a follow-up test could be, all right, let's do a holdout now on like all of our TikTok Shop affiliate ads in one cell and holding that out in another cell and see what kind of lift All that content promoting such a variety of products lifts. 'Cause I think there's, I mean, we all know this, right? Like people see many, it's not like they're seeing one ad only over all time. They're seeing tons of ads. So I think there's a ton of value in people seeing an ad about the 12-piece set and then an ad about the griddle and then an ad about the high-sided pans and then an ad about the wok. I just think there's more like trust and yeah, I just think there's more trust baked into that experience versus them getting hit over the head with like a 12-piece set. ad or different 12-piece set ads over and over and over again. So I could see all of those ads driving a huge lift, not only on those products, but like we talked about on our sets as well, because of the value of like promoting multiple products to the same person over the course of many months. I just think there's more trust, there's more use cases, more value props to hit on, more ways to tell that story when you're promoting 10 cookware products versus like a single set or 2.