He changed outdoor cooking forever — then took over Weber

It’s time for our annual Fourth of July grill episode here at Decoder, which is when we invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition. Today we’re talking to Roger Dahle, the CEO of Weber Blackstone, a full circle moment for Decoder. Roger was our first-ever grill CEO on the show back when he was the CEO of just Blackstone. Five years later, Roger now runs one of his biggest competitors, after Blackstone announced a merger with Weber in 2024. So we talked about that process, and how Roger is managing the integration of these two grilling giants. Links: Weber and Blackstone to combine | The Verge How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok | Decoder (2021) How arson led to a culture reboot at Traeger, with CEO Jeremy Andrus | Decoder (2022) Big Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov on growing kamado cooking | Decoder (2024) How SharkNinja took over the home | Decoder (2025) Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:31Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. It's the 4th of July, and this is our annual Grille episode. We invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition of our Grille episode. Today, I'm talking to Roger Dolly, the CEO of Weber Blackstone, a full circle moment for Decoder. Roger was our first ever Grille CEO on the show, back when he was the CEO of just Blackstone. He started the company in 2008, but these griddles exploded in popularity during the pandemic, when videos of smash burgers went relentlessly viral on TikTok. The company grew grew so fast and so furiously that Roger was able to buy Weber a couple of years ago,

• 2:14Speaker 03

  a legacy company that had fallen on hard times. Fun fact, we wanted Roger on the show last year to talk about that deal, but it was stuck in antitrust review at the Federal Trade Commission. So Roger and I talked about all that, what competition review entails for a merger of Grille companies, and what it takes to manufacture these products overseas and import them to the United States in an age of high tariffs and even higher energy prices, which are pushing consumers down market. Of course, we also talked about what it means to merge with Weber, a storied company with iconic products that have gotten really stuck in its ways and pretty siloed. Roger seems very eager to break those silos down and create a new company with a new culture. Like I said, there's a lot in this one, including whether or not the chip market is affecting Weber's connected thermometer business. It's pure Decoder bait through and through. Roger was great in this one.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Can't wait for you to listen to it. Here's Roger Dolly, CEO of Weber Blackstone. Here we go.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Roger Dolly, you're the CEO of Weber Blackstone. Welcome back to Decoder.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  Thank you. Good to be back.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  I am thrilled to have this conversation. Five years ago, 2021, we thought it would be so fun to talk to Grille CEOs in the summer, because one of our theses here on Decoder is all these companies have the same problems, and it's the summer and we should go talk to Grille companies. And at the time, we made a list of all the companies we want to talk to, and we put Weber at the top, because they were the big brand name, and they said no. And I was like, we got to talk to Roger at Blackstone, because I'm watching TikTok every day, and Blackstones are going viral on TikTok. And so we start with you. You were first ever guest in this series, and now you're the CEO of Weber. And I feel like that is just about as perfectly full circle as it gets. So thank you so much for coming back.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I didn't see that coming when we talked a couple of years ago.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  A lot has happened. Weber was bought by private equity. You had a SPAC that came and went. You didn't go through with it, and you bought Weber. Let's just talk about how all of this came together. Blackstone's been around since 2008. We won't go through the whole history. People can go listen to that episode if they want to. 2008, you started it. You went super viral in 2021. You did a lot. How did you end up in the position to combine with Weber, which really turned out to be more of an acquisition?

• 4:33Speaker 04

  So interesting. In 21,

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I have to go back to 2015. Blackstone was growing so fast, I needed to get a manufacturing partner that I could rely and trust on and knew a family from Taiwan that had facilities in mainland China. Father-son combination, good friends, and they had never been in outdoor cooking before. So we started together and they, in fact, became an equity partner in the business in 2015. They were building for me a little bit before then. The business was so successful and grew so rapidly from 15 through 2020 that the father of the father-son combo was at retirement age and he wanted to slow down. So they were looking to sell their equity in the company, which started this whole process

• 5:22Speaker 04

  of me going into the financial markets and talking to investment bankers and going through that whole process, which led to almost going public via the SPAC. During that time and through some of those roadshows, I met Byron Trot, who owns BDT. He actually has owned Weber since 2010, if you can believe it. So his company's held on to that position for over 16 years now. And he loved the story of Blackstone and we actually went through a pretty serious process with them about a potential acquisition of Weber, of Blackstone.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  So Weber would acquire Blackstone?

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Back originally, yeah. But it just wasn't right. Timing wasn't right. There were just a few things that didn't line up at the time. So we ended up not doing that transaction. That's when we almost went public via the SPAC. And then, as you know, the financial markets fell to pieces and Weber and Traeger coincidentally had already gone public and their stocks had horrible experience. You know, they came out, ran high and then went really low. So the SPAC deal didn't work. And at that point, I did find a financial partner, a private equity group, who took possession of my Chinese manufacturing partner's shares.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  That was in '22 and then in '24, we had continued to grow at Blackstone and had phenomenal success. We were very fortunate. Again, we had accomplished really in two years what that financial partner thought would take five. So we... Decided to test the waters and see what the next transaction looked like. Byron found out that I was thinking of that again, called me up and said, let's do a merger. Let's not do acquisition, but let's merge these two companies together. And so we came to an agreement in 24, end of 24, and then we had to go through antitrust process with the FTC and that took until May of 25. So we've been merged together now for just barely over a year.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  It's funny, we asked you to come on the show last year for this episode because we'd heard all about all this and I thought this is fascinating. We have to get Roger back and you declined because you were in the middle of this antitrust review process. I'm curious about that. This is the Trump administration. They're historically very friendly to deals. This is not Lena Kahn's FTC. Why did it take so long? Why was it so complicated? This isn't like a big tech deal. This isn't paramount.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  It was an easy deal. Unfortunately for us, we, we signed our agreement in December and that's when the clock started ticking with the FTC. Well, they're not going to get anything done December with all the holiday breaks. They have 30 day windows to look at your deal and say, yes, you can merge or no, we want to take a further look. So they extended that till the end of February. Then they extended it one more time because all the commissioners and the new administration hadn't been appointed yet. So we, we just really got stuck in no man's land because they have five commissioners in Washington DC, as I understand. And I think two were in place, three, but they needed all five to be in place.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  As soon as they were fully staffed, they called us up and said, yeah, your deal's fine. Go ahead.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  So it just took a minute. I think we were just in the middle of transition with administration.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I look at the grill industry, the outdoor cooking industry, as you call it, and There seems to be a surplus of competition. There's infinite brands showing up constantly. Last year, we had the CEO of Shark Ninja, they had just put out a grill because they saw opportunity in the space. Do you feel like you've reduced competition by acquiring Weber? Do you think the competition is getting more ferocious?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Competition's always there. And the other thing about our industry is in outdoor cooking, every major retailer has their own in-house brand, private label. I could own every outdoor cooking brand in the world, and I still couldn't affect the consumer retail price. Because my customer is really in charge. They walk into a store, online, wherever they might find our products for sale. And if they don't like the retail price, they don't buy it. So the FTC is really focused on competition and making sure the consumer is protected, which I love. I think I have no problem with that. I want the consumer taken care of and protected as well. But my business is very competitive. There's always somebody new coming along, like Shark Ninja, who'd never been in the business before.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  And then people who've been around for a long time, competitive companies have been around for a long time. And then on top of it, I have my retail customers with their own private label brands. And so if retail prices get out of hand, or they think they're too high, or if they think a product has been more commoditized, they put their private label brand on it and offer it to their customers.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Do you supply any of that private label stuff? I don't think Home Depot is actually manufacturing some grills. Do you supply any of that white label product?

• 10:19Speaker 04

  I don't, but I know most of the suppliers, the factories in Asia who do.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  And are they competitive with you? Are they price sensitive to you? This is a market that I think it's so physical, the products are so big. And then they do turn. People buy new ones kind of all the time. So it's just a different kind of competitive dynamic to have the white label supplier right there and so top of mind for you.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's really kind of a go-to-market strategy that each retailer deploys. And how they think about it, what retail prices they want to offer their customers, and what features, benefits they want to offer at those price points. And so if they can better serve that price point and that feature set using their own label, they will. But if a brand, for example, Blackstone. For a long time, none of my customers carried an in-house griddle, for example, because they wouldn't sell. They put them out there and people would step over them, around them. I don't mean physically, I mean over the price point to buy a Blackstone. So we were very fortunate that way. But if you look at gas grills, Lowe's, Depot,

• 11:23Speaker 04

  most of the retailers, Walmart, carry a house brand because they can offer their customer the value they want at that retail price point. It's really a merchandising strategy that they use. And I think it works. I think it's great for the customer. It's tough right now at retail, as I'm sure you're aware.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No, I want to come to manufacturing the products. You've mentioned China several times already, that obviously that's changing the dynamic when the hardest summer, I'm sure this is the high season for you. It's not getting easier. So I want to come to that, but I just want to stay on the deal for one second. Weber is, it is the household name. Like I said, we made the list of grill CEOs and obviously you put Weber at the top. You're now the CEO of Weber. My understanding is that Weber's business was not doing very well, that there was some inherent flaw in that business. We've done a lot of episodes about private equity takeovers and how the PE firms tend to extract the profits and not invest in innovation, especially for big legacy companies. Was that your assessment of Weber? Was that the opportunity?

• 12:22Speaker 04

  No, BDT is a phenomenal financial partner. I mean, I love working with them and Byron Trot is at the top of the list, I think, behind the scenes in that industry. Weber, in my opinion, and in my assessment, when we took over and started being able to look, because until we had FTC or clearance, 100% clearance, we couldn't really see anything other than public information. But it's a typical legacy type company with a big brand and great presence, great product, phenomenal quality, really good people. I love the people that were working there and the culture that they had. But in my opinion, there had been

• 13:04Speaker 04

  some C-suite turnover that was way too high and different philosophies on how to serve the customer.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  And as a result, expenses got way out of hand. And then, as you know, a private company versus a public company, the cost structure is completely different. And there's a lot of expense in being a publicly traded company. That hadn't come out of the business yet. So the products sell through at retail and the perception within user customers has never been better. It's extremely well. But the profitability of the company was challenged and needed a different. I think, I think that's why Byron wanted to merge us is because we just do things completely opposite of the way they had done it traditionally at Weber. And especially over the last, I'm going to say, seven years. Because, you know, for many years, the Steven family, who were the, George Steven is the

• 13:59Speaker 04

  founder of the business, then his son Jim took over as CEO for a long time until they sold to BDT. They're a great profitable business. And up until 2020, 2019, they did extremely well. So really, the last five, six, seven years.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, the timeline here, just, I just want to clear it up for listeners because you're, you're talking about BDT a lot and they've been in and out of Weber for a long time, it's true. So they bought a majority stake in Weber in 2010. Then Weber IPO'd in 2021. It didn't go well, right? They only raised 250 million. I think their target was 500 million. In 22, BBT took Weber back private.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  So then they were the full owners. And then, obviously, in 24, you and Ans are going to combine. So they, the, you know, the PE firm took the company back private. Were they sort of immediately looking for a buyer or was it just you showed up and they happened to know you quite well?

• 14:51Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't think they were really looking for a buyer. The merger made a lot more sense, especially by combining the strengths of both companies and then just cleaning up. It's a phenomenal opportunity. You know, we have legacy brand and then Blackstone's innovative and disruptive and. It's still growing. So yeah, it's a great combination. It's been a lot of fun so far.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Tell me about the mechanics of this. You're saying the way you do things is differently than the way that Weber had done things traditionally. They are a legacy brand. They've been around since the 50s. There's a world in which they just have to keep selling Weber kettles and that is the thing they have to do. It's literally the logo. I have a Summit Grill, one of the fancier grills. My father-in-law bought it for me ages ago. The thing has been rocking and rolling for a decade. What does Blackstone do differently that Weber wasn't doing that created the opportunity?

• 15:39Speaker 04

  We're a entrepreneurial led business and that's the way I like to think and operate and spend money and not spend money. And I don't, I don't think Weber's alone in this. Whenever you get a company that's been around 70 plus years, you start getting too structured, you start getting too layered and you start getting too siloed. And that's completely opposite of the way we do things. Let me, let me explain it this way. So part of the culture at Blackstone that I've always tried to instill is if you're walking through my parking lot and you work at this company and there's a piece of garbage on the ground, you bend over and pick it up, put it in the garbage can.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Not because you have to, but because that's what you do. That's your culture. You want to make this a great place to work, great environment. When I got to Weber, I wondered if that was the culture. And what I found out was it was not. And not that they wouldn't bend over and pick up a piece of garbage. They'd be more than happy to do that. They're not too proud. They're not, it's not beneath them. But if they do that, they fear that they might be taking the janitor's job away. And so out of, out of respect to their coworkers, as strange as this sounds, they stay really siloed and they, they start here, they end here, and this is what I do. And if I try to expand beyond that,

• 17:05Speaker 04

  it throws off the whole system of the way we do things. It's very, very structured. Everything has to be tidied up, put in place perfectly before the next step can even begin to happen. And we start off at Blackstone, we've always done this, speed to market with new product, new product development to me is critical and essential. I can't take three years to get a new product in a box. I gotta take three months. And, and so that's the differences that I'm talking about philosophies, how speed to market.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  They're a mapped price and we're not. I've never been a mapped price. I don't know if you're familiar with that policy.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Can you explain that to the listeners?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  So MAP stands for maintained advertised price. And so Weber sells a $4.99 gas grill. Everybody's the same retail and they can't control retail prices, but what they can do is say, this is what we want you to advertise it for. If you do that and maintain that advertised price, you will be eligible for the rebate you get from our advertising department. And so, you know, nobody can control retail prices. That's anti-competitive. But you can have a MAP policy with your retail customers. So everybody's the same retail that sells Weber, whether you buy it at Walmart, Lowe's, Ace, Depot, wherever you buy it, if it's the same

• 18:29Speaker 04

  grill, it's going to be at the same retail price point. I've never been a mapped price policy with Blackstone and I don't want to cause confusing with my confusion with my customers. And so what we've done successfully is we've developed products of families that we sell to our retail customers. And that way, everybody kind of has their own product and it works great because we merchandise with the retail customers to their customers. And that's really what we try to focus on is the end user, the people who are walking in, laying down a credit card to buy a griddle or a grill. They're expensive. This is not a hand of the moment fly decision that people make. This is an expensive product that they

• 19:12Speaker 04

  buy that needs to last for a long time. So they take their time to make a decision. And so we like to give our retail customers the features and benefits and the value proposition that they're really trying to get for their customer who walks into their retail store.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Can I make the comparison to tech companies? This is why I love doing the grill episode every year. You're describing a lot of things that obviously you've thought about very deeply in your corner of the industry. Tech companies do this all the time. Samsung makes a different phone for every carrier, right? The Samsung Galaxy S26 is actually slightly different for every carrier. So they can play these same games with MAP, right? Minimum advertised prices. Apple won't do it, right? The iPhone's the iPhone and maybe there's like radio differences, but the iPhone's the iPhone. And you see there's competition in the market in that way, right? With Blackstone, the culinary line is at Lowe's, but it's not at Depot. It's you've got you. You're literally making different products or at least different branding for all of your partners. You're also describing what I would call pure decoder bait.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  That Weber had this extremely divisional organization that was very process driven. And you have it sounds like I'm going to ask you the question more directly, but it sounds like you're more functional structure. You're really product led, product development led. All that comes together, right? But you've got to change the culture at Weber. You got to go into this company that is has a different business process, right? You've got to take your company, which approaches the retailers like Apple and go into a company that approaches the retailers like Samsung. And then you've got a functional structure and you got to go into a very rigid process oriented divisional structure. It's been about a year. Did you just smash glass and make all the changes? Like, how does this work?

• 20:48Speaker 04

  A little bit. There's there were some hurt feelings here and there and and kind of on both sides. That's been really interesting to me is just kind of watching the way the team at Blackstone reacted to this and the team at Weber. One thing I absolutely knew and has proven to be true is that I was going to find people at Weber who were just dedicated phenomenal employees who may have a little bit of pent up ideas and ambition and wanting to do things differently. And that's certainly been the case. So I got to unleash those people and let them go do things the way they thought that they wanted to. And that the way that they thought would be better. This is a better way to serve our customers.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  Let's do it this way instead of that way. So that's been really fun, but I did hire a consulting firm to come in and help me with the integration. And it was a good decision. I didn't really start hard on integration until November of last year. I took the first four or five months to try to learn and see and understand and get to know people. And candidly, I had to really evaluate the C suite that merged in together and see how that all worked. And I had to make some changes there. So it took a minute from the top. You know, really integrating my C suite and then moving it out to the rest of the organization. And really, we're still in that process. It's going to take me another

• 22:14Speaker 04

  year to fully get that done. But the results are phenomenal and the momentum has been building and it's really coming together.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Most people are never going to hire a consulting company to manage an integration. This is a, this is a pretty high order thing to do. Like, very, very few people have to make a decision of which consulting company to pick. How did they pitch you? How did you decide?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  When I had my previous financial partner, they, you know, a week after we closed the deal with them, this is going clear back to 22, they parked their consultant in my office in Utah because they wanted to see how they could help improve. And he worked for that company, but he had spent his career with one of the really big consulting companies in the US. You could probably guess which one. And so he was really, really sharp and learned a lot from him. When I went to hire a consulting company, I called him up and asked for recommendations because he still hires them to this day. When they invest in a company, they bring a consultant in to kind of help if they're integrating or just

• 23:21Speaker 04

  trying to improve process. So I called him, he gave me four names and gave me the contacts for those four names. I called each company and then I just took them through an interview process, just like you would hiring somebody. And then I also included two of my board members who've had a lot of experience with integration. And they stepped in and together it was a pretty easy decision for us which way we went. And it's turned out to be a really good decision. They've been really, really helpful.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  One of my tropes here on Decoder is that culture is really important and structure really defines your culture. And I've had people just straight up disagree with me. There are CEOs who are like, no, no, culture is something you can change the structure as much as you want. The culture just comes from leadership. You're integrating two very different cultures, two very different structures. It sounds like you know what you want, right? You're gonna, you're gonna change both companies, it sounds on both sides, ever so slightly to get to the outcome you want. Is it more of telling everyone to pick up the trash culture change, or is it more structure change?

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Let me answer that this way. So a lot of people advise me and they're like, you know, when you start doing this integration, you want to take the best from best practices from Blackstone and the best practices from Weber and merge those together. And I said, well, I don't know if that's what I want. What if the best and the best are just mediocre and not the best? I want world class. So I want benchmarks of the best finance department, the best operational team in the world, at whatever company. So I've really tried to approach it from that viewpoint. And then the culture, I think culture comes from everybody unifying and having a common

• 25:02Speaker 04

  goal of what they want to do and what we want this company to become and having enthusiasm and excitement and pride. So when you come to work, whether it's Monday or Friday or any day in between, you're really excited to get in the office and get going because you're going to make a change and you're going to impact the business and it's going to be exciting and it's going to be rewarding for the employee. That's really kind of where I'm keying my focus.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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  Hi, everyone. I'm Kara Swisher.

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• 28:17Speaker 03

  So let me ask you the decoder questions now. It sounds like you have a ways to go on this integration. How are you structured now? Is it two different companies? Is it one company of two divisions? How is that working?

• 28:27Speaker 04

  One company with two awesome brands is how we're structured.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  And then under that, are you sharing R and D? Are you sharing product development?

• 28:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and kind of by centers of excellence, if you will. And we have a beautiful office in Chicago, out in the suburbs. We have a new office here in Utah for our headquarters that we just built. I was doing that anyway, just coincided with the merger. We have R and D facilities here in Logan and in Chicago. And then we have teams around the world. Weber has a big organization in EMEA, and we have a manufacturing facility in Poland that's state of the art and about four years old. We have operations in China still, and we've moved to Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand for manufacturing. And so we have staff and

• 29:17Speaker 04

  people there as well. So we're keeping it based on centers of excellence and where expertise lie, because nobody in Logan had ever built a gas grill before. So I'm not going to really take those engineers and try to expect them to get up to speed, and vice versa with griddles in Chicago.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Well, Weber had built a griddle. They built the slate. They went after a bunch of your influencers. There's like a tiny little scandal in grill influencer world that Weber had done a bunch of integrations. Are you canceling the slate?

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Uh, no, because there's still consumers who love the Weber brand, but we'll merchandise it by feature, benefit, and value proposition, based on retail price point and retail placement. So, you know, if you look at our industry, we're small as far as numbers of doors that sell our product. Well, I shouldn't say it that way, because there's a lot of doors, but there's Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, and then it goes way down from there as far as potential volumes with retail customers. So it's a relatively small customer base.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  And so we have to do business with everybody, number one. And I want to please my customer. Again, I really try to focus on the end user. And we have extremely dedicated Weber customers and we want to offer them products. But there's no reason, for example, for Weber and Blackstone brand to both have a $150 griddle. That's really kind of more of a Blackstone type price point. But if there's a retail customer who wants an upgraded griddle and they want the Weber brand and a longer warranty experience, then a $7.99 slate is probably the answer for them.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Let me ask you about that, just the development of that product. As you combine the companies and you combine these cultures. Blackstone, every year, I just like look at the product catalog. I'm like, everything is brand new. Right, it's almost like the company is starting from scratch over and over again. Weber is very classic. That kettle has really not changed. And the Son of Girl that my father-in-law bought me 10 years ago and the Son of Girl today, they're virtually identical. In fact, the big difference is I think the new one can accept griddle plates in mine. It's like fundamentally the difference. That's a different approach to product development. Are you going to have one product development team that drives a roadmap for both brands? Or does Weber get to have its own griddle development team because the price point is different?

• 31:50Speaker 04

  No, we have one, we have one R and D group. We have consolidated that. That's one of the first departments I wanted consolidated, even though it wasn't the easiest, because we have great talent in both offices now. So we have a VP over R and D and then it staffs out from there. And we assign development groups based on grill type, basically. So we'll have product management and industrial design and engineering for gas grills, for griddle. But if we have a group working on griddle, they can work on either brand and vice versa with gas grills. If Blackstone decided to ever get into gas grills, that team would develop that for Blackstone.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  So this reminds me, you know, Mary Barra from GM on the show, and she has Buick and Chevy and Cadillac and there are shared platforms for those cars. And then there are brand teams that build on top of those platforms. Is that the model that you're going after here?

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Pretty much. There's companies who.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Black and Decker maybe one, I'm not 100% sure, but they might have a DeWalt team and they don't share resources, say with the Stanley team, but I don't know, I'm just using that as an example. I mean, you could go down that road and have that model. They even have salespeople dedicated by brand, some companies do, where I'm not going to retail that way. If I go into Costco, my sales team that calls on Costco, the commercial team, they're representing both brands to the buying teams there.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  And then I'm assuming all the rest of your functions, IT and legal, that is all just long since combined?

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Correct, yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  You said something really interesting, I just want to come back to it really quickly. You said there were hurt feelings on both sides. What were the hurt feelings on the Blackstone side? Weren't you just the winners? It feels like you're the conquering heroes here.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  No, I mean, the reality is, is everybody can improve and everybody can get better. And one of the things that I've really fought hard to maintain was making sure that at Blackstone, we didn't get complacent. Cause we've had a lot of success for a long time. We've had a great run. That can breed complacency. You better wake up every day and feel like you're starting at the zero yard line and you got 100 yards to go. Nobody gets to start at the 10 yard line. So that was, that was some of the, oh, we're Blackstone, we've done extreme, we know what we're doing and Weber's been old and slow and no, I won't put up with that kind of attitude.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  So that's a little bit about what I was referring to.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  How many people is the combined company? How many employees do you have?

• 34:19Speaker 04

  About 2,100.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  And how's that split between Weber and Blackstone?

• 34:23Speaker 04

  High majority at Weber. And keep in mind, there's two factories there. And so there's a lot of employees in the factories, both in Poland and in the United States.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  And will that division maintain that some are Weber people and some are Blackstone people? Are you going to have like a central company and then the two brands express differently?

• 34:40Speaker 04

  A central company is what I'm driving for. This is one company with two awesome brands.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  And then just real quick, how would you define the Weber brand and how would you define the Blackstone brand?

• 34:52Speaker 04

  The Weber brand is, it serves the customer more of on a premium level. And it is for, you know, like when you want to cook serious and you want to take your time and you want to craft, crafting is kind of the word I use to describe Weber. Blackstone is fast and fun and easy and variety. Weber, more of the crafting style of food.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  I feel like I could waste an hour on that, but we're gonna, we're gonna let that one go because I don't want to run all the time. I need to ask you another decoder question. I think this has changed for you over time. How do you make decisions? What's your framework now?

• 35:28Speaker 04

  I make decisions by counseling with my executive leadership team. I love to bring everybody together when there's a tough decision because I want it. And let's say it's a marketing decision. I expect my finance guy to chip in and make a contribution as to the comment. If it's a finance decision, I expect the sales guys to chip in or my commercial leaders to chip in and talk about it. So I try to get everybody together and really go more through a counseling process. I think we make better decisions when we get all of our brains working together. And then I'm the final vote decider. If I don't like what they all think together, then I'll decide what I think is best.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  But I have found over time and over a lot of experience and making good decisions and making bad decisions, better decisions are made when I get everybody working on it together.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  You mentioned you had to make a lot of decisions on people, right? There are hurt feelings on both sides and you wanted to really evaluate their C-suite and their people and maybe they were doing things better than the Blackstone side was. Making decisions on people is really hard. It sounds like you just had to make a lot of decisions on who to keep and who to move on from. How did you make those choices and how did you communicate those choices?

• 36:41Speaker 04

  So we went through quite an elaborate process with the executive leadership team and they each took responsibility for their areas. And they went through working with our consulting company, line item by line item, job function by job function. And one of the variables that was taken out is where people lived. I don't care where they live. I don't care if they're in Poland, or Chicago, or Logan, or New Zealand, Australia. We really went through and looked at job function and where it could be best performed. And then the harder decisions are where you're just looking at where we're duplicated in staff, and how do we make those decisions? But that's the process that we went through.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Tell me one of those. Certainly you had VPs of sales, for example. You had to make a choice. What was the framework for making that choice?

• 37:33Speaker 04

  It was so different depending on each function. There wasn't one set of, this is the variables you'll use to make a decision for everybody. So, again, the variables were so unique depending on the job function. One hat didn't fit all. One of the easier ones, although it was very difficult from a personal standpoint, but Chicago is my center of excellence for the finance department. And we had duplication in Logan. So, you know, accounts payables, accounts receivables, those kinds of teams needed to be consolidated. And the folks in Logan got more impacted from losing their jobs than the folks did in Chicago. So, that's

• 38:16Speaker 04

  one example of where we, you know, that one was maybe a little bit easier to make a decision because the finance department's staying out there.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Do you want the Weber brand to rub off on the Blackstone brand, or do you want them to grow independently?

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great question, and it's really part of our go-to-market strategy. We really believe both brands serve different purposes. And that's what I want the team to focus on, is what purpose does Blackstone serve, and what purpose does Weber serve to the customer? And what does my end-user customer expect from both of those brands to deliver? Because there's some nuances, there's some differences there.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  I'll just say this, it's been five years since we've spoken. You're playing a different character now, right? You're the CEO of a much larger company. You're obviously thinking very hard about how to manage Weber and integrate it correctly. You just have a much bigger problem to solve. The last time we spoke, you were on an upswing of rapid growth, particularly in a pandemic, right? The Blackstone was a viral sensation on TikTok in the pandemic. You were just trying to move as many units as you could. And you had a lot of ideas about how there'd be recurring revenue for Blackstone as people bought more and more accessories for the griddle. And you said, you can cook on this three meals a day and we see people making pancakes and then they're making dinner and we're going to sell the pancake kicks and then we're going to sell the dome to melt the cheese on the cheeseburgers.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  And that was such a huge part of your focus then, right? You weren't just going to sell one griddle, you were going to sell an entire lifestyle. Now, I've got this other big company, which has its own lifestyle associated, its own kind of brand image, its own moments in Americana, and you've got this much bigger problem to solve. Is the thesis still the same? That you're going to buy a Blackstone and then I'm going to buy one set of accessories and another set of accessories? And then Alexis O'Handon is going to make dinosaur pancakes with his kids on Instagram and that's going to sell even more? Like, how does that work as your role has gotten so much bigger?

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Thesis is still a lot the same. Accessories are a very important part of our business and especially on a griddle because there's so many things you can do on a griddle that you need those accessories. They're a pretty important part of it. And then, yeah, the other interesting thing is, is that with the retail marketplace, the way it is right now, the way it is today, tariffs have been heavily impacted us last year and we're still feeling the results of that from Liberation Day. And then on top of it, we had to move manufacturing facilities to Southeast Asia. That was not flawless, I should say. We had plenty of headaches there. And then just this summer with gas prices going up the way that they have, that really affects our customers.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  And so they may not be able to afford a new griddle right now for Father's Day, but they certainly can go buy two or three accessories that dads always wanted. So the accessory business is a huge part of our business and translating that over and sharing that concept with the Weber teams and helping them understand, you know, McDonald's wouldn't make it if they couldn't sell French fries. You gotta sell the fries with the hamburger. So accessories are a really critical part of our total overall business for both brands.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  The interesting thing about the griddle market, when you said that to me, you know, I was a new griddle owner five years ago. And I was like, yeah, I want to buy 10 spatulas and four different hamburger smashers and let's do it. And now I have all that stuff. Do you have to invent new things for me to try to do in my griddle? How does that work?

• 41:38Speaker 04

  That's interesting. We don't try to invent new things just so you'll buy something else from us. Everything we build in accessories especially, and we learned this the hard way because at first we're like, oh, let's do this. Let's do that. And we would put those products in the market. They wouldn't sell. So when we put a product in the market that's a new accessory, it is coming from a lot of consumer feedback. We get great ideas from YouTube and TikTok and we watch what our customers are doing and how they're modifying things and how they're making it easier and simpler. It's all consumer driven on the accessories.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  What's an example of that?

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Uh, well, the spatulas themselves, right? And so sometimes they're thick and not flexible. Those are great for hamburgers, but sometimes they're softer and more flexible. Those are great for pancake flipping and especially if you're doing eggs, scrambled or fried eggs. You just mentioned a dome, a melting dome. People were using cake pans when we first saw that on YouTube and were like, we, they were drilling a hole in it and putting a handle that they got from someplace. And so they could lift it on and off the griddle. And then over time, as products develop, especially on our accessories line, we learn from one year to the next, working with our retail customers. You had 50 accessories.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Here's the top 10 sellers. Here's the bottom 10 sellers. Let's go through item by item. Talk about what worked and what didn't work and what do we need to learn from our customers to modify, get rid of, improve on and change for next, for next season. That's kind of the process we go through.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  All those accessories are made overseas. You've mentioned overseas manufacturing and tariffs and liberation day now several times. It's interesting. You have competitors are public, like Traeger is a public company. They've had to just loudly say that tariff policy and trade policy has hurt their business. It sounds like that's the same for you. Is that something you're actively lobbying against? Is it something you're just dealing with?

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Not lobbying, dealing with, and it affected the whole industry because everybody builds overseas, except, interestingly enough, Weber. Because we have a factory just west of Chicago in a suburb called Huntley, and we still build most of our kettles for the US market in Huntley, Illinois. And we've maintained that, and it's really challenging. It's very difficult to maintain a retail price point that my customers want to pay for a kettle. And we've upgraded the quality of that thing. It has a 10-year warranty on it. That's amazing. A kettle gets hot with coals and everything in it that you put in there. It gets beat up and abused. But we build it at a quality level that we can maintain a 10-year warranty on it. We

• 44:21Speaker 04

  also build kettles for the European market in our factory in Poland. And we wanted to expand manufacturing, and then with tariffs and everything else, and a tariff gets announced, and the cost of steel goes up the next day, coincidentally, right? Big surprise. But demand goes up for it. So it's still markets are reacting to the demand. So it just continues to kind of chase itself on profitability and where you can and can't build a product. But we work every day still trying to build in the US and continue to figure that puzzle out. I'd love to build more in the US if I could. But this is not a particular product. But if something retails for $600 or $300, the customer votes with their credit card,

• 45:05Speaker 04

  and they vote for 300 because the quality's the same.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  The theory of the tariffs is they'll just bring up the prices of the overseas products to the same as the prices that you would have to charge if you made them in the United States. It doesn't sound like that's actually pushing you to manufacture more in the United States.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  I'm trying to push more for manufacturing in the United States just to have more control of my supply chain. That would be my biggest motive there. But I have to be profitable. Tariffs have certainly started to even the playing field and make it more attractive to build in the US. And we're actively reviewing opportunities, you know, like I say, to continue to build more product here in the US.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  I don't think you have too much of a chip dependency or a RAM dependency. Weber owns iGrill, which is their connected platform. I don't think Blackstone has a huge connected platform. But Weber, you know, that was part of their strategy was to get smarter, to make it easier to cook. Has that affected you? Or do you stare down the barrel of Nvidia buying all the chips in the world and say, this is really hurting our iGrill portfolio?

• 46:04Speaker 04

  It hasn't impacted us because we haven't expanded into that category deep enough to where it would impact us. But we did buy another technology called June Ovens, Weber did, and it has some phenomenal technology for cooking. It's just really super expensive. And so we're still trying to figure that puzzle out. But as a result of that technology, we've greatly expanded our connected devices and our thermometers. And then you're going to start seeing some electronics on some of our high-end Summit grills that are just unbelievable. And really, I think the biggest application for technology and outdoor cooking is with pellet grills. Because on a griddle, it takes you two minutes to cook a hamburger,

• 46:48Speaker 04

  right? I don't need, I don't even have time to hook up and my meat's done. But if you're smoking something, you're going to take four, eight, 14 hours to cook something. The connected device is really beneficial and helpful.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be right back.

• 47:17Speaker 15

  We're just about one month out from the midterm elections in these United States. And despite all the gerrymandering and voting restrictions, legal challenges and personnel shakeups, it looks like the Democrats are gonna flip the House of Representatives.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. It's mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, like, don't oversell how amazing of a night we're gonna have.

• 47:43Speaker 15

  So on Today Explained from Vox, how are the Democrats gonna mess this up?

• 47:48Speaker 15

  Nah, JK, JK, JK.

• 47:55Speaker 06

  The question isn't anymore, like, will Democrats flip the House majority? It's how big is that majority going to be?

• 48:05Speaker 15

  So on Today Explained from Vox, we're gonna talk about the new sheriff in town, if all of this goes as Democrats think it's gonna go. Hakim's house on Today Explained, Monday through Friday afternoons in your feeds.

• 48:21Speaker 16

  What if we told you there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter? Interested?

• 48:28Speaker 17

  And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable?

• 48:35Speaker 16

  No, it's not protein. It's actually fiber, the least sexy, most overlooked nutrient of all.

• 48:42Speaker 17

  But what is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough? Is a powder you stir into some water gonna do it for you?

• 48:50Speaker 16

  All that, plus the strange tale of the gorilla poop-obsessed father of cornflakes in the latest episode of Gastropod. Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  So we did have the CEO of Traeger on the show. He had been a tech executive. He owned a headphone company. He went and bought Traeger. That's actually a great conversation, and I encourage people to listen to it. He also had to do a culture change. That was a family business, and he pushed really hard to change the culture. Traeger's obviously very successful. But he understood that modality, right? This is gonna take a long time, and I can put a lot of technology around it to make that consistent and easy for people. Griddles are what you're describing. You can make a hamburger in two minutes. It's great. It's done. It's very fast. You can use it over and over again throughout the day. Gas grills are kind of in the middle, right? You can pretty easily screw up cooking on a gas grill. You can very easily cook up, screw up cooking on a charcoal grill. That's just like a thing people do all the time. Even just lighting the thing is challenging.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Do you want to bring technology to bear on those experiences?

• 49:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we are. And I think one of the greatest technologies to help you with gas grill cooking is having a really good thermometer, instant read thermometer. And we have those now that connect to the app that we have on Weber. It's a phenomenal app. You can use it to cook on pellet grills, which we also make under that brand. But we're going to have connected devices that will connect into the app and help you with the meat temperature. It's funny you mention that because I haven't cooked on a gas grill for 25, 30 years, right?

• 50:25Speaker 03

  I was going to ask you about this. You were all, you were off it the last time we talked. You're like, I don't even need this thing anymore.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  That's funny. Those are some words I had to eat. I said many times, we will never sell a gas grill. And now I'm the leading seller of gas grills. So, but it's funny. So in the Chicago area, there are four restaurants with the Weber banner on them. And inside those restaurants, they actually have a section where they have all the gas grills set up and you can take a cooking class there. And so we went there and ate at, ate dinner and then we went back into the area and we got trained and I was told how to cook a steak on a gas grill and I loved it. It was amazing. It was really delicious, but I didn't know how to use it.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  So gaining a little bit of knowledge, we're going to be putting more content out on how to use a charcoal grill, how to start it, how to deal with the coals, how to move them around, how to create a hot zone and an indirect, indirect zone, all those different kinds of things that people need to learn and may or may not know. So we're going to have all of that set up. And you know how Blackstone, we, we've been huge on social media. It's still a big part of our philosophy. We're driving more of that same type philosophy on the Weber brand as well to help our customers. Cause when you fire up a really good ribeye and on a Genesis or a Spirit or a Summit gas grill and you know how to cook it right. It's a pretty darn good steak, I have to admit.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  There's a lot of people on the Black Zone subreddit who are gonna say that actually it's much better on a griddle.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  Well, I know, but I love it and it's hard not to be biased.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  Actually, do you find right now with the energy crisis and the price of fuels that more customers are buying charcoal grills?

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Well, they're buying charcoal grills because of the retail price point. They're not trading from a 36-inch griddle to a 28-inch griddle because of money. They're going all the way down to a charcoal grill.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  So, yeah, we're seeing some big trade down right now.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  But you don't think that there's the, just the ongoing cost of propane is driving that change?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  No. Well, it's part of it. Fuel's definitely part of it. I mean, I had some reports that I was studying the other day and the bottom...

• 52:38Speaker 03

  If you're listening to this, he's, Roger's literally looking at the reports on his desk right now.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  The bottom almost, let's see, 50% of our consumers are spending 15 to 20% on, on, on power. That includes electricity at home, gasoline, propane. And those customers are squeezed, you know, if they're spending 50% of their income on housing and 20, 25% on power, they have no money left. It's really, it's a really difficult economy for them right now. So, yeah, they're trading down to charcoal grills because of price point.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  And do you think that that represents a growth opportunity? Is that just an opportunity to provide outdoor cooking equipment to everyday Americans? How do you view that statistic?

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Before I learned this, I mean, we saw that. We saw that as a trend developing this year. You mentioned our kettle earlier and you mentioned that it's part of our logo. It is. It's actually a trademarked logo with the shape of our kettle in there. It's iconic to the Weber brand. I want to see what we can do. To get sharper price points on the kettle because they've crept up over time. They can retail for $200 and you know, traditionally that was a hundred dollar retail item. And now it's all the way up to 150, $200. So what can we do innovatively to help the customer have a better experience at a better price point is really kind of what I'm focused on.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  Can you do that with American manufacturing? It feels like you want to push the price points down. You're, you're headed overseas and then the terrorists are going to keep you from hitting those price points.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we can. I think there's some innovation that we can put into some of these. As simple as they are, they're a sheet of steel that's molded to half dome on each side and put some legs and you know, it's a pretty simple product, but there's innovation left in there that we can come up with. And I think we can help the retail price points.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  You've mentioned the longevity of the kettle several times, 10 year warranty. The CEO of Big Green Egg was on the show a couple of years ago, and he said specifically about the kettle, they cost 200, 300 bucks. They can buy at the grocery store, within two or three years, you're buying another one because they fall apart. The last time you were on the show, you were like, it's outdoor cooking equipment, two, three, five years, it's time to buy a new one. You're talking about very price sensitive customers now, even maybe at the high end, people are very sensitive to the prices are going. People do want things to last longer. How do you think about that? I mean, the stuff is outside, it is going to wear at a different rate. Can, can you make these products to last for more than three years? Can you actually guarantee that the 10 years across the product line or is it the kettle?

• 55:07Speaker 04

  No, the Weber gas grills have, some of them have a 15 year warranty. The biggest difference there is rust and Weber grills traditionally have been made, we would call it the burn box, the part that holds the burners. That's cast aluminum, that doesn't rust and that lasts forever. And our hoods on Weber grills are also cast aluminum on the sides with enamel coated paint on the top, which doesn't chip as easy, it stays, it lasts a lot longer. So the Weber gas grill is more expensive than a lot of the cheap imports, but the quality difference, you go pick up one of my gas grills compared to it, you know, one

• 55:49Speaker 04

  for $300 and you can immediately feel the difference as a consumer.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Do you think you're hedged against trends? Like, do you ever worry that smash burgers are just going to go out of fashion and maybe big? Big gas grill burgers are gonna come back around and you'll have Weber instead?

• 56:05Speaker 04

  I don't really worry about it because people are always gonna eat and we cook great devices to cook your food on and we will innovate to lifestyle changes, demographical changes, economic changes. That's what I have to do. I can't control those things. I just have to merchandise around those things and react to them. I don't like to react. We like to be a little bit more proactive than that. So we try to, we try to spot trends to where we have time to react to that and make sure that we're spot on with what the customer wants to pay and buy.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  I'm asking that because again, five years ago, we talked, the Blackstone Griddle was a TikTok sensation, particularly Smash burgers were a TikTok sensation and maybe the entire country learned how to make a Smash burger in that summer. And you learned a lot in that process and I remember talking to you back then and you had been spending almost all of your money on television advertising and you weren't even doing it to drive sales, if I remember correctly. You were just trying to get people to the website and then take them from there. There wasn't like an 800 number. You were literally just trying to create brand awareness on television. You're talking a lot now about informational content for Weber Kettles and teaching how people how to use charcoal and how to use gas grills. Is your marketing effort focused more on social media now or are you still so heavy on TV?

• 57:22Speaker 04

  The spend that we have has definitely changed since we first met where we were 100% spend on traditional television advertising. Off the top of my head, it's probably closer 50/50 spend now on social media advertising and promotion versus just traditional TV, but I'm still on TV. And we're now taking the Weber brand and putting them back on traditional TV advertising, driving the brand awareness. I still don't have an 800 number.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  On the Blackstone brand, you know, just go to blackstone.com and most people go to their favorite retailer and purchase the brand there. Here's here's something that you'll find really interesting on Blackstone. We have a really high propensity of people who actually make the full purchase online, not necessarily my website, because my corporate website is still a small percentage of my overall volume and business. But the people who now trust and know the brand, buy it online and most of them have it picked up at the retailer of their choice. And a lot of them are having it delivered now as well. They're not going into the store anymore. They know the product. They know the brand. They know what they want. They go online. They do their research and they make a purchase and it gets shipped to their house

• 58:34Speaker 04

  or they go to the store at 10 o'clock at night and pick it up. So but it's really interesting. If I truly analyzed brick and mortar versus D to C, if I count all of my retailers D to C, it's definite that that has shifted now to more people buying online than five years ago in a big way.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  I think that's really interesting because, you know, the last time we spoke, it was really the beginning of brand marketing through creators and these integrations. You had on staff influencers back then who were doing tours at Walmarts. I don't think you were seeding product at scale, but you were beginning to dabble in it. You had a Roku app that you had made with like cooking content in it. Those were early. You were early to a lot of these trends. Like, these are big trends now at massive scale. You see ad agencies spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the creator economy in this way. Mark Barokas, the CEO of Shark Ninja was like, we have 10,000 creators that we work with on brand deals and we evaluate the sentiment analysis of their comments. Have you gotten all the

• 59:35Speaker 03

  way that far in creator marketing? Or do you still have on staff influencers? How are you thinking about this?

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I will never get that far because I don't believe in it.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  I think when you buy and pay for influencers, the consumer picks it out in seconds. The consumer is so savvy and so smart. So our content creation, we still have influencers. We've expanded it. We have what we call the Griddle Crew. And these are creators and content creators that we've seen online. We followed them for a long time. They're authentic. If somebody calls me up and says, hey, I have 5 million followers, pay me $3 million a year and I'll pitch your brand, we respectfully decline and hang up as fast as we can, quite frankly. We don't do it that way. And I don't see a lot of people. Doing it that way. And I tell people all the time, that's the best way to do it,

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  but no one believes me. Nobody, they, they think they have to go buy their content creators. And typically what happens is what you mentioned earlier in the call where coincidentally, some of the Blackstone influencers got quote unquote swiped by Weber. That happens all the time to us because we have these people who start cooking on a Blackstone. They start getting a great following because people want to follow the brand. They think it's them and my competitors think it's them. And then they go buy them and have them come and hawk their products. And to me, it's fake. It's not authentic and I don't like it. So I'll never do that.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Have you talked to some of those influencers? Some of them like truly had hurt feelings that you hadn't competed for their attention or their brand integrations because that's their money. You know, the platforms don't pay the influencers any money, really. It's all brand deals. It's all sponsorships. So it is created a different dynamic on that side of the house for sure.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  We have conversations with a lot of them and some of them, you know, some of them came to us and were, they negotiated and they like, I won't pay that money. And they can be hurt all they want, quite frankly. But I do that for the brand and for the product itself, not to hurt anybody's feelings or be offensive or anything to influencers because I wish them all the best. And some of them do really well and do a great job. I think it's great. It's a great business model for an independent person. I just have to protect my brand and integrity and the authenticity of my brand. That's what I focus on.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  How do you think about finding that next new customer? And maybe it's different. You know, Blackstone has become a household name. Weber is certainly a household name. It's the first thing people think of. The logo is iconic. But this is the challenge for everyone now is finding that next new customer who, when we're all just sort of awash in feeds full of slop, everything is brand marketing through influencers. Maybe we're not even watching TV as we used to as much anymore. How do you find that next new person? Are you just paying? Do you see a world where you just have to pay meta for meta ads? Do you see a world where the content travels organically? This feels like the biggest problem for everyone. And then your sales cycle is long and the products are expensive and heavy, as you keep pointing at. Where does the next new customer come from?

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's crazy for us. The next new customer still comes at a very high percentage by word of mouth. And all this money we spend on marketing and advertising and influencing and everything else. When we do surveys annually, which I've done now for about seven years, still the number one way people hear about our brand on the Blackstone site. I haven't got caught up yet on Weber, but on the Blackstone site, it's still by word of mouth. So somebody cooks on the weekend, they invite the neighborhood over. He's flipping pancakes in the morning or they're doing smash burgers or whatever they're doing. People, now the difference is they've heard of Blackstone. They've definitely seen one, but now they're experiencing it. And it's still a big influence on them making that purchase.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  So we'll continue to try to drive that in different ways and creative ways. And it changes weekly, monthly, daily, almost, that strategy. So the marketing team spends hours analyzing results and what worked and what didn't work. And how can we improve and where should we spend money? Where should we shouldn't spend money? That is just an ongoing process on a daily basis.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  But you're saying the biggest share is still word of mouth?

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, isn't that crazy?

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  It is crazy. I mean, I would say, you know, people have seen me use mine. I've watched my friends use theirs and the number one thing they talk about is, boy, that seems hard to maintain. On the griddle side, anyway, right? You gotta care for it. You gotta scrape it. If you leave it over the winter, you gotta clean the rust off of it. That feels like a technology problem that you have not yet overcome. Right? Like the thing will just get rusty. And maybe like I love going on the Reddit and everyone just like cook another pack of bacon and it'll all be fine. Like there's some aspect of like this thing is harder to use than a regular gas griddle that you can just let deteriorate until you buy a new one. Do you think about that? Is that part of your marketing?

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  It's not just part of our marketing. It's part of our product development. Interestingly enough, when Weber got into the griddle business.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  As a competitor, I was at least impressed by the fact they tried to improve on something that was a consumer complaint, rust. And so they came out with a slate, which is just basically a preseason griddle at the factory. And they came out with a new process on how to do that. It drives the cost higher, it's more expensive to do. But at least they went after a concern from the consumer. They just didn't knock me off and say, here's ours, it's Weber. They came out with a feature on it. So that makes the industry better. That's great. And as a result, we focus on that a lot because of our customer. While it may be, it definitely is a concern and customers identify that, but on total

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  number of units we sell and the complaints we get about rusting, it's a really, really small percentage. And we have so many cleaning kits and restoration kits and hundreds and thousands of YouTube and TikTok videos on how to deal with it and how to fix it. And in 30 minutes, you can clean up your griddle. It's really not that hard.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  No, I'm just curious about that because that is the competitive dynamic, right? Of having the Weber in the ecosystem at the higher price point. That might be the competitive dynamic that has been removed, right? Because you now operate Weber. Do you have other griddle competitors that you wake up and think about every day?

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  There's always a griddle competitor. They pop up on Amazon overnight, but yeah, there's plenty of competition.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  And that's the other piece of this that I want to talk about. We've talked a lot about manufacturing and you've had to deal with tariffs, you've obviously moved your manufacturing around the world. That dynamic still exists, right? There's any hot product in the world, you've got Chinese manufacturing partners, you can't totally control them. That ecosystem knocks off products at completely high rates, especially if there's any innovation that differentiates a product. That stuff is still flooding into our markets, tariffs or not. It's still showing up on the internet, one click away. Duke culture is as high as it's ever been. Is that a worry for you, the way that it's a worry for, I don't know, the headphone manufacturers that I talk to or any of the fashion retailers we've talked to?

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  It's definitely a worry. My big advantage is, is we have two unbelievably strong brands. So you can knock me off, but it's not a Blackstone and or it's not a Weber. So that's a big advantage that we have. In my opinion, the key to that, I can't just rest on my laurels and say, well, I have the coolest brand. Who cares? What I have to continue to do is innovate my product and stay one, two, three steps ahead of my competition. Cause they're knocking off, in my opinion, two to three year old technology. It's how long it takes them. It just, they can't knock me off overnight. This is a long lead time production product. And by the time you want to knock me off and you find a source to have it built and you

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  pay for tooling, which is not cheap, it's a big capital expense. And then you start buying inventory in minimum quantities from, they're not going to build you 10. You know, you gotta buy hundreds or thousands of units to get going. And then your cost isn't going to be as good as mine. You don't have the economies economies of scales that I do. So we have a big competitive advantage over knockoffs, if you will. And I'm talking non branded importers. But believe me, they're very innovative. They're very creative. Their speed to market sometimes astounds me. I have a bigger problem on my accessories with that than I do on the on the grills and griddles.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. You go on Amazon and the accessory kits are everywhere.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  They're everywhere.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  Do you fight with Amazon about that? Do you ever complain?

• 1:08:03Speaker 04

  Off the record. Yeah, that's, it's definitely a concern.

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  And I mean, that's the recurring revenue, right? This is the thing we've discussed now for for a while.

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  And it's our brand and they and that those people, whoever they are, they don't care about intellectual property. They don't respect it. They're just trying to sell as many units, whatever that is, against me, my brands, against other companies. They don't care. They just knock stuff off and sell it for as long and as fast as they can and they get shut down and then they move on to the next product.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Amazon's a unique case, right? They're also a big advertising platform. There are a lot of the answers is we'll just pay for the ads and we'll put your results at the top. That's the new way Amazon makes money. Is that a game you want to play? You've been resistant to playing some of these online. Retailer games, the influencer games, that's the game on the Amazon platform.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  It is definitely difficult on the Amazon platform. The other challenging thing with Amazon is just their algorithm in particular. Because if I get backordered, or if they sell more than they thought, and then they don't have inventory, then the algorithm thinks no one wants to buy it because they're out of stock. So that's probably the biggest challenge with Amazon. And it really is difficult to get that overridden by a human. That's the algorithm and that's what it says and that's what, kind of what they stick to.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  As you can tell, I could obviously talk to you about this for hours upon hours. You're going to have to come back in faster than five years. I want to end with kind of just a big picture question. And I kind of alluded it to earlier. The last time you were on the show, five years ago, you had been at it for a long time. Right? You started the company in 2008 and you were experiencing this rapid, kind of big growth. And you were the disruptor CEO. You know, and you were operating every piece of this business. And I could tell you were just in the weeds of everything Blackstone was doing because you were in that growth phase. And every single thing mattered to you in a very specific kind of way. You're in a much different role now, right? You're operating two brands, you're managing this big cultural integration. How are you thinking about yourself and the character you're playing now? Because this is a change most people will never experience.

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  It's a really interesting question. And, and a lot of times, from what I've seen, not very many entrepreneurs who start a business and are entrepreneurial minded like I am, like to operate in that type of a corporate environment, if you will. I don't know if I'm different, unique, I don't know. I'm not really trying to compare myself anywhere, but I just love what I'm doing. You know, how many people get an opportunity to ride the wave of a disruptive technology like Blackstone was, into an old category that had been around forever? And then on top of it, you get to manage and take over the best, biggest brand in that industry. So the way I look at it, like, man, this is, this is a once in a lifetime deal. So I'm loving it.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  This is great fun and I'm sticking around for a while to keep doing this.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  How much time do you spend with the R and D people inventing new griddles? Because that was the thing, you drew the first one, I think, on like a legal pad, right? How much time do you spend in the product weeds?

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Well, I will spend more as soon as disintegration gets finished.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  That's a good answer. I mean, this is the challenge, right? You get away from the product as you manage the corporation more.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  Yep. So I force myself to stay in there. And that's my personal love. You know, my finance guys are smart. I don't need to spend time with them. Operations, they'll clean up everything and get it tidy and get it rocking and rolling. I don't need to spend as much time there. I like the product. I love delighting my end user customers, coming out with innovative, cool ideas and expanding beyond outdoor cooking. That's, I have way too many ideas in my brain that, yeah, that makes my board a little nervous at times. They want me to stay focused. But yeah, there's a lot, a lot to do.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. We haven't even talked about the pizza ovens. And now you're saying you're going to get beyond that. You're going to have to come back soon, Robert.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  All right. Yeah. I enjoy, I enjoy your show. So I'd be happy to come back.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Fasten in five years. Well, thank you so much for being on Decoder. Happy 4th of July. This is our 4th of July episode. I hope you get some time to go cook outside.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  That we will do for sure. Thank you so much.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  I'd like to thank Roger Dolly for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails, or hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're at DecoderPod as well. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe or get your podcasts. Decoder is production The Verge and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.