Digital Social Hour - Building a Clothing Empire: Managing Multiple Eight-Figure Brands with Frankie Quirroz | DSH #65

Episode Date: August 5, 2023

Hey there, listeners! We've got an incredible episode lined up for you today that you don't want to miss. Get ready to dive into the fascinating world of branding, licensing, and influencer marketing with our special guest, Frankie. In this episode, Frankie spills the secrets behind his massive success with his brand, Tuned In Tokyo. With over $10 million in sales and collaborations with big names like Yu-Gi-Oh and Dragon Ball Z, Frankie shares how he managed to secure those impressive licensing deals and build a thriving coaching community. But that's not all! Frankie also reveals his genius strategies for Facebook ads, with an unbeatable return on ad spend that will leave you in awe. He breaks down how he maximizes his ad campaigns by spreading his budget across a multitude of Facebook campaigns, leading to game-changing results. And hold on tight, because Frankie doesn't stop there. He dishes on his journey with Drip Creations, where he faced a lawsuit from Nike. Discover how he navigated the challenges of customizing Air Force Ones and his thoughts on Nike's actions. This insider perspective is nothing short of eye-opening. But don't just take our word for it, join us on this episode and hear it all from Frankie himself. From his influencer partnerships with big names like Logan Paul and Selena Gomez to his groundbreaking marketing strategies, this episode is packed with valuable insights that will inspire you to take your brand to new heights. So, what are you waiting for? Tune in now to the Digital Social Hour and unlock the secrets to branding success with Frankie. Trust us, you won't want to miss this one. Hit that play button and prepare to be amazed! BUSINESS INQUIRIES: [e-mail] SPONSORS: AG1: https://www.drinkAG1.com/DSH Hostage Tape: https://hostagetape.com/DSH --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One thing you crushed it with was your influencer marketing. Yeah. You like straight dominated because you weren't even charging the celebrities that you were partnering with and you worked with some of the biggest names. How did you pull that off? So we worked with over 1500 influencers and celebrities and like hundreds of them per day. We did like shoes for Logan Paul, Charlie D'Amelio, you name it, Ruby Rose, like Selena

Gomez, whoever, like it didn't matter who you were. We probably made you some shoes. Black Bear, I remember him sending me an album cover. And he's like, yo, you should use this on a shoe. It'll sell. I'm like, are you giving us the rights to use you on our shoe? 100K, 200K profit doesn't really impress me no more. And not even millions.

All right, we're back on the Digital Social Hour. I'm here with my co-host, Christiana Hurt. What's good? Wayne Lewis. What up, what up? And our guest today, Frankie. Kuros. Kuros.

Kuros? Yeah, Kuros. I always mention it. How we doing? Great, bro. I love Vegas, so glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. Of course, man.

Yeah. What you been working on lately? A lot. So, I mean, obviously growing my brand. Tune in Tokyo is my number one. We're working on different collaborations with like Naruto, Dragon Ball Z. Just getting as many licensing deals as possible. Growing my coaching community too that I just started.

So that's something that I'm very passionate about right now. Awesome. Let's go one by one. So Tune in Tokyo, you've done over 10 million dollars in sales yeah you've licensed with some of the biggest brands like yugioh how are you able to get these huge licenses so i've tuned in tokyo we've been around since 2015 so we're eight years old which is dope bro because i've always wanted to have a 10-year run and i'm there. You know, I got a couple more years and we've crossed over the tens and tens of millions of dollars with tuned in Tokyo. It is my livelihood. That's where I make all my money.

And it's really dope because I started this passion at a very young age. And it kind of just like intertwined with my passion for cars and streetwear and clothing, meshed them together. And eventually, like we crushed it enough to get in front of the right people um but i got the licensing deal from yugioh uh i was connected with like dan fleishman and damon john from shark tank helped me get the licensing deal but they made the connection when people are looking for licensing basically our first one was with yugioh when people are looking for licensing they're looking for they're looking for longevity so when yugioh doesn't just want to collaborate with any random brand they want to stay consistent over time and in order to like trend with the new kids and the new school and gen z

they need to bring the classics back into hype and the way they do that is through brands like us because they look at our customer base our demographics are 16 to 24 so they're we're introducing the classics of yugioh through our brand and because of that they're willing to do that but we had to show them like our customer list and that we actually can we built something big do you guys have any store accounts yeah we do have so we've been in a few zoomie stores so you do trade shows or are you no I haven't really gotten too crazy into wholesale but we've tested like zoomies and tillies yeah that's dope one thing you're phenomenal at i don't know many

people better than you honestly is facebook ads how did you get so good with those because your return on ad spend is the highest i've ever seen in the clothing space because the clothing space is very hard to have high rows yeah so like the average row as usually people get is like 2.8 i get like 7.9 yeah uh pre ios like 14 update it was like 20 i remember those consistent um of course they changed so the way i do this is i've mixed hype drops which is like releasing limited collections to basically over expand the entire month so we'll do a drop like february 5th and we'll do like 80 000 on that day and i'll roll over that 80 grand throughout the entire month and that's all organic so customer list sms list so when i'm launching ads on the overall 30-day span i'll have like a six or seven

x because of that but the way i launch ads like versus agencies agencies try to bundle up as many campaigns and like or as many ads in like three four campaigns what I do for if you look at tune in Tokyo's account I have over a hundred active campaigns and they all have like 10 to 20 different ad sets in each campaign but every budget on those campaigns is 20 to 30 dollars. We don't really spend more than 100 dollars per campaign unless it's like absolutely crushing. But that's what that's my secret sauce is I spread my ad spend my budget throughout many campaigns. Yeah, exactly. That's I was doing that in 2016. That's so that's just scaling horizontally. Basically, the two dollar budget back in the day.

For sure. Yeah, $2, you could do that back then. Back then. Now it's a little bit more expensive. Yeah. That was the 2016 sauce. You just changed with the trends. Yeah.

That's really dope. So it's always worked since day one. Like, I started running ads in 2017. Technically, I started running ads on myspace like in 2008 or 9 but my real my real is big cartel and i used to run a myspace ad and i had a myspace bot that would auto like auto comment on people's posts back in the day follow them yeah has facebook ever like banned any of your ads that's a good of course i think anybody that's ran has gotten disapproved ads disabled accounts like that's part of the game how many merchants have

you ran through merchants not a lot because i have like a really great like customer service team that mitigates chargebacks like that. I've never drop shipped. I have a different model of drop shipping, but because we take care of our customers, we never had any issues with like our merchants. That's good. Let's dive into drip creations because you run two eight figure brands at the same time, which is really impressive. So how did you get started with Drip Creations?

So I got to be careful with what I say because I'm in a Nike lawsuit, but a big one. But so with Drip, here's I can say what I what's public already. OK, so with Drip, I started basically my business partner and I in 2019. We were talking about – or 2018. We were talking about releasing a sneaker company because I'm not the biggest shoe head, but I did clothing, the T-shirts, the hats, and the hoodies, but I wanted to do shoes. And the reason why I wanted to do shoes is because sneakers usually cost anywhere from like $70 to $200. And at the time time my sister was

living with me and i had this casita and um one day i'm coming like home and i just start seeing a bunch of like custom clothes and shoes i'm like what are you doing with these shoes she's like oh i'm customizing them i'm painting them and doing all it was like vans at the time and light bulb goes off in my head i'm like holy this is crazy next thing i know i look at her etsy account and she sold over a hundred thousand dollars without even telling me without even telling me that's crazy but the reason why is because i was working like six to seven days a week 10 hour days so i didn't really see her but this one time when i was actually home i saw enough

boxes to really pay attention to what the was going on and yeah from there on i told my business partner with tuned in tokyo yeah i got our sneaker company and then we started releasing customized vans eventually we got into like air force ones and and then we created our own sneaker and yeah it's till till this so what did you guys use a nike silhouette that's the um no we didn't use the nike silhouette but we used air at first we started customizing air force ones so that's the reason why nike wasn't cool with us so because you guys were customizing yeah we were touching which my my whole thing is like, well, I just bought an Aventador, right? And I'm

changing the color of it and the wheels. Is f***ing Lamborghini going to come knocking on my door because I just changed the color of my car? No, so we're buying these shoes retail from customizing them. So we had, I mean, we're good to

go in my eyes but i guess like nike's coming down on everybody right they are they are for sure but nike will take your they obviously have a streetwear element to them nike is the biggest thief in the industry they'll make them come after well no no no what i'm saying is they'll look at his design the customization and then they'll drop a air Force one that'll look just like it. Can you patent a shoe design? You can. You can patent anything.

So they do have trademarks that they just got recently, but I don't know. I just feel like I have to be careful with what I say, so I'm trying to think before I say it. But look, I feel like like I didn't do anything wrong and I know I didn't do anything wrong. It's just, they kind of press you. They throw allegations. They accuse you and basically bleed you dry, swallow you and throw you out on the street with nothing. They're doing that with Kool Kai. Yeah. And John Geiger too.

Really? Yeah. Who else? Ami and a hookup. Yeah. Oh, Ami and a, oh, they came out. came out yeah because he's using it yeah wait what did he do like going to prison for like three years not off that but off some other oh wait was that the scam or something no no no he's definitely his Nike Nike's trouble for other stuff but he also got in trouble for a sneaker yeah Nike's coming after everybody for using their silhouette. So, like you said, they got some new trademark stuff coming through. So, it allows them to just come after everybody.

Even if you change the shoe a little bit, they still don't even care. Really? It's like, no. You have to change a certain percent. Well, it was like 1 to 10, but Nike's still like, no. Because they reissued a lawsuit against babe against babe yeah they allowed bake to actually use the air force one silhouette which bake showed proof of that and they still like nah suing you it was like 14 years now that they tried to like do a

collaboration and i guess the licensing deal didn't work but like i don't want to compare like them to what we did because what we did we did everything correctly we came out with our own original shoe and we were also selling air force one so it's like they actually all they did was replicate a shoe and slapped a lightning bolt instead of the swoosh it's a little bit and it's like come on it's like spade to spade, bro. It's a knockoff straight up. It's definitely a tricky argument. So going back to licensing, you listed off a lot of heavy hitters. Why not Pokemon? Well, we are trying to work with a lot of them.

It's just kind of hard to get them to work with us, you know? That's a heavy hitter. Yeah, like there are many people like selling anime, like street wear, all these type of designs. But it's one day Pokemon or whoever owns that licensing is going to knock on their door and come with like a huge fat. And if they really want to, they can come through with the lawsuit, but they can file a complaint versus a cease and desist. So they can go straight to the point they got the money for it so what we're trying to do is we're trying to do everything legit versus trying to scheme behind certain ways because we don't want to get in trouble for it but don't they take like what like 30 50 50 sometime maybe 60 40

they take it no they don't it depends on your deal but like 15 of sales something crazy yeah and they ask for an advance depending on what licensing like with drip we were talking about okay i almost said something but with drip we were talking about licensing i'm not going to say which ones but we were talking about several licensing and they were taught they were asking us from anywhere of 75 to 300 grand depending on right yeah it's taken out of the sales no it's yeah it's an advance taken out of the sales one thing you crushed it was with was your influencer marketing yeah and the you like straight dominated because you weren't even charging the celebrities that you were partnering with and you worked with some of the biggest names how did you pull that

off so we worked with over 1500 influencers and celebrities and like hundreds of them per day uh we did like shoes for logan paul charlie d'amelio you name it ruby rose like selena gomez whoever like it didn't matter who you were we probably made you some shoes so very similar to your model with like jersey champs um we wanted to make them custom shoes so we asked them can we make you a custom shoe and they were totally down with it for some reason like we got big enough to where our messages were like automatically at the top of their dms probably and they read every single one but what was real what was really interesting it got it became like a snowball effect eventually we had influencers and celebrities reaching out to us

i remember machine gun kelly and black bear messaging me personally because we weren't responding on like drip uh like yo can i get some custom shoes made and jake paul too and uh black bear i remember him sending me like an album cover and he's like, yo, you should use this on on a shoe. It'll sell. Like, are you giving us the rights to use you on our shoe? So it got to that point where it was like a very personalized relationship versus a business deal. And we were able to like sell a lot of different collaborated shoes without having to go officially through like licensing and advances i think because you had a trusted brand and you weren't really asking them to post you were just naturally just yeah definitely like we didn't ask for anything it's like very similar to

what you did bro yeah do you want a pair of shoes cool i can customize anything that you want on them what's send me your logo send me a picture of your dog i got you and eventually like when you got these pair of shoes you opened them and it was like the coolest thing ever because it's unique everyone gets t-shirts hats glasses socks but no one gets shoes and when they get shoes it's game over they automatically posted it because they love this and that's part of what my formula is of success when it comes to brand building collaboration is definitely key but it's high barrier to entry collaborative products meaning he doesn't do shoes he just does clothing i do shoes and he can't do it or i do jerseys because nobody can do jerseys but I do jerseys

getting into that high barrier what stopped you from getting into the kids niche I never thought about it we did we were making like kids shoes we were getting into that but with clothing I never got into it I just didn't know about it till till right now yeah like you literally you literally opened my mind. Right now. It's so crazy. Right now. Because when I did tell people, like, I'm like, yeah, I'm starting a baby line.

People were sitting there like, what? And I'm like, yeah, get close. We all start off as babies, so. Yeah, like, because, you know, like, the first thing that happens as a baby is you're growing. Right. So your return customer rate is much higher. Right, right. And siblings, you want your kids to

match and things like that wow that's actually a good tip there because you're right like they're gonna outgrow the clothes so they have to come back how many people you have a sister how many people you know only have one child right yeah customers probably have kids yeah yeah most people have multiple children I have siblings you have siblings i was like the only only child in my town you don't have no brothers and no everyone i knew we had like 3 000 kids in my school i was like one of the few only childs in the whole school oh no that's crazy most people do have multiple children and at one time in your life you probably matched that sibling in one way shape or form they dressed you the same. So it became a really easy way to create a higher AOV with clothing. So I was

going to ask you with the profit margins, how did you stay afloat with clothing? That's so that's easy. That's easy for me. And the reason why is because my average order value on every brand that I have is over a hundred dollars because I create mystery boxes so the reason why and I'm not afraid to like be completely open the reason why tune in Tokyo my clothing brand is almost 10 years old is because we've survived off this 120 mystery box and it's like 60 percent of our sales. It's 10 items for $100. So a deal that you can't refuse. And our CPA is about $20 to $30. We still make about 65% margins on the cost of good. So we're walking away with anywhere from $25 to $35 per order on those mystery boxes so at scale when we're selling three four hundred of them a day we're selling a thousand shirts or pieces a day yeah with the lights on

so that's exactly how we did it yeah i feel like the apparel space is tough and like i just launched my own jersey company but it's for disney people like theme park goers it's called park friends so you kind of did it but i did it for theme park goers it's called park friends and before i even started this brand i knew i needed to stay over 150 average order value so i wanted to do not a mystery box but a bundle deal so like bogo 50 off buy two jerseys for 150 what style jerseys it's uh hockey baseball all of them but they're at their uh that like the theme is for the theme park or what yeah yeah so like if you go to universal like i don't know if you've ever gone to disney but everybody rocks like yeah exactly so that's what we're doing we're take we're i don't know the proper like terminology but we're

making parodies of we're getting inspired and we're making parodies of like your favorite movies of disney and universal okay and you get to put your family's last name on the back yeah and your favorite number they're the fully fully customizable that's fire yeah that fire yeah you're bringing in that over a hundred dollar price so high barrier to entry plus my yeah it's bogo so it's 150 ticket and i'll pay like 30 for cost per acquisition at scale i'm still making 30 to 40 per order and i'm happy how do you balance all of this i mean you're doing a lot of businesses so i do have a team um i have so my money comes from tuned in tokyo life of an outsider which is this brand i like that um thank you and uh park friends and then i have a master class where i make like 30 grand a year from which is like nothing which is nothing and yeah you're gonna have to hit her up

10 million so i'm new to the coaching space but uh i have like investments that build compound interest like over month to month so i have that too but the way i manage all of them is definitely like with partners in the team so i've noticed that i'm not a great I could be as good CEO but I'm not a great like consistent CEO I'm really good when it comes to marketing so if I can just be the CMO of every business which takes about 10% of my time and I'm just like structuring making checklists every day and I'm able to knock everything out cmo yeah i don't really need a ceo or water that's the water to the business so what industry do are you curious about and wanting to get into and haven't just dove into it yet uh the coaching space is something

that i'm like diving into but other than that i feel like i've already hit everything i wanted except for kids except for kids but i don't have kids yet so when i do have kids i'm pretty sure like i'm at that point where i need to actually be passionate about what i do it's not about money or dollar signs anymore back in the day it was like pre-2020 i was like really chasing revenue and money now I'm just like 100k 200k profit doesn't really like impress me no more and he's not even million it has to be like 10 million or more I feel that I'm at that point where if it's not going to make 10 million or more and I'm not passionate about it I'm not going to do it I feel like that's where i'm at so do you feel like for clothing it needs

to be customized to be profitable no i mean there's plenty of people it's just you're gonna have to work 10 times harder than i do to acquire a customer at the end of the day because everything i do is so custom and so unique that kind of gets my foot in the door, brings me opportunities like with this brand Life of an Outsider. We started this as a denim company. So I found this fashion designer, bad fashion designers. There's two guys, two partners that I have. And I told him, yo, you guys are really dope from the same city. Let's build this into like an actual brand.

And let me scale it. First year we do 800k with zero ad spend um and this year i mean who knows what we're going to do but we started off as a denim company and denim is something i wanted to get into jeans so jeans is expensive jeans is crazy yeah i mean we're selling 200 jeans so my average order value again close to $200 and I can scale this business. It's just cut and sew, though. That's a little bit more difficult. I remember it's always expensive.

It's a little bit more difficult. I remember when you told me about this business idea before you even started last year. And now you've already done a million. It's crazy how fast you grow these things. I know. I know. It's pretty dope. But I feel like I've hit the underground designer.

I've done the basic t-shirt company, the shoe space. I mean, I just kind of want to like exit my businesses and then see what happens from there. Yeah. Was there a certain level of wealth you hit where you're just like, wow, I'm set for life. I'm chilling. 2020 was a great year. That was like the year where I was pretty much set for life but i realized one thing like i can stop doing everything that i want to do right now if it was just me and my girl but if it was if i'm trying to take care of my parents and maybe my siblings i'm not done yet i'm set for life for sure but that's me being selfish if I say that.

So right now I feel like I still need some work to do. I'm not done yet. And I'm young, too. Like, I mean, I'm not the youngest. I'm 31. I just turned 31. But, bro, I still got like another five to ten years in me to just grind my face. So I'm longer than that. Grind my. Well, I don't want to like work. I'm saying so i work six days a

week 24 hours that day like the moment i go to sleep to the moment i wake up even in my sleep i'm probably working i'm saying i'm it's 24 it's 24 now i'm not i may i take one day off but i don't know if i can do that after 40 you know like I got I told myself I got another five years to grind my face off like I got 20 bucks in the bank account after that like I'm probably gonna coast and chill but yeah up until then like I'm just I'm gonna eat as healthy as possible I'll do my best to work out wherever i can but majority of my time is being spent on my businesses right now so when people ask me like where do you find all the time to do what you do well i'm doing it full time all day every day and i think that if you're going to

be a great entrepreneur you have to do those things like there's nothing wrong with like entrepreneurs that work out look fit and are good but while they're at the gym while they're watching tv while they're watching their favorite sports game i'm working so i'm always going to outwork everyone i've always outworked my business partners i've always outworked my girl and our relationship i've always outworked everyone and it's not like I'm competitive towards people. Cause I'm actually humble, but I'm just so passionate about winning that I'm willing to do whatever's

necessary, including outworking people. Mamba mentality. Yeah. It's like that. Yeah. Is your girl cool with you working, you know,

six days a week, 24 hours? No, no woman is. No woman is. I woman is i mean you want to chime in here yeah like i i don't i mean you're a hardcore entrepreneur so you probably are more lenient trips together trips that's the thing like my man works all the time but like we have date like it's a date for the whole year it's a list of this is my time and i know i always i'm

a person that has to have something to look forward to. Like if he didn't give me like, hey, we're gonna go out on X day or do this on X day. Yeah, we wouldn't have made it. Like I have to have something to look forward to. As long as there's a date that's set aside for me that I have and I can look at the calendar every single day, then I'm cool.

But the minute you take that away, oh no, I'm not making it to tomorrow. I won't i feel that do you go on vacations at all with your girl yeah like once a year we just got back from a three week it's better than better than three weeks yeah it was like three weeks though in europe how was that it was dope bro i mean it's definitely like inspiring but even out there it's kind of hard to shut off you know like i'm looking at all of these different we're in the fashion capital of the world you know milan and paris i'm just getting all these different ideas my brain is racing the whole time inspired by it all same thing you take time like november

and december we stand on vacation damn near the whole two months and now we're not traveling at all we just it's just work now so but i know when november comes that we'll be gone the entire month so i mean but you worked the whole year for it though yeah so it makes sense it just makes it easy though to just set that time aside right so where can people find you at and um uh the best place to find me is instagram so at frankie kuros with q U I R R O Z. Perfect. And your brands,

uh, tuned in Tokyo. You can just Google it. Uh, drip creations with the Z at the end life of an outsider, which is a brand that I'm wearing and park friends. Just Google all the four in there. They're pretty big.

So you'll find them. Oh yeah. Any closing comments? Um, nah, bro. Just happy to be alive. Happy to be them. For sure. Hell yeah. Any closing comments? Nah, bro. Just happy to be alive. Happy to be here. Thank God.

Got to jet back to California. Oh, man. I love you. Happy to have you, bro. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, bro. Thank you. All right, guys. Digital Social Hour.

Thanks for tuning in. See you next week. Peace.