Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - A Story of Growth: How Buff City Soap is leveraging Shopify and it's people to take a giant leap foward

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Who doesn't love to feel great and smell even better?! (Said no one!)In this episode, host Ryan Alford and Director of E-commerce at Buff City Soap, Sanjay Jenkins, talk about the transition out of Woo Commerce as they head into a more integrated e-commerce approach. Sanjay entered the e-commerce space in a fun way, and his journey to Buff City Soap has proven fruitful.Here are some highlights from the episode:Successful transition from Woo Commerce to ShopifyThe extreme growth of Buff City Soap. Buff City started with just a few stores in 2013, have grown to 44 and countingMarketing strategies in a franchise business modelAnd more (We're not going to give it all away!)Follow along in our series, The Future of Digital Commerce, to learn how to scale your e-commerce and marketing strategy | @the.rad.cast | Like our host? We do too! Follow him on Instagram | @ryanalford | If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford. Welcome to the latest episode of the Radcast. We're in the middle of our e-commerce series. It's been going really well. We've had some fascinating guests.

And we've got a fast-growing company that I'm excited to be talking to Sunjay Jenkins, who's the director of e-commerce with Buff City. Soapes, Sunjay, great to have you on the Radcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. Great. Well, hey, man, you're the director of e-commerce. We talked a little bit pre-episode of the growing role that you have.

We'll talk about that as we get into the episode. But maybe let's just go right at it. Let's talk about Sunjay. Let's talk about your background. And then we'll dig into specifics on Buff City. But maybe just start there, man. Yeah, I'll give you the, I grew up in Missouri. I'm a Missouri boy, a small town.

I'm big nerd. I just love learning about stuff. I got into e-commerce about seven years ago, and I started a Barkbox clone. So it was like right when the subscription box, boom, started to happen. Saw barkbox was taken off, thought I'd do the same. Just started the, it was a class project in college,

is like my senior year project. And we made, you know, five figures a month doing it from a revenue perspective. but that was like my first lesson in like profitability and just like just the complexity of operations. Because we made no money from a profit standpoint. It was for every box that we sent to a customer, we sent one to an animal shelter, kind of trying to do the Tom's one-to-one there. But there was so many.

We just did not plan out the cost associated with shipping and like actually letting the customer choose where to send it to versus us making those like donations in bulk. So we ended up graduating college. We rolled that, like actually handed that off as a project for students in the entrepreneurship program at the University of Arkansas at one, just where I went to college. And I just worked in e-commerce in a variety of places. I worked at an architecture and engineering consulting firm, which is a very specific thing. and they sold digital products.

So they had information books about, you know, what the salaries were supposed to be for your architects and your project managers who were, you know, civil engineering background project managers, like very interesting, very niche there. From there, I work. So the thing that I learned there, one of the cool things about how my career has progressed thus far, is that at each job, like there was one skill that I really, like, got to go deep on.

At that company was email marketing. So I was not familiar with email marketing at all at that point. Like, I grew up in the age of social media being like the number one thing. And that was always the focus, especially particularly on the organic side. So I was like, okay, email marketing, do people actually open this and just seeing the power of it. So, you know, learning how to, I became a power user of Clavio in like two weeks. And, you know, we ran about seven figures through the pipe just on email at that business. From there, I worked at a e-commerce platform startup, which is an interesting experience.

It's basically a competitor to Shopify Plus, really enterprise-level software. And the thesis that that business was, you know, Shopify's got this entire ecosystem of apps and all these features. Like, what happens if we consolidate everything? and then build like a true enterprise software in that space. So I was the seventh employee. I was the first sales hire. I was an SDR there. I started as an SDR.

As I went along, I mean, I learned two major skills at that business. But first was selling. Like I became like a proficient seller from SDR to close. And then the number two thing that actually became kind of, of the cornerstone of my career since that moment was media buying. So I really, I went deep on media buying. And as that kind of company progressed, and I kind of realized, like, you know, it's probably not going to work out for me here long term. We actually launched an email marketing tool, basically like a MailChimp light, which MailChimp is by itself a pretty, pretty lightweight

product. So something even less robust, very simple product. But we got, like we went from zero to about $100,000 in ARR in like a week, like about a week and a half through media buying. I literally recorded the ads in front of the camera, edited the videos, bought the ads myself, like full end-to-end, built the landing page, the whole thing. So that was a really cool experience. Realize that, you know, I can make a little bit of a career out of media buying and just doing agency work now that have the email marketing skills, a buddy who worked at the company, that startup, we left and we started our agency,

ran the agency for a little bit, just working with e-commerce folks. So that's our bread and butter. What was interesting about that little experience was we were in North West Arkansas, so that's predominantly Walmart, J.B. Hunt and Tyson. And really, if you're in agency world, the money is servicing,

money isn't servicing Walmart. We didn't do any of that. We worked with companies that didn't sell. into Walmart.com or didn't sell into Walmart at all. So we're always kind of like the odd man out. And I was trying to figure out like, what's the next path? Is it, do I go start? Like the bag was very clearly in servicing these Walmart clients, you know,

six, seven, eight figure contracts. No one really understood direct to consumer the way, you know, we did at the time in Northwest Arkansas. And so I was trying to figure out what to do. And then someone that I met a couple of, years prior. His name's Justin Delaney, CEO of Buff City. He hit me up on Instagram. He DM me. He was like, hey, man, like, I've got something I want to talk to you about. I met Justin two years ago or, yeah, it's two years ago now at a pitch competition at the University of Arkansas.

It's like one of the 60-second business idea pitches. I won the contest. He was one of the judges. We talked about shoes for 30 minutes. He was wearing Yeeasies. He's got one of the greatest easy collections I've ever seen. I think he has like literally every pair. And we talked about that and we kept in touch for two years over Instagram DMs about shoes. And we have like a great like love of cars. And like particularly Porsches and Lamborghini. So that's what we talked about for two years. And then he's kind of out of the blue.

I didn't realize that he was actually following what I was doing in my career and hit me up about the job of running e-commerce for Buff City, which I started back in January. What that looked like was replatforming online. off of WooCommerce, putting us on Shopify, building out the tech stack, and just starting to scale this business from, you know, just like the really basic direct-to-consumer stuff, getting our Facebook and Google ads running correctly, you know, just like the really, really it's honestly like simple at this point. Maybe it's when you do it, I guess it's pretty complicated. And then in addition to that, I've been doing support for digital marketing for the entire Buff City system. So we are, just to kind of give some context on Buff City, we are a

primarily physical retail soap company. Everything that you see in a store is really made in the store that you're seeing it in. And our physical retail footprint growth happens through franchising, so we're a franchise business. It's a really interesting model. I run e-commerce, which is kind of owned from the central franchisor entity and have to work really closely with franchisees. There's a lot of intricate stuff there in terms of, one, just trying to build an Omni-Channel experience for the customer, making a seamless, but two, on the back end, making sure that, you know, franchisees don't feel like this is corporate competition, but actually, like, building a system long-term that will actually give them credit.

I mean, the goal of the dream is that we can build a system where we can credit them for e-commerce sales that occur in their territories or customers that are in their database. So we're trying to figure out how to execute that at scale. And then recently, as I was telling you about pre-show, like literally last week, I took over the production facility that we have. So it's basically one big soap makery. We're running, you know, very similar processes that we do in the stores to make all of our products. Our products are handmade daily.

And I get to like, there was like, I did the Six Sigma internship a couple years ago at a shingle company. And I was like on like, I went from fiberglass to the asphalt lines to like the finished shingle line like diagram and all these things. I get to like deploy that kind of thinking, that experience into a facility that I control. And the cool thing there is, you know, from the moment a raw material, you know, the soap blend is made. it's poured into a mold, gets cut to getting a customer to buy it online, you know, and then shipping to them. Like, I control that entire experience now. And having these controls, understanding the process just makes scale a lot easier to achieve

in the wrong run. So that's the abridged version of my career. A lot to unpack there. A lot of keywords, you know, your clavio experience, we're a Clavio partner agency or Shopify partner agency. I have to like, I don't know, my mind just goes here. I could go about, I have like 10 things noted here, but I'm going to go here. So when you first come into Buff City, was it already decided or did you make the decision to transfer from, you know, WooCommerce, which runs on WordPress, is their e-commerce engine? It's considered a legitimate

e-commerce platform, even, I'm going to lead you to an answer that I hope it is, because as a Shopify agency that does both. I'll show my hand a bit. I am curious, was that your decision, when a decision already made and you came in to help steer that? Or, you know, what was the decision? You're moving from what is a relatively robust e-commerce platform? Your commerce is not a lightweight.

It's not like some clients that come to us around Squarespace e-commerce or something, you know, I can understand that transition. Walk me through whose decision that was. and why the decision was made. So that was something that Justin, CEO, had kind of already decided upon. And I was just kind of like the verification step. I was like, yeah, if I'm going to run it,

like I went on on Shopify. All of the sites that I've been able to scale, we built on Shopify. Which is not to say that there aren't other e-commerce platforms. I think we'll evolve. We'll probably have a more custom solution as we grow. The nature of the business that we're in. but for right now, Shopify is the platform.

You think about WooCommerce that scares me the most is that when you have a product or you add a product to a cart, it creates this like phantom blog post. And that's how like WooCommerce on the back end actually like tracks these things. And think about like the technical complexity of that system. Just you're trying to turn a blog tool into a shopping cart. Like it's scary as hell. Yeah.

So we, yeah, I was I was so eager to get off of WooConnor. It was a decision that had been made, and I'm glad that it wasn't hard to put the final stamp on that. We've had a lot of clients come to us that, you know, have been on, you know, big commerce and other platforms that are seemingly, but nothing scales like Shopify does. I don't want this to be a Shopify commercial, but I'm in agreement. We use Claibio as well and some of the integrations and just they've kind of figured it out. And now Shopify Plus is the more commercial grade, you know, as you. grow that that's an opportunity or whether you you know custom code your own you know site you know right to a certain point so you so you own the full experience and don't feel like you're renting

from shopping right you know right for sure own land versus rented land another discussion we had in the marketing space but talk about the you know what that transition's done and kind of just overall growth that you guys are happening maybe just give us some some uh the landscape of where above cities at. So I'll say I'll be delicate about this in the way I phrase this. We have, so we haven't hit Q4 yet. This is September 23rd, I think. In 20, since we have 10x the top line of 2019 so far this year before hitting holiday.

And we are very much one of the retailers where like, you know, 40 to 60% of our revenue, maybe more, depending on how hard we can scale in the next few months, we'll come from Q4. So Shopify has been a tremendous tool. If we were still on WooCommerce, so like when COVID lockdown started happening across the country, a lot of our stores had to shut down. So we essentially, like all of that store volume was processed through our store.

If we were still running in WooCommerce, it would have, like we would have had like a disaster. We had on April 1st, which was hilarious because I'll say April Fool's Day, we had our biggest day yet. Like single day was 3X what we did on Cyber Monday 2019, which is just insane. Just a really great preview of what's to come later this year. But if we were on WooCommerce, like we would not have been able to support that. Even on just like very simple things, like customer service. So I run the customer service team.

We are set up on gorgeous. That's our customer service tool. The fact that our customer service team can, you know, we need to reship an order for some reason or like they were missing a bar of stuff, but we can take care of things really quickly. That is just one of the great parts of Shopify is that it's so well integrated with so many things. It's so easy to use and it's so easy to train people on. if we probably when when we move to a custom solution i'm trying to mimic as much as we can

from like the shopify experience just because from the back end user perspective it's it's pretty dialed in in my opinion what's been the um path to growth from a marketing perspective for buff city you know maybe from a tactical standpoint whether it's social media which i'm sure it's a big role um but maybe what are some of those you know tactical past that have that have seen and driven the growth for you guys. So we launched our first ad, like true like Facebook marketing, like advertising on March 16th, I think. That's been a huge lever for us this year as we've scaled.

So like top line customer acquisition stuff, Facebook advertising has been like the cornerstone of that. Within that, we're really big on text message marketing. And we use a tool called Voxi. They're based out of Atlanta. It's two-way communication. So we can do blasts. We can do behavior-based triggered texts, like a banning cart, for example.

But we can also, like, customers can text us back. And my customer service team is plugged in to have two-way communication. So if the customer texts in, like, we'll send a blast on like a weekend sale day and say, hey, like we're doing a laundry sale, you know, stock up on your laundry soap. don't forget to add a dryer ball. And customers say like, hey, what's a dryer ball? Or like, what kind of sense do the dryer balls come in? Like customer service team comes in and says X, Y and Z.

So that list has been, especially from like a conversion standpoint, it converts a lot higher at a higher rate than our email marketing list. But for both email marketing and the text message marketing, we've been doing pretty aggressive push, just like lead generation stuff, just to grow those lists. because once we have them, obviously it's a lot cheaper than trying to pay the Facebook, the Zuck tax to acquire them again. So, you know, Facebook advertising flowing into just like true direct response and then also

lead generation to build our email and tax messages list. And we're, you know, we're very intentional about that. We've 20X our email list since I took over. Yeah, that's great. Got to have, you got to own the customer relations. And that starts with email primarily. Is any other channels? So you've got the stores.

You've got an e-com. Are you guys at Amazon? I mean, any other distribution is 100% D to C? It's D to C. And really the reason, so I'll put a little asterisk on that. The core Buff City business, you know, from a customer perspective, is like, you know, this is a place where I get soap. But for us, when we look at it as stewards of the brands, of the brand, as executives

of the company, like our first customer is our franchisees. So Buff City's value is really derived by, you know, the number of stores we have. And so that's always the primary focus. Like I have to like always say, um, the source. stores are more important than what I do online on e-commerce. And it's a very interesting, like, you know, I've been a DTC guide since, you know, since I started in e-commerce. So, like, having the knowledge that what I do supports a larger mission that's, like,

nothing related to e-commerce, really, has been, has been an interesting shift in thinking. But, like, that's like the baseline is growing the first. franchise business is the most important thing. I'm sorry. What else? There's a deeper part of the question holds. Oh,

the channels, right. Franchisee based, obviously, which is actually, and I want to go down that path of the, the e-com franchisee share model. Like,

I want to hit that, but didn't know if there were plans in the works for other distribution points. Right. So the reason why we don't do Amazon, we don't do wholesale, we're trying to grow the franchise footprint, like the store footprint. So that is like our true like mechanic of growth and scale and distribution. I mean that every time we open a store, like that's just more fuel for the econ as well.

It's just by nature of like franchisees spending money to grow marketing and people becoming more of the brand, us spending marketing on behalf, our marketing dollars on behalf of the franchisees to grow awareness and new markets, things of that nature. We've got a vending machine that we're testing out. all this crazy stuff that we do. The stores are the primary growth channel, which I think is, I think it's a unique... It's contrary to everything else that's going on in a COVID world.

If we just want to call it what it is, obviously you guys are generating success from it. We're going to talk about some of that growth. But, you know, you're at 40 plus stores. You've had a COVID world, still in a little bit of a COVID world, where everything's moving online. You guys are growing online, but you guys see the growth through the stores

and through that experience. So that's unique to you guys, for sure. I mean, what, like, we're so lucky to be selling soap, like making and selling soap in a time when the world needs it. And then for us, we feel this great sense of duty for people to provide people with, you know, something that they need, but in a really delightful way.

So our fragrances, our product forms, like the way you use them. Like all of these things are designed to be delightful and pleasant and like spark joy in your life. Which is, it's a really great thing to like come in and every day and like, no, like we're trying to make the world a little bit better place from our supply chain. Like all the good stuff that we're trying to do there making sure we're not, you know, supporting any like manmade mica mines. Like we're kids working. We cut that kind of, make sure we avoid all of that and we don't support those kinds of entities and all the way to like the end customer experience where they receive it and they can like, you know, smell a bar, whether it's in store or on and they receive a shipment. It's pretty, I feel like it's almost like a noble cause in that way of what we're doing. We're really lucky to be in this game right now.

Like there are so many things. And it's a very jarring thing to say, I think, because like obviously, the luck has not been evenly distributed across the ecosystem. So we're trying to grow as much as we can. It's gratifying to be able to provide people jobs in a time when it's really hard to get a job. So that's the kind of stuff that we're really working for us. It's like we want to be stewards of growth to be able to provide opportunity in time.

It's really hard to access opportunity. That's great. So you're at 40 plus stores this year. and growing and some significant growth plans for next year. You talk about that and back to that e-com share, which is pretty unique, you know, how you guys are envisioning. You know, a lot of times the stores are in, see themselves as in competition with their corporate e-com site, right?

You can buy online, then I sell less in store, but you guys are approaching it a little differently with your growth. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So, I mean, again, primary growth metric is store, number of stores that are open. Our goal is to have a thousand stores open in the United States alone by 2025. And that's just like, that's what we're doing. We will be to our third of the way there or so, like about, that's the estimation right now, by the end of next year.

So, you know, the rest of solid two years in and like we've made some amazing progress. And it's just like, it just depends on how quickly, you know, we can get real estate approved and, and,

get store set up. Is it 100% franchise? 100% franchise? It's not 100%. It's mostly, I think, probably like at scale it'll be like 95ish, I don't remember the exact number, but it'll be primarily franchise.

Some company owned. and primarily franchised. Right. So our corporate stores right now, we've got some in Memphis, which is where the company is founded. We're opening two here in Dallas, which is our new headquarters in the next couple of months, which will be really exciting,

some amazing flagship stores. And then our Denver market is also corporate right now. But everything else right now that we have is franchise on. And so, but the e-commerce side is being tailored to where, franchisees will share in revenue that they're you know say you come onto the site and i you know we're in greenville south carolina so let's say you have we have a store that opens in greenville hopefully soon uh the it's like q1 or q2 of next year it's coming so buff city opens i'm on my phone i'm store locator and i'm here and i purchase there's going to be some attribution back to

the store that ecom share so that's the goal um we that's one of those like five-year infrastructure projects that we had. I was about to say that seems like a long-term play. That's a great difficult play, you know, on the, we don't have to get too geeky on the technology side of that. But that's pretty high at development stuff there. Our CTO, his name's Brandon Powers. He is like a wizard, like a technology wizard. I wish I could have a tenth of his like brain power.

So that was like when he came on earlier this year or at the beginning of the year, his five-year vision was like to be able to build that model. We piloted it or pilot, yeah, we tested it throughout COVID. So when the stores shut down or like, you know, it was kind of variable, we started doing rebates. So basically using the store customer database to cut like, you know, checks to stores. Like, okay, this is like, the customer. customer was acquired at your store, order was processed online. You can't be open legally. So like,

here's, you know, here's the money. That allowed, like, some stores were able to continue to grow through it, I guess if they were able to do curbside. Other stores, they were from those checks at least able to pay rent, which is so critical. Like, the fact that, you know, we were able to help these businesses stay upright and going in the right direction in a time when it was very, very difficult for retail to exist at all. Long term, so we're calling this program shipped from store, which is, which rolls in both the attribution model and, you know, as the name suggests, like the ability to ship from the store.

So all of the products that we have can and are made in the stores. So we can turn those into like we need production and distribution centers. So in, you know, the future state that we're working to, we've built, you know, some way to attribute cleanly and reliably the sale to the store as when it gets processed online. And then we don't, we haven't worked at any of the details on like what the percentages are and like how that's calculated yet. But in addition to that, like the same way that when you order like a. pizza from Pizza Hut, your closest franchise, Pizza Hut is the one delivering it. They're the ones making it and shipping it to you. Or if they have a delivery vehicle, for example, they'll deliver it to you.

So that's the future state we're working on. That's probably when we leave, like, the Shopify ecosystem, go build a custom e-com setup that's really deeply tied to our store point of sale system, which is unified across the system. And that's, like, the core. And then from there, it's like layering on, like, loyalty, like, a unified CRM, we can track lifetime value in store and online versus just like those two entities separately. That's where the stuff gets really crazy and really fun.

What are, is there anything else on the marketing side that's, you know, been successful for you guys? I mean, influencers, have you gone that path. Direct mail. Direct mail. Hey, I love it. We work with, we actually just still do a lot of direct mail too. It's so funny. People have like given up on it. It's like still. works. Yeah, if you do it right. And for us, like, we have, we've done it both for the stores and online. And we basically just like have a like a kickback. It's like, you're 20% off or $5 off laundry or a free bar of soap, that sort of thing. That's been really effective for us. And I think through the postal service, it's like 17 cents to send a postcard. Like it's super cheap. So it's

really effective. Influeners have been good. We haven't used that as aggressively as I would have liked from a like a sales growth for example. We're doing a lot of work on the, um, basically influencers doing parties with their followers in the stores, getting, you know, people in the stores.

Again, that's like the primary, uh, thing that we want to support and grows, like all the stores that we have. Um, we've got some influencers. Like,

I think the best channel that we've had influencer like effectiveness on in any sort of return has been TikTok. So we'll give influencers like a discount code for them to share with their followers. We'll send them a care package. And they'll post about it. Here's my code. We got some like it's it's you know 80, 20 rule to the max. We've got a ton of people who like, you know, one z, two z sales here and there.

And then we've got a few. They're just like massive like returns. And they've got like 4,000 followers. It's not it's not a crazy follower account. It's that for us like the local. communities. Like our model for the stores works well in 10,000, like populations of 10,000 people and, you know, much more than that.

We can support such a like a wide range of folks. So it's just cool to see like those micro-influencers. Oh, yes. I guess they're called. That's where it's at, the micro-influenfer. Really crank. Yeah. We see it with campaigns we run like a couple thousand, three-thous followers.

they get the best results. You need a bunch of them. They're cheaper so you can spread it out. Talk about who's your customer? Who is the, I mean, I know there's probably different, but who is the Buff City customer? Like, what's your profile? So I'll use some of the terminology that we have in our brain guidelines. She is, you know, someone who is scent obsessed and wants something that is good for her skin,

just like conscious of that, like skin conscious, I think is the terminology there. The scent obsessed part is the really critical thing. We are a scent-first brand. Our fragrances are amazing. Like we've got such a wide range of them too, and we can customize a lot of things. So it's really just people who care about the,

like the plant-based, like the natural ingredients that we use in our soaps and skin care products. But really, like, they're primarily motivated by fragrance. So, you know, these are the, we kind of overlap a lot of customers with lush and Bath and Body Works. I think those are probably like the two best competitor proxies that we have. So, yeah, it's just like, from an age range, like, it's so weird. I, from a client services perspective, hated talking to,

that says, oh, everyone's our customer. Like, we don't have, like, one specific customer profile. We can splice and dice our customers in a variety of ways we do. But there is a lot of evenness in the size of our customer demographics. Apart from, like, gender is probably, like, the most polarized one. I think it's 75, 25, 25 female to male. But our age range is, you know, little kids all the way to 65 plus. we can we can we can we can hit that 13 plus on on snapchat when we run

snapchat ads and like still see a good return hey everybody needs some soap and the smell good yeah yeah it's a very universal thing absolutely yeah exactly uh i love it so where's product development like that seems like that would be a huge one um you know product you know maybe we'll tie it up with that like product development and where you where where things we've talked about it overall but you know i i i don't like to say end game but where you know where are we headed with all this overall for both you and the brand and then you know maybe touch on pride development a little sure um so i'll do product a moment and i'll do like the long the end game kind of stuff um so our cmo his name's chad brisen

Dean who I love that guy. I really do. In his off time, he runs bourbon companies. He just had his first bottle launch for his new bourbon company this week. He and our first soap makers are founders of the company, Brad Kellerman and Jen. They work together really well in coming up with new products, new product categories that can still be manufactured within the store. that's like the context that we always like to take things back to.

But like really like the goal is like how do we kind of P and G it and you know, kind of own everything in in your your bathroom and then your skincare routine. And then obviously like our one of our best products ever is our laundry soap, which is a replacement to laundry detergent. It's a powder. And then it's literally the best stuff. I'll make sure to get shell some. but, you know, it's like going more into the home care stuff.

Like that's the kind of thinking that we're doing now and the plans that we put in action. Again, like trying to contextualize that as much as possible to can be made in the store. I'm sure at some point we'll have to deviate from that maybe. But like primarily it's like let's try to do everything we can in the store to just own bathroom, laundry and just like home care, like bathroom and home care. For the company in general, like 1,000 stores, 2025 in the United States, but like long-term goal, Toledo to Tokyo. Like, we're going to be everywhere globally.

We're very aggressive about, or very intentional, not aggressive, but intentional about trying to break into Asia and Europe. I'm really keen on trying to break into Africa. I just something about that continent that fascinates me. And I think that because of like how universally applicable our brand is, there'd be a lot of cool stuff we could do there. It's something that was just kind of like a passion of mine. And then for me personally, like, I'm trying to ride the soap game as high as I can go.

And, you know, maybe buy some apartment complexes and self-storage units all along the way. But apart from that, just keep cranking in this. soap game, build a really beautiful Omnichannel experience. I mean, that's like the buzzword of the century right there, Omnichannel. But like I truly believe giving customers the ability to buy their stuff from anywhere, whether it's in store

online. And then on the back end, empowering our store operators, whether they're corporate stores or franchise store operators like from a digital marketing perspective, like having access to the LTV data to make really great decisions, having access to the, you know, the real-time, you know, cross-selling upselling decision systems, it's just to increase their revenues because, like, ultimately, we are, like, the brand is supported

by our stores. They always come first. And everything that I do, everything we all do is to support the stores. I love it, man. I wrote down selling suds with your buds. There you go. there it is. I love it, man.

So where can people keep up with all things, Buff City and all things, Sunjay? What are our best destinations? So for Buff City, Buffcitysoap.com, please get you some soap, as it were. And social media at Buff City Soap, if there is a Buff City soap near you, they'll have their own local Instagram and Facebook pages. you can follow our corporate Buff City soap on Twitter and then if you want to hit me up I'm pretty active on Twitter at Sunjay at play

is my Twitter handle DM me just message anytime happy to have a conversation with anybody sweet man Sunj it's been a pleasure let's do it again man let's follow up a little follow up maybe beginning of the year I want to see where this

all this group was headed and you know it's it seems like like you said I mean you're fortunate you I believe people create their own fortunate you know we're in a time where there's hyper sensitivity to cleanliness and those kind of things which is helping things but it sounds like you guys are also kind of creating and generating your own path so congrats to all you guys and really appreciate you coming on the rap cast thank you so much for having having me and then giving us an opportunity to share what we're building All right, guys. Thanks so much, man. We'll talk soon.

Hey, guys, really enjoyed this sit down with Sanjay Jenkins, the director of e-commerce with Buff City Soaps. We cover the gamut of e-commerce on this episode, everything from transitioning from WooCommerce to Shopify and the opportunity to build Shopify Plus or bigger platforms. We talked about Sanjay's growth in his position and the extreme growth of Buff City Soaps. Really fascinating franchise model they have building. and just a lot of exciting content. Check out more with Buff City Soap and always learn more about the Radcast at theradcast.com

or on Instagram at the.orgad. Look forward to see you next time. To listen to full episodes or to contact us, visit us on the web at theradcast.com or follow our host at Ryan Alford on Instagram. Thanks for tuning in.