Black Friday Gigastream with Shopify | Harley Finkelstein, Noel Mack, Sara Foster, Sean Frank, Kat Cole, Peter Rahal, Farhan Thawar, Torin Herndon, Kevin Harwood, Nish Samantray, Bené Eaton, Brian Keller

(06:32) - Harley Finkelstein is the President of Shopify, helping lead the company’s global commerce strategy and long-term vision. He works closely with founders, brands, and entrepreneurs building businesses on the platform. Harley is also a prominent voice on entrepreneurship and the future of retail. (36:06) - Noel Mack is the Chief Brand Officer (CBO) of Gymshark, responsible for the company’s global brand, creative, and community strategy. He has helped shape Gymshark into a culturally resonant fitness and lifestyle brand. Noel is known for his focus on creators, storytelling, and social-first marketing. (47:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (59:35) - Sara Foster is the Co-Founder of Favorite Daughter, a women’s apparel brand she built with her sister Erin. At Favorite Daughter, she focuses on brand, creative direction, and product vision. Sara also brings a background in entertainment and media to her work as a founder. (01:12:38) - Peter Rahal is the CEO of David, where he is focused on building new products and brands in consumer and food. As a founder-operator, he brings deep experience in scaling packaged goods and modern CPG playbooks. At David, Peter is focused on long-term, disciplined company building. (01:35:36) - Farhan Thawar is VP & Head of Engineering at Shopify, where he leads large engineering teams building the company’s core products and infrastructure. He focuses on scaling systems, improving developer experience, and shipping fast at massive scale. Farhan is known for his practical, high-velocity approach to engineering leadership. (01:41:26) - Torin Herndon is the CEO of ModRetro, a company focused on nostalgic, design-forward consumer products. He oversees product, brand, and overall company strategy. Torin blends design, storytelling, and physical product development to build memorable experiences. (01:53:19) - Kevin Harwood is the CTO of Tecovas, leading technology, data, and digital product for the modern western wear brand. He focuses on building and integrating systems that support ecommerce, retail, and operations at scale. Kevin works at the intersection of engineering, customer experience, and brand. (02:11:51) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:19:57) - Nish Samantray is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Arrae, a wellness brand focused on targeted supplements and high-intent communities. He leads company strategy, growth, and operations alongside his co-founder. Nish is focused on building a customer-obsessed, education-driven wellness company. (02:29:45) - Bené Eaton is the CMO of FIGS, overseeing marketing, brand, and storytelling for the healthcare apparel company. He focuses on connecting with FIGS’ community of healthcare professionals through content, campaigns, and product launches. Bené blends performance marketing with brand-building and culture. (02:37:33) - Brian Keller is the Co-Founder & CEO of Rorra, a modern water-filtration company focused on designing high-performance, beautifully engineered home water systems. He oversees product development, brand, and long-term company strategy. Brian brings a background in engineering and consumer product leadership to building Rorra’s next generation of water technology. (02:46:20) - Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 and a member of its Board of Directors, leading the company’s global strategy and operations. She brings decades of experience scaling consumer and franchise brands to the health and wellness space. Kat is known for her operator’s mindset, people-first leadership, and board experience across multiple companies. (02:56:09) - Sean Frank is the CEO of Ridge, the company behind the Ridge Wallet and a broader line of everyday carry products. He leads the company’s growth, product expansion, and brand strategy. Sean is known for his operator-focused approach to ecommerce, performance marketing, and content-driven brand building. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, November 28th, 2025. We are live from the Commerce Corral.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Commerce Corral.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  You might be wondering.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  It is good to be back.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  This show, of course, is sponsored by Ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, a whole lot more. But we're doing a crazy Black Friday stream with none other than Shopify.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  That's right. We're in the green suit.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  You have a...

• 0:26John Coogan?

  We got tons of guests who are on Shopify.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  And a guest host today.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Guest host Carly Finkelstein from Shopify. He's gonna be calling in throughout the show at multiple periods of time to let us know what's happening in the world of e-commerce, in the world of commerce generally.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Look at this guest lineup.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Can we just drop the E at this point? Why do we keep calling it e-commerce?

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  It's just commerce.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  It's just commerce. I don't care about any commerce other than e-commerce. So we should just take it over. The rest should be called T-commerce, traditional commerce.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  T-commerce.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  T-commerce and e-commerce. We're just calling it commerce from now on. It's just commerce.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  It's over. We won. Completely total culture victory.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  We lost one thing.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  What did we lose?

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  You used to be able to meet up at your local retailer on a Friday.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yes, on Black Friday.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  On Black Friday.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  And fight.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Still nursing a hangover from Thanksgiving.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Getting a fistfight.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Over consumer electronics.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Nobody has replicated that online yet.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  You can't do that online.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  That is a startup.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You can't do that online.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Request for startup app that lets you

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Fight strangers for consumer electronics deals. Nobody's done it yet. Very...

• 1:35John Coogan?

  So you get on the waiting list, you'd be able to check out just normally. It would just be a normal Shopify checkout, but then maybe there'd be a Shopify plugin and

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Friendly little boxing match.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Post-purchase flow. A post-purchase flow. Post-purchase flow. Would you like to get in a wrestling match for more, for a bigger discount?

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Put the gloves on. It doesn't need to actually be violent.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. You've secured the product. You're good. But if you want to get in a fight, we can bring that experience of the traditional commerce experience. We're bringing the traditional commerce experience into the modern era, into the e-commerce era, into the commerce era.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  And we're doing it here on Restream, of course. One livestream, 30+ destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Harley kicked it off with a video that's just hit the timeline. He says he's ringing the opening ballot NASDAQ this morning alongside Shopify merchants, Brunt, Workwear, Wild Ones, Swim Suites, a boat. There are a ton of companies that he's going to be taking us on a whirlwind tour of. We're very excited to have him calling in in just a few minutes. Toby Lookie also hit the timeline. He said, "It's officially Black Friday in the first time zones and we're live with this year's Live Glow, Globe now inside of a pinball machine."

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Pull up, pull up this video so we can see it.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  "Fun to play and live sales trigger surprises. The team went all out on this one. Give it a spin." Yes, very, very fun. I feel like there's been this like, you know, the, the Black Friday sales tracker has been, I don't know, a decade in the, in, in the works, maybe two decades in the works almost. I mean, Shopify is coming up on the 20 year anniversary next year, I believe. I believe the, the first sale that they processed was in.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one is wild.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  19 years ago.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  Feels like being inside a video game.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yes, and so every year it's become a, it's become a race to create an arms race, to create an even more extravagant and elaborate sales tracker. But it's a lot of fun. It's gotta be, this is like, this is like a, like a Manhattan project for front-end devs.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  It really, it really is.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  It's like AGI for front-end developers. Seriously, if you're, if you're a front-end dev, like.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  This is your Super Bowl.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  This is your Super Bowl.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  It is. A lot of folks are doing, are doing crazy stuff all over, all over the internet today. It's a lot of fun.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, I am excited. We should read through the guest lineup if we can pull that up again. But we have a pretty incredible lineup of guests. We have Harley joining, of course. We have Noel from Jim Shark. We have Sarah Foster, co-founder of Favorite Daughter and podcaster. We have Peter Rahal from David Protein, former guest of the show. Excited to have him. Back on, he has just put on an absolute masterclass with David this year. It's will be a Harvard Business School case study, if it's not already.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  And we haven't had him on since the boiled cod thing, have we?

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Because we had him on and then he did the boiled cod stunt where he had a whole bunch of billboards.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  He sold a lot of cod.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Did they actually?

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  They actually were selling cod.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  They actually sold it.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  They were actually selling it. I had to, I had to double check on it.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  It was a real sale.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, been on an absolute tear.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  And who else we got? We have Farhan, VP of Engineering over Shopify. We have Torin from Mod Retro. He's got news today. We have Kevin from Tacovus. We of course are wearing Tacovus today here in the Corral of Commerce. And we have my dear friend Nish from Array, one of the fastest growing supplement brands that I've ever been aware of. So very excited to talk with him. Benny from Figs and Brian, of course, my co-founder over at Aurora. And then, and Kat from AG1. And then we'll wrap it up with Sean from The Ridge, repeat guest and dear friend of ours.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  So it'll be a fun, fun, fun show today, trying to get, really get a view into how brands are approaching.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  The production team's fired up.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  They're fired up. We got a skeleton crew in here today.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  A lot of people traveling.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  We did, we did let most of the team just focus on, focus on commerce today. And, but we are here, of course.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  This is not the biggest lineup yet in terms of total number of guests. It's close, but I believe

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  Didn't we almost?

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Teal Fellow episode was really huge. And then there's been a couple

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  Obviously you have to count YC Demo Days.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Where we've just gone through just one guest after the next, after the next, after the next. And we sort of lose track at that point because it's so many guests. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Harley.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  The man from Shopify.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Harley, how are you doing? Oh, look at that. Oh. Where's your tie?

• 6:37Harley Finkelstein?

  Let's go.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Casual Friday over there.

• 6:40Harley Finkelstein?

  Wait a second.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Throw them up, throw them up.

• 6:44Harley Finkelstein?

  Tecovas, let's go.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 6:48Harley Finkelstein?

  I don't, I don't know where you guys get these outfits, but I'm in.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  They're fantastic, yes.

• 6:52Harley Finkelstein?

  They're fantastic.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Looking, looking great.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Some people say we look like the Riddler. I think it's very clear that.

• 6:57Harley Finkelstein?

  I think we look, I think we look great. I will tell you, I don't know how many suits you guys have, but I assume you have every color of, uh, in your closet.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  Clothes.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Not green, not green.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  No, I've got a darker green.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you have dark green. Yes, you have dark green. I went with brown.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  But, but nothing quite this green. Nothing quite this green. Shopify green.

• 7:14Harley Finkelstein?

  Well, Kevin, Kevin from Tecovas is coming on later on. I just got a text message from him. He sent me a photo of their store in Austin, which I think he's going to be calling in from.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:22Harley Finkelstein?

  And apparently, uh, they have a fire, fire marshal issue there because the store is so insanely packed.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  No way.

• 7:28Harley Finkelstein?

  So he'll tell you the story of what they're doing there, but it looks really cool.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. And what, what do you got going on behind you here?

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Harley Finkelstein?

  So we're, I'm at the, uh, I'm at the New York port, uh, our office here in New York City. Uh, the other capital of capital, other than of course where you are right now. And I have the Shopify dashboard behind me, uh, and we are doing 4.3 million dollars per minute.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Per minute?

• 7:49Harley Finkelstein?

  40,000, per minute, per minute.

• 7:53Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll use this.

• 7:56Harley Finkelstein?

  Forty thousand, uh, orders per minute. And since we started counting last night at around 7:00 PM EST, about 26 million unique shoppers across Shopify. And then I just posted this just before I got on the show here. Let me tell you guys, you guys want this information?

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  Of course we do.

• 8:14Harley Finkelstein?

  12:01 PM today, we hit a peak sale of 5.1 million dollars, uh, per minute. 5.1 million.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for that one, John.

• 8:25Harley Finkelstein?

  Which is pretty good.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's, we gotta warm up the gong. I feel like we're gonna be hitting it a lot today.

• 8:29Harley Finkelstein?

  There's gonna be a lot of that, yes, good.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  A lot of that.

• 8:31Harley Finkelstein?

  Excellent, excellent.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, I would love to kinda get your view. I think people have a good sense of like the history of of Black Friday as a sort of like the Super Bowl of shopping for a long time now, but I'd love to get a sense of how you've experienced it across the years, specifically at Shopify, and how it's evolved from your view.

• 8:54Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. Well, look, I think, I think Black Friday initially, as the history of it was, Black Friday actually belonged to physical retailers and specifically big box stores. And then kinda Cyber Monday was kinda the time where the direct-to-consumer startups began to take hold of it. And something sort of flipped over the last, I guess, eight or nine years or so, where ultimately, these direct-to-consumer independent brands, not necessarily small ones, a large one also, began to kinda take over Black Friday. And so, I think what we've ended up with is sort of, Black Friday's become kinda the Super Bowl for entrepreneurs. What we've noticed is that they prepare all year for this weekend, and what we do is we spend the year building for them. You know, we think most people, you know, associate Shopify

• 9:39Harley Finkelstein?

  with small businesses, but we also power, you know, the likes of On Running, or Mattel, or Birkenstock, or, you know, ALO Yoga, or Viori. So, what's interesting is that, and we'll see this across the show over the next couple of hours, that regardless of what size of merchant you're gonna be talking to, they have one thing in common, which is they identify as entrepreneurs. So whether you're the CEO of a publicly traded direct-to-consumer business like On Running, or you started your business two years ago, you sort of, you are an entrepreneur. And this weekend, and this sort of four days, is kinda when we celebrate them. I think the cool part about it is that, this year in particular, it does kinda feel like- The first time, these first time entrepreneurs are are kind of standing shoulder to shoulder with

• 10:20Harley Finkelstein?

  much larger brands. I think part of the reason is that technology has just gotten so good. So that, you know, the most viral videos that you're seeing from brands today are not these super produced ones. In fact, often it's like some person in their car with their phone on the way to like the gym and that video ends up getting a ton of virality. I think also, you know, we'll talk about like agentic commerce and social commerce, but I think some of these new areas where commerce is happening, as opposed to sort of the big stores, physical stores, allows for more of these small businesses to get seen a lot faster. And the end result, of course, is that, you know, things are just blowing up. But yeah, we have the Live Globe. It's my favorite thing we do every year. You guys pointed out that, you know, it's sort of like nerd heaven here. Anyone at home can

• 11:04Harley Finkelstein?

  watch bfcm.shop and, you know, it's, as you can see, it's moving. We're at 4.5 million sales, excuse me, dollars per minute right now. And again, we peaked at about 5.1 and it's, it's really cool. One of the other things I want to show you is, we, you guys, I don't know if you can see it here, but we also took over the sphere in Vegas.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Harley Finkelstein?

  I don't know if you guys have a shot of that to pull up, but

• 11:29John Coogan?

  There we go. It's amazing.

• 11:31Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. So we, we took over the sphere in Vegas. We do this, we've done this the last two years or so. It is the world's largest LED screen. And the idea here is like, can we just put entrepreneurship like on stage? And so this is a visualization of global sales happening in real time. Every arc you see is actually a live order. And what's really interesting is that every one of these confetti bursts is a merchant's first sale. So it's happening right now about every 26 seconds, a new entrepreneur is making their first sale on Shopify.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 12:00Harley Finkelstein?

  And, and this is, this is people's entrepreneurship journeys, starting in real time. I love seeing this.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love, I love the sphere just as like a, like a monument, but it's also just, I love it when you find, you know, a match for what fits on the screen. Like the globe obviously works very well.

• 12:18Harley Finkelstein?

  It works well. Yeah.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  And, and, and there are lots of things that, you know, they do marketing campaigns on the, on the sphere and you're kind of like, oh, well. Like that would have worked on a normal billboard. Uh, the, the, the, the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sphere is like uniquely.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were in Vegas for F1 and they were just, they just had a bunch of different driver views on the sphere.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  There was some who once where it was like the helmet and, and you could see Brad Pitt's face. That one was kind of cool. Obviously if there's like a tennis ball or a basketball like that can work really well. Uh, but yeah.

• 12:46Harley Finkelstein?

  What's interesting actually on the sphere, when we first went to them two years ago, we told them we want to, we want to broadcast live. And, and actually at that particular point on the sphere, it had to be a, a recording. You couldn't actually broadcast live. So now you can do it live, but that's, that's basically, um, that's the reaction to Shopify actually building it with them. And we started two years ago and we need to show.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  They have to have a pretty high level of trust with the company that is broadcasting live to the sphere. Cause I can imagine they're certainly not going to make that open and programmatic.

• 13:16Harley Finkelstein?

  I think the cool thing about the sphere also is, uh, you know, the sphere obviously is, is it's located in Las Vegas. But the, the vast majority of people that look at it are, you know, it's, it's usually on social, not in Vegas as well. So it's kind of an interesting kind of thing to do because you, you're doing something physical in a particular geography. But the actual like the distribution of it is global and, and in a totally different way. And I think, you know, having these new cool things, I think you're building a second sphere. Um, uh,

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, in London. Oh, oh, did the London one, I, I, I know there was a, there was proposals to build one in London. I think it hit snags with, uh, with a permitting or something like that. But, uh, I mean, Middle East makes a ton of sense. That would be a very logical place to have one.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the pressure and the pressure right now, right now, it's a big investment to take over one sphere. But to take, eventually it'll be like, oh, well, if you're going to do this sphere, you gotta get all eight.

• 14:02Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, but I do, I do love these really, I mean, you guys, this is like exactly, you know, right in your wheelhouse. But like, I, I like these really ambitious projects, these projects that like in the first meeting, someone proposed it. And, and someone else said like, there's no way we're going to do this. And then of course they end up doing it. So I think more of this is good, but it lends itself really well. But in many ways, like I, I, I think back to sort of the, the original question. I think like BFCM is in many ways, it is a celebration of entrepreneurship generally, even if you're on a retail. It sort of just feel like we all kind of take a moment to kind of celebrate businesses of all sizes. It also feels like consumers are very much, I don't know, there is a different connection that consumers have to their brands they love, you know?

• 14:44Harley Finkelstein?

  And like, do you look at Takovis for example? I know we're going to, we'll see Kevin a little bit later, but. You know, you can't really understand if the store is a retail operation or if it's a saloon because a lot of people just go in there to hang out or have their boots shined and have like and drink bourbon and that's like totally okay with them.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 15:00Harley Finkelstein?

  And I think this idea that, you know, there isn't this online versus offline kind of, you know, false dichotomy, but rather retail is happening agentically, it's happening. Like the consumer journey starts like a TikTok video and then eventually goes to an online store and then maybe they don't buy anything, but they walk into a pop-up and then eventually they end up in Roblox and they actually complete the purchase in Roblox. Like that's kind of what we're seeing in BFCM 2025 and I, I don't know, it feels like a little bit, it feels like the golden age, a little bit of retail right now.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  Has, uh, what does the data look like from your guys' side at a, at a kind of global or macro level? Is there a specific moment in the day that, that, uh, is the most intense from a platform standpoint in terms of demand or is it kind of smoothed out more than, uh, let's say in a traditional retail world that, you know, whenever the store opens is like the sort of period of peak intensity?

• 15:47John Coogan?

  There was somebody here on X saying it was 11 a.m. Eastern time is the peak, which is not what I would have expected, but is that, is that roughly correct?

• 15:54Harley Finkelstein?

  It always is.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  It always is.

• 15:55Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. It's always between 11 a.m. and noon Eastern time. So you kind of think about like West Coast is, it's nine a.m. West Coast or so, eight or nine. Europe is sort of peak, you know, celebration mode. They've already had their pints.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:07Harley Finkelstein?

  And it, but yeah, that usually is. Something interesting is one of the stores that's on Shopify that I love is Supreme, which, you know, is, is a legendary, you know, flash sale retailer.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Harley Finkelstein?

  And they have every, every Thursday, 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Supreme does this massive flash sale. And one of the reasons that we wanted, one of the things, uh, you guys have probably heard me say this, but the, one of the things we love about these millions of merchants on Shopify is that they push the boundaries of the platform. Whereas, you know, some companies would say like, that's too big or that's too complicated. Like, you know, you kind of fire customers. We do the opposite. We kind of embrace the most complicated merchants on the planet because we feel like they kind of stretch us in the right direction. Supreme very much does that. Um, but what's interesting is that like on a regular basis, Supreme has the largest flash sale that's ever happened. And then a week later, they then break that record.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 16:53Harley Finkelstein?

  And so Supreme, you know, is, obviously has been doing a lot. They push it. We also have like the, you know, like Universal Music does a lot of their drops of this, whether it's for Taylor Swift or it's for Bieber or some of those type of acts. So that pulls the platform as well. But generally like. You know, knock on wood, things have been going really well. We have an incredible team on the infrastructure side. Farhan, who who leads engineering is going to be on later to kind of tell you exactly what goes on, you know, behind the scenes on the infrastructure side.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What happens? Do you guys get a lot of inbound from bigger brands that are kind of running their own commerce stacks after? After this kind of four day stretch?

• 17:29John Coogan?

  It's like this broke me.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, well, yeah, yeah.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  I'm ready to move on.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  It's a time. It's probably a time to capitulate.

• 17:37Harley Finkelstein?

  Well, especially if they have an issue, right? Like every year, I don't do this anymore because frankly, I've I realize that it pissed off a lot of people. But often what I would do is during Black Friday, when I saw a very large big box retailer go down, I would literally just post something on X saying like, you know, like should have been on Shopify. And then sometimes they would call in. It's very aggressive and it's very passive aggressive. And sometimes they would find that to be, you know, cute and other times it'd be like totally, you know, disrespectful.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  It's like, hey, our site was down.

• 18:04Harley Finkelstein?

  Our site was down for.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Just straight up aggressive.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, if your site goes down for your site goes down for 10 minutes and you could lose out on, I don't know, a million dollars in sale.

• 18:15Harley Finkelstein?

  If you are, if you were one of these large sort of electronic big box, like a Best Buy type retailer, and you go down on Black Friday, which, you know, has happened, it is a really big deal. There was kind of this era, to be honest, of of enterprises believing that part of their real value was owning their own stack.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  We're a tech company.

• 18:33Harley Finkelstein?

  That's the first time.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. A hundred thousand sale milestone just happened there. Whoa. It's cool.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 18:42Harley Finkelstein?

  So that's right. So some of these merchants, like they wanted to be, they they believe they were tech companies. And I think that era is over, which is at some point you read about, you know, chat GPT embedding commerce and in a board meeting, someone says, well, do we have that? And then someone else says, well, no, but you know, if we were on Shopify, we would be, we'd be in that launch. And that that helps a little bit. The idea also run. It's like running your own servers or having your own data center. Like at some point, it doesn't really make sense to do that. I think that era is over. And so one of the I on the last earnings call, I talked about Estee Lauder coming to Shopify. One of the reasons I'm talking a lot about the Estee Lauders of the world and these much larger brands coming to Shopify is that I want to kind of begin to explain to the world that we also handle the most iconic legendary brands,

• 19:25Harley Finkelstein?

  Mattel or Birkenstock or these brands, you know, Hunter Douglas, these companies that historically wouldn't have come to Shopify are now coming and we love that.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing, what are some kind of key trends that you're seeing as far as like everything from like marketing strategy to discounting strategy, like what are you seeing globally this year across the platform?

• 19:49Harley Finkelstein?

  Discounting still is the case, although I don't actually think that discounting is as important as people think. I actually think value matters a lot more. I was on CNBC, I was on Squawk Box this morning and Steve Leesman was asking about consumer confidence and I told him sort of the way that we look at consumer confidence is we just measure it at checkout because you can read all the reports and all the surveys you want, but ultimately what are people doing? And Steve kind of made a joke that often with these surveys, you know, what people say they're going to do and what they actually do is totally different. They say they're not going to spend as much and then when they see something they love, they just of course go and buy it immediately because humans are humans. So one of the things that I think actually is happening is consumers are kind of voting with their wallets to buy from brands that they love. So if they love Viori or they love ALO, they're

• 20:31Harley Finkelstein?

  waiting for some sort of sale from those brands. And if those brands, if the sale isn't what they thought it would be, they're still buying, but they're being a lot more intentional about how they purchase. The second thing is, I think this era of like online and offline, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but this is like, this is totally over. I think we have Figs coming on. I think this, Figs is going to be on a little bit later on. One of the things I love about Figs is this is a, this was an online business, homegrown story on Shopify, incredible growth. They went public and pretty much in every hospital, every, everyone who's like, you know, who cares about how they look and how they feel is wearing Figs. They started opening up physical locations around hospitals and

• 21:12Harley Finkelstein?

  what's effectively to make it really simple for healthcare workers on their lunch break or on their, you know, coffee break to come down and purchase stuff there. So if you were to ask Figs, are they an online retailer, they would say, we're like, that idea of omnichannel, we're just a retailer. It feels like that is almost a, this whole, like, we're living in like a post omnichannel world, as silly as that sounds, where sell in every surface area. We have an integration with Roblox. And in some cases, most merchants most of them don't use that integration. But we have some merchants who do like real business using the Shopify integration inside of roadblocks. And so the idea from our perspective is like every surface area that exists should be a place where you're able to transact and merchants can choose whatever's most appropriate for them.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  How is the POS side of the business growing? Is that growing faster than the overall business or the ecommerce side?

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  Or is it more like an add-on where somebody starts with Shopify online and they realize, hey, we should probably unify the backend and then the POS system?

• 22:11Harley Finkelstein?

  From a GMV perspective, actually, point of sale GMV is actually going faster, but it's on a much smaller base because most merchants on Shopify are using ecommerce. Look, initially, it was it was meant to be if you're on Shopify for online, let's also let us also serve you offline as well. Now, what we're seeing is merchants are coming to us like pure-play offline retailers are coming to us, like brick and mortar retailers are coming to us first for offline and then expanding online as well. So it's an area, it's one of the most important areas for the business. It's getting really, really good. Initially, it was only, you know, for smaller, you know, a couple of stores. Now you have massive brands like ALO, you know, using it across all of their stores as well. We just announced that Aldo is going to be using it across 400 stores, the shoe, the large shoe company. So more and more, it's becoming a big thing.

• 22:55Harley Finkelstein?

  But we look at these as like on-ramps into Shopify. Like, tell us what channel is your predominant channel. We'll make that really easy and scalable. And then, once you're using Shopify, we're going to introduce you to other channels where we think you can probably find real success.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  How have bran, how have things on the macro, kind of the tariff side, settled? Thankfully, we haven't had a crazy, anything crazy in the last two weeks or two months, but.

• 23:22Harley Finkelstein?

  Is that your gauge of, if it has, if like two weeks is a sigh of relief?

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pretty, pretty much. I mean, I mean, I would have been concerned, you know, if Liberation Day had happened like three months ago, it would have been potentially really scary.

• 23:37Harley Finkelstein?

  Or on Black Friday. Yeah, that would have been bad.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it would have been highly disruptive because, I mean, a lot of, I mean, a lot of brands today will fully sell out of especially their hero products and be leaving a lot of revenue on the table. And so like, having a successful Black Friday is, comes down to a lot of just like high, you know, good demand planning. And earlier this year, you know, it was just really chaotic.

• 23:59Harley Finkelstein?

  I mean, we're we're we have a good mutual friend in Ryan from Flexport. Ryan's an amazing guy. I think he was on the show yesterday or the day before that.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  We were reposting clips, but he actually. Yeah, that clip was from like a couple of weeks ago, but yeah.

• 24:13Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay, so Ryan, I mean, and Flexport's an incredible partner of us. So, you know, we talk, we hear from Ryan quite a bit about what's happening. The supply side of just commerce.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 24:24Harley Finkelstein?

  In terms of the tariff side, look, I mean, we've seen merchants go through Shopify is 20 years old. We've seen merchants go through the global, you know, financial crisis through the pandemic. Through a bunch of, obviously through Liberation Day. The way that we sort of, most of the merchants on Shopify seem to be incredibly resilient. Our job is sort of to make it really easy for them to navigate whatever comes their way. On the tariff side of things, we haven't really seen any change in behavior. Certainly, we did Q3, we saw about 91 billion of GMV because of the platform. That was, I think, just over 30% year-on-year growth. So we haven't seen that. We haven't seen any type of change in behavior. And then on the pricing side, I said this on the call also, we haven't seen merchants change their pricing all that much. And so I think that, again,

• 25:07Harley Finkelstein?

  it's not that consumers aren't, don't care about it. I just think that they're being more selective, which I think leads to kind of what you'll see, what you'll hear a lot over the next couple of hours on the show today, which is that brands really matter, like the relationship that like direct to consumer used to be this thing that effectively was a bit of a fad. Like, oh, this is that kind of business. And this is a different, this is a, you know, this is Sean at Ridge. He runs a direct to consumer wallet company. No one calls Ridge a direct consumer. It's just a wallet company now. I think the advantage to direct to consumer is because they have a direct relationship, they also have a direct connection.

• 25:41Harley Finkelstein?

  And they're able to cultivate a different type of dynamic with their customer base. And you'll hear that from across the board, I think, today. So generally, you know, again, that what I said to Steve, and I'll say to you guys is we measure consumer confidence at checkout and and people are buying.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a great way to do it. Great way to do it. I was, I was, I was driving into the, to the, to the gym this morning before we got to the studio and there was six people outside of a Target at 6 a.m. 6 a.m.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Is that low or high?

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  That felt extremely low.

• 26:12Harley Finkelstein?

  That felt low. Yeah, that feels, well, there's, there's probably 60, 60 people outside of a Tacovus right now in somewhere in America. So that does feel low. Remember those videos of like they opened the doors, everyone like rushed in together, the TV?

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  But I, I never participated in that. So I completely missed that. And I don't, I don't know if it's like, is it completely died off? It seems like it has.

• 26:32Harley Finkelstein?

  I never understood why people, how many people needed that many TVs? Like, how many TVs does one person need?

• 26:37John Coogan?

  The TV thing is crazy, is crazy. I, I guess it's just like one of the bigger purchases you make. And so if you can save a couple hundred bucks on it, it's like worth it or something. But uh, yeah, it was a big, a big meme, the, the, the last TV.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  I just, I, I think what you're saying earlier is true. It's like people have brand, everyone at this point, I like, you don't even have to be like that. You don't even have to be like into shopping or into the different things. You have a handful of brands that you really love. They're probably independent. And when it comes time for Black Friday, you're like, okay, what are, what are the brands that I like doing? And I'm going to put my dollars there and maybe I'm going to do some uh, Christmas shopping too.

• 27:15Harley Finkelstein?

  It feels a little bit like, like we're all kind of voting with our wallets to, to have more of the brand that we love exist in the world. Like I, I, I wear a black t-shirt almost every day. It's a James Purse black t-shirt. I know, I've got to know James really well. Like every time I buy a James Purse t-shirt, I buy it because I, I think he makes the best t-shirts. But it's also a vote of like, I want more James Purse's in the world. These like kind of quirky guys, in his case, in out of, out of California, who is obsessed with making black t-shirts. And I like, as someone that is an entrepreneur myself, been entrepreneur my whole life, I just, I want more James Purse's existing in the world across all different verticals. And so I'm willing to spend a little bit more money. And this is like, I've been buying James Purse t-shirts before I could even afford them when I was a student.

• 27:54Harley Finkelstein?

  Because instead of buying like five Gildan t-shirts, which were kind of crappy, I would save my money and buy one James Purse t-shirt every six months. And it was because I liked the shirt, but I also, I like the story behind it. And I think that, that matters to consumers.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  What, give us the update on agentic commerce and AI. We've obviously spent the last, you know, couple of weeks talking about the battle between ChatGPT and Gemini. And, but I'm curious what the

• 28:22Harley Finkelstein?

  You guys are definitely the, you know, ground zero for that battle, it seems. The amount of debate from all, each, every one of your guests is amazing.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  Everyone is perfectly conflicted, you know.

• 28:35Harley Finkelstein?

  And everyone has an opinion.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Harley Finkelstein?

  That's right. Look, we are not trying to guess exactly what permutation is going to win. What we're trying to do effectively is whatever is the, the way that agentic is going to happen, we want to make shop, we want to make sure Shopify is, is right there. We want to make sure, more importantly, that our merchants are there. So part of the reason that we built our agentic tools in a way that is more modular, like we built catalog, which is effectively every SKU on Shopify. We, and we built, you know, checkout kit. So you can actually effectively customize the checkout inside of the app, the agentic application. So it looks like it's natively integrated and, and it feels like it's part of the conversation. The reason we're building these sort of tools in that way is to effectively give these tools to every single application. And we've, we've partnered with ChatGPT, obviously that got a lot of attention. We're, we've partnered with perplexity,

• 29:22Harley Finkelstein?

  we're working with Microsoft as well. So our view is that in a similar way that, you know, when social commerce started to gain some steam, we didn't really know what platform was going to be the one that ended up being sort of the winner. Obviously, social commerce is a bit different. Now it feels like it's more about discovery, less about the transaction. No one's really checking out on these platforms, but they're learning a lot.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  The thing I'm super excited about and super bullish on is ChatGPT had some news, I think it was last week around deep research focused on shopping. And it feels like, it feels like that is the way that people, like that is a better way to do product research, discovery, which is just like, hey, fire off a prompt and then go do something else and then come back to a report.

• 29:59Harley Finkelstein?

  Especially because it has, it has all your context. It knows what you've been searching for. If I've been, if, if my particular, you know, chat application knows that I deeply care about, you know, on running, that's my favorite stuff. If I'm looking to get gear for, you know, a camping trip or a hiking trip, it should so, first it should show me on running, you know, boots, because it knows that I have a proclivity or some sort of connection to that, to that brand. I think actually the coolest part, so, so one is, we think that like it's, we think that it's going to change the way consumers shop. It may actually, remember, e-commerce as a percentage of total retails is like sub 20% in the US still. It's like 25% in the UK, but. It's still pretty small. So one thing that might happen is Agentic may invite non-traditional online shoppers into the online world, which we think is really good.

• 30:44Harley Finkelstein?

  But whatever permutation ends up being the winner, we want to make sure that our merchants are best set up. And I also think it creates a little bit of a leveling of the playing field whereby now if I'm using, you know, a search engine to do my shopping, I'm going to be, you know, the first thing I'm going to be served is going to be whoever pays the most for an ad. Whereas on Agentic, hopefully what I'm being served is the thing that's most relevant to me based on everything the chat application knows about my personal interests. So I think it actually may help a lot of smaller businesses get bigger.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I'm curious, by this point in the day, do you have a good sense of where the platform will land from a volume standpoint for Black Friday in total?

• 31:24Harley Finkelstein?

  No, not even close.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Wait, really? You have 10 years of data. How can you not hit the curve?

• 31:31Harley Finkelstein?

  I have, sorry, I should say, I'm not ready to disclose that.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, okay. But like, I imagine that you have 10 years of data.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not asking you to disclose. I'm just saying, like, do you have, can you get it within like five, you know, like?

• 31:44Harley Finkelstein?

  Our data team is legendary.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  I'm sure, I'm sure.

• 31:47Harley Finkelstein?

  Legendary.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  There's no way you can't predict that.

• 31:49Harley Finkelstein?

  But yeah, but I mean, so far, things are going really well. We did nine points. So for the weekend, so for the four days, so Thursday night till like Friday, so Thursday night, when sort of Thanksgiving starts until Monday night, I think we did 9.3 billion in 2023. We did 11.5 billion in 2024.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 32:07Harley Finkelstein?

  We'll see, see what happens this year.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Let's, we gotta take the over on this.

• 32:11Harley Finkelstein?

  I'm not participating, I'm not participating. But I will say, this, I didn't even talk about this. This guest list we have today is stacked.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:20Harley Finkelstein?

  And what's really cool is it's sort of a mixture of like, some of the people on here I actually haven't met yet. They're Shopify merchants. I don't know them. And some of the people that I invited on, I don't think you guys have met yet.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:30Harley Finkelstein?

  But it's, I mean, I don't know if you know, like, Favorite Daughter is coming on, Sarah Foster. I mean, Sarah Foster, like, Favorite Daughter is amazing. What you may not know is like, she also has a hit Netflix show where everybody on the show wears Favorite Daughter. And she has like a hit podcast called

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  When we when we introduced her earlier, I said I said podcaster because both of our both of our wives.

• 32:51Harley Finkelstein?

  My wife too.

• 32:54Harley Finkelstein?

  But but a lot of people know, you know, nobody wants this from on from Netflix. But this like you talk about the future of retail and how it all fits together. Or Kat Cole, who I think you're you're having Kat Cole on who's the CEO of AG1.

• 33:06Harley Finkelstein?

  Kat recently, you know, she said this publicly. Kat does like they sell something like $600 million is what Kat says with one single SKU. I mean, that is unbelievable. You talk about this exciting new evolution of commerce and retail. Like, these are the people that are building it. It's it's and they're building on Shopify, which is which we feel very honored. But these are the people on the show that are are really leading like where this whole thing is going.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's incredible. We're having Brian on the CEO of Rora later. New new Shopify merchant. Brian and I started Rora together.

• 33:38Harley Finkelstein?

  I heard.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  A while back, and this is the this is Rora's first Black Friday ever. So I have the I got the I got the.

• 33:44Harley Finkelstein?

  How's he feeling?

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's feeling great. He's feeling great. No, it's been it's been an awesome year. And I get that.

• 33:50Harley Finkelstein?

  Tell Brian to send me all of his feedback and product suggestions and anything else he has there.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 33:55Harley Finkelstein?

  That's really cool there.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 33:56Harley Finkelstein?

  Yes, you have Kat, you have Brian, Nishant, you have on, wow, I mean, this. Peter.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  Do you know, do you know, do you know, do you know a Ray yet? Nisha's brand?

• 34:06Harley Finkelstein?

  No, I mean, I know the brand. I don't.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is a very, very under the radar because they raised one round. Like, right right at inception. And then I won't I won't dox their revenue because I don't know how much is public. But one of one of the biggest, one of the biggest companies that's joining the show today. And hardly anyone, at least in the X world, is even aware of them. So excited for that one.

• 34:31Harley Finkelstein?

  Incredible. Yeah, I'm just looking here. I mean, OK, so Noel Mack, who leads with Ben France, they lend Jim Shark. He's actually calling in from his new store in Dubai.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Harley Finkelstein?

  Jim Shark is the poster child for like online, you know, multi billion dollar company. And now he's talking to us from Dubai where he's opening a brand new store. So it'll be interesting to see like, and if you've been to any of the Jim Shark stores, they only have a couple of them. But they're like gyms and like you talk about experiential retail. They're like, they're the best of that.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're gonna have him. We're gonna have him go for we should have him do a one one rep max on the show. If they have the setup.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. All right. Well, you'll, you'll be back on, you'll be back on soon. Where are you headed out to?

• 35:12Harley Finkelstein?

  I'm heading right now to Tacovus in Soho. They have a brand new store they just opened, so I'm going to be calling in our next, uh, next round, I will be at the store, uh, in Soho at their bar and, um,

• 35:23John Coogan?

  A little over an hour. He'll be back in 12:50.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 35:27Harley Finkelstein?

  Thank you for letting me co-host and thank you for sending me this amazing outfit. I feel like I'm one of the boys.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  You are.

• 35:32Harley Finkelstein?

  I, I'm very grateful for you guys, uh, doing this with us.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. We'll see you in a little bit.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 35:39Harley Finkelstein?

  Bye.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Uh, we're about to hop on with Noel from Jim Shark, uh, before he does. Let me tell you about cognition. This is a great Christmas present.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Get someone cognition. Get him Devon, the AI software engineer.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Devon under the Christmas tree.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Say, hey, hey, mom, I want you to crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team. Here's, here's a hundred thousand dollars of cognition credits. Thank you so much to cognition for supporting the show. Our next guest is Noel from Jim Shark. Let's bring him in from the restroom waiting room.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for staying up late, right? Are you in Dubai? Is that right?

• 36:16Speaker 03

  I'm in, I'm in Dubai, but I'm on British times though. So this is, this is fine for me. I'm good, man. Don't worry about it.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  You're good. Uh, how's the day been so far? Mellow?

• 36:25Speaker 03

  We're, we're wrapping up here now, right? So it's 22 midnight right now here in Dubai and my plan was to do this with the store in the background, but there's still so many people in the store tearing t-shirts of hangers. You wouldn't have heard a word I was saying. So yeah, man, it's been wild.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Wild. Uh, when, when do you actually close this, the, the retail store?

• 36:42Speaker 03

  This store closes in 20 minutes.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Okay. So did you do it 24 hours? Like, did you start, did you open at midnight last night or when did you actually open this morning?

• 36:50Speaker 03

  It opened, you know what? I should know that. Devil's in the details right now. I don't know what time the store actually opened this morning, but I only arrived, I only got into Dubai at like 10 a.m. So I'm not sure. So that's going to be my excuse.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  So did you start, start the day back in the UK?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Started the day in the earth. Did the red eye last night from the UK and landed here. They call, uh, they call Blackfrode over here Dubai super sale. So they do it a little bit differently to the way we do at home. And it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's wild. There's, there's literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people walking around Dubai more outside right now, which is nuts.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Uh, what's the shape of the business, uh, these days? Like what, what, what categories do you, uh, like how, how do you segment out the business and, and sort of understand what you sell?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Well, the key difference, the key differentiator to understand about Gymshark is there's lots of sports brands out there, right? There's been a few brands in recent years. I think Lulu kicked the door down for the yoga brands and then a bunch of other brands came in after that. We're, the really unique thing about us is we're not any of those things. We're a gym brand, right? And in the same way, Lulu said to people, hey, you shouldn't wear sports clothes to do yoga. You should wear specific yoga wear to do yoga. We're trying to introduce people to the idea that actually you should wear specific gym clothes to the gym. So our brand platform is we do gym and we think we do that better than anybody else out there.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's the, what's, what was your interview process like? Did you have to like show off your one rep max or anything? What was the process?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  No, you know what? It's a common misconception that, that you have to be some huge lifting person to come and work at Gymshark, but you really don't. However, one thing I would say is a lot of people fall in love with it once they start a Gymshark and then they find themselves doing all sorts of crazy marathons for charity and lifting events and bodybuilding and all this crazy stuff. So it's a great environment. Steel sharp and steel and all that.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  Uh, what about the geographical distribution? I mean, obviously a global brand, but like how global, uh, have you focused on any particular markets? Has Middle East been particularly important as a growth area? Where, what's growing fastest? What's the most interesting thing happening, uh, geographically for Gymshark?

• 38:41Speaker 03

  So we ship to like 130 countries, something like that, um, through several different Shopify stores. The UAE has been a real, has been a real new thing for us. It's been going for about 18 months.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, you guys went international super early. You also worked with like, I, like you, you, uh, from, from my understanding, thinking back like a decade ago, you guys like did influencer marketing probably better than any other brand and did it at a scale that no one had really done it before. I'm assuming you were working with like 10,000 plus influencers at any given point. Like it seemed like you guys were just everywhere. Did that force you guys to go international earlier than a lot of other brands?

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had a really interesting moment once where I was sitting in a boardroom doing some work and an intern knocked on the door. I was on my own and she said, um, no, can I ask you a question? When did Jim Shark enter the US? And it kind of stumped me for a second. I had to stand there and think about it. And I said, we never sort of entered the US. That seems to be a thing that old, old school businesses did.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  We were, we shipped to wherever people wanted to buy it from, from day one of Jim Shark. So we were technically global from the, from the rip, but you're right. We were very, very early to influence the market and a lot of people credit us as some of the real early pioneers of that. But actually where you were slightly wrong was the point on 10,000 influencers. That was kind of the opposite of what we did while a lot of people got into influence marketing early and just spread better and hit as many people as they could, anybody with a few followers. We, we decided to sort of handcraft this like select group of what we call Jim Shark athletes, who were like the, the biggest names in the fitness industry, the really, really revered ones. So what might have felt like a bit of a roadblock on social media to you was probably more depth as opposed to wit, if that makes sense.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just working with the biggest names in, in the category.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  And in terms of 2025 now, take me uh through what's working on the marketing side. What strategy, what area has been the most exciting uh this year for Jim Shark as a whole?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. It's, it's less about, you know, it's not, there's a particular channel that's ripping right now, or there's this, there's a new version of influence of Martin, or it's TikTok shop or anything like that. It's finding our lane and sticking to it, right? And being relentless about the fact we make gym wear. That's what we do and we're better than anybody else at it, right? We noticed a little while ago, everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things. And, you know, we, there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well. And then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were. We doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand. We launched our brand platform, We Do Gym. And people have taken to it incredibly, incredibly well. There was a, there was an article I read on LinkedIn the other day that said, the world doesn't need more uh bland brands. It need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies. And I think that is exactly what we did. Not enemies per se, but we're willing to say, hey,

• 41:14Speaker 03

  if you don't rock with us, that's absolutely fine. There's a million other brands out there that are probably for you, but if you want great gym stuff, you should come to Jim Shock.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  How, how is gym culture evolving? I feel like the story of the last couple of years was this like hybrid, hybrid athlete movement. Uh, we don't do a lot of running. We probably should. We, we hit the, we hit the gym as a team every single morning. We gotta get uh, get into doing, doing some more cardio, but how has that kind of impacted the product strategy, if at all?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  We've got about a 500 people run club this Sunday in Dubai, so get me a green jacket, you boys are happy to, I'll happily have you, host you down here, we'll all run together. Yeah, you're right. So the first thing I'd say is, the culture of like resistance training and quote unquote sort of traditional gym work has really, really grown in the past few years. So you talk to any of the big equipment providers and they're telling you that they're going into some of the big gym chains in the US, they're removing steppers, they're removing cross trainers by the ball fort and they're putting squat racks in, right? A little while ago, squat racks looked like a medieval torture device to some people if they didn't know how to use it. And now people are really learning how useful real resistance training is. But you're absolutely right, the rise of the hybrid athlete is a wild, it's like, it's a real step forward in people's understanding of fitness. So

• 42:25Speaker 03

  previously, you saw a big guy, you're like, he's a big guy, he lifts weights but he can't run. You saw a guy who weighed, you know, 120 pounds, you're like, he can probably run, but I doubt he can lift weights. And now the two things are merging massively. I ran the London Marathon last year and I had guys coming past me at like 230 pounds lean with a ton of muscle mass and I was just like, man, that is so unfair. Yeah, and they're going past me as well and they're, and they've got 100 pounds on me, which I thought was wildly unfair. But yeah, this hybrid thing, this, this, this, you can still carry muscle and you can be a runner and this and that and that. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's a real new development and we're leaning into that pretty heavily.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about competing with some of the older, more like legacy brands in the space, specifically in becoming like that household name, breaking through across everything? Are you focused on just owning the next generation or do you eventually want to go and, and, you know, get to such saturation that you become a household name even with the older folks? How are you thinking about the different demographics that you're going after?

• 43:25Speaker 03

  I'll be honest, saturation and household names aren't, a household name isn't something we put at the top of our Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Becoming the best version of us is what we do. If what comes with that is household name status and market saturation and that kind of stuff, amazing. If it doesn't, no problem. But we know we're going to be the best gym brand out there. So we're never going to beat some of the big players from your country or from Germany, you know who I'm talking about, at being them. But what we can do is win at being us.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What about 2026? Are there any upcoming marketing or growth strategies that you're excited about potentially exploring next year?

• 44:03Speaker 03

  I personally, we don't have a huge plan for this year. I love streamers right now. I'm like, streamers are doing a lot and I, I think that's, that feels like influence marketing to me in the early days when it was kind of untapped and we dominated early.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  I like seeing what streamers are doing. Um, there's, there's something that we are doing that we are very good at is these I R L experiences. Like our last event in London had over fifteen thousand people come out to it. That was two days. There was, there was, there was stock for sale, but it was stuff they could buy on the website. There was a few exclusives. There was their favorite Gymshark athletes, the group of people I talked to you about earlier on.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  They could hang out and lift together. We've done them in Miami. Again, the last Miami one, I think we had thirteen and a half thousand people over two days. So those are just wild and they, they, they, it's almost like, it's almost like a rock landing in a lake. The, the, the, the ripples that sends out across the fitness industry, across all of social media, across TikTok, everything is absolutely nuts. And that's not us. That's, that's, that's consumers coming along, creating their own TikToks, taking selfies with their own favorite influencers, athletes, creating their own content and it's spreading out into the world. So yeah, that works really, really well for us. We always say that Gymshark is an online brand that was built offline.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. In the chat, they're saying people yearn for I R L events and I couldn't agree more.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how are you guys thinking about the intersection of A I and, and commerce? Are people discovering Gymshark in, in different L L Ms yet? It feels like a really tough channel from a brand standpoint because right now you don't, you don't even have the ability to do that great of like imagery and, and uh, just like showing off products in the way that you might want to on, on your personal site. But uh, what does that look like today and how are you kind of forecasting out?

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. I think that like literally A I is such a buzzword that absolutely everybody is using and I tend, I tend to try and steer clear of talking about them when everybody else is talking about them. So my, my, my thinking about stuff like this is a little bit Buffett-esque. Be brave when others are uh, scared and be scared when others are brave. But you're right, A I results, A I search is absolutely huge. We already do pretty well on that front because there is such an organic ground swell of information on Gymshark, on TikTok, on Reddit, on, you know, a lot of the places that you're scraping for information. Exactly. So we do quite well. But you're right, I'm not going to give away the secret sauce now, but we are, well, it's not my department, but somebody else at Gymshark is working really hard on making sure that we do even better on that front going forwards.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep, makes sense. Well, thank you for taking the time out of a very, very busy day. Where are you? How long are you going to be in Dubai? You're doing an event and then you're going back to the UK or are you doing a world tour?

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're launching our second Dubai store on Tuesday. So we've got a bunch of stuff leading up to it. Like I said, we have a really big run club in Jamira Gulf Estates on Sunday morning. We have our conditioning club. We're doing a run club inside the Mall of Emirates, which is another mall. Because it's that big, you can do a 5K run inside the mall. That's real Dubai stuff.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  Stampede.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  And we open our store on Tuesday and then I get out of there and I'm back to the UK.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  Nice. When you say experiential retail, is it running focused? Do you have full squat racks in there? Like, what does experiential mean in the context of Jim Shark?

• 46:53Speaker 03

  It depends on the format of the store. Like, we can scale it down and up. Like, sometimes it's just, we have a bunch of personal trainers come up. We're doing pull-up competitions, we're doing run closing, a lot of kind of stuff. Our latest store that we've just announced, the date isn't out there yet, but our latest flagship store, our first ever US flagship store is launching real soon in New York. On Bond Street, opposite Kiff. And that has, I mean, I can't reveal it yet, but that has the whole two floors of experiential. So anyway, keep your eyes peeled and you'll see what I mean when I say we can scale it from small stuff to really, really big stuff.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, great, great meeting you. Thanks for coming on the show. Fantastic to hear your approach to all this. I love the focus and just the intensity. Makes a lot of sense.

• 47:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Appreciate it.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Thanks, fellas. Have a good day.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI-native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. I asked ChatGPT, I put the shopping research mode to the test. I said, "Find me the most expensive elite luxury goods hosted on Shopify sites specifically."

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Basically, just one item per brand, but pull as many different products as possible. Take me on a full tour of top Shopify products. The best overall, a $28 million yacht, motor yacht, the Magnusta 165.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Is it actually?

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Motor yacht? It is, it is. I can put it in the...

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  They're selling yachts on Shopify?

• 48:18John Coogan?

  They're selling yachts on Shopify. This is not a joke. I'm going to put this in the timeline so we can all pull this up. It's a $28 million yacht. It's 50, 50 feet, maybe 50, oh, 50 meters. It's a, they call it a super yacht. Few consumer products exceeded tens of millions of dollars, but this, this is a full 50 meter super yacht. It comes from a boutique broker using Shopify, not a big generic marketplace. Third-party yachting press documented the yacht, noting the N1 was the first hull in the Mangusta 165 Rev series designed in collaboration with Overmarine and Labunov. It's listed at 28 million euros. This confirms it's not a speculative

• 49:00John Coogan?

  or unknown build. It's a real super yacht. You can buy it on Shopify. It's available in the shop app. Also, we are of course sponsored by Bezel, getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. But again, as you say, there is somebody on Shopify selling a $5 million Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime. And even though it's a competitor to Bezel, we gotta talk about it.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about it. Can you?

• 49:25John Coogan?

  It's a five, it's a $5 million. You gotta see this watch.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine the credit card fees on that?

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That is wild. Hopefully you've negotiated a fantastic rate with Shopify Payments. You have the lowest possible payments. Maybe you're doing ACH at that level. I'm, I'm pretty sure Shopify offers something like that. I'm sure there's something that you can do, but this is a, this is a $5 million Patek Philippe Grand complications, Grandmaster Chime. This is of course on Shopify. You save $208,000 when you buy it, this, this Black Friday.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  That is, that is so generous.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  $208,000 savings if you go with the Grandmaster Chime. I think this is a fantastic watch.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  If somebody out there really wants to stimulate the economy.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  This is a great option.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  I have another, I have another, I have another one. So, have you ever wanted a, a supercar? And if you thought, I couldn't possibly get a supercar on Shopify. That's crazy. I couldn't get a Bugatti Chiron Supersport on Shopify. Well, you can't, but you can get the front end because there's someone that's selling just the front end for $400,000.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  An LLM sources for you?

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay. AGI not achieved internally. This is.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  What do you mean? This is a $400,000 Bugatti front end. What more do you want?

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess this would be cool to use to build out the set here.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  You could use it as like a

• 50:54John Coogan?

  This is the front of a Bugatti Chiron Supersport. And where else are you gonna get a front end if you smash your Bugatti Chiron because you're tracking it? And you dig it into the gravel, the kitty litter, and you need a new front end? Where are you gonna go? You're gonna go to a Shopify store, of course, Jordy, of course. You go to Shopify for this. The last one is, there's a Richard Mill. There's an RM at a different store on Shopify. $500,000 for the Richard Mill. Let's see which one this is. I actually did check to make sure that these sites are actually using Shopify, and they are, which is crazy.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  It's the Richard Mill RM 7201, black ceramic rose gold box and paper.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  $525,000 on Shopify right there. You'll love to see it.

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  I would encourage any venture funds out there, an RM would be a fantastic gift, end of year gift, you know, holiday gift for Portco founder.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  I mean, only if the Mangusta 165 REV motor yacht is out of stock. But yes, I would agree.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  But an RM that's engraved on the back would be quite a nice holiday gift for

• 52:10John Coogan?

  100%.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Like a Series A stage founder. You'd wanna go maybe with the yacht for Series B and beyond, but Series A?

• 52:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  Perfect stage for a holiday.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  Or you can give them a Bugatti Chiron Supersport, one piece at a time.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Just say, job's not finished, job's not finished, but maybe by the time it is, you'll have a full Bugatti.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  It's just like, hey, keep delivering, and you'll keep getting pieces of Bugatti Chiron until you have a full car eventually.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if you just buy up all the random pieces, if it'll come in at lower.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  No!

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  It goes way higher?

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Just the front end was $400,000. That's not a $50 million car.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if it's, that feels like a more expensive part of the car, it's probably fully carbon.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  I don't know. I feel like Really, what about the motor? What about the, what about the, the drive train? What about the interior? There's so many expensive parts.

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  That'll cost you. Over, over on X, saw a post here from Colin Slattery. He runs a digital advertising agency. He's blackpilling a little bit.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  Okay, well, before you read this post, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Continue.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  Colin Rock, Rock, strong name, says, "Super slow start in the US so far." Referencing his Black Friday. He's, he's also managing the ad accounts for some DSC brands. Colin says, "We are seeing the same." But the next post I have here from Jeremiah says, "Looks like Black Friday/Cyber Monday is perfectly tracking with the last two years, expecting a peak around 11 a.m. Eastern." So, again, I don't think, I'll be interested to see where, where's today, where today's volume actually nuts out. Obviously, I think Harley had, had some, probably knows to within, I feel like, do

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  you think they could get it within $100 million at this point?

• 54:12John Coogan?

  100%. Like, at their scale, they, at this point, past the peak, like, it's, we're, we're three hours past the peak time, like, there, there's no shot that they, that they don't know exactly what's gonna happen. Just from fitting to the previous curves. I mean, look at this, look, look at this chart. Like, it's very clear that, you know, you can fit a curve to the next, to like, the previous trend and project out. I would be shocked. But, I mean, yes, there, there probably is some error bar. And what was he saying? $11 billion? So, within a few million is actually extremely precise.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was saying, within 100 million.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Within 100 million, that's like, within 1%. Like, yeah, they probably can.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  But not within, like, the single-digit millions. Anyway, we gotta, we gotta get to the bottom of how TikTok is performing on this Black Friday. Sean Frank is joking around here. He says he has a seven-figure day because he made $711 on TikTok Shop. All because of the highlight.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely crushing it. Seven hundred.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  And there's a lot of other, there's a lot of other.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Says buy a Ridge Wallet to get my course.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's something, yeah, there's something odd. I, I, I was hearing that TikTok Shop was scaling like crazy. It, it sounds like it's pulled back. We'll have to, we'll have to ask more people about are they getting value out of TikTok Shop? Or, or any of the other vertical video platforms, short form, what's actually working? I would also be interested to see just do, are people actually timing up influencer marketing to Black Friday sales? Are they ramping on more programmatic platforms? I'm not.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Zach Stuck, who runs a number of different brands, says officially Black Friday, here's the media mix. So he's sharing a breakdown. He's spending $300,000 today, $220,000 on Meta, $30,000 on AppLovin, $25,000 on Google, $20,000 on YouTube, and then a handful of other buckets. But yeah, notable that spending more money on AppLovin than on Google or YouTube.

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  And then David Herman, who's also runs an ad agency, he says AppLovin too low. So he's, he's bullish on AppLovin.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  There's some people that are super bearish on AppLovin and, but everyone, every time I talk to somebody who's like actually using it or buying ads on it, they're always like, yeah, it's real. It's, it's fine. It feels like AppLovin has a weird disconnect with either, maybe it's like retail traders that are, that are bearish or something. Or I've heard from like, you know, competitors being like, oh, it's, it's, it's.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's, it's, it's kind of like, I think it's kind of in the Palantir bucket of like fundamentally the business is working and scaling really quickly. But it's, it's at a 103 P/E ratio right now.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So it's highly valued.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  So it's highly valued.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  But, but, but yeah, it, it's also something where I, I, I think because the AppLovin. Brand and logo doesn't show up everywhere, whereas like Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, these ad platforms do. Apple even is like behind the scenes, a little bit below the surface. That just confuses people. And they're like, yeah, how can you possibly make money behind the scenes?

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  David Herman says, cut ad spend so far for Black Friday Cyber Monday for one client by 48% year over year, and we're only down 6% year over year. So.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  Interesting strategy there to actually.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  I mean, it is a big question about like, on Black Friday, it is probably the highest intent shopping day of the year. Very much you, you're every, every person on Black Friday, almost all of them, they're not just sitting there being like, oh, I'm bored. I'm going to go shopping. It's more like, okay, I need gifts for this type of person and let me work backwards with brands. Do I know what brands do I like? And so they're much more likely to react to brands that they've been seeing messaging from all year. Oh yeah, I remember that brand that they had a funny Super Bowl ad and then I saw what they did over the summer. And then I stopped by the store here and I wound up getting retargeted and put some stuff in my cart over here. But now is the time to go buy. And so I'm going back to my favorite brands.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  It's not necessarily just the day where you're like randomly scrolling Instagram, clicking on whatever is coming across your feed.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  High intent.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  It's a high intent day, I would assume.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  David Herman also says, right now, Apple's pacing has been insanely good, essentially reflecting the ad spend change swimmingly. Meta is not so much. We're down 30 to 70% day over day on meta spend despite increasing things for X. So we increased budget for X, but the actual spend that's happening is down. And so, yeah, basically, people are having some issues with ad pacing. As you can expect, this is like, I would love to know how much is actually spent on meta ads on Black Friday. I don't know if they disclose, actually break that out by the day. I doubt it. Someone else says, my Black Friday campaign spent 70%

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  of the budget by 9:00 AM Eastern. So that can be a problem and these things can get unpredictable.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Other fun fact a little about David, he's obsessed with police chases. Did you know this about him?

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, does he live post them?

• 59:20John Coogan?

  He live posts them. He's obsessed with watching them. It's like one of these funny fun facts about him. Uh, anyway, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Fall. Build and deploy AI video and image models. They're trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Our next guest is Sarah from Favorite Daughter. We might have to change hats. I have a favorite son hat here.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  There she is.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Thank you for joining the stream. Thank you for sending these beautiful hats. How are you doing?

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Hi guys, I gotta, I gotta tell you, a lot of tech bros.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Text, texting me up this morning being like, this is so cool. I'm like, alright, alright.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, our, our wives, our wives said the same thing. They're, they, they listen, they listen to the podcast. They're fans, so. Uh, everybody's excited. Yeah, we're super, we're super excited to have you on.

• 1:00:06Speaker 04

  I love it. Harley wrote me. He was like, you know, he's the, he's the e-comm king. So when he asks, we show up. You know what I mean? We, we show up.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  My co-founder is probably watching, by the way. My, my other known is my, my, my little sister.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Little sister.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  She's moving, so she's not joining.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Moving on Black Friday.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  Well, for the, for the tech people that don't know, um, can you introduce the brand? Can you introduce the, the, uh, I don't know, yourself? How, how do you actually think about yourself? Do you use the term slash?

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  I guess like we really give like a multi hyphenate a run for its money. We were speaking at a Bloomberg conference the other day and they're like, how, how do you actually describe yourself? It's weird. You know, we talk about our business as an ecosystem. We have all these things that feed each other. The same girl or guy who's buying Favorite Daughter is listening to our podcast. She is probably following us on socials. She's listening to the pod. She, you know, Aaron created, you know, a global phenomenon and nobody wants this on Netflix. So we got that girl now. It's, it all, it all feeds each other the flywheel.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  And then, and then from a product perspective, specifically, uh, with, with Favorite Daughter, how are you thinking about the shape of the business today? Where do you want to take it over the next few years? How, how big are the ambitions?

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  I mean, look, we're growing fast. If you had have told me that, that we'd be where we are right now. I mean, I said it at Bloomberg. I can say it now. We're gonna do like 150 million in retail sales next year. We were profitable, we were, woo!

• 1:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Congratulations.

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  I don't know, is that tacky to give numbers? Whatever.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  No, not at all.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  You know, whatever.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  The people, the people want numbers. Why do you think we have a gong?

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  The people want numbers. We have the gong for numbers.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, that's cool. Um.

• 1:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so basically you're saying you made a hundred and fifty million dollars last year in your bank account?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's in my account right now as, as we speak. No, I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined, of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer from my sister now. We were like, we're not fashion girls. Who, who want clothes from us? I could have never fathomed that this is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out, the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool, is our customer. She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencer celebrity brands maybe not scaling as fast as we have, is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear Favorite Daughter. We're wearing Favorite Daughter out in the world.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's authentic.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Talk, talk about this year. We live in LA. Uh, it's been, you know, it was obviously a super wild, stressful start to the year. You guys have had a store, right, in, in the Palisades? Is that correct?

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then moving in, a few months later, you're dealing with tariffs. I mean, it's been a really stressful year, but, um, how have you guys navigated it?

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  The tariff thing is, the tariff thing is interesting. I mean, when it's, it hit out of the blue, we were like, I'm sorry. And we kind of knew it was coming, but you don't really think it's gonna actually happen, you know? Um, and it really is us, the, the, the business paying these tariffs. So we had to mitigate real fast. We're looking at, you know, India, we're looking at Turkey, we're looking to move from Mexico, but then it's, it's, it's changing in real time.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  So it's been a real challenge and I can't take credit for it. We have an unbelievable team. Jennifer Stender-Hawkins, who is like our president, she does everything. She's like, the way that our team came together in that moment was, was iconic. I mean, it was elite. It was elite, the way that the team came together and did what they did. And, and our profit, you know, our, our EBITDA is looking a lot better today than it was about four months ago.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  What categories are you most excited about in the future? Started out with an apparel focus, but I imagine you guys can, in the fullness of time, do everything for your customer, or at least everything within reason.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, our customer wants it all from us. She does, and we're learning that. You know, we didn't know. Everything's been sort of, we didn't anticipate growing as fast as we did, and we didn't try to. We started sort of testing, like, would she want to spend over $1,000 for outwear? Would she? And we sort of dipped into it, and now we know she does. We just launched shoes, a license with Caleres, because our thing is like, let's partner with the people who do it best. They do it best. Accessories is huge for us. Obviously, like, logo. It's a different girl. The girl buying the logo is not always buying the denim. And we always said the logo is going to pay for the women, for the ready-to-wear.

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, very cool.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about AI? Specifically, in AI-generated content? I feel like you're going to hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI-generated imagery and marketing materials. At the same time, sometimes people want to see how it looks on them, and so they might want to see an AI image do something.

• 1:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not all AI is created equally.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  I feel like consumers are going to have a massive aversion to AI-generated ads, specifically of clothing, because if you buy something and then it fits terribly, and you're like, I've been lied to. But then, at the same time, AI try-on has been pretty amazing.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  I mean, look, the thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is, that is something that we are talking about all day. So I will, we will embrace the right AI in certain, but like, when it comes to e-comm models, I don't know. I mean, I think that's where it's going. Of course it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on e-comm because we're perfectionists and we want it to look great. But I'm not going to lie, it's expensive and it's time-consuming. And if, all of a sudden, they're introducing ways to change that. But I don't know. Do you guys think the customer is gonna? We're nervous about it.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  I think that customers want, will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. I don't think customers are gonna be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm looking, I'm considering buying this item and

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  And it's on a robot.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Completely, yeah, it's not, it's not real.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, at the same time, like, the line of AI is getting very, very blurry. There's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platforms, Steam, has a tag, was this game made with AI? But the question is like, what does that mean? If one of the software developers in the game used AI to write a little bit of code, that's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said like, make a video game. Or like, the entire characters are AI generated. Like, there's this huge continuum, and I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah, if you're at a photo shoot and there's a light stand in the background and you wanna remove it, like, you go into Photoshop today, you do content aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill, you technically used AI. Does the consumer care about that?

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  There's gonna be this like, back and forth around trust. And as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the, the trust of the individual, of the consumer, I think you'll be okay, but you have to be more open about it. And I think that's probably where you have an advantage because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly, essentially, and then set a very clear boundary as opposed to like, some of the faceless corporations that will, uh, you know, have to issue like, PR releases when they make mistakes.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  I know, listen, it's so tempting, right? Because at the end of the day, your customers trust in you, your customers loyalty to you. It's all you have. So we've, we've, before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know, because it speeds up that, a lot of brands do it. Moda does it, and they do beautiful, um, you know, everything they do. I'm like, I want it, I want it. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less. But at the, it, it's tough. I mean, product, obviously, number one. At the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Speaker 04

  So that is like, first and foremost, that is our focus. How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality? How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like, our customer doesn't always even wanna see the clothes on me. You know, we, and that's the thing, like- Of course, when I post something or when I push something, it sells, but it sells just as well on girls that work in our office who are different shapes, different sizes, different ages. And that's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video is crushing for us.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  It is crushing.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the page, you're saying?

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, video on the page and in paid.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah, all of it. I mean, video is, video is crushing.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Is, is that the marketing strategy that you think worked best for you in 2025? Or is there another sort of growth initiative that as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out?

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, it's a combination of so many things, but I do think that we hit this sort of, this wide open white space for the working woman, you know, like the biggest compliment, the most, the, the people that come up to me the most are, are career women. They're women who go, oh, my gosh, my whole law firm, all we wear is favorite daughter because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality, but that's not, you know, $1,500. You don't have to spend $1,500 on a blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good. You don't have to spend that.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep. How, how do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably extra sensitive to this, given that you guys are creators and personalities yourself and you're probably like, you know that like you guys represent the brand. So if you're working with another creator, they're representing the brand. And I feel like in apparel, it can be way more sensitive than a supplement brand that just says like, hey, if you like share our values at all, like we'll, we'll work with you.

• 1:10:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you know, we've, we've really leaned into Shopify, which is a fantastic company, which I actually looked at as an investment, which I, big mistake on my part.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I, I was talking with my wife and she was telling me about Shopify and I was like, I I I I haven't I was like, I haven't heard of it. And we we've interviewed a thousand companies this year and and I looked it up and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then the next week they announced like a, I think, a billion dollar round. So it wasn't on my radar, but they're ripping.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  It's genius. And it's like, it's made the whole process so much more seamless, to be honest with you. And it gives, you know, moms at home an opportunity to move product, to make a little cash, to build some sort of audience. I mean, the celebrities with millions and millions and millions of fans have or followers have not sold as much for us as like a Dallas mom, who has like the micro influencer.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool. How much you like, how much time are you spending on the investing side? And you guys have a fund that you run? What what's kind of the focus of the fund? And what kind of companies are you really looking to meet?

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we're a consumer focused fund. It's me, my sister Erin and Phil Schwartz is our partner. It's it's kind of a different kind of model. He, well, I could go into the weeds, but we probably don't have time. We're looking at companies that we are the customer for. That's it. It's very simple. That's the thesis. It's not only female founders or only, you know, female, it's that's not what it is. It's are we the customer? Can is our audience going to resonate with this product? And it's that simple.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, taste smart.

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  That's that.

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining on on such a busy day. Really, really fun to have you on. We'll have to have Erin on sometime soon. And congrats to the whole team on on all the progress. It's incredibly impressive.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  Guys.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  And congrats to you guys. Congrats. Everybody loves your show.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Cheers.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we're back in cowboy hats. And we got a cowboy in the studio, Peter Rahal from David Protein.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Protein cowboy.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Cowboys cowboy. How you doing?

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? It's great to have you back.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Good to have you back.

• 1:12:49Jordi Hays?

  The COD King.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  The COD King. Yeah, we haven't talked to you since you did the COD. I was talking to Jordi, but I thought I didn't know it was real. It was real. You actually sold COD? Is that correct?

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  Yep, and we still are selling it.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so are people just cooking up?

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  What is?

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Cod tacos at home?

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  Where does this go? Like, what if it's actually successful and then you just have to sell cod only?

• 1:13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Hard to outsell David protein bars.

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  We don't have the same product market fit.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:21Speaker 05

  With frozen glaze of cod.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, amazing. Uh, how's, how's it been since we last caught up? Uh, I know, I know, like the, it sounds like the number one challenge for David is just keeping the product in stock. Is that true?

• 1:13:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would say, um, building foundation for, for a big, um, big 26, uh, getting the supply chain set up.

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so mostly on the supply side and, um, you know, this business is a little seasonal, so Q.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  Seasonal?

• 1:13:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, Q4 is pretty slow.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Pretty slow. New year, new you. You go on a diet? Is that the idea?

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  Well, Q4, you're just really eating turkeys.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  Drinking alcohol. Um, and then, yeah, January, all the shame comes and you just.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Get on the ground.

• 1:14:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, it'd be like, uh, it's like 50% month over month from January or December to January.

• 1:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, uh, how is, now that you're, how, how, is it two years into David or around there?

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  One, one year and three months.

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  One year and three months. Um, how is it different than, uh, the journey, uh, from RXBAR? Like, uh, like in the first year, it's obviously been accelerated on the capital side, but what, what are the big learnings? Like, what's, what, what's the, what's the biggest difference?

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  Um, so RXBAR for the first two and a half, three years was finding product market fit, like.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:54Speaker 05

  And then, um.

• 1:14:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, once we hit it, it's pretty similar. Actually, once we hit it, it was in 2016. David was like right off the get go. So like year three of RX bars, like year one of David.

• 1:15:14Speaker 05

  And then

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  I'm trying to think like markets have changed, like marketing tactics have changed, like influencer.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  Tell me more about the, the, what was the biggest tactic then? And then what was the biggest tactic of 2025 for you?

• 1:15:30Speaker 05

  So Instagram and influencer marketing was sort of the arbitrage. And it was more that the influencers weren't aware of their influence. So that was like a big mispriced opportunity.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  So there were opportunities, like if you just showed, if you just like shared someone like, like sent them the product and they would just post about it for free almost, or, or just small little, little like checks here and there as opposed to now there's like whole companies that intermediates, you know, oh, this person has this many followers is going to cost this much. It's a whole machine now.

• 1:16:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally. Like this is pre stories, but like if Kim Kardashian posted a story of RX bar, you, we would see it right in our sales. Today, I don't think you see it in your sales. So I think there's like

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting fatigue. So, so it's actually becoming less effective as well as back then it was potentially underpriced. Interesting.

• 1:16:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense because there's like novelty of like, oh, these people that like, I haven't seen them promote products. So what, so what is working on the growth side in 2025?

• 1:16:40Speaker 05

  It's a good question. I mean, it's, it's, it's hard to attribute to like one thing, you know?

• 1:16:49Speaker 05

  I think if you're in the health and wellness space, the health and wellness podcasts are great.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  Huberman, of course, is really powerful. Meta ads are working really well for us.

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  And then like, I'm kind of old school, like just trial, like sending product out, sampling, like the business is really simple. We have a, we have a bar. It's really easy to sample it. And if you do that at scale, it really works.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  And so at scale sampling means you have hundreds of people out in the real world that are going to retail stores and, and maybe fitness studios and just like physically sampling, or is, are you saying more like sending it, you know, sending out, sample bars to individual consumers or both?

• 1:17:39Speaker 05

  Both sending up, we don't have much retail, so sending out individual sample packs to, to consumers and influencers and people of influence and then,

• 1:17:53Speaker 05

  events, doing good, good events and micro influencers. I heard your previous guest talk about that, that like really powerful. Cause they have credibility.

• 1:18:05Speaker 05

  But from a growth, like,

• 1:18:08Speaker 05

  tactically speaking, like,

• 1:18:11Speaker 05

  everything is working for us and it's not to be arrogant, it's just that the products are just really differentiated, like.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  No, that's the key. That's the key in CPG. I've, every time I've invested in a company where I try the product and I go, this product is 10 out of 10. It's the best in its category. The business just crushes and the founders can, you can still make a bunch of mistakes. You can, you can, you can not have the best ads. You can not have the best website. You cannot even have the best team, but if you have the best product, it just, it just works. People, people come back. And so if you have the best product and the best execution, you're pretty much unstoppable and you just see this lift across the board.

• 1:18:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so it's, it's really hard to attribute it to working because it just kind of works everywhere. I know where it doesn't work and it's usually like, a price thing. But, um, cause our product is expensive.

• 1:19:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, so what is the plan on the retail side? Like I, I'm assuming as soon as you have the inventory, you'll flip a switch and try to be everywhere? Or is there a more specific rollout?

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So in, um, January, rolling out in Target and Walmart. So that's a huge, huge lift. And then, um, we'll be building the majority of, we'll get majority of the major distribution, with great retail partners throughout 26.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, and what about new, new product, like stuff on the new product side? You've talked before about being a, being a house of brands and that being the way that you get to the multi-billion dollar scale. Any, any, uh, rough timelines you're thinking about?

• 1:19:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, we have a new product we're launching in, uh, January.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  Fish based?

• 1:19:57Speaker 05

  It's no, no, it's, it's legit.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  Another fish product?

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  It's.

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  Anybody?

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  It's boiled trout now. John?

• 1:20:07Jordi Hays?

  That should, that should be how you haze new employees, like how you ramp them up. It's like to earn it, to earn a spot on like the core David team, you have to be able to sell fish online. Frozen fish.

• 1:20:19Speaker 05

  On Tik Tok shop.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. You gotta hit a million dollars of sales on Tik Tok shop.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  What? So this is a new product under David or it'll be in a new brand?

• 1:20:29Speaker 05

  Under David, um, it's a new bar. I'll flash it right here.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Leaking alpha right here. First time we've ever seen it. I was hoping you were going to pick it up with like two massive arms, like it was a Dura Flame. Fill like a quart of firewood. It's like, yes, this has enough protein for an entire year. And you can just slice off, slice off a chunk as you need.

• 1:20:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, so no, uh, no stunts. That's a real product. Um, let me put on do not disturb. Um,

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  Chad is asking if it's a collab with Nature's Valley Granola. You know, the crumb one that like you eat it and the crumbs go everywhere. That one's so funny.

• 1:21:14Speaker 05

  It's like, it's funny. It's like a negative trait became a meme that actually benefited the brand.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And you have to imagine that those bars are like 100% carbs, basically.

• 1:21:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, energy bombs.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, but yeah.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what are you seeing? I know you have a big, uh, CPG portfolio. What, what are you seeing on, on the portfolio side? What's working? Where are brands doing well? Where are they struggling? Uh, not everybody can have a product that has as much product market fit as David. Uh, so it's not always.

• 1:21:49Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't, I, um, I don't spend any time on my portfolio and I don't, um,

• 1:21:57Speaker 05

  so I don't know. Um, I quickly focused on David. Um, so I actually have no idea. The one that is sticking out is this THC, um, Boom, the Willie's, um,

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're crushing it.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  That was the kombucha, the kombucha brand. They, didn't they like spend that out?

• 1:22:18Speaker 05

  Junshine, um, and it's like a historic pivot because like the Junshine or the hard kombucha TAM is like 200 million.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 05

  They pivoted this and it's like really, really strong numbers. Um,

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:22:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I think it's, you know, macro trend is no one, people want to get high, but they don't want alcohol. Um, and they're seeing all that demand.

• 1:22:41John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  A, uh, 33 inch, uh, lake trout.

• 1:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Lake trout.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Lake trout. Let's hit the gong.

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna hit the gong for the lake trout. Last question, what's your prediction around 2026 revenue? Are you sharing any of those numbers?

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll share it. Moving target, we should do north of 300 million.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Masterclass.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Crazy growth. That's a lot of bars. That's a lot of protein.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot of protein.

• 1:23:26Speaker 05

  A lot of protein. We have a great team. We're striking on all cylinders, so.

• 1:23:33Jordi Hays?

  How many, what will the team look like next year?

• 1:23:42Speaker 05

  Next year, I mean, we shoot for 2 million per head.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  So I bet we'll be north of 150. We're about 80, 80 right now. I try not to comp these things because I find they're really bad.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  But yeah, we have a great, we have a great team and super productive group.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  2 million ahead. It's good.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  It's a good, good benchmark.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Keeps you honest.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining. Always, always good to have you. And incredible to get the update on the business.

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  No Black Friday talk?

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  How's it going? Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that it's not the biggest day for you.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's your strategy going into this? I mean, and what's your philosophy even around like discounting? I, we're hearing different things from different people today. I know brands that, that their max discount ever is 15% and they're super religious about that. They don't want to train their audience to kind of wait and buy a ton on a specific day because it hurts the rest of the year. But what's your approach?

• 1:24:54Speaker 05

  Well, we, we did this at RX. We basically conditioned our customers to a quarterly clearance of some sort. So with David, we don't, we don't do discounts. And then, yes, we don't do discounts. We just do a buy four, get the fifth free. And then, yeah, so I think it's important for us as a brand. I think it's a, I think it hurts the brand to be discounting.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  And then we just bring, we do bring a lot of value like on a dollars per um protein perspective.

• 1:25:29Speaker 05

  So uh and then with Black Friday, uh it's just too competitive and then um. Yeah, it's.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  So is it even worth it to ramp? Do you ramp ad budgets at all or do you just let people?

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  Because you're not a gift?

• 1:25:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, we basically, we basically just run steady state.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Speaker 05

  And we basically kind of hibernate and or November, December.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  And you know, like our sales are today are only going to be down 20% from an average.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you're gonna have 20% uh less sales today, but but you but less uh sorry, explain. So you're just like you're turning off?

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  So so we're not, say ads are ads are consistent at 15K.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:16Speaker 05

  Uh.

• 1:26:18Speaker 05

  Uh. We're not like, you would think that all the consumer attention is going to Black Friday and our sales would be hurt pretty, pretty materially. But they're actually like, they're only down 20% to a normal.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Got it, got it, got it. Yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 05

  Um, which I think is interesting is like, we're not participating and it's actually not that. And I thought it'd be more impactful because.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  People are taking all their dollars to somewhere where they can save 30% on their favorite apparel brand or something.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it makes sense. I mean, people need to order consumer staples on Fridays. Wow. And then they they almost see it, they probably see it as like a different thing. It's like, yeah, I gotta order groceries. I gotta order protein bars. I gotta order whatever my health products are. And then I also gotta get that new TV and then I also gotta get the gift for grandma. But I'm not gonna forget to get food for myself as well. So I show up and I get food and then I go and get the TV and then I go and get the gift for grandma or whatever. That that'd be my mental model. I don't know.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  From a uh, as you think about next year, from a.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do you think about like just getting enough inventory to support that kind of revenue? And how far, how far in advance are you kind of doing demand planning, given that you're, you're on a rocket ship? And I know that you guys have a unique, unique supply chain and some unique advantages, but how are you thinking of scaling that up?

• 1:27:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so since August, we've been preparing more or less for 26. We've actually had a throttle back demand to build safety stock to prepare for,

• 1:27:56Speaker 05

  to prepare for 26. So I always think like in growth, like we don't have, you kind of want to oscillate between chaos and just like crazy growth. And we had to intentionally do that just to make sure we service and don't have service failures in 26.

• 1:28:15Jordi Hays?

  And service failures are like, somebody's a subscriber on, on e-comm and you actually cannot deliver the product.

• 1:28:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and that's a failure. And then what, then it's unacceptable, but it's more on retailers. Like we've opened up retailers, it's a deal and you cannot, you can't ship your, if you can't fulfill POs, it's a huge problem.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Speaker 05

  And so there's just not a tolerance for that.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the long-term of the business? Like you've sold our X-bar. I'm sure you know all the potential buyers in the category already. They kind of know that you're, they know you're a known quantity. I'm sure they can DD this really quickly, but do you want to IPO the company? Do you want to own it privately forever? Do you see yourself working on this in 20, 30 years? Is this like your life's work? It seems like to pull back from all the investing stuff, like you're pretty into it. Like you, you, you're enjoying what you're doing, but do you think you'll, do you think that'll be the case forever?

• 1:29:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, speaking personally,

• 1:29:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, this is basically a platform for me to create new businesses and brands.

• 1:29:21Speaker 05

  And if I were to sell it.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  I would just start another. He's starting.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're like the ultimate, like, I know one thing guy.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  You're like Mark Zuckerberg at bars.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg was like, if I sell Facebook, I'm just gonna start another social networking.

• 1:29:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, and starting is a hard part, like, yeah, starting is really hard, so never want to do that. And like, the asset, the asset becomes the organization. And that's the hard part.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I mean, our vision is to create multiple brands to address different consumer needs and help remove a ton of excess calories from American diet.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Speaker 05

  And I, I think, I, I've, my, I think going public is something that's like a notch on the belt thing. But I would try to just be objective about it.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  What about, what about, like, reference points throughout CPG or, or consumer brand history? Are you like, I love the Red Bull model of like, all this crazy marketing for a very narrow product? Do you like the Budweiser model where, you know, the Clydesdales come out every, every Super Bowl? Like, are there certain brands or founders that you look up to throughout history and draw like inspiration from?

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  Um, I look at Mars.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:37Speaker 05

  Like, we're going, we're going for Mars.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's a fantastic one. There's that book, The Chocolate Wars, right, about Mars versus Hershey? I, I'm blanking on the name, but it's fantastic, all about the development of the M and M. How that was Mars and another company that was like the offspring and they did some joint ventures, crazy business.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I think we're, we're trying to build a, like, a house of brands and.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:31:02Speaker 05

  I think Mars is a great role model.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Do you think there's a finite amount of good consumer brand ideas?

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Like, do they come, do they come in like, based on consumer preferences and then innovation, like innovation on the ingredient side, like, what is it, because, because David was coming into a category that people thought was noisy and, and, and had a number of, of winners. Everybody could name like, a protein bar company, but clearly you came in innovate, you know, innovative product and, and have just, you know, very quickly dominated. So I'm assuming like, whatever the next brand is, it has to fit, it kind of has to fit within that same criteria of like, it doesn't matter if the category is noisy, but there needs to be something that is like durable and differentiated about, about the product.

• 1:31:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think the, the both good thing and bad thing about food, and it's similar to fashion, like, there's always a need for novelty with humans.

• 1:32:07Speaker 05

  And both food and fashion, there's always going to be room for, for something new. The, the ugly side of that is, there's like product fatigue and so you have, staying relevant and innovating is, is the challenge.

• 1:32:22Speaker 05

  But there's always room, and then there will be different sort of waves or opportunities that come, whether it's a trend or a new ingredient, or something like that you have to spot, but in general, my, my approach to something new, like we're planting a seed now for something to launch next year, and the, I would say like, the product has to be 30% better, like measurably better. Brand cannot be a differentiation. If I'm sitting here telling you how our brand is differentiated, like, this is like so abstract and doesn't mean anything, so it has to be, yeah, materially better than what's on the

• 1:33:03Speaker 05

  market and, and I, I personally, I like categories that are sort of boring and.

• 1:33:11Speaker 05

  What appear to be on the surface like really competitive?

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Do you spend any time at all thinking about the kind of strength of the consumer? Obviously, David customers are all strong because they're consuming a lot of protein, but more abstract, I think if you are a Mars and the strength that consumers aren't doing well, you're going to see contraction just because you basically are the TAM. And so if the economy is, if demand is falling, you're just going to see lower sales. You guys are growing rapidly in a big category. And so you're not necessarily going to notice the fluctuations, but any feelings around sentiment?

• 1:33:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  And overall strength?

• 1:33:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I feel like in our life cycle, yeah, we're not feeling the pricing issue, but you can tell by the retailers are constantly talking about it, which is a reflection. And then I always, I tell our team internally, like our product needs to get less expensive and crunchier, like our portfolio needs to get less expensive and crunchier over time.

• 1:34:17Speaker 05

  And that is to address a larger group of customers because price really, really matters.

• 1:34:24Speaker 05

  Like the TAM for a bar will be really set on like on price. Like you need to get to the 10 for 10 promotion spot to get to a billion revenue.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  And it's that Nature Valley angle, right? Like you're not going to be buying for your family $3 protein bars for everyone to eat. You're going to be buying this 49 cent snack bar.

• 1:34:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  And so for sure, we think about it and it's becomes as we go down our adventure and

• 1:35:01Speaker 05

  Um, in our lifecycle, it becomes more and more and more important for sure.

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Jason Creed says hello, by the way, to you.

• 1:35:12Speaker 05

  Oh, nice.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  He says hi. Hey, Peter.

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Hey, Jason. Legend.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to catch up. Congrats on all the progress.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on. Give us the update.

• 1:35:20Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk again soon.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin.ai. It's AI that handles your customer support. It's the number one AI agent for customer service from Intercom.

• 1:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Up next, we have Farhan.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Farhan from Shopify in the restream waiting room now.

• 1:35:38Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  He's in the TBP in UltraDome. How you doing?

• 1:35:40Speaker 06

  I'm good. I'm trying.

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  If you're here, who's keeping the servers online?

• 1:35:45Speaker 06

  I don't understand it.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  I thought you had to personally fan the GPUs.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is this, is this Shopify's like advantage is the, the, the infra team is in Canada? So it's just a regular?

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  It's colder, so the, so the servers don't go on fire.

• 1:35:59Jordi Hays?

  You guys don't do normal, you don't do like American Thanksgiving, right?

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:04Speaker 06

  It's true that we are not on vacation today. I mean, we would not be on, I mean, a lot of our American employees are not on vacation today either.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  But this is, this is really why they won because they're in Canada. It's cold up there, so the servers don't matter.

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  During the Super Bowl, the servers don't matter. They're locked in.

• 1:36:18Speaker 06

  And I'm trying, I'm trying to match you guys with my green sweater, but I don't have the jacket.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. Thanks for taking the time out of a busy day to come talk to us.

• 1:36:25Speaker 06

  No worries.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  What, what, what are the biggest learnings, changes to how Shopify is doing Black Friday or just infrastructure or technology?

• 1:36:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  This year, has it been the diffusion of AI or, or other stuff? What are the big macro trends in your world?

• 1:36:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. So a couple of amazing things. One is like, we don't just like roll into Black Friday, right? It's an all year round thing. We start planning like tomorrow, we'll start thinking about, or I mean, after the weekend, we'll start thinking about Black Friday 2026. And what's crazy about how Shopify's growth is, and really it's all about our merchants. It all comes from the fact that they're doing such an amazing job for by creating great products for all of their buyers. And so what happens is there's Black Friday, it's crazy, you see our sphere, you see the globe, we're showing you all the crazy sales. And then by April, May next year, it's just gonna be a regular day at Shopify, because that's how fast our brands are growing.

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  And yeah, the way we handle it is we do lots and lots of scale tests, man. Like, it's crazy. We can, we build up our infrastructure so that if an entire region goes down, we can just shift it to a completely new region and have no impact to buyer's emergence.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Talk, yeah, I guess, talk more specifically about like what, what part of the business at Shopify is getting less attention than it should right now? Obviously, people are focused on big headline numbers, they're focused on the sphere and some visuals, but like, how much of a role is like the shop app and just like shop pay playing this Black Friday as a product that's now been in the, been in the wild for a while now? I think everybody listening to this will have used it probably multiple times at this point. But how big of a role is that or kind of other parts of the business playing?

• 1:37:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would not sleep on the shop app. It's amazing. Started off as just package tracking and now I know lots and lots of folks, including myself, where I just start that shop app to search for something from an amazing brand that is building something specifically for you. I mean, one of my favorite brands right now is this weights company called Motivate, M-O-T-V-8, number eight. And it's got these adjustable dumbbells from like five to 80 pounds, beautiful, matches my gym, doesn't roll away. And I found it on shop. I would not have found these adjustable dumbbells any other way. And so, yeah, you should, you should look it up right now.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  I wanna, I wanna see, so, so we, we hunted around and we found a yacht for sale on a Shopify store, a 28 million euro super yacht, mega yacht. Somebody set up a Shopify site and they are trying to sell this yacht on

• 1:38:44Speaker 06

  I love it.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  On Shopify. And I wanna see if the shop app has it. We're gonna dig in there.

• 1:38:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, we should check. And then, I mean, you mentioned shop pay. You mentioned shop pay, right? I mean, shop pay is the, you know, the fastest way to check out and we see, for example, if you just have the shop pay logo, even if you don't click it,

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:01Speaker 06

  conversion goes up because people trust the merchant.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  Is, does that give me some buy now, pay later opportunities potentially?

• 1:39:07Speaker 06

  You can, yeah, I mean, obviously, as you know, we have lots of buyers who wanna do a buy now, pay later. We have shop pay installments, which allows you to do that.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  I'd love to just pay 1 million euros a month for 28 months to pay for my 28 million euro yacht. That would be fantastic. This is, this is the future. I love it.

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what um, uh, yeah, Shop Pay, I still notice, even though it's, I've been using it for

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Years at this point, like the multiple times, probably a month that I'll, I'm willing to actually just buy something on my phone because I know it's gonna be so fast.

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  When historically, I'm like, if a store is not on Shopify, I'm just not gonna buy, I'm not pulling out my credit card to buy your thing.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Also.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  I just don't wanna do it anymore.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just, it's made, uh, really, really, anything that speeds up that, you know, there's always those famous studies about like, you know, if you cut down the time it takes to do something on the internet, you'll see massive conversion. We look at it in very like abstract, kind of quantitative, 3% gains for one, one millisecond over here, whatever.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  But just the pain of actually having to, you know, go and find your credit card and stuff. It's, it's, it just brings actual delight to the entire process. And you have an entrepreneur who's focused on like building a cool brand, promoting it with cool people, and like the customer's feeling cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, and then miserable. And so if you can pull that out, like it's a, it's a huge, huge advantage.

• 1:40:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, and we see, and we see, for example, especially on your phone, right?

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  It's like over three quarters of those checkouts happen on the phone, and you just wanna be able to quickly check out. It's a trust builder. And by the way, imagine buying from a site that's not in your region, right? You're buying from Europe, you're in Europe and buying from the US. You wanna make sure that's a seamless experience, and Shop Pay will do that for you. It'll show you your shipping rates, you can feel like it's trustworthy, you can see the delivery times. You click, you get the package tracking right away, you get the order confirmation, you get the little cha-ching in the shop app, and everybody's feeling good.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, giving us the update. Cha-chang.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Massive day.

• 1:40:59Speaker 06

  Massive day.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  All right, congratulations on the progress.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for keeping everybody online.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  We appreciate it.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Keeping the, the orders coming in.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  It's not easy, what you do, and we appreciate you.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Unsung hero.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:41:12Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me on, and back, back to the war room.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Back to the war room.

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. How you doing? Hi. Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. No better day than today to check out Profound. Up next, we have Torin from Mod Retro, of course, the makers of the chromatic.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  We've, we, yeah, good to have you.

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  First time, first time.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  First time on the show. Uh, thanks so much for taking the time. How is, uh, Black Friday for you? You're obviously focused on the chromatic this year. Are there other ways that you're, uh, merchandising the product? How are you?

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Is this the best Christmas present ever?

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  This must be huge for you, right?

• 1:41:54Jordi Hays?

  Like, is this like, it feels like, it feels like you kind of made the perfect Christmas present.

• 1:41:59Speaker 07

  It's, it's this thing that we, you know, we, on our checkout flow, we have the post-checkout survey, and I think the, the biggest thing that we've been learning on this Black Friday is that it's just, it's such a unique and perfect gift, no matter if it's for a child or for somebody who is much, much, much older, because everybody can just appreciate that, that, I have one right here, that simple idea of just turning it on.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  Turn it on. No.

• 1:42:25Speaker 07

  You're in the game.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  No, I, I, I was, I was experiencing this. I mean, like, there's so many tech products today. We talked to Palmer about this, uh, where just going from unwrapping it to setting it up, to logging in with your, so create an account, create, add two factor, like, upload your DNA and all this other stuff. And it's like, can we just turn it on and have fun with it? And it's like, you can. We know we have the technology, but we've forgotten how to do it. And we, and, and fortunately, we can make things that just turn on and are fun in this country.

• 1:42:59Jordi Hays?

  Powerful stuff.

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  So, so yeah, uh, how is it going? Is, are, is it surpassing your expectations just financially? Are, are you happy with how things are going today?

• 1:43:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's it's been amazing. I don't know if you guys have been keeping up with this, but we also just unveiled the design of the M64.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:43:18Speaker 07

  Today.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:19Speaker 07

  And so we've seen a pretty massive spike in traffic and inevitably people coming to look at the design of M64 are the exact same types of people who want to play Chromatic.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. Give me, give me the rundown, the best practices for M64. I want it on day one. What do I have to do? And then my, I, I, I obviously, I, I want one as soon as I can get one. How do I do that? And then also, should I be digging through old, old crates of N64 cartridges and making sure that I have those ready to go on day one?

• 1:43:53Speaker 07

  Yes, you definitely should be doing that, but we will also be announcing our biggest launch lineup of games that are going to be published in-house. And again, just like with Chromatic, we re-release classic games, re-master classic games, and we also make brand new games that are made by indie devs and things like that.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. And then what is the, what is the value prop? Like, like why M64? Why not just go on eBay, get something, get a bunch of adapters? Like, how are you positioning? I, you know, I, I've talked to Palmer about the, the mod Retro Chromatic many times and he talks about the materials and the, the screen is all's one, Sapphire glass. I don't understand how it works, but it seems very impressive and I certainly enjoy it when I look at it. But what, what, what are you most excited about with regard to the M64?

• 1:44:47Speaker 07

  M64 is, it's just like the Chromatic. Like with the Chromatic, it is, it is the only way to play one of these games, the exact way that the game artist intended for it to be seen and for it to be played. That's because, as you said, it has the only pixel perfect resolution display that's ever been made for a Game Boy clone, whether that's software emulation or hardware devices. It's the only one in the world that has a pixel accurate display.

• 1:45:18Speaker 07

  But it's a confluence of different factors that make it feel like this very authentically nostalgic experience. It's the exact same way with the M64. It's from the translucent colorways and the way that the design is made for the actual physical console itself, but also for the video output. We're doing a few things that add to the authenticity of the actual video out and what the game artists intend for you to see in those games that won't exist in any other piece of hardware.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Is that because when the N64 was created, we were using much different televisions? And now everybody has flat screens. And so you need to actually, like, the video out needs to have a better understanding of like the final kind of like screen form factor.

• 1:46:12Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. The funny thing is that upscaling the video out to 4K, which the M64 will do, is actually the really easy problem. The hard problem is how are you going to have a modern N64 console video out to a CRT? And to see the game exactly in the way that you used to see it? And that's something that the M64 is going to accomplish with a lagless analog video out as well.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, when we talked to Palmer, he talks a lot about the like pixel perfect jumps that like speedrunners do. It's a niche consumer, at least it feels like it is. But it gives me a lot of confidence in the quality of the product. If it's good enough for the speedrunner, like I can't speedrun Mario 64. But if it's good enough for them, it's probably good enough for me. It's probably going to be a good experience. Do you think that there's actually a benchmark where you would like to see the M64 in circulation at something like Games Done Quick, GDC, these like different speedrunning competitions? Is that sort of your internal benchmark?

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  If it's actually good enough for the speedrunners, then it's good enough for everyone?

• 1:47:30Speaker 07

  The only benchmark is that it is at feature parity in terms of video out and lag and things like that with the original consoles. That's the only, that's the only benchmark that makes any sense to compare against. And so that's what we compare against. Yeah, Palmer talked about that pixel perfect jump. And we have slow motion cameras that capture the chromatic versus a Game Boy Color and make sure that that is frame by frame accurate.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:57Speaker 07

  It's the exact same thing with M64. In fact, we will be a GameStop quick.

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:48:02Speaker 07

  With chromatics and M64s.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Amazing. Yeah, so it's already in process. We have some questions from the chat.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  Any plans to do a clear case chromatic? Is that you keeping that in the chamber?

• 1:48:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, we get a lot of requests for it. That's what I'll say.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  What about reactions to more modern hardware? Valve just released the Steam box, the Steam frame. What was your initial reaction? Are you chomping at the bit? 25 years, you're going to be making one? Or are there any other kind of takes or opinions or thoughts that you can share about what that maybe means for the gaming ecosystem broadly?

• 1:48:43Speaker 07

  I'm a huge fan. I'm honestly a fan of all gaming hardware, and I think Palmer would say the same thing. For mod retro specifically, what we try to do is, is kind of dig into the past for these threads that are still relevant today. So like, in the case of chromatic, it's this idea that you can pick up a game and play it, and the game doesn't ask anything of you after you're playing it. Most modern games, they're constantly trying to get you to, to pay more money after you've already bought the game, for example. It, you know, it's the same reason that you can pick up a Game Boy game that was left in your parents' closet today, stick it into a chromatic and have the exact same experience.

• 1:49:27Speaker 07

  That, that is the thread that we wanted to pull on for chromatic. So I think with mod retro, a lot of the harbor that we're going to make is have these. These elements of the past that are still valuable today that have just been kind of steamrolled by, by, by modern times. Uh, it's not to say that the devices aren't modern and their technology stack. It's just that it gives you an experience uh that isn't common in, in modern hardware ecosystems. And so, uh, you know, all of the stuff by Valve, I'm, I'm obsessed with it. I love it. I'm a customer of it. Um, but the types of experiences that Modern Retro creates live alongside that for somebody who is interested in gaming.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Speaker 07

  And they're also better for people who actually just don't consider themselves to be a hardcore gamer, but um, but they want to play a round of Tetris on an airplane or something like.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, uh, obviously with Palmer, um, he can draw a ton of attention to the company, to the category. Um, but uh, what's, what else is working on the growth side in 2025? Have you gotten into performance marketing, doing uh paid partnerships with other influencers? Like what, what is the growth engine at the company look like these days?

• 1:50:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, we're, we're just starting to scratch the surface of that stuff because the product with no growth engine behind it at all does pretty well. And what we find is that the biggest thing for Chromatic, for example, is to get it into somebody's hands. And when you have it in your hands, it's, it, it creates a network effect of other, other people buying it. Especially just, yeah, you can't fully communicate that feel, that click of the cartridge, the.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  And it's also a forgotten, it's like a forgotten feel. Like I think that people remember abstractly liking the Game Boy, liking, you know, physical handheld gaming, um, but they don't quite remember what it actually felt like to feel it.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  It's too good. Uh, last question, anything you can share around the time horizon for the M64 pre-order?

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  When they can pre-order? They're, they're hungry. Chat is going crazy.

• 1:51:41Speaker 07

  I, I know. Uh, I'm sorry, but not right at this moment, but very, very soon.

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  But, but, but there is something that you can do today, which is drop your email and you'll be the first to know if you're on that email list, correct?

• 1:51:55Speaker 07

  Drop your email on the waitlist, which is on autotrader.com/m64. Will be prioritized in terms of shipping timelines. And, and you'll know the second that the, that the preorder is ready.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:10Speaker 07

  It, it, you know, we're, we're in the early stages of production on M64. It's just that we, we don't like to jump the gun too much with taking your money ahead of being able to ship the product.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  And so that's. I mean, Palmer lived that with the first Oculus, I, you know, he, he delay, he was probably the most successful Kickstarter campaign in history. And still months of delays, of course, it's hard, it's heart wrenching going through that. Uh, and yeah.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of other companies would have launched the preorder today.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  It's very mature to say, we'll take.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  They wouldn't even call it a preorder.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna ship next week. Who knows? But subject to delays.

• 1:52:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, we, we don't have the need to take your money ahead of time. We can shoulder the burden of the development and be confident that, that, uh, that you're gonna love the M64, so.

• 1:52:56John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for joining the stream. Congratulations on all the progress.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great. Uh, great to have you on finally.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Have a good one, Tor.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. You're right, built by Shopify alum, and we have a current Shopify, uh, not an alum. We have Harley back with Kevin from Tacovas in the stream waiting room. Now they're here in the TVP in UltraDome.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, don't mind if I, don't mind if I kick my, put my boots up on the table.

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  Don't mind if I do, partner.

• 1:53:36Speaker 08

  I don't know if I can reach that high.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  This is actually the second pair of Tacovas I have. I, somebody, a very nice, uh, enterprising, um, young man who now works for us, came all the way to Los Angeles to interview me, and I think he'd interviewed you or someone from Tacovas, because he brought me a pair of Tacovas, and I was like, are you guys sponsored by Tacovas? He's like, no, I just like giving them as gifts to people, and it made a really big impression. I wore them at a wedding in Mexico. It was fantastic.

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  And we gave some Tacovas to a, to a guest and, and. Friend of the show recently Dylan Patel.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Friend of ours is one of the top analysts in the semiconductor space. So he's always going around, always going around to different data centers.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  We're spreading the word.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  In the back of pickup trucks. And so we said, you should be wearing Tacovas when you're out on the road.

• 1:54:18Harley Finkelstein?

  Kevin, your work is done here. You should just, you should just log off now.

• 1:54:22Speaker 08

  At this point, that's great.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  No, I just actually love it. But yes, how, how is the day going? Give us the update on your side. What's the latest?

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  And you guys in the Austin store, is that correct?

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern.

• 1:54:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm here in Austin South Congress, which is one of our flagship stores, Harley's actually in New York, in our Soho store.

• 1:54:40Harley Finkelstein?

  So the Soho store right now is packed. It's insane, Kevin. You'd be so impressed. It's amazing here.

• 1:54:46Speaker 08

  I was actually looking around going, I don't know if we can do a live interview in here with how crowded it actually is. So hopefully it sounds okay. But yeah, we're being doing great. We've actually got a line of about 50 people still outside the door. We've had that since we've opened this morning. So just a constant stream of traffic. And things have been going just fantastic for us. We're having great sales online, great sale on all our stores. It's a, it's a great Black Friday so far.

• 1:55:09Harley Finkelstein?

  You'll be happy to know that Chanel is right across the street and your line here at the Tacovas in Soho is longer than the Chanel line across the street. I don't know what that means. I don't know if that's even a point.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Harley.

• 1:55:20Harley Finkelstein?

  But I just like, just to say like Chanel is not on Shopify. Tacovas is.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  I knew you were gonna say this.

• 1:55:25Harley Finkelstein?

  Correlation causation, guys.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Ridiculous, ridiculous.

• 1:55:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, Kevin, Kevin, it's, it's great. How, how did you guys, how did you guys first meet? Did, was, was Harley, you guys were born on Shopify? Or did Harley bang down your door and?

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  Shame you publicly in the beginning.

• 1:55:41Speaker 08

  So it's been, I've been on Shopify for almost 10 years now.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:55:45Speaker 08

  And have definitely, I guess, grown up, grown up on Shopify. But actually, the first time that Harley and I did something together. He, he basically said that he, he wanted me to do a little fireside chat with him in front of a top 100 Shopify influencers on a retreat they were having. And he wanted me to say, tell them how Shopify sucks. And I told Harley, I'm in. Do I only get an hour?

• 1:56:13Speaker 08

  I don't know, four or five years ago. And so it was great. It was a great opportunity to get closer with all the product leaders at Shopify and really talk about some things, you know, that we have on the outside. And it just was an awesome experience to get more embedded with that team.

• 1:56:26Harley Finkelstein?

  You know, I'm sure you guys have this also. I'm sure there's some like advertiser partners that you guys have that they're constantly just giving you great feedback. That's Kevin for Shopify. Kevin will text me at like Saturday night at 11 o'clock and say, I have an idea about subscriptions. It may have nothing to do with Tacovis, but there's constantly this like incredible, you know, feedback loop. The one thing I will say that Kevin's quite modest, so I'm going to say it for him. You guys remember that era of like retail where for some reason every store for a while had like a cafe and then eventually had like a DJ booth?

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:55Harley Finkelstein?

  Like every store had it. And you kind of went in there and you're like, this doesn't feel right. It feels inauthentic. Tacovis is kind of the opposite of that. For some reason, and I think like they're very intentional about it, like I'm sitting at the bar right now where there's like literally bourbon beer being served to all these people to get them drunk so they buy more boots and cowboy hats. It feels so authentic here. There is this like je ne sais quoi about the brand that makes makes them, the way that they handle themselves, the way that they build their stores. There is a certain thing that they do that I think is exceptional. Actually, I think like, and we're joking, but Chanel, but like, I think Chanel like lost a little bit of that. I think, you know, a lot of the luxury retailers want to, you know, try to expand that.

• 1:57:36John Coogan?

  Be careful how hard you go on Chanel because they're going to come on Shopify and next year you're going to be here being like Chanel is back. Like they, they never had made a misstep in their life.

• 1:57:49Speaker 08

  And just to piggyback on that, that's a mindset we have here called radical hospitality. And we are always looking for ways to kind of better serve our customers. We do have open bars in all of our retail stores. I'm also sitting here at the Austin bar. Drinking a glass of whiskey. We do branding and customizations. There's actually, we have branding irons in the store with floor torches. And we will heat those branding irons up and kind of stamp the boots right there. We've got a boot shine station as well. And so really trying to create moments where people to come into the store, even if they're not looking to buy and just hang out and just create an awesome experience one day.

• 1:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Thing I'm most curious about is like, how like, how do you, how do you view your role as CTO of a retail brand when you're powered by infrastructure like Shopify? We were talking with Harley earlier. I think a lot of CTOs of some legacy brands would say like, no, I'm going to own the full stack. That's my job. I don't want to let it go.

• 1:58:47Harley Finkelstein?

  Kevin, how much, I mean, this is Kevin's favorite topic. Let's go.

• 1:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I figured because there's so much, there's so much more that you can do as a technical leader that's not just like the core like commerce engine. There's so much more that sits on top of that. So many things that you can optimize, marketing, et cetera. So, but I'm curious how you view it.

• 1:59:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, there's no reason at this point, certainly, you need to have a completely custom from the ground up built tech stack. I am, I'm almost looking at it as a, I'm like the conductor of a symphony or an orchestra, you know, trying to bring together a bunch of different puzzle pieces and operate at a higher level. You know, we have obviously Shopify as our commerce platform. We have RFID deployed in all of our stores. We have email and text messaging and advertising and data feeds and AI now that we need to plug into different parts of the organization. Our retail business is absolutely taking off. And so there's a bunch of interesting kind of retail physical tech, technology challenges that are out there to solve.

• 1:59:47Speaker 08

  So I'm certainly thinking in the bigger picture, I don't want to be standing on my own commerce stack and Farhan handle all of those problems and I stand on top of his shoulders on days like today and make sure that we're operating at the best efficiency possible.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  How much is, how much?

• 2:00:04Harley Finkelstein?

  So I was gonna say, can you tell us how today's going for you?

• 2:00:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's going great. We have set multiple records in terms of orders per hour. I think we're on our six straight hours of breaking that record there.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Six straight hours?

• 2:00:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, which is fantastic. Obviously, Black Friday is always our biggest day of the year and we're seeing some fantastic growth year over year and everything's running great. Farhan did a great job with the system on his side.

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  You don't keep the notifications on, the push notifications on the Shopify app anymore?

• 2:00:36Speaker 08

  I mean, I had to turn those off like nine and a half years ago. It's been a long time since I had the little the bell on my phone going off there.

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Where where are you getting leverage from AI on the engineering side? Are you using it to spin up landing pages faster? Like where where's the most where are you getting an edge there?

• 2:00:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, we're actually we're actually doing exactly that. My entire engineering team also is using Cursor and Claude and a few different tools to be more efficient on that front. We also just deployed a tool here in retail called Invent AI. And it's designed to optimize all of our retail inventory for all of our weekly transfer orders and replenishments that we need to do to all of our retail stores. So it's doing a bunch of things for us that used to take three or four people, a couple of days to bring together in spreadsheets now at our scale. And we've completely optimized that now with an AI system that we've been seeing some great leverage on here as we've run at the holidays.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  What about customer service? What about customer service? Because I feel like there's the natural progression of, you know, you have some knowledge base, then you have a whole bunch of back and forth and emails, like smart email responses. What are you doing there?

• 2:01:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, our CX team, our CX team has been working hard on our AI assistant agent on a website. Our ticket volume that actually is making it to humans is down significantly year over year. Our CX team and our Black Friday channel is actually, hey, things are going really smooth this year. And part of that's because we've been able to offload a bunch of those requests directly to that agent. And so that's been super valuable for that team to be lean and efficient during our biggest time of year here.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Jordi Hays?

  What's your if you can share this, what's your what's your biggest store by volume?

• 2:02:23Speaker 08

  I'm sitting in it here. Austin South Congress is definitely our biggest store. Nashville will give it a run for its money, depending on the day, depending on the country music concert that might be going on. But yeah, our flagship here in Austin is our is our largest store.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  And is it is it twice? Is it like twice as much from a gross revenue standpoint as say like a Manhattan or or is it is it closer than that?

• 2:02:46Speaker 08

  That's a good question. Yeah, so Soho, we don't we don't even open for that. Three months now in Soho. So that's still a relatively new market for us as we're growing and investing kind of up into the northeast here of the country. And we're super excited about that Soho store. It's incredible. And honestly, I think it's probably our best store we ever built. We've had taken

• 2:03:05Harley Finkelstein?

  Beautiful in here, like the deep, the floorboards, for example, Lee, like it is really spectacular. Can you actually talk about what your issue with opening these stores and like the free bar issue? Because I think I think the boys would love to hear like that issue.

• 2:03:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, I can't actually say that we have alcohol in every store. And there are some menus that are slightly curated in certain markets because we actually run into issues with certain city councils. And kind of legalities in that area where they don't really have like a license for a retail store to offer hospitality, liquor. And a shopping experience without food also being served. And so we've had to get creative in some cases. We've had to actually spend some time with different city councils in other cases. And it's just

• 2:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Let me explain how we do things around this retail store.

• 2:03:56Harley Finkelstein?

  Well, it's just the reason I love that story is because the like the genius of Tocovis and business models like this is that the traditional kind of city councils, they can't put them into any box. They don't know what to call them. Like the traditional, like it's a store or it's a place to hang or it's a saloon or it's a place to come and just like, you know, get your, get your boot shine. Like they can't figure out what they are. And I think that's, I think business models that are difficult to explain in that way, usually the ones that are most interesting.

• 2:04:25Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's been your guys' policy around using AI on the, on the content side? Any, any strong opinions or kind of guidelines that you've been following? We've been asking some other, other founders.

• 2:04:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a good question. We, we have not gotten to the point where we have deployed any AI produced content into any of our ads for free. And we certainly used it to help brainstorm and come up with ideas of how things could look or, you know, get some, some storyboards or things like that. We haven't gone all the way off like the Coca Cola rails here and created like a weird AI ad. That's not, uh, that's not something that, uh, we want to get to, um, right now. We think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the Georgia Tech game. We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech event end games.

• 2:05:11Speaker 08

  Um, and those ads like to have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty. Uh, they fit real naturally into like Landman and Yellowstone and some of the other, uh, big, uh, commercial brands that we're sponsoring and being a part of. Um, and we, we are, we couldn't be more happier with, uh, what we're doing right now from a creative perspective.

• 2:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm curious how, how much is, uh, counterfeiting an issue for you guys? Because we are now dealing with counterfeiting. We just saw this morning, somebody included a TVPN merch in a gift guide that they were doing. That's not, we don't, we haven't sold, uh, we haven't sold any merch ourselves, but people are making counterfeit, uh, goods. I'm sure you guys have, have a bunch of issues with that, but I wonder what the approach is.

• 2:05:53Speaker 08

  I mean, I feel like I need to knock on wood right now. It's not a huge problem we're dealing with physically. We do see it more digitally with like ripoff sites and scam sites that kind of pop up around the web and even the dark web. Yeah. Yeah. And so we've got, uh, a partner named Bolster who helps monitor, uh, those, uh, kind of site developments in real time. They also help issue take down notices and bring those things down as fast as possible. Um, and really since we, we probably started using that tool now three years ago. Um, and it's something that I, I don't really even have to think about too much now because it's just kind of up and running and, and serving as our frontline defense.

• 2:06:25Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Uh, we probably need to sign up for that.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to.

• 2:06:29Harley Finkelstein?

  Can you talk a little bit about, um, sort of this, like you guys are, how many stores you have now?

• 2:06:33Speaker 08

  Forty, fifty? Five, yeah.

• 2:06:36Harley Finkelstein?

  So the pace, the, I mean, that's unbelievable. The pace you guys are opening right now is kind of unbelievable. Um, can you talk a bit about how the relationship you have? Like, I, I think it'd be valuable for, for, uh, those listening and watching. Just how you think about like channels and channel, like, you know, traditionally you think of channel conflict, online turning offline. With cowboy boots, you kind of want to go into the store first to try it on, but subsequent purchases maybe can be down the line. You have a very, I, I think, a really great way to kind of think about that and how you think about expansion. Can you talk about how, when you sit around and you think about where to go, how to expand, what, what channels are producing? How you guys look at all that?

• 2:07:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, totally. So, you know, we started only as D to C. So, we're website only for five or six years. And we got into retail, I think, like, uh, it was December before COVID, which is a terrible time to start retail business. Um, and basically opened eight stores and then immediately closed them. Uh, but we kind of survived. We survived, uh, obviously, that year and it came back super, super strong from that. You, you mentioned cowboy boots. It's a very unique first time purchase for someone who has never purchased a cowboy boot before and can even be slightly intimidating. And so having a brick and mortar retail store to come in and get that experience, get that fitting, kind of understand how that boot is supposed to feel when you're wearing it is a massive unlock for us as a brand. Uh, today, our retail business is larger than our e-comm business.

• 2:07:53Speaker 08

  Um, both are super healthy, but retail is actually scaling even faster. Uh, so we're seeing, uh, fantastic results here. We actually see when we open a new retail store in a new market, we may actually see e-comm dip just slightly when that store opens because there's so many customers who want to go to the store. Uh, because they've been waiting so long to actually have that experience, um, uh, in real life, which is, uh, I think a unique attribute of ours. Obviously, the whole, the whole market lifts over time, which is great. Um, and then we've also just recently started partnering, uh, partnering with, with specific wholesalers. So we see a, a great opportunity to go outside just of our direct channels, um, and meet the customer where they're at. Cowboy boots have been around for 150 years and there's lots of great

• 2:08:33Speaker 08

  independent western dealers out there that, uh, we're excited to get our products into. And, uh, we certainly don't look at it as, as channel conflict, but if we can get someone in the cowboy boot, we don't care what channel it comes from and we know over time we're going to lift the whole market. So, uh,

• 2:08:46Harley Finkelstein?

  And are you taking market share from anyone? Are you taking market share from a different company or is it like non-consumption you're competing with?

• 2:08:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk bad about anybody, Harley, but there's only one line here, uh, today on South Congress, but there are multiple boot shops here, uh, on the street.

• 2:09:01Harley Finkelstein?

  Shockingly in Soho, there's not that many boot shops.

• 2:09:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, our store, uh, our store is the most crowded.

• 2:09:06Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about international? Uh, are you guys thinking about, uh, like what country do you think will buy more cow or could, could come close to buying cowboy boots at, at the level that, uh? Uh, Americans.

• 2:09:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's, that's a good question. We still have not tapped international at all. So we are still United States only, uh, and still we have a very large screen sold internationally. Uh, if you look at markets like Canada and Australia and Brazil and Mexico and Spain, there's Germany even has a, has a, has a pretty big TAM there. So, um, we think there's a great opportunity for us to continue to expand internationally, but we also want to do it in a thoughtful way. We want to do it in a profitable way. Um, and make sure that, uh, you know, it's the right decision for us to go that direction.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. Got anything else?

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for taking the time. You, you seem like you're just, uh, cruising through.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:02Harley Finkelstein?

  He's like, he's steady Eddie.

• 2:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Just throw, throw the boots on.

• 2:10:07Harley Finkelstein?

  Getting things crazy, but.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Throw the boots on the desk and just enjoy the rest of the day.

• 2:10:10John Coogan?

  CTO who's on Shopify. Like it's not going down.

• 2:10:13Speaker 08

  It's, this is my, Harley, this is my 10th Black Friday on Shopify.

• 2:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:10:18Speaker 08

  Um, it's, uh, you know, we've come a long way and things are going really well.

• 2:10:23Harley Finkelstein?

  That's awesome. This is my 16th Black Friday. Almost half my life. This is good. Yeah. Honestly, I'm not just saying this, Kevin, because you're on the call, but like you'd be so proud of the store, the staff here are doing amazing. You can feel the energy. People are just hanging out in the front. There are people that are having, um, you know, their, their, their shoes, their boots personalized. You got a lineup of people drinking bourbon here. You'd like, as from one entrepreneur to another, man, like you should be really proud of this.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Okay. Last question.

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  We got one more question for you. We gotta ask, what's the biggest fish you've ever caught, Kevin?

• 2:10:53Speaker 08

  You know, I, I heard the last question you asked that. I mean, I think I probably caught maybe like a, a five pound catfish.

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, catfish.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  Nothing wrong with.

• 2:11:02Jordi Hays?

  That's on brand. Catfish. We actually.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  Did you eat the catfish? I feel like if you catch it and eat it.

• 2:11:07Speaker 08

  It was a catch and release.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Catch and release. Okay.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  There you go. First catfish.

• 2:11:12Speaker 08

  Eat it and put it back.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  That's the first catfish. We need to start putting them up on the wall when we.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're having the fishing wall over here.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day. Happy Black Friday.

• 2:11:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate you.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  Thank you for these wonderful boots.

• 2:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  See you soon.

• 2:11:28Speaker 08

  Cheers. See you, Kevin. Cheers.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  Look at that.

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  Look at that, Dragger. Oh, we have a new record.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  We're up $4.2 million in sales every minute, right? Isn't that it?

• 2:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Every minute.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  Millions per minute. Wow. That is a fantastic amount. Well, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Apparently, someone found a company that might be slightly worse at naming than OpenAI. I believe this is Samsung. Have you seen this? So they have a Q5 Max Plus, Q5 Pro Plus, Q5 Pro, Q7 Max, Max Plus, Max Pro Ultra. Have you seen these? I think these are different phones. It really makes you appreciate how, how hard Apple works to create like a logical flow between all of the different phones. Like, it really shows you that when you're like a massive company, it's so easy for it

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  to get away from you because you're like, oh yeah, there'd be like massive demand for like a mini pro version and you're like, okay, whatever, let's green light it. And then you wake up and you realize you have 75 different permutations and that's what's, that's what people.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Scale.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  This, Hermes versus Gap.com. I thought it was somewhat relevant to Black Friday. Hermes is pulling 25 million visits, I guess, per month, or I guess from August to October. So for that quarter, 25 million. Gap, 200 million. So Gap, 10 times the viewership, basically, or the visits than Hermes. And of course, people are, this is in reaction to the difference between Claude and perplexity in the App Store. Claude has 33,000 five-star reviews. Perplexity has 370,000 five-star reviews, is number 14 in productivity. Pretty remarkable results from perplexity. I think a lot of this has to do with the pricing strategy.

• 2:13:25John Coogan?

  I think there's much, there's a lot more to the free tier of perplexity. Whereas I was even just trying to like randomly pull up Claude just to run a quick test. And like it immediately before, it hit me with a, with a, like a sign in page before you could even fire off a single prompt.

• 2:13:41Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, a lot of people use perplexity.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  A lot of people use perplexity and there's a lot of channel partnerships.

• 2:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Credit to perplexity, as much as.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  You heard Harley mention that they have a partnership.

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  As much as ChatGPT is AI to most people out there, there's a lot of people where perplexity is AI to them.

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. They've done a really good job.

• 2:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how how they can continue to to hold on and and scale that user base.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Over time.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Well, before we move on, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance is handled, so you can focus on growth. I wanted to share a potential gift for the AI lover in your life. The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI. If you preorder on or before December 15, it'll ship.

• 2:14:31Jordi Hays?

  Lot of graphs in here.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Lot of graphs. I I thought this was interesting. I I've seen this person on on YouTube and just seems like a fun, like, interesting book. I like these types of books. It's like almost a textbook, but a lot of interesting graphs, just documenting some of the AI things. Also, I mean, if you need, if you need books, Stripe Press, I mean, you really can't go wrong. There's so many beautiful books there, so many interesting books about technology.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Put some Stripe Press under the Christmas tree.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  I would agree. I think that's that's the way to do it. What else?

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  We have, this was crazy. You know, we covered Giant Slalom, the FBI operation to find Ryan Wedding.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  They they they were able to capture his Mercedes, 2002 Mercedes CLK.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:22Jordi Hays?

  GT-R.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  And I put this in here because I thought it was a good gift idea.

• 2:15:25Jordi Hays?

  I know. Are they going to auction this off?

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  Just get a 2002.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  The trouble is, if you're one of the world's most wanted men, it's kind of hard to be whipping around a Mercedes CLK GT-R.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  It's going to turn some heads, for sure.

• 2:15:39Jordi Hays?

  You could make your own track.

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  Wind up turning the police heads. It is a massive, massive car. The back of this car is just remarkably long. Just what what an exquisite exquisite vehicle. I love it.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  This feels like an under discussed, you know, the Carrera GT gets a lot of, a lot of love, the F40, LaFerrari, Enzo, like those get a lot. This is, it blends in almost like too much, but I mean, obviously there are some people, it has a ton of fans, but very, very, very cool. Well, if you, you know, if you're not living a life of crime, you gotta automate compliance and security on Vanta. It's the leading AI trust management platform. Look at that stinger for Vanta.

• 2:16:26Jordi Hays?

  That's stinger. New Vanta stinger.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Kat Korvex says, when my husband asks how many Amazon packages are still on the way, it's a quick clip from meme from Ilya.

• 2:16:38Jordi Hays?

  There were so many good moments in this.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Because the answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers. You know, people were kind of dunking on Ilya for, for having this like vague response to Dwar Kesh asking him how will SSI make money? And I was just like, this is the most, like, this is, this is not a bad answer. This is the perfect answer. Because he literally did this. He went to OpenAI for 10 years, they just worked on research, and then wound up with a massive consumer business. They wound up with a consumer tech company that, that makes $20 billion a year in revenue.

• 2:17:13Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you read some of his answers, though, as he, they will likely release a product before?

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  People were saying that? I don't know. I, no, I don't think so. I think he's actually just gonna do the OpenAI thing again. He did it at OpenAI. People are like, how could he possibly be so vague that like, you know, he's, he's vague posting, vague podcasting, thinking that like, the answer will reveal itself. It's like, well, that's exactly what happened the last time he was in this, in this role. He was in the role of, hey, go research. You have basically an unlimited budget, more or less, because there's just nonprofit dollars coming in. You can pay the bills. You're gonna keep scaling up, doing experiments, do whatever. And then it's, and at the last possible second, once he'd done a lot of good AI research, you know, someone came in and said, hey, why don't we like, wrap a chat box around that and put it on the internet? And then boom, $20

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  billion business. And so, like, for him to, to be saying like, yeah, we're gonna run it back. It seems very logical to me. It seems like, yeah, that's a great plan. Although, you know, $36 billion valuation, I'm sure that there is, there are some reasons why people are like, oh, this is capital incineration, blah, blah, blah. But I don't think it's that crazy, given that he literally just did this.

• 2:18:20Jordi Hays?

  If you need a place to park $3 billion?

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  In AI? I think it's a, I think it's a, as part of a basket.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Companies, I think it's a.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  I mean, it's certainly like a venture style risk like it's like it's could be a zero. But just like if anyone else was giving that pitch of like the, oh, we don't know how we'll make money, blah, blah, blah. I'd be like, red flag, but like not with Ilya, like Ilya is the one person who's extremely qualified to say, we do a bunch of research and then we figure out how to monetize it later and it actually works because it worked the last time.

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, did you know about this movie Battle Royale from Japan? Tim Sweeney's posting about it.

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  I, yes, I, I haven't seen it, but I'm familiar.

• 2:18:59Jordi Hays?

  Battle Royale movie from Japan.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  It inspired movies like Hunger Games and games like PUBG and Fortnite.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  I've played PUBG, I've played a little bit of Fortnite, uh, Player Unknown, yeah. Uh, Battle Royale, and then, and then it was adapted into, uh, The Hunger Games, of course, and, and, uh, but I like that Quentin Tarantino, uh, this post from Variety says Quentin Tarantino starts to reveal his 20 best movies of the 21st century. This is how you reveal a list. This is what they should do with the Midas list. Should be like, they're starting to reveal it. He's, he didn't tell the top 20. He just said, here's nine, here's 11 through 20. You'll have to tune in next time to my next Variety article.

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 2:19:41John Coogan?

  It's really good, babe. Cause now I'm like, well, what's his number one? I gotta know. And he'll be like, okay, number 10, number nine. It's a, it's a great way of keeping somebody on the hook. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. Uh, we have Nish, right?

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  My dear friend.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  Your dear friend. I think we ran into each other. Did we run into each other in Nobu? How you doing?

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:20:10Speaker 09

  What's up? What's up, guys?

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  How you doing?

• 2:20:13Speaker 09

  Good, good.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  How locked in are you? How locked in are you right now, the last 24 hours?

• 2:20:17Speaker 09

  This is it, man. This is the Super Bowl, dude. So like, you know, it's like no sleep. It really is.

• 2:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay. You, did, did you really not sleep last night? Did you get a couple hours at least?

• 2:20:26Speaker 09

  Thankfully, we have a team that does this kind of stuff now, so it's not that bad.

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I mean, some companies, it's like January 1st is their Super Bowl. Because it's like people are getting in shape, new year, new you. Other stuff heavily gift driven, so.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  Black Friday is really big, having a discount driven, like where, where do you sit on the?

• 2:20:42Jordi Hays?

  How much bigger is, is Q1 than Q4 for you guys?

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:46Speaker 09

  Q1 is always bigger than Q4, especially the health and wellness space. So like they call Q1 really Q5. And so everyone's like, you know, ramping up towards Q1 January to watch easier Super Bowl for sure. But this weekend is still gonna be a really, really large weekend. And like these next four days, people are gonna be like, the buying intent is just so high. So everyone is just really excited to purchase regardless. But even after this, December is usually a little bit of a lull in the health and wellness space, but you're still spending and building awareness. And then Q1 is just like, you know, that's where you're making as much money as possible.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us through the product set for those who don't know.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Before, before, give an intro on yourself and the company. I, we're close friends. I don't want to skip over it for the, for the audience. So yeah, introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:21:33Speaker 09

  Yeah. Hey guys, my name is Nish. I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Array. I started the company with my wife and we're basically a targeted supplements for unsexy problems. So we started the company five years ago. Our hero product is bloat in the digestive health kind of category. And since then, we've expanded across multiple women's health problems. So metabolic health, sports performance, digestive health. And we have very few SKUs, but we do, you know, nine figures of revenue of, as a business and we're five results.

• 2:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, well, there we go.

• 2:22:10Jordi Hays?

  And you guys have, you raised one, one round back in the day.

• 2:22:15Speaker 09

  Yeah, we raised like a really small, like couple million dollars, super small seed round, maybe four, three years ago, something like that. Yeah, we've been profitable since.

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Insane. What's been the, what's been the strategy this year? I feel like other categories in, in e-comm have had like more volatility this year, just like given the, the trade war and all that stuff, but, but how's it been so far?

• 2:22:38Speaker 09

  No, okay, so the first half of this year was completely different than the second half of the year. So the first half, something about just buying sentiment was a lot better. And so the way you're able to grow these consumer businesses and just marketing in general was really efficient, really strong growth. Second half of the year has been really interesting. Something has changed in just like macro environment where people are not spending as much money just buying things online anymore. And Sam notices across the board, if you look at like macro 10 data, look at even retail category data, just customer acquisition costs have really, really gone up, meta acquisition costs have really gone up. Brand is still growing, but it's as hard as it was in the first part of the year, that's for sure, yeah.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  And so to counteract that, you guys are launching new products, you launch Target, walk us through that.

• 2:23:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, so for us, you know, launching new products has always been a really big part of the strategy. I think innovation is so important because without innovation, you just can't really build the company and you kind of die. So we're always launching new products, but we try to launch very few products that have a really large TAM. And so this year we launched a tone, tone gummy, which is basically creatine that was built in a form factor and has certain additional ingredients that is really geared towards women. And so a lot of women are like so scared of taking creatine and so scared of bulking up. And so we're like, let's make this more approachable for them. That was like a really strong product for us. We have another clear protein product in the protein category, protein's been like going crazy this year. So that was like, that was another really big launch. We have a clear protein with electrolytes in it, so that did really well.

• 2:24:08Speaker 09

  And then more recently, it was a product line extension. We have a really strong MB1 metabolic health product, and so we did that as well. But the biggest thing for us is we've been expanding heavily into retail, just because that's where the next kind of phase of growth comes from. So we've went nationwide through Target, nationwide at Sprouts. Those two are really, yeah, big, big launches. No, it's been, it's been a crazy year, man, crazy year, really good.

• 2:24:32Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about online channels? How's, how are things on TikTok Shop? I know we were, we were in the Alps in December, January, and you, you said it was like insane at that point. Has it, has it kept up? I know, I know that, I know that they kind of subsidize demand on TikTok Shop, or that's, that's been my understanding of it. Has that continued? How are you thinking about it as part of this acquisition that's going on, all that stuff?

• 2:25:00Speaker 09

  TikTok is actually pretty insane. So TikTok Shop is this crazy platform where you can go from doing nothing to doing, you know, multimillion dollars a month in like three months. And so that's what that's what happened to us. When we were in the Alph store, like we were just ramping up by March, we were doing seven figures per month, per month, just on TikTok Shop.

• 2:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:25:19Speaker 09

  And so that was like, it was really, really cool, really fun. But what's crazy about it is the amount of investment that you need to get that going is just a lot. So TikTok is interesting because you get this virality, you get this insane amount of impression share, and you're really banking on the halo effect it has on other channels. So when TikTok goes viral, you're not really making any money on TikTok, but you're making money on Amazon, in retail, and even this bill over effect on DTC. And that's where you're seeing the results. So the thing about that is you do it, you know, you're not going to make a lot of money, but you gotta like staff up and get really complex on like incrementality and just your overall marketing strategy and just getting really good at measurement. So you know where you're making money. But TikTok Shop is really interesting because

• 2:26:05Speaker 09

  it's actually changed black bride behavior quite a bit. It's in a, it's in a position where it's a a constant deal seeking like throughout the 12 months of the year because they have so many sales and so many promos happening all the time. And so consumers on TikTok Shop are like, okay, I'm just gonna go look for the best deal. And I'm just gonna go for whatever creators are telling me are the best product, but also the best value. And so it's like really changed things because, you know, you really don't want to be on sale all the time, but you kind of have to be if you want to play competitively on that platform. But it's still really interesting because you can, you can have certain products that are like really meant for TikTok Shop, other products that you're kind of on your DTC and you're cross-selling, up-selling. But it's a, it's a strong platform. Like it, once it gets going,

• 2:26:49Speaker 09

  there's no denying the halo effect it has on everything else.

• 2:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, makes a lot of sense. How are you navigating uh, growth and profitability? I know you've been generally profitable for a while now, but you still have your foot on the gas from a, from a growth standpoint.

• 2:27:05Speaker 09

  Yeah. I I think like right now we've been profitability first more than more than growth. And so we've just been like, okay, um, no matter what, um, even on the B F C M, even when we're doing like these large sales and whatnot, like we're not going to go above a number if you're going to become unprofitable. Now, obviously, the profitability takes into account a lot of like L T V and it's a mechanic on, okay. Um, we don't mind losing money as long as you're sure that we'll make money back within whatever, you know, one, two, three month payback period. So we'll that that type of math and give the best possible kind of value to the consumer. So we've still been very healthy like L T V on that note, but it's interesting. I mean, we've been expanding so much in retail and all that kind of stuff. You just need money to grow that machine and you just need to market a lot more.

• 2:27:50Speaker 09

  So there's a world where regardless of how profitable you are, it's the pure dollars needed to, you know, market.

• 2:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Scale and retail.

• 2:27:57Speaker 09

  Target, you just really money for that. So we're we're considering, okay, um, you know, how much do we increase that marketing budget by? Um, maybe reducing profitability even more and just like spending more because it's what you need to get successful. There's a flywheel effect that will take in later. Uh, so I'm sure this might be made later on that, but uh, right now we're profitability first, but I think we'll maybe be more lenient on that even going into next year just because you want to grow the business more, especially with the channel increasing.

• 2:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Do you do you track revenue, revenue per employee? We had, we had David, uh, not David, we had Peter, Peter, uh, Peter, Dave.

• 2:28:31Speaker 09

  From David.

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Peter Protein.

• 2:28:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  David, he was, he was saying, you know, he looks to keep like a couple, couple million of revenue per employee. Is that something that you think about at all or just kind of a vanity metric?

• 2:28:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, we do. Actually, we do. We're probably like one of the leanest. I think we're sitting anywhere at like, uh, somewhere in the two to three million dollar range on uh, revenue per employee. So like, that's really, yeah, it's been, uh, it's been really good. Maybe a bit too lean though, but yeah.

• 2:28:58Jordi Hays?

  It's incredible. I've had a front row seat to watching Sif and Nish build a ray and just absolute, absolute monsters. Someday you'll go on like a nice podcast tour victory lap when it's all, when it's all over, but uh. Must, must accompany. Yeah. Awesome, dude. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the time out of the day. Say hi to Sif and the whole team and. I will. I'll see you soon. Thanks, guys. See you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Cheers. Our next guest is already in the stream. What you got?

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  I was just gonna say, Nish is just the epitome of golden retriever marketing. He's, he's an absolute animal.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. We will.

• 2:29:51Jordi Hays?

  Next up.

• 2:29:51John Coogan?

  Take it over to Figs. I believe we are inside of a store.

• 2:29:56Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  Is this a virtual backdrop or are you actually in the store right now? I'm so confused.

• 2:30:02Speaker 10

  I am actually in the store.

• 2:30:05John Coogan?

  Okay, amazing.

• 2:30:06Speaker 10

  Yes, we're at our brand new store on Upper East Side here in New York City and we just opened.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:30:13Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Good timing. Hit the gong for the store. There we go. What, what is, like, what is Black Friday like in your category? I'm assuming a lot of your, a lot of your consumers are like, it's a normal work day. Is that true? How, how do you guys approach the holiday?

• 2:30:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, that's exactly right. At Figs, you know, we are building a brand exclusively for healthcare professionals and many healthcare professionals, they're working the holidays. They were working all day yesterday through Thanksgiving and they're working nights and weekends all the way through the new year. And so for us, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's really a moment for us to show up for them. These are the people that are showing up for all of us. And so we really approach this moment as a moment of gratitude and a moment to give back to our community.

• 2:31:12John Coogan?

  How are you positioning gifting the product? I can see, you know, it is a professional outfit and but it's also a product that people love. And so if your family member gives it to you, they're kind of giving you more work, but also it's a very nice thing to give. So how are you positioning like the, the, the marketing around who, who should be participating in Black Friday? The gift giver or the, or just the person who's shopping for themselves?

• 2:31:36Speaker 10

  Well, it's all of the above. I think, you know, everyone wants to thank all of the incredible healthcare professionals in their life or for, you know, people that are being treated and cared for by healthcare professionals. And so it goes both ways. I think, um, you know, healthcare professionals are able to use this as a moment to stock up on their essentials and the uniforms that they need to wear every single day. But at the same time, Figs is a really premium brand. It's completely revolutionized the way healthcare professionals get dressed for work and the uniforms that they're wearing. And so it also is a really nice gift for, uh, you know, someone to gift another healthcare professional or, um, you know, to gift the healthcare professional loved ones in your life.

• 2:32:21Speaker 10

  And so it really is all of the above, and I think it ties back to this, uh, feeling of gratitude, giving thanks to, um, you know, the most incredible people on this earth that are saving lives and curing diseases. And so we position it both ways, both as a moment to stock up for yourself, but also as a moment to give back.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  What's the biggest, uh, what was the biggest unlock this year from a marketing perspective? What was one campaign or strategy that you feel like as you look back on 2025, uh, you feel like it went particularly well?

• 2:32:52Speaker 10

  Oh my gosh, we've had an epic year. It's been so awesome. And I think one of the things that I was reflecting on it with a moment like today, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, for us, it's not just about these moments. It's about how we show up 24/7, 365 for our healthcare community, who we call awesome humans. Um, this year we launched a year-long campaign called Where Do You Wear Figs? And it talks about all of the places that healthcare professionals Which is literally everywhere. It's before their shift, after their shift. It's to work every day. And so we've had a series of chapters throughout the year celebrating Women's Month, celebrating Nurses Week, most recently celebrating the holidays.

• 2:33:37Speaker 10

  And we've really shown the insides of what it's like to, you know, work within this industry and the space and all the different places where our brand shows up. And so I think what's so important on a moment like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that, you know, you're building this brand equity and you're building this connection with your community throughout the year. And then that pays off in these, in these big moments. And so showing up for them, listening to them, telling their stories throughout the year, which we've done with our Wordy Perfect campaign has been really incredible for us. And this is just another moment to celebrate that.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on all the progress on the epic year. And thank you so much for taking the time to.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for bringing us, bringing us into your new space.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  It looks amazing.

• 2:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Quite busy in there.

• 2:34:25Speaker 10

  Yes, it's packed. We have nurses coming in for hot cocoa and it's been really fun.

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  Very cool, very cool. Well, good to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:34:38Speaker 10

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And let's go back to the timeline. The folks over at Deal were having some fun. Have you seen this?

• 2:34:58Jordi Hays?

  This is a new account.

• 2:34:59John Coogan?

  Trend.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  I haven't.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Heron Resource.

• 2:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly executing on this strategy very well, they say. I noticed one employee wearing noise canceling headphones, not earbuds. The big cushioned over ear kind that create a tiny personal universe. I asked if everything was all right. He said, yes, he's just trying to focus. You do this in the morning.

• 2:35:20John Coogan?

  I do. Lock in.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Your big earbuds. I told him we value focus, but isolation can misread as resistance to collaboration. He said he's literally sitting at his desk doing his job. I told him we track human presence, not just output. He asked how presence is measured. I said imperfectly, which is why it's so important. Then I logged, quote, "avoiding spontaneous culture building opportunities" in his engagement profile. 10 million views.

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  50,000 likes and it's an ad for Deal. And it's so interesting because it feels like it's part of this new trend. Like there's that

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  The European

• 2:35:56John Coogan?

  There's a European VC guy who's really funny, who I believe is owned or partnered with like a SOC 2 compliance competitor or a company out there that does that, like a Vanta competitor. And they, and it's just a very funny positioning of like these, like owning these accounts. We also saw, I think, Polymarket bought Rosalie for $500,000. That was leaked on the timeline today. And so there's like a whole bunch of interesting ways that companies are engaging with like different accounts, whether they're buying ones that are already existing or they're spinning up new ones. It just, it feels like it's like part of the Go Direct story, but not entirely.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  You have to do it all on the founder's profile. But it's definitely blurring this line between like what's in-house and outsourced media. How are they getting attention? What's marketing? I have a friend who has a, is an ad agency where he just buys, you know, ads for companies. And he set up an AI-based profile like years ago. Like as soon as, as soon as the AI dropped, like it was not particularly good. It just has like an anonymous picture, like an AI-generated image. And he posts just like, here are the greatest ads in history every day. And so it's just like great ads. And people will just, they go viral all the time because they're just interesting ads, funny ads. And then it's just a funnel to be top of funnel to just do lead gen on.

• 2:37:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  And so there's all these different ways that, that companies are like plugging into like, you know, social media these days. Very fascinating.

• 2:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very interesting.

• 2:37:31John Coogan?

  Another way to advertise is of course with adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Brian from Rora, your co-founder. No way. Brian, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 2:37:47Speaker 11

  I'm doing great. How are you guys?

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically.

• 2:37:49Jordi Hays?

  So great to have you. So great to see you. Do you get any sleep last night?

• 2:37:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, got a little bit.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  This is a big day for Roar, right? Introduce the product, introduce the progress and then take us through what some of the expectations are for Black Friday.

• 2:38:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, so Roar is a premium water filtration brand, primarily trying to build products that will extend people's lives and help people get access to cleaner water. So we're effectively trying to build like the Dyson of water filtration. So an entire ecosystem of products that helps people get access to clean water wherever they are.

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  And first Black Friday, but not your first Black Friday. Went through a ton of them. Maybe it'd be kind of interesting to hear like how Black Friday has changed even while you've been an e-commerce operator. You had a company, Love Your Melon, that did many, many millions of dollars of revenue and scaled profitably over close to a decade, I believe. So yeah, I'd love to get a sense of like how this day and these kind of four days have changed and then we can talk about Roar.

• 2:39:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, definitely. I think it's definitely changed quite a bit. And I think this is like my 12th Black Friday. But it used to be that Cyber Monday was really the day and you kind of build everything up to that. And you know, you could set budgets at 10x and things like that on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and you could just rip a ton of sales.

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Print.

• 2:39:25Speaker 11

  Yeah, but in today's day and age, you really have to build up the learning on those ads and you have to build a lot of that forward momentum really to maximize the potential of it. So I think now in today's day and age, it's really about obviously capturing the momentum. And so, you know, we did a couple of key things like, you know, having a product release about two weeks ago and really using that as an opportunity to build a lot of lead gen and a lot of interest around that, leading up to this. So, yeah, we did a lot of things focused on the top of the funnel leading into this. It was our first, you know, first Black Friday, but it's a lot cheaper, obviously, to get

• 2:40:07Speaker 11

  eyeballs on your product when, you know, it's a month before. So we did a lot to fill the funnel and then.

• 2:40:15Speaker 11

  You know, this

• 2:40:15Jordi Hays?

  And this is also not a product that it's it's less of like an impulse buy. I feel like is that correct? Like if you're if you're buying a product to that you're going to rely on for clean water for your family, like you might just see an ad and immediately click through and buy, but you also might want to learn about it over time. And I think top of funnel is like really important because of that.

• 2:40:37Speaker 11

  Yeah. So, you know, we allow people to find out what's in their water. They can go to our website and you'd find out what's in their water. Then they go through a whole series of, you know, emails and informational aspects, then to learn more about the aspects about our product. And so we pushed a lot of that leading up to this. But we also know that a lot of people have been looking at our products for quite a long time. And so we felt that it was important to do, you know, a discount for Black Friday, just to allow more people to have access to cleaner water. And so that was ultimately the biggest decision behind it. And we've seen a lot of, you know, great response from from our customers and driven quite a bit of sales from it.

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

  What tactically on on Meta, what are what are kind of the risks? We were talking earlier about how like brands are setting budgets and then blowing through them either way faster than they intended or not as fast as they wanted to. What's been your approach there? And how are you kind of where are you finding success?

• 2:41:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think for us being, you know, as young of a brand as we are, you know, we've only we launched about a year ago. It was really focusing on just top of the funnel. And so really keeping a lot of that budget on prospecting and, you know, continuing to funnel in your best best ads into the prospecting side of it. But also making sure that we can come out of this and keep consistent, you know, consistent sales for the brand. And so really building up the learning earlier than we typically would instead of saving all of our best assets and pushing it out, you know, waiting for Black Friday or right when we start the sale. So I think we've done that fairly effectively so far.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  What what are you seeing other brands do in terms of just approaching this four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday? Is it all just one continuous sale now? Or does it make sense to be launching like different sales at different points? Like what's best practices that you're seeing?

• 2:42:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think consistency definitely is best practice. I've done so many different ways over the, over the past, whether it's free gifts with purchase, whether you've got different products releasing, whether you've got a better deal on Cyber Monday. And I think a lot of those things worked well in the past, but I think in today's day and age, it's better to stay consistent with one sale. I think starting that a little bit before, you know, a couple of days before Black Friday so that you can build up the momentum with those ads tactically and then you don't have to decrease that spend because you don't have a big dip in overall volume. So you can kind of just consistently then scale that up throughout, you know, Black

• 2:43:23Speaker 11

  Friday into Cyber Monday. And then also you get the lower CPMs starting that, you know, a couple of days before Black Friday than trying to start it on Black Friday and experiencing those high CPMs out of the gate.

• 2:43:34Jordi Hays?

  And then what about from a, like, this is, this is the first, like, real holiday season for Rora and then the first kind of like new year cycle that a lot of health brands go through where the business is like starting to, you know, be at a pretty meaningful scale. How do you, like, do you think this is kind of like, a lot of brands get the benefit of, like, they're either a gifting brand and, or like, it feels like Rora could be-

• 2:44:05John Coogan?

  New year, new you health brand.

• 2:44:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Rora feels like it's like-

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Everyone's been split as we've talked to all the entrepreneurs.

• 2:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're doing supplements, it's like, people might buy this week because-

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  This isn't going to be the biggest thing for you.

• 2:44:16Jordi Hays?

  But January will be a lot bigger, whereas I feel like, I expect January to be significantly bigger for Rora, but really just because the business is scaling so quickly, but it should be a big gifting product.

• 2:44:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think, you know, we saw on, yesterday- Like a large amount of organic sales of being Thanksgiving. And I think people go, you know, wherever they go for Thanksgiving and a lot of people tried out, you know, Aurora system at somebody else's house. Um, I think we'll see something similar around, uh, you know, Christmas, um, and the holidays, but I think going into, um, going into January, there's going to be an entirely new demographic that kind of comes into the funnel that's focusing on their health again. And, uh, I think it'll be a, a big opportunity for us to capture that demand. Um, we've also got some big partnerships that we're going to be launching right at the beginning of the year around that as well. So, uh, I think it'll all, it'll all tie together, but I think, you know, there's an opportunity for both from a gifting

• 2:45:13Speaker 11

  perspective and, you know, the health and wellness for us leading into January.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  Well, close us out with a big number, which you got for us. What, what can you share?

• 2:45:23Speaker 11

  Uh, this Black Friday, this Saturday, Monday, we should go over 20,000 systems sold for the year.

• 2:45:29Jordi Hays?

  There we go. We'll let people at home do the math.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  That's a lot of systems. Thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out on a busy day.

• 2:45:39Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, watching you put on, you and Charlie put on just an absolute, uh, execution masterclass this year has been, uh, been an honor. Uh, and, uh, yeah, excited, excited to see how the rest of today nets out.

• 2:45:53Speaker 11

  Well, we've got a great team, a lot of people around us. Thanks so much for having me on.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Aidsleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. I got an 81. Quality was not quite right.

• 2:46:07Jordi Hays?

  How'd I do?

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  Thanksgiving. I feel like I did okay, but, uh,

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  83.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  Oh, are you back in the house?

• 2:46:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm back.

• 2:46:14John Coogan?

  You're back. Okay. I wasn't sure how long the renovation was going to happen. Congratulations. I'm glad it's over. Wait, uh, what'd you get? 83?

• 2:46:20Jordi Hays?

  83.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Ooh, wow. Came back with some authority, with some authority. Well, uh, we have, we have Kat from AG1 in the Reacher Motorrad. Welcome, former guest. She's back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us on such a busy, busy day, right after Thanksgiving. Welcome to the show.

• 2:46:39Speaker 12

  Thanks for having me. Great to see you.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  Since we last talked, what's new in your world? We've been sort of bucketing brands. Okay, someone's more of a, you know, this is Black Friday. It's the most giftable Game Boy possible. It's going to be under the Christmas tree. And then David Protein, you know, sales are down 20% today. Gearing up for January, New Year, New You.

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Black Friday is not a huge focus for them.

• 2:47:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are you thinking about making the most out of today, Monday, the rest of the year generally at AG1?

• 2:47:12Speaker 12

  You know, I think of today twofold. One is today is a day to capture demand we've been building throughout the year. When I was hanging out with you guys, I think it was in June.

• 2:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:21Speaker 12

  We had just launched in Costco.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:24Speaker 12

  We had not even launched our new flavors.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  That was the number one tip we learned from you. If you're in consumer packaged goods, just launch in Costco, win in Costco, and then you're good. That's the tip.

• 2:47:36Speaker 12

  It's been incredible.

• 2:47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:47:38Speaker 12

  But after that, we launched flavors for AG1. And we launched our first ever truly second brand and product with AGZ. So we went from one product to this.

• 2:47:52Speaker 12

  And so today is about capturing the demand we've been building throughout the year with these product launches, investments in upgrading the formula, multiple human clinical trials, really bridging into retail and having multiple products. So as we market, as we invest, as people flood into market for what are typically offers, but still to shop, to make purchases, it is absolutely a demand capture moment. That being said, much like some of the other premium brands you've spoken to, it's also a day just to be in front of people and build future demand for when more are in market at the end of December and in January. But we are. We're up almost 40% Black Friday to Black Friday.

• 2:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:48:38Speaker 12

  And, uh, yes, and I think a big part of that is bring on the gong.

• 2:48:45Jordi Hays?

  Bring the gong.

• 2:48:46Speaker 12

  You know what, I, I shared this on X a little earlier that this is a brave new world for us having multiple products, so we can create bundles. We don't discount per se, but we can add value with multiple products, allowing people to bundle. And that is absolutely what's driving that year-over-year growth on Black Friday. People are adding AGZ to their AG1 orders. They're adding a flavor sampler to their order. They're bundling our Omegas and D3K2. Just, we didn't have that portfolio a year ago.

• 2:49:16Jordi Hays?

  You guys were playing on, you guys were playing on expert mode, just single SKU.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  So, so up 40% year-over-year, Black Friday to Black Friday. Uh, obviously that's driven by products, new products, expansion. Uh, but if there's one marketing or growth strategy that really stuck out over 2025 as particularly effective, um, what, what can you share about a, a strategy or a channel that, that, that you, you think you executed particularly well on this year?

• 2:49:49Speaker 12

  I'll share one strategy and one channel that stood out for us this year. One strategy was shifting the marketing focus from as influencer and creator forward to more science forward. You know, we invested over 10 million in four double-blind randomized placebo-controlled human trials, and it makes a lot of sense to try to get credit for that and help to stand out in the crowd. So for the first half of the year, we pulled back marketing investment 40% to focus on executing product launches, executing channel launches, and building the story around the real work of quality, science, and research. So that strategy, that

• 2:50:30Speaker 12

  approach, which colored everything we did, from the actual marketing where we put up huge billboards, we invested millions in out-of-home advertising that said something like, please enjoy your, your randomized double-blind placebo-controlled daily health drink, you know, with a picture of each one.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  That is brilliant. Beautiful.

• 2:50:52Jordi Hays?

  I would say maybe like literally like point one, point oh one percent of supplement companies actually do like studies on their products and they're just like, hey, this study happened over here with this one ingredient and so we're just gonna apply that.

• 2:51:06Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:51:07Jordi Hays?

  Over here.

• 2:51:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's, you know, and it eat, that strategy even colored our partnership approach. We, instead of partnering with athletes this fall, did NIL deals with nutrition students, college students. So we just, and we had them put on the hat, the jersey, everything and sign up. So the science strategy pulled through the year. The channel strategy that we are really starting to see the value of is actually TV. Lanier and CTV, we were on game seven of the World Series with our Good Morning Moon campaign narrated by the ever epic and a longtime AG1 drinker, Rick Rubin.

• 2:51:48Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:51:49Speaker 12

  And it was much more brand, top of funnel, emotional, like who are our people and what do they do when they get up early in the morning? And then we created 15 and 30 subcuts of that for parents, for runners, for athletes. And so that's pulling through to the high season as we get into December and January and we're starting to see, and it's tougher to track those types of things, but there's incredible AI and technology out there to help with that. We're starting to see that channel contribute meaningfully and especially now that we're in retail and we're in Costco today. We'll launch additional national retailers next year, thoughtfully going direct to national. And so, you know, as many others have said today, when you have multiple channels, you

• 2:52:34Speaker 12

  make those top of funnel marketing investments, they have more places to contribute.

• 2:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So we can expect to see a Super Bowl ad?

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  One day. One day. One day.

• 2:52:45Speaker 12

  You can expect to see more human clinical trials. I got another 20 million going into research.

• 2:52:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow, 20 million. Amazing. How do you, how do you rate the overall health of the consumer and just kind of the macro over the last, we had a friend of ours, Nish, from Array on. He said the first six months of this year felt wildly different from a, from a macro standpoint than, than, than the last five or so months. But what's been your view?

• 2:53:14Speaker 12

  You know, certainly if you look at the economic data, it says there's a tale of two cities in the world of consumer with, you know, people who have higher income propping up spending versus those who don't. For us and our business, because about, you know, into the first quarter, but halfway through the calendar year, we had so many back-to-back launches of products, channels and innovation, it masked what might have otherwise been bumpiness with a more mature model and it gave some variety, again, some value creation for that consumer. What hasn't changed, and I've heard a few others on with you today reference this, is how deeply considered

• 2:53:55Speaker 12

  these premium purchases are. And so the investments we made a year ago in top-of-funnel marketing, six months ago in clinical trials, two months ago in launching AGZ, leaning in still to our podcast partners and the creator economy, where we were early movers and it's still a key part of our strategy today, but nowhere near the largest channel from a marketing perspective. All of that brings people to, for us, what on average is eight to 10 touchpoints before they purchase. I mean, it is a long consideration journey and we're seeing it play out in multiple markets. In our partnership with Shopify, we launched Australia, we launched

• 2:54:34Speaker 12

  Japan, we are launching more of these products in our, our European business now, and we see very similar behaviors. So we are a premium price point, but it's also an incredible value because we consolidate an otherwise very expensive supplement stack in both AG1 and AGZ.

• 2:54:53Jordi Hays?

  Got anything else?

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  We'd love to have you back on in January when we kick off the new year.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  That's time.

• 2:55:00Jordi Hays?

  That would be a massive, massive period for, for you guys. But, uh, wish we had more time, but.

• 2:55:05John Coogan?

  And, and just to clarify, there's, there's a question in the chat about AGZ. Uh, it's for sleep, correct?

• 2:55:11Speaker 12

  Yeah, AGZ. Where's my little AGZ?

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  AGZ, I have it here.

• 2:55:15Speaker 12

  So it's a melatonin free.

• 2:55:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:17Speaker 12

  Nighttime rest and restore product. So we, just like we did for AG1, we consolidated a multivitamin, a probiotic and greens. For AGZ, we consolidated what most people are making their sleepy girl, sleepy boy mocktails with ashwagandha and magnesium, two types of magnesium and incredible research-backed herbal blend. So AG1 for the morning, AGZ for the night to calm and develop a restored sleep.

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  24/7.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:55:43Speaker 12

  24/7.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Great to get that.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:55:50Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the podcast.

• 2:55:51Speaker 12

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:55:52Speaker 12

  Happy Black Friday.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  Happy Black Friday. Uh, before we bring in our first in-person guest of the stream, let me tell you about wander.com, book of wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. We have Sean Frank in the TVP and all.

• 2:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Wallet King.

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  He's been on the show multiple times. This is the first time him, seeing him in person. How are you doing, Sean? He is the world's number one wallet salesman. Good to see you. How you doing?

• 2:56:19Jordi Hays?

  And dominating every other category now.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Yes, dominating, dominating luggage, dominating knives, dominating.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Consumer electronics.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  Consumer electronics, batteries, battery packs, correct?

• 2:56:29Sean Frank?

  Yeah, man, it's game day, dude. You got the jersey on.

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  It's game day. I love it. Have you guys been on Shopify the entire time?

• 2:56:35Sean Frank?

  Dude, since 2012.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  There was never like, uh, you never.

• 2:56:38Jordi Hays?

  Never thought about it.

• 2:56:39John Coogan?

  You never blame. You never, you never like, let's just set up, let's just set up another little landing page over here. Maybe let's just, you know, have a side, side hustle page.

• 2:56:47Sean Frank?

  Shopify till I die, man.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:49Sean Frank?

  The best payment processing rates.

• 2:56:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:51Sean Frank?

  All the perfect apps inside the app store. I'm a big Shopify fan.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you. Thank you for taking time out of your day today. Is this the most mellow Black Friday? Hopefully, you've been building the company, building the team. You guys are so dialed in so many different ways now. I would hope that every year is slightly less stressful than the last.

• 2:57:13Sean Frank?

  Yeah, this has been the chillest Black Friday by far. It's the biggest Black Friday ever, but teams bigger, processors dialed in, and the world's not on fire.

• 2:57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, when something does go wrong on Black Friday, how did it manifest in years past? Because it's obviously not like, okay, the website is down because you're on Shopify.

• 2:57:30Sean Frank?

  It's never gone down before.

• 2:57:31John Coogan?

  It's never gone down. But there are things where it's like, okay, we got to be a little bit more dialed as a team today. What are you actually monitoring? Like, what is, just like inbound requests?

• 2:57:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what situations are you monitoring?

• 2:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, what situations have you monitored in the past? Or do you need to monitor?

• 2:57:44Sean Frank?

  The most common problems would be credit cards going down.

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:47Sean Frank?

  Right? So...

• 2:57:48Jordi Hays?

  What does that mean?

• 2:57:50Sean Frank?

  So...

• 2:57:51Jordi Hays?

  Like payment processing? Or Visa network is down?

• 2:57:55Sean Frank?

  Yeah, like hitting limits on your credit card. Because in a typical day, a brand might spend 50 grand on Facebook ads, and then you go to spend $500,000.

• 2:58:02John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, so your corporate card's going down.

• 2:58:05Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:05Jordi Hays?

  So it just turn off and somebody's not at their desk that moment and they...

• 2:58:09Sean Frank?

  Yeah, or your account gets frozen. So your actual Meta account gets locked up. And they're taking the week off, right? I love Meta, I love my reps. But if you have a junior level of service, there's no way to escalate that.

• 2:58:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:58:21Sean Frank?

  And then your whole weekend's screwed if you can't spend money on Meta.

• 2:58:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:58:24Sean Frank?

  So that's the most common thing. Inventory issues always, right? How do you make sure things are staying in stock? How do you make sure your warehouse is actually working? Warehouses are in-person businesses. So it's kind of like retail stores, you have to staff up for it. But today, our store will do 10x normal volume. How do you make sure those customers get their stuff when the whole three-week period's going to be huge?

• 2:58:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what percentage of a brand's Black Friday should come from advertising? Versus just, oh, there's leading demand, they built up a bunch of email addresses, their customers are coming back, they return by default. So yeah, if Meta goes down, that's maybe 5% of Black Friday. But it sounds like it could be a lot more. What are you thinking?

• 2:59:05Sean Frank?

  It should be your biggest spend day by far.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:07Sean Frank?

  But it should be one of your most efficient days of the year.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:10Sean Frank?

  So...

• 2:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Just because intent is so high.

• 2:59:12Sean Frank?

  Intent is so high.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  Intent is so high.

• 2:59:13Sean Frank?

  So we'll spend... You know, in a typical day, we might be at a 2X M E R. Half of our money going to marketing for digital channels. But a day like Black Friday could be like a 4X M E R. But we're still going to spend multi-million dollars today, right? So conversion rates shoot up, you can spend more money, C P Ms are higher. And it just, it varies by brand, right? If you're Tacovas, you know, you might have a bigger spike because like, oh, the boots that everybody wants are actually on sale right now. But if you're A G one, they're not going to have any spike at all. Like, nobody's like rushing out to get their supplements. And I think we heard that from the David's Protein.

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was saying he was actually down a little bit because it's like, it's a January product. And that makes a ton of sense. What, on, on the digital ads thing, like, what? I'm trying to think of where, where to actually dig in there. Yeah. Take me through TikTok Shop. You were saying that you made a seven-figure day?

• 3:00:09Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Seven hundred dollars.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  What's actually going on? Because reading behind that tweet, I was, I was thinking like, okay, he's extremely bearish on TikTok Shop, maybe TikTok broadly. Like, how much should I read into that?

• 3:00:20Sean Frank?

  Okay.

• 3:00:21John Coogan?

  Explain what happened.

• 3:00:22Sean Frank?

  Yeah, the general thesis on TikTok Shop is it's really, really good for a certain type of brand. If you're female focused, if you are a supplement, if you can make pretty, you know, bold claims, TikTok Shop is going to print for you.

• 3:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Bold claims. That means people are like.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  restores all your hair for $5, something like that.

• 3:00:40Sean Frank?

  Because the brand doesn't make the claims, the affiliates make the claims. The affiliates are incentivized to say crazy stuff to try to get the affiliate commission. So if you're.

• 3:00:48Jordi Hays?

  This wallet will turn you into a millionaire.

• 3:00:50John Coogan?

  You put a hundred dollar bill in here, it's going to change it into $200 out. You can get $200 out.

• 3:00:55Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and there's a whole cohort of like Gen Z brands that are doing nine figures in like six months off of TikTok Shop. Like, you guys should.

• 3:01:01John Coogan?

  What are the categories?

• 3:01:03Sean Frank?

  It's supplements for sure.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  For sure, like get jacked, look hot.

• 3:01:06Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah, like testosterone gummies.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  Testosterone gummies? No way. Gummy'd everything.

• 3:01:13Sean Frank?

  Dude, the.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  Test gummies?

• 3:01:15Sean Frank?

  The biggest brand no one's ever heard of is Comfort. You guys should just go on TikTok Shop and just check out what Comfort's doing.

• 3:01:21Jordi Hays?

  What do they make?

• 3:01:22Sean Frank?

  So it's hoodies. And it's like, you know. Price at 120, marked down to 35 bucks. And they'll do.

• 3:01:29Jordi Hays?

  So they're like eating into Mad Happy. They're like a Mad Happy clone.

• 3:01:32Sean Frank?

  Or really like a fast fashion clone, like a, like a Timoosh.

• 3:01:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:01:36Sean Frank?

  Shein, like Zara type clone, but like really high quality anxiety reducing hoodies. They'll do. That's, that's the claims, man, the claims, but they'll do over 700 million this year.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  700 million.

• 3:01:48Sean Frank?

  Third year in business.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  Third year in business.

• 3:01:50Sean Frank?

  Yeah, they're killing it.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:51Sean Frank?

  So TikTok shop can totally work.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:53Sean Frank?

  Now, the joke there is that for a men's, like almost luxury good brand, it will not work at all. We did multi-million dollars yesterday and we did 700 bucks on TikTok shop. But I'm working, dude, I'm grinding out.

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Bigger, bolder claims.

• 3:02:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, yeah, so do you, do you think there's just like, there's no way for you to, to get it to work? Like you've, you've tested everything. You've like done a bunch of specific TikTok creative and hired people who have gotten into work in other categories. Like at this point, you know, it's not you.

• 3:02:23Sean Frank?

  The shops program is way different than the ad program.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:26Sean Frank?

  I'll, I'll spend 50 grand on TikTok shop today, or sorry, TikTok ads today, but that's driving my website.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:32Sean Frank?

  To make TikTok shop work, it has to be an impulse purchase.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:02:35Sean Frank?

  But I haven't given it my all. In January, we're giving it our all.

• 3:02:38John Coogan?

  You are.

• 3:02:38Sean Frank?

  Yeah, we're gonna throw everything at it.

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  Is it, is it your number one, like big opportunity for 2026 or are you thinking like AI into commerce?

• 3:02:46Sean Frank?

  I would say that there's probably six things a brand should be focused on in 2026 and I'll see if I can rattle them off.

• 3:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, six is a lot.

• 3:02:53Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah, but I think social commerce is for sure one of them, but then that ties into point two, which is just getting way better short form, organic video. Right? You guys post clips, like more brands need to be clipping.

• 3:03:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:04Sean Frank?

  And it's just because watch time on social media apps is continually be dominated by short form video. Nobody's scrolling feeds anymore and it's just gonna continue to take over long form YouTube and Twitch streams and everything else. It's just all for the clips.

• 3:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it feels like the, the Instagram feed is just a catalog now and you, I don't even know if you should care about engagement as a brand.

• 3:03:28Sean Frank?

  Well, dude, and also, like, the idea of a brand has also been, like, disimmediated because it's not about the brand page anymore. Like, the best TikTok shop brands have fifty TikTok accounts because it's just volume. And if you pull up the number one TikTok shop affiliates, there's people making a million dollars a year, and they'll post seventy videos a day. And so many of those videos get twenty views, but then one will get twenty-eight million, and it will just print for them.

• 3:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you think there's any, uh, do you think that takes you out of, like, building an enduring brand? Like, like, will the next Hermes really be doing that? You know, will the next, like, iconic, like, the Louis Vuitton or the Ferrari be, like, slopping it up on the short form?

• 3:04:12Sean Frank?

  Well, no, I think they're gonna be sponsoring, like, you know, DJ tables at, like, F1 stuff, but like, the rest of us are gonna be slopping it up, dude.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  The slop comes for us all.

• 3:04:22Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and I know you guys love luxury. The luxury space is super interesting because Richemont's actually the only brand dominating right now because they have Cartier, they have Van Cleef, like, jewelry's taking over everything, and LVMH and Really Curing has been wrecked for, like, two years. So, the world of luxury is going on, undergoing a lot of changes right now as well.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure they're still having a big Black Friday since people just go out and shop physically, but so much of that is dependent on, like, the health of the economy.

• 3:04:50Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  What you got, Jordy?

• 3:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Carrying is up forty-one percent year-to-date, but they've been struggling?

• 3:04:58Sean Frank?

  Well, look at the five-year chart.

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  This is always the worst.

• 3:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Zoom out, zoom out. We're zooming out. It's down fifty percent.

• 3:05:05John Coogan?

  Okay, fifty percent, rough.

• 3:05:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, uh, what's, what's a white pill? Where's their opportunity? Uh, Peter, Peter Protein earlier, uh, Peter Hall was saying, uh, consumers will always want novelty, and so specifically in, like, supplements and CBG, there's always gonna be an incremental opportunity because people just wanna...

• 3:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Have even the same things delivered to them differently, but like where are you seeing opportunity?

• 3:05:35Sean Frank?

  Yeah, I think I think David Proteen proved and he said that like there's white space in everything, right? You know, nobody thought you could build a hoodie brand like comfort and just dominate a new channel like TikTok shop and affiliate and get to 700 million dollars. I think it's the fastest growing apparel brand of all time, right? And yeah, David's protein, two years in, 300 million dollars, groons, two years in, 300 million dollars. So I think the standards are way higher. You have to be really good at operating, right? You can't just have a good website. You can't just have a good product. You actually also have to understand the ecosystem. But our fastest growing channel this year is consumer electronics, right? Like doing phone cases. Everyone told me phone cases were a stupid business to get into, right?

• 3:06:15Sean Frank?

  And like, we bumbled along for four or five years doing it and now it's an eight figure business for us in six months or whatever.

• 3:06:21John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:06:23Sean Frank?

  There's white space everywhere, man.

• 3:06:24Jordi Hays?

  What did you think about my idea, uh, post purchase flow? We were working this out where, uh, you buy a product and then you have an opportunity to get, uh, to, to box somebody for a discount.

• 3:06:36John Coogan?

  You match locally.

• 3:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  To recreate the original.

• 3:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like recreate the original Black Friday experience.

• 3:06:43John Coogan?

  So do both people want a discount and only the winner gets it?

• 3:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  Or you guys? No, no, no, no. I know. I think it's like, it's like I, I'm on ridge.com. I check out with a bunch of stuff. Jordy's my next door neighbor. He checks out with a bunch of stuff. We're both happy. We're having the modern e-commerce Black Friday experience. Except there's one thing missing. We didn't get to fight each other. So then in the post purchase flow, it says, hey, there's someone that's opted in to a fistfight.

• 3:07:05Jordi Hays?

  In your area.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  In your area, walk outside, meet at this address, you can scrap it out.

• 3:07:10Sean Frank?

  It sounds asset light. So I don't, I don't have to, as a brand, I don't put up any boxers.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:07:14Sean Frank?

  You guys are fighting each other.

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  No, it's purely peer to peer.

• 3:07:17Jordi Hays?

  You do have to give some of the margin back to the winner though. That's the only thing.

• 3:07:21John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, so the winner does get a.

• 3:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a little incentive. You get like a gift card or something.

• 3:07:25Sean Frank?

  Dude, and the rich customers, they're scary, man. They're tough guys.

• 3:07:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're tough guys. I feel like you can't shave the beard now, at least, at least as well, CEO of Ridge.

• 3:07:35Sean Frank?

  No, I'm gonna keep throwing it out, dude.

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait, so how, how did you actually win in phone cases? That feels like extremely difficult, the most competitive. Is it the strength of like the product development, the positioning, the marketing, the operations? Like, how, how did that possibly work? That feels impossible.

• 3:07:50Sean Frank?

  Yeah, it's creative destruction, right? So like, the, the number one name in phone cases is still OtterBox. They do a billion dollars a year in revenue.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  They, they do more than Apple directly?

• 3:07:58Sean Frank?

  Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:59John Coogan?

  Like, third party?

• 3:08:00Sean Frank?

  Yeah, I'm not taking down Apple. But like, yeah, OtterBox is sold into Verizon's and Best Buy and everywhere, right?

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  I do see them everywhere.

• 3:08:06Sean Frank?

  And they do a billion dollars a year in sales. They've been like owned by private equity for four or five years.

• 3:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for private equity.

• 3:08:11Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:12John Coogan?

  Creating opportunities for him.

• 3:08:14Sean Frank?

  Yeah, because they're making a killing, but then they're in the value extraction mode. They're just like, they're not, they're never gonna pay for marketing. They're going to fight tooth and nail a Best Buy or Verizon of the world, right? And then it creates a market because Verizon's like, hey, I hate working with these new owners over here. Will you come in and take some of their shelf space? They want competition in their store and it's incremental sales for me. Like, it's their lunch that I'm eating. So I'm like, yeah, I'd gladly go in there. I'll take lower margin, I'll, I'll work it out.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Wow, okay.

• 3:08:39Sean Frank?

  You could shop Ridge phone cases at your local Verizon stores, T-Mobiles, Best Buys.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  Did you have a deal with any of them beforehand?

• 3:08:46Sean Frank?

  No.

• 3:08:47John Coogan?

  So is there a world where it acts as like a lever that opens a door to getting other products into these places? I don't know if a Ridge wallet would make sense in a Verizon store, but probably.

• 3:08:56Sean Frank?

  No, we have, we have wallets there now.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, why not?

• 3:08:57Sean Frank?

  And actually, I did lie. The first thing we had was wallets in Best Buy.

• 3:09:01John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, you told me about that.

• 3:09:02Sean Frank?

  We were the only people ever selling wallets in a Best Buy. And it's like, if we can make that work, then we can make anything work. And then we started just filling the rest of the catalog in there. You can buy our luggage in a Best Buy right now.

• 3:09:11John Coogan?

  Best practices for, uh, big influencer partnerships in 2026. What you got?

• 3:09:17Sean Frank?

  I, I think more and more, the brands need to be somewhat creator-led. And I think it's ways you do that internally, right? You guys had, you know, uh, a, like a couple of creator brands on today, right? You could say Mod Retro's a creator brand because...

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Palmer, it, it is crazy how many views Palmer gets, you know, even though he's not an influencer, just by going around onto Rogan, onto other shows.

• 3:09:39Sean Frank?

  And plugging it.

• 3:09:40John Coogan?

  He pulls it, yeah.

• 3:09:40Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  He pulls the audience.

• 3:09:42Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so I think... There's free impressions to be had and the most expensive part of my P and L is impressions.

• 3:09:48John Coogan?

  Impressions.

• 3:09:48Sean Frank?

  Right, so if you can go out there and tell a story and be good, like you'll get a ton of impressions. We just an hour ago had an MKBHD video go live and it'll probably get three million views, sell a ton of stuff. And it just needs to be a tighter feedback loop there.

• 3:10:01Jordi Hays?

  MKBHD on Black Friday, I'm assuming that's only possible because you guys have had like a very long-term relationship with MKBHD. And if, if like Samsung came to him and they didn't have that relationship, he'd be like, I'll take five million dollars or something.

• 3:10:19Sean Frank?

  I'm, I'm sure it'd be, yeah, it would take a ton of money. Um, you know, he's a equity partner in Ridge, so he's one of our co-owners. So he's on the board, we hang out and um, as part of our relationship, we get like 20 spots a year. And he wants to maximize our revenue too. So Black Friday is a great spot to give to us.

• 3:10:35Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Very, very cool. Uh, anything interesting on the, on the channel side? Like, uh, what, what's Connor up to today? He just got like, like eight monitors set up, just like fully locked into the vortex.

• 3:10:49Sean Frank?

  Yeah, dude, unfortunately, there's not a camera showing you guys' production studio, but that's basically what Connor's doing.

• 3:10:54John Coogan?

  I love it. We could be running a brand.

• 3:10:56Sean Frank?

  Yeah, you can have a ton of ads going right now, guys. Yeah, I mean Connor's behind the screen. Uh, we have a great team now. So there's, there's 70 or 80 people at Ridge just grinding out today. Um, but the most exciting channel is, is probably YouTube. They kinda, yeah, they kinda fucked around for a long time and didn't have good performance.

• 3:11:11John Coogan?

  Was that, was that, was that the targeting or the actual like?

• 3:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it would be, nobody, nobody could get, it was extraordinarily difficult to get programmatic ads on YouTube to work at all, right?

• 3:11:22John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but what about them was wrong? Just like the targeting on like who the person was?

• 3:11:27Sean Frank?

  Well.

• 3:11:28John Coogan?

  That you're reaching?

• 3:11:28Sean Frank?

  Yeah, I mean, their, their number one business is AdWords and they want everything to work like AdWords.

• 3:11:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:11:32Sean Frank?

  And that ad space doesn't work like AdWords.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:11:35Sean Frank?

  Right? And, and they weren't willing to make the changes to make YouTube an actual functioning ad platform. But now that it looks like, you know, the Google Ads business could be threatened or, or might be threatened. They're like, let's start actually finding all the dollars in the couch cushions.

• 3:11:47John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 3:11:47Sean Frank?

  And that is YouTube ads. Uh, I mean, pull up their K1 is the fastest growing part of their business, right? Growing 50% year over year. Um, and it's working. So YouTube's been like the second biggest channel for us this year.

• 3:11:58John Coogan?

  Interesting. Do you, are you seeing strong results on basically vertical video, like repurposing TikTok assets into vertical video ads in the Shorts feed on YouTube? Or are you creating bespoke content for YouTube? Are you at the point where you noticed that an edit that works on, an ad that works on YouTube won't work on TikTok and vice versa?

• 3:12:20Sean Frank?

  Well, I'll say that putting MKBHD in YouTube ads really works.

• 3:12:24John Coogan?

  That works everywhere, sure. Totally thumb-stopping.

• 3:12:26Sean Frank?

  Yeah, but what you brought up is the beauty of you should be a creator brand, right? Like, the real, like, alpha and leverage there is that a short-form video is the same everywhere. So you can run it on TikTok, you can run it on YouTube Shorts, Reels, AppLovin', you can put it on Twitter. Like, Twitter ads are crushing, right? You can put it everywhere.

• 3:12:42John Coogan?

  Twitter ads are crushing.

• 3:12:42Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:12:43Jordi Hays?

  No way. No way.

• 3:12:44Sean Frank?

  Dude, I mean, the guy they had, they hired that new guy, and he's like...

• 3:12:47John Coogan?

  Nikita?

• 3:12:47Sean Frank?

  Yeah, he's crushing it, dude.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  He's crushing it?

• 3:12:49Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  No way, that's amazing.

• 3:12:50Sean Frank?

  So like...

• 3:12:51John Coogan?

  The first person that's really called that out.

• 3:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Why, so, so why did it never work historically?

• 3:12:56Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Why was it purely a brand channel where you'd have, like, Uber, it's like, we're gonna, we'll give some of our budget to X?

• 3:13:02Sean Frank?

  Well, it's, dude, it's the same thing as like, why, why did AppLovin' go from like a $20 billion company to a $200 billion company? It's like, they built a really good ad engine, right? Like, dollars will flow to whoever has the best ad engine. I think a lot of the space is the same, right? They're like, oh, no, an X user is, is more valuable because it's into tech, or no, it's bad because of all these bots.

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:13:21Sean Frank?

  At the end of the day, there's purchasers everywhere, and you're seeing a really good ad engine. And Meta's had a 20-year head start, building the world's greatest ad engine, right? And now, the same people who built that are going to places like Twitter, going to places like AppLovin', and rebuilding better ad engines. And as long as they, you could put it on Reddit ads, you could put it on Criteo horrible ads, and as you have a really good ad engine, it will find purchasers.

• 3:13:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:13:43Sean Frank?

  And that's what I think they did over at, at X, and it's been, it's been working.

• 3:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, and video specifically, too. You, you been running video ads there?

• 3:13:49Sean Frank?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:50John Coogan?

  Because you were saying that you could bring your TikTok, YouTube ads, your MKBHD video ads all over. Has that been successful on X yet? Or is it more link-based?

• 3:13:59Sean Frank?

  We, we throw all the stuff in there, but like, but everything has a link to link ads and purchase on our website.

• 3:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. Well, we gotta close out with Harley. Thank you so much for...

• 3:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Will you hang out for a second?

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  Hang out.

• 3:14:08Sean Frank?

  Yeah, hang out back there.

• 3:14:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. We got Harley back in the, in the studio, closing out. Where did Sean go?

• 3:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Sean, hang out.

• 3:14:18John Coogan?

  You wanna hang out? Dude!

• 3:14:20Harley Finkelstein?

  What do you?

• 3:14:21John Coogan?

  You look like his, uh.

• 3:14:22Harley Finkelstein?

  He like ran away.

• 3:14:23John Coogan?

  I guess Sean won't have, he won't be able to hear you. If he sits here. He'll be, he's a pretty face. You look like his, uh, his boss or something. He's got it, he's got it, he'll hang. Oh, oh yeah, okay, we have, we have items for him.

• 3:14:33Harley Finkelstein?

  Oh, amazing.

• 3:14:33John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Close us out. Give us an update on the stats. What else is?

• 3:14:36Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay, let's go.

• 3:14:37John Coogan?

  What's the latest?

• 3:14:38Harley Finkelstein?

  All right, let's start with the stats, of course. Sean, can you hear me?

• 3:14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, I can hear you, bud. How are you?

• 3:14:42Harley Finkelstein?

  You can. How you doing?

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  Good, man. We pressed it. We said, has he ever flinched and thought about even for a second using a different ecommerce platform? He said, never in the entire history of Bridge. Never. Never even thought of it.

• 3:14:56Harley Finkelstein?

  Actually, in, in, in truth, Sean's one of those guys that, uh, he gives you tough love when you deserve it.

• 3:15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:01Harley Finkelstein?

  But he gives you praise only when you deserve it also. And so that makes him a real one.

• 3:15:05John Coogan?

  He is, he's a real one.

• 3:15:06Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay, so let's check it out as we close this out. How are we doing? So $4.1 million right now sales per minute, 38,000 orders per minute, 30 million unique shoppers today.

• 3:15:16John Coogan?

  Wow. Whoa.

• 3:15:17Harley Finkelstein?

  Across all shops.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  Let Sean hit the gong. Oh, he's going for the gong.

• 3:15:20Harley Finkelstein?

  Go on, do it for us. Give it to us. Let's go!

• 3:15:25John Coogan?

  He hit with the setup, with the prancing setup.

• 3:15:29Harley Finkelstein?

  Wow. Okay, so I also have a few other things for you.

• 3:15:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:15:32Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay, so I'm gonna wrap up some trending categories for the day now that we're getting to 5:00 PM EST. Skincare, vitamin supplements, t-shirts, activewear, makeup did really well. This is really interesting. At 5:00 AM, when I was on CNN, I looked at trending products. At 5:00 AM, it was Aloe Yoga with their crew neck pullover. It was Cozy Earth with their bamboo sheet set, and Merritt Beauty with their flush balm. When I look at it now, it's totally switched up. You have Victoria Beckham's eyeliner. You have, uh, earplugs from a company called Loop.

• 3:16:03John Coogan?

  Earplugs?

• 3:16:04Harley Finkelstein?

  Loop Switch 2.

• 3:16:04John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:16:05Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. Loop earplugs, uh, the ones that's trending is called the Loop Switch 2.

• 3:16:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:16:10Harley Finkelstein?

  And you have Lola blankets, the antique ivory blanket. Here's what's really interesting. If you go back to this time last year, last year was all about getting outside. You saw ski equipment, adventure stuff, outdoorsy stuff.

• 3:16:22Jordi Hays?

  That's over. We're going on, we're going, we're going

• 3:16:24Harley Finkelstein?

  We're going cozy, man.

• 3:16:25John Coogan?

  We're going cozy.

• 3:16:27Harley Finkelstein?

  We're going cozy. So things like bakeware sets, blankets, wooden toys, and coloring books are all up 100% year over year.

• 3:16:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:16:35Harley Finkelstein?

  Goose Creek Candle, Christmas Tree, three big candles killing it. And Caraway Cookware Set is also killing it. So those are the trends. It's been, I mean, the cozy era is definitely here.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  We're in the cozy era.

• 3:16:47Jordi Hays?

  Cozy era.

• 3:16:49Sean Frank?

  Dude, all those are great brands. If you guys know Loop, like they're

• 3:16:52Harley Finkelstein?

  I don't know Loop.

• 3:16:53Sean Frank?

  Oh, something like really old, like them with like earplugs? They made them really cool.

• 3:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Is it for sleeping?

• 3:16:58Sean Frank?

  No, it's for like going to concerts.

• 3:16:59John Coogan?

  Concerts and stuff. Okay, yeah.

• 3:17:01Sean Frank?

  You pull up the website, Super Gen Z, Cozy Earth has a bunch of stores in LA. Like all those brands.

• 3:17:05Harley Finkelstein?

  Cozy Earth is really cool. Yeah.

• 3:17:07John Coogan?

  Loop earplugs. Yeah, this is amazing.

• 3:17:09Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:17:10Harley Finkelstein?

  And obviously Aloe, Aloe is Aloe, right?

• 3:17:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we know Aloe, of course.

• 3:17:13Harley Finkelstein?

  They're serious. They're, they're great. And actually, they're in LA also, an amazing company. But I just want to say, you know, a couple of things, just, I know you guys have to wrap it in a minute, but Jordy, John, I just want to say thank you so much for this.

• 3:17:23John Coogan?

  Of course. This was fantastic.

• 3:17:25Jordi Hays?

  We love, there's nothing we love more than celebrating commerce.

• 3:17:28John Coogan?

  It was a fun, it was a fun tour, talking to folks who, today is the biggest day of the year for them, to other folks who, you know, this is just another day, or they're, you know, they're

• 3:17:37Harley Finkelstein?

  It was cool to hear the juxtaposition between like, you know, even Kat had said, like Kat Cole versus, you know, the David's guy. Like David's like, no, no, it's January. And Kat's like, no, no, no. This is like, this is where you're able, it was so, the juxtaposition between two similar products. But I just want to say thank you to you guys. This is my 16th Black Friday at Shopify, my favorite one yet. Huge thank you to Noel, Sarah, Peter, Torin, Kevin, Nish, Benny, Brian, Kat, and of course, Sean, and Jordy, John. You guys are amazing. Sorry we stole your day off. Please apologize to your wives and your families.

• 3:18:10Jordi Hays?

  No days off.

• 3:18:11John Coogan?

  No days off when capitalism is on the line, when commerce is on the line. It's the biggest day of the year.

• 3:18:15Harley Finkelstein?

  It's the best. And we're still full of energy, but hopefully you agree it was worth it.

• 3:18:20John Coogan?

  Oh, 100%.

• 3:18:21Jordi Hays?

  100%.

• 3:18:21Harley Finkelstein?

  I'll see you guys in Q1 for our next earnings call, I guess.

• 3:18:24John Coogan?

  We will. We can't wait for it.

• 3:18:25Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for 17.

• 3:18:26Sean Frank?

  Dude, Cyber Monday, run it back, dude.

• 3:18:28John Coogan?

  Cyber Monday, we're doing a house streaming with the green suit. We own these.

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Join, join, join. Cyber Monday.

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have.

• 3:18:33Harley Finkelstein?

  I love to join you. You'll have me. I'd love to join you Cyber Monday.

• 3:18:35John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:18:37Harley Finkelstein?

  Maybe Sean and I come on together. We do a whole like back to back DJ thing.

• 3:18:41John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 3:18:41Sean Frank?

  Sales hour by hour. I'm going to report in.

• 3:18:43John Coogan?

  Yes, I want to know.

• 3:18:44Jordi Hays?

  I love it. I love it.

• 3:18:45John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:18:45Harley Finkelstein?

  Thank you, guys.

• 3:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole Shopify team for another.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  Another massive year.

• 3:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Blowout day.

• 3:18:51Harley Finkelstein?

  Thank you very much.

• 3:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait to see the final numbers.

• 3:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to know the final numbers. We got to, we got to figure that out.

• 3:18:55Harley Finkelstein?

  I'll come back Monday. We can chat.

• 3:18:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much.

• 3:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Harley. Talk soon.

• 3:18:59Harley Finkelstein?

  All right, thanks.

• 3:19:00John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 3:19:00Harley Finkelstein?

  See you, Sean.

• 3:19:01John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:19:01Sean Frank?

  Later, Harley.

• 3:19:04Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful, wonderful show. Thank you to everybody who has hung out with us today.

• 3:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Celebrated commerce, celebrated entrepreneurship, celebrated the American consumer.

• 3:19:16John Coogan?

  The Commerce Corral with the Cowboys.

• 3:19:17Jordi Hays?

  And the Canadian consumer. Commerce Corral. We, I wish we were podcasting tomorrow. We won't be.

• 3:19:23John Coogan?

  Tomorrow's Saturday.

• 3:19:25Jordi Hays?

  But we will be back in full force on Monday.

• 3:19:29John Coogan?

  Back in full force.

• 3:19:30Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it'll be a busy weekend.

• 3:19:33Sean Frank?

  Dude, it's going to be great. Thanks for doing this. Shining some light on a small little company called Shopify.

• 3:19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:41Jordi Hays?

  fledgling startup.

• 3:19:43John Coogan?

  Twenty years, twenty years, uh, next year. Twenty year old company. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. Thanks for listening.

• 3:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful rest of your.

• 3:19:52John Coogan?

  Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter, tbn.com, and we will see you on Monday.

• 3:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:19:57John Coogan?

  Bye. Goodbye.