Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Eucalyptus is the Sheet! Meet Colin McIntosh CEO and Founder of Sheets & Giggles

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

In this episode on The Radcast, host Ryan Alford talks with the CEO and Founder of Sheets & Giggles, Colin McIntosh. In Denver, he's known as the sheet guy, and for good reason! He's generated a million dollar revenue in sheets monthly. He's one with the environment, and is happy to discuss any and all things bedding, sheets, puns, and of course, good marketing.Get ready for a super fun and insightful conversation. Follow Colin on Instagram @colindmcintosh and check out their company at sheeetsgiggles.com or visit their instagram @sheetsgiggles If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love what we discuss, so we can keep giving you the strategies to achieve radical marketing results! You can follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | @radical_results | @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? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. I must say, my favorite name of a business, any business we've ever had, is here today, the business, the founder and CEO of Sheets and Giggles, Colin McIntosh. You win the award officially. And it's just a nice digital pat on the back.

I appreciate that and I feel bad for all other companies that you've had on the radcast They all know where they stand And they're not as cool as sheets and giggles I Raleigh our producer and I talked You know when she found you guys And I was doing research

And I was like I got to talk to this guy And I got to meet this company Because anyone with a sense of humor That's also killing it in D to C Is already my best friend Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I asked me how I came up with the idea, or like why I started a benchie's company.

And I do often say that a solid, like 70% of the reason is because I was just that obsessed with the brand name and that into the brand and the company. And I had to do it once I thought out of the client. It was a no-brainer. I love it. And I love the purple. And I love the fact that if you're watching the video,

depending, you know, where you digest your radcast, be it YouTube, IGTV, or the audio, you're just not getting the full effect as Colin has his sheets and giggles shirts on. And I do believe he might be wrapped in in these sheets themselves. I am indeed. Yes. I get my mint green eucalyptus sheets, our gray comforter and a eye mask. Yeah, I like doing these from bed whenever anybody will let me. Actually, we were recently, I was interviewed on Good Morning America in November.

and I actually asked them, can I do the interview from bed in a bathrobe? And their answer surprised me. They said, from bed, yes, in a bathrobe, no, because there's like a weird guideline that apparently is like an actual guideline, which is if you're on ABC in a bathrobe, you're just assumed to be naked under the bathrobe and there's no nudity on Disney channels, which I thought was a great little. They're now building an intent. Like, you know, like they know what you're intending to have on underneath that background. That's news to me. I thought it was great, yeah. But yeah, so, no, thanks for letting me do the interview from bed.

And it's kind of where I do 90% of our work anyway. So I'm feeling natural. Yeah, you're no kidding. Your product in development here. Yeah. Well, Colin, let's give everybody, you know, we're going to have a good discussion. But I do like to tee it up. If you haven't heard of sheets and giggles, you definitely have now.

But let's talk about your story and you know leading up to kind of where we're at today with sheets and giggles Yeah, I mean I don't know how really you want me to start I was born in South Florida I I went to school at Emory University in Atlanta I went to the B school there Then I ended up working at the world's largest hedge fund in Connecticut for my first job called Bridgewater Associates Crazy place not you know any good and bad ways.

I don't know. How long is my non-disparagement clause with them? I got fired in like five months, which was probably the best thing to ever happen in my career, even though at the time when you're 22, you think the world is falling down around you. I became a recruiter. I ended up hiring myself at one of my clients in Seattle. It was my first startup that I worked at.

In 2015, I then ended up driving to Denver for the summer to participate in TechStars Boulder as a employee at one of the first. of those early stage companies going through that accelerator. And then I worked with that company for three years. I got laid off at 1 p.m. on Monday. I've been fired a lot.

I'm not a very good employee. And then three weeks after I got laid off, I found a sheets and giggles in October 2017. And the rest is history. And I've actually worked here longer than any other job in my career so far. All of what, three, four years? Is it four years? Yeah, exactly.

Three and a half. Yeah, the longest part of that was a couple of years. Yeah. You could, you know, we're going to get into it on the ups and downs and pains of startups and all that. But did you consider yourself now, like, being reflective of where you are? Were you always an entrepreneur and you didn't know it? Or have you always been an entrepreneur? Yes to both.

I mean, I guess, I guess the second choice. Yeah, I've always been an entrepreneur and always knew it. I didn't really know that, you know, there was like a subclass of people that were, like, founders and entrepreneurs. and like all the all the different things that go along with that and the kind of the self image that goes along with that for me it was more of like my my dad is an attorney he started his own law firm my mom is an acupuncture she started her own practice um and so growing up I had two self-employed parents that I would just think that was normal that was just they didn't have a boss or a manager that was grilling them they didn't have stories about their managers or their

CEOs or whatever, it was always stories about their clients and their employees and their team. And that was really, I think, formative where that just became my norm. And so, you know, I also always thought that one day I'd started business, I thought it was something that people did. I thought that, you know, growing up, everybody goes to college and then works for somebody else and then starts their own company or maybe even starts their own company directly out of college. That was kind of my perception. And so, yeah, I mean, it took me five years after I graduated to start my own company, but I don't think I could ever work for somebody else again unless it was on different terms

because I can't stand in the corporate world, and that's why I've been fired so many times in my career. Tusha, toochay. And I think we're even getting further from the corporate role with everything COVID's done. It's got everybody working from halfway home or home or whatever. such a good development. I think that just the material improvement in people's lives from not having a commute is going to be world changing for some percentage of the population.

It's going to be incredible. Let's talk about how you started Sheets and Giggles. You know, I've read some of the interviews you've done, but I want the audience to really understand the process that you took, which I thought was really smart. You know, we own a digital agency. I mean, like, we work with a lot of D to C companies and people that have wonderful product ideas. But they haven't really done the research and really backed their way into the full business plan of what the white space is or how they're going to sell product, how they're going to differentiate, all those things.

I'd love for, you know, you to kind of tell that story for how you, you know, thought of and brought all of this together. Yeah, so it's actually interesting. I think a lot of founders will go through the very typical founder journey of I have a problem. I'm going to build a solution and then I'm going to bring that solution to market. And I actually saw that happen over and over again when I went through TechStars, when I was on this other startup. It was very much a problem, solution, business model. And I realized at some point when my last company was kind of, you know, when it didn't work out,

I realized that earlier that that's actually really flawed ways. of creating a business because you're basically spending all this time, energy, and emotion, and money building the solution for the perceived problem. And then so many people do that, it happens every day. And I hear about every startup week I go to, and every time I do mentorship hours, I mentored 10 companies last night for something in Denver called the Commons on Champa, where I do every quarter I mentor these 10 companies that are going through this Denver-funded accelerator and I hear it every time and then they get to the point where they need to build a business model and it's like how do I sell this thing how do I raise money how do I validate this

market oh my god people aren't buying it I can't get any clients and it really breaks my heart because I think a lot of people will will spend years of their life and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars getting to that point only to have the market rejected and so what I did was the opposite I built the business model my perfect perfect business model and then I backed my way into a product that plugged into that business model. And so after I got laid off, I said, okay, well, what have I learned from this experience? It's really emotional gut-wrenching experience. I learned that I'm either going to start my own company or I'm going to go work at Amazon

and actually have to be doing a good salary. I was like, I'm never working for somebody else's startup again. I'm never working for somebody else's business again. Because that is, I think, a surefire way to not pay yourself well enough, not have good benefits and not have actual power to affect, change at somebody else's startup and not even have that really nice exit because you don't control the path there. So it's going to be very binary. I decided to start my own business, and I decided, all right, I need to build my perfect business model. So I want a massive commodities

market with zero brand differentiation or loyalty so I could zig where everybody else was sagging. I wanted something that was highly fragmented so I didn't have to chip away as some market leader. And I wanted something that was largely traditionally physical retail so I could help bring it online with the direct-to-consumer model. I also wanted something that was a low complexity supply chain. And by low complexity, don't get me wrong, textiles is wildly complex, but it does not have Bluetooth, doesn't have firmware, it doesn't have software engineers.

And so I really wanted something that I could, you know, bring to market without having to hire a whole technical team. And so I looked at my perfect business model. And then this is a true story. I looked at, and sorry, the last component I want to mention it is I really want to be a physical, sustainable good so I could be proud of what I was making and so I could have a positive. of impact on the world. And I looked at all the domains that I own. This is a true story. I think there's a ton of power in a brand name and a ton of power in a name. And I owned

Sheetskiggles.com as well as a bunch of other pun-based domains. And I thought, does betting fit my criteria? And it fit it perfectly. 12 billion dollar market, growing 10% you over year, 27% market share amongst the top five players, highly fragmented. And the number one thing was that there was zero brand differentiation. And I looked across the whole space. space, bored me to tears, everybody was doing the best cotton you'll ever feel, oh, the cheapest polyester you'll ever buy. Like, it was, and it was always white sheets on a white wall, exposed brick with a front in the corner of the bedroom and a French press coffee.

You can literally see the Instagram has it in your head, right? Oh, yeah. It's nightmarishly boring. And so I decided to just do something totally crazy and different in the space. And I incorporated three weeks after I got laid off because I was so taken. with the business model. And then I discovered eucalyptus Lyle cell as an incredibly sustainable luxury material in the space that was not heavily adopted yet.

And now we've kind of become the de facto eucalyptus sheet brand in the United States. A lot to unpack there, I think, the biggest. But no, no, it wasn't even that long as much as there was a lot of insight there for anyone in any stage of their brand or development. and it's so many people get so emotionally tied to, you know, a product. And, you know, to hear that you had no emotional tie to a eucalyptic sheets, it warms my heart that you actually did this from a smart perspective of analyzing the market and back. Now I'm obsessed with them.

I'm the best guy in Denver, you know, like, it's a weird, it's a really weird reputation that I have. It's like, oh, yeah, Colin's like the betting. guy and it's like it's a really weird but you know um it's actually but you know i do hear the i do hear them talk about you they said that calling guy he's full of sheet i mean i am definitely talk about you a full i mean do you ever get tired of the jokes of something to they because you you got and it's great because everybody the first time they hear about it everybody wants to get in on the action and it's great because they and other companies try to do other we've seen our competitors like Brooklyn and Boland Branch and Parachute, these very highfalutin, you know,

brands that talk about themselves in these very grandiose terms. I mean, they're just making bed sheets, but, you know, they can fill whatever brand they want. You know, they, and I respect their business a lot. They built the hell of business. But they will start to copy us and they'll start to put the puns in the ads and they'll start to, you know, put the crazier imagery out there that sort of thing, but it's such a dichotomy with the brand that they've built and the products that they're selling that it doesn't work. And so building this from the ground up has allowed us to walk this tightrope of sustainable, luxury, and funny.

And that is like a really hard tightrope to walk. And I think that it creates this sort of like brand moat around the company. And it's a level of authenticity that I think is like, it's very much me in the sense of like this company is just kind of the best parts of my personality with none of the neuroticism, maybe a little of neuroticism. But it's definitely been a lot of fun to build like this brand out of nothing. And you're right, though, that it's the only attachment I have is to the business and to the customer.

And that is what I think makes us successful so far is that we have this very, like, neurotic hyper focus on making that customer happy. and like we are completely dispassionate about the products in the sense of like whatever the community needs, colors, sizing, combinations, new product lines, deeper corners, shallower corners, like, split king, which is like 0.9% of the mattress market. Like, we'll do it all in order to make our customers happy and people really love that. How's scaling been for you guys? Like, I mean, talk to me about, you know, the stages. of scale over these, what, call it three and a half, four years? So October 2017, I found the company.

January 2018, I began work on it. May 2018, we launched on Indiegogo with a crowdfunding campaign, which was the biggest crowdfunding campaign ever for bedsheets. Very proud of that. $284,000 for bedsheets on a crowdfunding platform. Holy shit. I know. And, you know, it's probably the,

the proudest, so there's two things there. I'm very proud of that connection with those people. Those people are my core, you know, they brought the company to life. And so I still have personal relationships with many of our backers. And then on a different level, convincing 2,000 people to wait five months for bedsheets is the proudest marketing accomplishment of my entire life. And I think that there's something to be set there. But so then that was kind of the launch.

We shipped our first box in October 2018, so about five months after, that. We were 30 days late on our promised timeline, which I think is pretty good for crowdfunding. We kept people in the loop very transparent about the timeline there. And then October through January, I was really, I was shipping all the boxes myself. It was me, my buddy Bobby, my customer service rep, Emily. We were in the warehouse eight hours a day shipping boxes. And then eight hours at night, I was doing CEO duties and raising investment and, you know, on the floor. I was on the phone, the warehouse packing boxes, negotiating our valuation of people.

And then January 2019 was when we got into TechStars. And that was kind of a big accelerator for us. You know, it's literally an accelerator. Around that time, early 2019, we were doing about $50,000 a month, $60,000 a month. And now two years later, we're doing over a million dollars a month. So that's kind of the scale that we've had in that timeline. and I kind of yada yada yada through all the

in between there but it's been a pretty it's been a pretty fast two years for sure how big is a team I mean how you know you're all in Colorado there's two answers of that the full-time team is very lean we're only seven people full-time and that is kind of a modern direct-to-consumer company where you're built to have over $1.5 million per head these metrics are pretty well understood, I think, at this point.

And then from a part-time, you know, contractor perspective, there's probably 50 people that I interact with every single day as their manager, boss, director, client, whatever you want to call it. Digital agencies, content agencies, Amazon agencies, our freight forwarders, our warehousing team, manufacturing teams, you know, part-time customer care reps, to supplement our full-time team, our inventory planning, our CFO, legal accounting. And so overall, it's probably about 50 people that I engage with on a daily basis.

But in terms of full-time here in Denver, it's only seven. So we started all D-to-C, all Shopify, website, marketing, all the layers that you did. You're now in Amazon. How is that transition or addition to, you know, You know, you started the right way. You know, we talked to a lot of people that, you know, they go the other way. And Amazon owns a customer relationship. Doesn't have, you can't expand the brand.

You did it the right way, obviously. And now you have a little bit more leverage in some ways. If leverage over Amazon is even, I'm not sure those things, those words exist together. I have zero leverage over Amazon. Yeah. We do own actually Amazon.com slash sheets. Oh, nice. Okay.

Bragg there. That is probably the best URL we'll ever get. So I do want to clarify, I don't think there's like a right and a wrong way. I think that there's two different theories in terms of like what you're trying to build. If you're trying to build an Amazon business that relies on that continuous search volume of your category and you are building a product that is priced appropriately to be number one in that category, that can be in the first three results organically on Amazon and that that is a good, repeatable business

that you don't need to own the customer because that customer comes back and finds you every single time. And so I think that, and there's actually these, you know, Thrasio and other, this is a huge hot space right now. People are raising billions of dollars from these PE groups to go out and buy every single Amazon seller. That's, you know, number one or number five. in their category.

And so it's definitely like a repeatable business that people see a lot of value in. And I just think that that's different. It's just different than the company that I wanted to build. And I don't necessarily think it's a right or a wrong thing. From a D to C perspective in the business model that I wanted to build, yes, the right way would be to own that customer relationship and I get more value out of that customer long term because you own that customer relationship. And I view Amazon as sort of a channel overflow.

to where it's a different customer and we're not really cannibalizing our direct to consumer sales. We actually have an abandoned cart survey that goes out that asks why did you abandon your cart. And it's something like 4% of people say that they prefer to buy from Amazon. So it's a different customer. And it's basically 54% of Americans will start a product search on Amazon. And if you're not on Amazon, your competitors are. And so people, you do all the groundwork and the leg work. to build the content, run the Facebook ads, and do the podcast advertising.

And then somebody searches for sheets and giggles on Amazon, they search for ukulep the sheets, and they find somebody else if we're not on there. And so it's really just a way to capture that natural search volume. And now we have over a thousand reviews on Amazon, and we're pretty well established there with a nice motor reviews around the products. Can you or do you mind sharing your mix of D to C versus Amazon sales? In November, because we were doing heavy email marketing, it was about 9010. January, it was about 85, 15, and then at February it will be about 80, 20.

Traditionally, it's been about 70, 30, but as we've grown, we've really scaled the dot com tremendously more than the Amazon channel and so it's becoming more and more skewed to the dot com. Yeah, that's good. And I don't look, you can make a lot of money with Amazon, but they're kind of the... Yeah, I like Amazon. They do a lot of good stuff for us. I mean, there's a whole bunch of like, you know, I used to live in Seattle, right? I used to live in Lower Queen Anne.

I know people that work there, they're good people. Like, I know the teams there. they support us like they great great small business support um they allow us to reach new customers like new markets all the all the stuff the amazon will pitch you on is true right yeah then then there's the darker side of it there's the margin share the advertising cost the difficult part of the technical support not but the thing is that they are constantly improving that and always trying to get feedback from their partners and they invite me to plenty of sessions to give them feedback on that And there's the political component of it of who this company is and what they do and what they represent that I think also gets muddled in that and is a hard thing to navigate sometimes.

So I think there's multiple components to it. And overall, I think I see as a channel that we have to be on. Yeah. Until they make an Amazon original of your exact product. They already have. Okay. They have much worse reviews than we do. Okay, well, it must not be an exact copy.

So, yeah, exactly. Talk about, you know, the marketing side. I mean, we're a marketing and business podcast, obviously. So the, what's, I know at this stage you're doing a million dollars in revenue a month, you've got a lot of leverage you're pulling, whether it's channels or mediums or whatever. But can you talk about some of your most successful marketing channels as you've grown? Yeah, I mean, they're the ones you expect right they're their Facebook Instagram Google Amazon we have

totally bombed on Pinterest Twitter I've done a lot of organic marketing on Reddit that's not really marketing it's more like I will post stuff about resumes I'll post stuff about Marvel I'll post stuff about other things that I am you know interested in and people will you know comment about like hey aren't you the sheets and your tools guy or like, you know, there will be some nugget about she's and giggles somewhere. And it's a nice way to like add value to the platform and make people smile and laugh and get good value out of the comments I'm doing without like advertising of overly. So Reddit's been good from our organic traffic flow. YouTube has been really good with a sponsorship we've done. Shout out to a guy

named Ryan George who makes these amazing videos where he's talking to himself, which sounds schizophrenic, but he's, you know, he's so funny. And I saw his humor and I just knew it was like a year and a half ago. I reached out to him on Instagram. I was like, I have to sponsor you. I love your shit. And he's been a very successful partner of ours. And I'm trying to scale that with more, you know, sponsorships of YouTube channels.

We haven't really done ads pre-roll before YouTube. We're going to invest more heavily in video this year. And then we've also done podcast advertising through radio. Radio.com, Colorado Public Radio, IHartMedia. And then we do programmatic advertising as well to retarget people that have been on the site. And overall, I would say the success per channel is basically what you expect it to be, where it's like Facebook, Instagram, Google are all crushing it. And then everything else is kind of like experimental.

Oh, that's neat. Let's put more money into here type of spending. Yep. I noticed you guys seem to do a lot with content and SEO and all that. That's got to be a pretty big driver, I imagine. For sure. We do a lot of, you know, I have full-time content marketing manager named Chris who can, I swear to God, he could write for Seinfeld.

And initially I wrote, I wrote all the copy for the first couple of years. I hired him about a year ago, and he's really gotten the brand voice down pat. And so I'm constantly pushing on him to get more blog posts, more content. and more SEO-driven stuff out there. And there's plenty of stuff that we rank very highly for on Google when people are looking for different things about sheets. And we're just constantly pushing on that as well because I think that organic traffic flow is really big

and has a really nice long tail to it as well. This isn't a pitch-you conversation, but I will just tell you a tactic that you should look into that we're doing a lot of search retargeting. So we can get the keyword searches and retarget people. So we don't have to run a paper code pad.

We don't have to be an SEO. We can get the search made IDs in running on Facebook or programmatic for anyone real time that's doing searches. So if I look, if I search for sheets, I can retarget the 90% of all search traffic.

I'm sure that we're doing that. I've got a whole performance team now that I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure we're doing that because a lot of my friends will tell me that the moment they start searching for bed sheets, they see our ads. You're probably doing it through one of their programmatic ones, but it's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. It is tricky because, you know, our sheet sets are, they're super high end. They're like, they're, they can do a shameless plug. They're softer than cotton.

They're more breathable. They're more moisture-wicking. They're better for hot sleepers. They're zero static, hypohylogenic. Their dermatologist recommended for sensitive skin. And they're also incredibly sustainable, right? So you have these cooling soft bed sheets. They're sustainable, luxury sheets.

And then they're also 150 bucks. And our manufacturing costs are four times that of cotton. They're 10 times that of polyester. And we're still beating, you know, bowl and branch on their pricing. We're still beating parachute on their pricing. We're beating almost everybody that I really care about beating from pricing perspective, I don't want people to have to pay to pay more to try a new material, basically, even though our margins are a lot lower.

But at the end of the day, the bedsheets market is a $12 billion market with thousands of options, and 60% of what people are buying is $20 and $30 polyester bed sheets. And people don't even know they're buying it. They're buying microfiber. They're buying down alternative. They're buying vegan fabric. It's all polyester. It's all polyester.

And they, you know, there's 19 results on Amazon. You search for clean sheets. It's got 50,000 reviews or 100,000 reviews or whatever, which is an absurd amount of volume on Amazon. And, you know, we're competing in that market. So I do focus less on, like, that customer who's querying clean sheets. And I focus a lot more on the people who are searching for best sheets for, hot sleepers, best sheets for menopause, best sheets for neuropathy, best sheet for fibromyalgia.

And we get a lot of people with skin conditions or other sensitive sleep conditions to use our sheets and then word of mouth starts to spread from there. I've got a good keyword for you that you should go after. I want to buy eucliptic sheets today right fucking now. I would go after that long tail keyword. I want to buy euclipid sheets right fucking now. I think they're ready. They're raising their hand.

We do a lot of advertising on Eucalyptus sheets. We're actually the number one result on Google and Amazon for Eucalyptus sheets, which is awesome. And it makes me really happy because we fight with our main competitors for that spot. They're a lot more well-funded than we are. But Gen Z and millennials, they'll pay for sustainability. And I don't have to tell you this, because I, if I don't, one stat I didn't read is what's your average age of your customers. I have no idea. If I had to guess, most people listening to this hearing $150 sheets would probably go like $45.50.

I bet it's like 30. Or 28 to 32. I don't know. Like, it's just a guess. The core demographic, the core demographic for us is 25 to 44. Yeah. So that 30, we look at our core customer as a 30. something you're old woman.

Even though a lot of guys own our sheets do, obviously. I think our splits like 70, 30 women, men. And the number one demographic is that millennial demographic. And you're exactly right. Sorry, I got something like, you're exactly right that like, you know, I think that people, this is a weird market, right? People don't know why they should pay so much for bedsheets. They don't know why some sheets cost $50 and some

sheets cost $100 and some some sheets cost $500 like Bowling branches selling their queen sheets for like $240 for cotton like that's I mean I think that's an insane markup I don't know if it is I think it is and so you know there's different manufacturing costs depending on the raw materials depending on the production the thread count the yardage the fat this you know there's so many different pieces of it and so for us I just know that our raw materials are extremely expensive we don't make that much of a margin on our sales, especially with the marketing costs worked in. And our prices reflect what we think that we can do to build a sustainable business. And so, you know, I think that over time with, there are only a handful of people in the world

that actually make this material. And that over time, if we continue to scale and our quantities continue to get higher and higher, that we will be able to bring those prices down. And I would love one day to be able to offer this for that $50 price range. to hit a more mass market adoption. Yeah, maybe Costco. You know, that was the last place I bought sheets, but I am going to do this.

I'll tell you this. So many people, so many people buy their sheets from Costco. I don't like, maybe it's because I always grew up going to Costco with my mom and getting groceries, but like I don't think about Costco as a bed sheets. Let me say this. I will spend money on,

because you sleep in your bed more than you anything else. So we'll spend money on, I mean, obviously. And, but I am going to buy some sheets and giggles. You will see an order coming from Alford here in the next 24, 48 hours. I was a believer before talking to you, but I'm even more of a believer now. But I just, I love the story. I love the perspective. You're likable guy and you're easy to root for.

So, hey, there's all your, there's all your, uh, pat's on the back. You're, uh, you know. No, I, I'm very flattered. I appreciate that. I will, I will say, um, if I do a deal at Costco, I know, I've already talked to them a little bit. and I've talked to a few other retailers as well. I've done a lot of retail in my past, and there's a reason why I went direct to consumer.

They absolutely just break your arm behind your back to get you to do their deals. And it's not just their business model. Like they get every dollar margin they possibly can. And so, yeah, it'll be really interesting when we branch into physical retail. Probably 2020. Probably 2022. I don't think physical retail is a good fight right now. No, no.

no there's not a whole lot there's not a there's not a good physical play in anything right now i can probably get some pretty good terms right now yeah you might good you might want to start it might be a good idea yeah there's any retail buyers out there listening to this you hit me up and maybe uh we can do we can do something so uh Colin you know as we kind of close out here um where you just mentioned a little bit physical retail i mean where we're headed i mean where's where do we want to take this where Where do you want to go? Like, what's the vision here?

We have a really interesting opportunity where, just to speak transparently, like most companies, I don't, there are long-term plans where there's like sell more shit, add more products. And I think that's a good plan. Like, you know, you're an apparel company. What are you going to do? You're going to sell swimwear. Like, you're a braw company.

What do? You sell bikini or if you're a shoe company, what do you do? you sell socks. Like, you know, it's, there are very obviously, obvious complimentary products that you add in over time for us, but those are all like $40, $50, $100 type incremental LTV ads. And so for me, I'm actually really interested in, we have kind of interesting opportunity where we've cultivated this audience of, you know, I think we're approaching 100,000 customers in a couple of years who, who love us, who like us, who dig our authenticity, who, you know,

we've got 4.8 star rating with 3,000 reviews on the website. We don't hide our one-star reviews on like pretty much every other drug-to-consumer brand out there. We just reply to them and fix the problem. And, you know, like, I think that they really trust us. And so we've got an opportunity. We're actually been working on it for a few months where I think we're going to start introducing a sustainable mattress option and sustainable bed frames,

sustainable mattress topers. and it's really hard to do a sustainable mattress topper without polyester with that plastic she thing to protect the mattress. And I think we're going to be rolling those out as well as pillows probably mid-year this year. And it's an interesting marketing opportunity for us because not only do I get to introduce, I think, a better mattress than, or more sustainable mattress, a better mattress. I have a herniated C4-C-5, so I will not put anything out on the market that does not totally crush from a, sleep through the night with no pain, wake up feeling totally healed and refreshed perspective. But like we can also increase our LTVs from a couple hundred bucks or a few hundred bucks to potentially in thousands of dollars range with this product line, which is a very rare opportunity

for DSE brand to have an existing customer pool that can then introduce such a high value item to. And so that's kind of where I'm thinking about it from the brand perspective. it's been in the works for a while and I'm getting ready to launch it and I'm really excited about it. And then in terms of long term, I just want S&G to be a household name. I want us to be synonymous with the bedsheets industry. I think it'll be funny that I kind of started this company to make fun of other bedsheets companies and now we're taking money out of other people's pockets because we're doing things so differently. You know, it's always, it's like I built a company sarcastically.

which is kind of funny. And then, you know, in terms of the sustainability and the good that we do in the world, I've got a total bleeding heart. We plant the tree for every order. That's, I think, tens of thousands of trees planted in the United States and areas that need reforestation. We've pledged 1% of our profits, time, products, and equity, which is very important in the event of an exit to local Colorado charities, which is awesome. We donate hundreds of sheet sets every year to Denver homeless shelter. We donated $40,000 last year to COVID-19 relief in the state of Colorado.

We donated $12,000 to over 100 charities over Black Friday weekend this last year as a percentage of sales. We do a ton of stuff. And that to me is like the number one thing that I want is I want to look up in a few more years and say, not only did we make this much money and have this much success and have this much fun. But we also like materially improve the world and measurably. And so that's kind of the goal that I'm building towards.

Hey man. I mean, you're doing a lot. I mean, that's it's admirable. I'm like, damn, I'm like checking my list over here going. I mean, given back enough yet. Like, man. It's good, man. I mean, do it.

Yeah. And I will say this, recovery, which is what the business that you're in, which is sleep is at the forefront of people's mind now because we had the CEO of whoop which is a fitness track of the most advanced fitness tracker in the world that you wear and it tracks your sleep like a lot better than like an Apple Watch would like it's like digs into like every detail of your you know blood pressure and all these things anyway I'll get the acronyms wrong but no and but it is a hot topic right now the importance of recovery and sleep and all of these things and you guys are right in the throes of it and it's it's only going to get bigger because

if you realize and the importance of human performance and all these things but hey you know you got to get sleep you got to get good sleep you got to get proper sleep where you're not up all the time where you've got the right sheets it's so you know you're in a great area sure there there are so many things that people know about sleep because it's a very I mean it's boring right it's sleep like It's naturally just a boring topic. But like the thing that I've learned as someone who does have a C4, C5 perniation, and as someone who I've woken up, I've been able to, unable to fall asleep before because of my pain.

I've had to put ice packs all over my body, take six Advil. I used to take six Advil every single day for years. And I've had three epidural injections to try to, you know, help the pain. The number one thing that I have done in the last year and a half is, I've strengthened my back, so I work out my back every day. I have my morning routine to make sure that I'm stretched, I'm good to go as soon as I wake up, and that's where my next night's sleep starts is in the morning.

And I think that a lot of people don't realize that your sleep cycles are when it's when your body releases growth hormone, it's when your body heals itself. Your non-REM sleep is actually the most healing. A lot of people think the REM sleep is healing. That's just a misconception. And they don't know the hours of cycles where you both heal and when you feel well rested. So, for example, if you wake up in the middle of a cycle, you won't feel rested.

Even if you got seven hours of sleep, you should have slept to the seven and a half hour mark. Even if you got, you know, eight and a half hours of sleep, you should have slept till a nine hour mark. And so there's different things that are pretty esoteric about sleep and how helpful it is for you. But these, you know, it's weird because we built the brand that was not built around this type of information. We built a brand that was built around fun and just, you know, hey, they're bed sheets. You know what they are. We're going to entertain you while we sell them to you. Yeah.

And now that we're a little bit bigger and we have an audience, it's actually a lot of fun for me to start writing more of this stuff around like, hey, like, here's how I got over my herniated C4C5 pain and how I'm sleeping through the night and how I no longer take Advil and haven't in, you know, two years. and, you know, I think that that's, that's been my number one thing is like being able to actually materially improve people's lives. I mentioned earlier, neuropathy, fibromyalgia, as someone who has had chronic pain, a different type of chronic pain, but chronic pain, I am always blown away. And it's not something I ever anticipated when I found out of Cheats and Giggles. Obviously, I founded a pun-based betting company that people would reach out to us the say, hey, I have fibromyalgia.

Your sheets are the only thing that allow me to sleep throughout the night. I have MS and I overheat and I have ALS and I overheat. And like your sheets are the only thing that actually get me that healing sleep every night. And it almost makes me get emotional because I understand that sleep deprivation. It's torturous. When you cannot fall asleep, you know that feeling. You sit up and you put your head in your hands and you just say, you just say, I can't like, you have a panic attack almost in bed because you can't fall asleep.

That's what a subset of the population deals with every single night. And the fact that our sheets are lower surface friction, they're naturally cooling. Like, I thought it would just be wonderful for people in general. I didn't realize what an intimate impact it would have on a small percentage of the population. And that is something that I think is very special to me personally. Colin, man, I love it. Hey, good night's rest is no laughing matter. Yeah.

When we release the mattress, the tagline, spoiler alert is going to be a bed above the rest. I love it. I love it. We're never for a few puns around here. No one loves a good pun better than me. But Colin, I really appreciate your time and your transparency. I think this has been an amazing episode. I know our listeners are going to get, and viewers are going to get a lot.

The viewers are going to get even more because they're going to get to see in real time here. the in the bed experience but uh yeah i'll tell you another shameless plug we have the best colors man you can't find a mint green sheet like this anywhere else we got we are red lavender like a deep purple like people they're like some people are always like these sheet colors are terrible and other people are like i love these i can't get these anywhere else and so i that's what i like about them they're very they're very striking and so for the viewers out there this is my bedroom this is you know my painting above my bed. You get a nice colorful.

You've got the mint, green, the purple, and the blue painting going. I love it. I love it. Where can everybody keep up with you, Colin? Where can everybody keep up with you? I'm really easy to find just sheetskiggles.com is our website. There's no and the URL. Sheetkittles.com.

And then, you know, I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. And those are the easiest ways. Yeah. And I can't. Let's catch up on club. House. I'd love to. Dude, yeah, let's do one of these live on Clubhouse. That would be super fun.

I'm Colin McIntosh on Clubhouse. I'm doing one tonight, actually, so I don't think this will be live. Cool. I love that. I'll wait to shoot you my contact and we'll connect on there. But hey, man, appreciate it so much. This has been the latest edition of the Radcast. Really appreciate Colin McIntosh coming on.

You know where to find them, Sheets Giggles.com. And we will see you next time. Yo, guys, what's up, Ryan Alford here? Thanks so much for listening. appreciate it, but do us a favor. If you've been enjoying the radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We really appreciate it.

And go leave us a review at Apple or Spotify. Do us a solid. Tell more people, leave us some reviews. And hey, here's the best news of all. If you want to work with me directly, you want to get your business kicking ass. And you want Radical or myself involved, you can text me directly at 864.

729-3680. Don't wait another minute. Get your business going. 864, 729, 3680. We'll see you next time.