Right About Now with Ryan Alford - 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. 

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 eCommerce series. It's been going really well. We've had some fascinating guests. 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 Soaps. 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 Sanjay. Let's talk about your background and then we'll dig into specifics on Buff City, but maybe just start there, man. Yeah. I grew up in Missouri. I'm a Missouri boy, small town, 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. It was like my senior year project. And we made five figures a month doing it. just started the 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 uh from a revenue perspective but that was like my first lesson in like profitability uh and it's like just the complexity of operations because we we made no money from a profit standpoint um it was uh 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 actually letting the customer choose where to send it to versus us making those donations in bulk. So we ended up graduating college. those like donations in bulk um so we ended up graduating college we rolled that like actually handed that off as a um project for students in the entrepreneurship program at the university of arkansas or one just where i went to college and um i just worked in e-commerce in a variety of places i worked at an architecture and engineering consulting firm. It's a very specific thing. And they sold digital products. So they had information books about

what the salaries were supposed to be for your architects and your project managers who were civil engineering background project managers. Very interesting, very niche there. From there i i work and so the thing that i learned there i'll i one of the cool things about how my career has progressed thus far is that at each job like there's one skill that i really like got to go deep on um at that company was email marketing so i was not familiar with email marketing at all at that point um i like i grew up in the age of social media being like the number one thing and that was

always the focus um especially particularly on the organic side um so i was like okay email marketing do people actually open this and just seeing the power of it so you know learning how i became a power user of clavio in like 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. Shopify plus really enterprise level software. And the thesis of that business was, you know, Shopify has 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 learned two major skills at that business. The first was selling. I became a proficient seller from SDR to close. Then the number two thing that actually became the cornerstone of my career since that moment was media buying. I went deep on media buying. As that company progressed, I realized it's probably not going to work out for me here long term. We actually launched an email marketing tool, basically like a MailChimp Lite, which mailchimp is by itself a pretty pretty lightweight product so something even less robust very simple product um but we got um like we went from zero to about a hundred thousand dollars in arr in like a week like about a week and a half

um through media buying i literally recorded the ads in front of the camera edited the videos bought the bought the ads myself like full end 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. Realized that I can make a little bit of a career out of media buying and just doing agency work now that I 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 Northwest Arkansas.

So that's predominantly Walmart, J.B. Hunt, and Tyson. And really, if you're in an money is servicing money is in servicing walmart we didn't do any of that we we worked with companies that didn't sell into walmart.com or didn't sell into walmart at all um so we're always kind of like the odd man out and i was trying to figure out like what's the next path um is it do i go start like the 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 is Justin Delaney, CEO of Buff City. He hit me up on Instagram. He DM me. He's like, hey hey, man, 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 one of the 62nd business idea pitches. I won the contest. He was one of the judges judges we talked about shoes for 30

minutes he was wearing yeezys he's got one of the greatest easy collections i've ever seen i think he has like literally every pair um 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 um love of cars um and like particularly porsches and lamborghinis 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 uh the job of running e-commerce for buff city uh which i started back in january um what that looked like was re-platforming 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 simple, 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 uh our physical retail footprint growth happens through franchising so we're a

franchise business it's a really interesting model um i run e-commerce which is kind of owned from the central franchisor entity and have to work really closely with franchisees um there's a lot of a lot of intricate stuff there in terms of, one, just trying to build an omni-channel experience for the customer, making it seamless, but two, on the back end, making sure that franchisees don't feel like this is corporate competition,

but actually building a system long-term that will actually give them credit. I mean, the goal, 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. We're trying to figure out how to execute that at scale. Then recently, as I was telling you about pre-show, literally last week, I took over the production facility that we have.

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 of 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 all these things i get to like deploy that kind of thinking that experience um into a facility that i controlled and the cool thing there is um 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. I control that entire experience now. And having these controls, understanding the process just makes scale a lot easier to achieve in the long run. So that's the abridged version of my career. A lot to unpack there a lot of keywords um you know uh your clavio experience we're clavio partner agency or shopify partner agency i i have to like i don't know my mind just goes here i could go about i had 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 WooCommerce, which runs on WordPress? Right. Is there an e-commerce engine? It's considered a legitimate e-commerce platform. I'm going to lead you to an answer that I hope it is because uh as a shopify agency that does both i uh but this is 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 um robust e-commerce platform. Sure. E-commerce is not a lightweight.

It's not like some clients that come to us are on Squarespace e-commerce. Yeah. 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, I want to run it 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. The thing 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 phantom blog post. And that's how WooCommerce on the back end

actually tracks these things. And think about the technical complexity of that system. You're trying to turn a blog tool into a shopping cart. It's scary as hell. I was so eager to get off of WooCommerce. 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 uh i'm in agreement um we use clavio 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's an opportunity. Or whether you custom code your own site, which makes it a certain point. So you own the full experience and don't feel like you're renting from Shopify. 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, the landscape of where Buff City's at. So I'll say I'll, I'll, I'll be delicate about this and the way I phrase this. Um, we have, so we haven't hit Q4 yet.

This is September 23rd, I think um in 2019 since we have 10x the 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 percent of our revenue maybe more depending on how hard we can scale in the next few months um will come from q4 so shopify has been a tremendous tool uh 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 a WooCommerce, it would have, like we would have had like a disaster we had on April 1st,

which was hilarious because it's like April fool's day. We had our biggest day yet. Um, like single day was three X what we did on cyber Monday, 2019. Um, which is just insane. um just just a really great preview of what's to come uh later this year but if we were on woocommerce like we would not have been able to support that um even on just like very simple things like customer service so i run the customer service team um we are set up on umorgias. That's our customer service tool. The fact that our customer service team can, you know, if 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. 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 backend user perspective, it's, it's pretty dialed in, in my opinion. What's been the path to growth from a marketing perspective for Buff City?

Maybe from a tactical standpoint, whether it's social media, which I'm sure is a big role, but maybe what are some of those tactical paths that have seen and driven the growth for you guys? Sure. We launched our first ad, true Facebook marketing advertising on March 16th, I think. That's been a huge lever for us this year as we've scaled. Topline customer acquisition stuff, Facebook advertising has been the cornerstone of that. Within that, we're really big on text message marketing. We use a tool called Voxy. They're based out of that. Within that, we're really big on text message marketing. And we use a tool called Voxy. 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 banding cart, for example. But we can also customers can text us back. And my customer service team is plugged in to have two-way communication. So if the customer texts in, we'll send a blast on a weekend sale day and say, hey, we're doing a laundry sale. Stock up on your laundry soap. Don't forget to add a dryer ball. And customers say, hey, what's a dryer ball? Or what kind of scents do the dryer balls come in? Customer service team comes in and says X, and z um 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 um but for both email marketing and the text message marketing we've been doing uh pretty

aggressive uh push just like lead generation stuff just to to grow those lists. Cause 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 text message lists. And we're, you know, we're very intentional about that. We've 20 X our email list since I took over. Yeah, that's great. Got to own the customer relationship.

And that starts with email primarily. Is any other channels? So you've got the stores, you've got e-com. Are you guys Amazon? I mean, any other distribution is 100 d to c it's it's d to c and 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 like first customer is our franchisees so buff city's value is is really derived by you know the number of stores we have. And so that's always the primary focus. I have to always say the stores are more important than what I do online on e-commerce. And it's very interesting. I've been a DTC guy since I started in e-commerce. So having the knowledge that what I do supports a larger mission. That's like nothing related to e-commerce really has been, has been interesting shift in thinking, but

like that, that's like the baseline is growing the franchise business is the most important thing. I'm sorry. Like what else? There's a deeper part of the question holds like you know 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 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 is because 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 e-com 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 dollars on behalf of the franchisees to grow awareness in 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,

it's, it's a, it's contrary to what to everything else that's going on in a COVID world. If we just want to call it what it is. Yeah. 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 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 you 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 are designed to be delightful and pleasant and like spark joy in your life um which is it's a really great thing to like come in and every day and like know like we're we're trying to make the world a little bit better place from our supply chain um like all the good stuff that we're trying to do there making sure we're not you know supporting any like man-made micah mines like where our kids working like we we cut that kind of make sure we avoid all of that and we don't support those kinds of entities and um 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 um on and they receive a shipment it's it 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. There are so many things. It's a very jarring thing to say, I think, because obviously the luck has not been evenly distributed across the ecosystem. We're trying to grow as much as we can. Like it's, it's, 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,

we're really working for. Like for us, it's like we want to be stewards of growth to be able to like provide opportunity in time. And it's really hard to, to access opportunity. That's great. So you're at 40 plus stores uh this year and growing and some significant growth plans for next year um you talk about that and the and back to that e-com share which is pretty unique um you know how you guys are envisioning you know a lot of times the 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.

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. 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, so we're doing, we will be two or a third of the way there or so like about that's the estimation right now by the end of next year um so you know rest of solid two years in and like we made some amazing progress and um uh it's just like it just depends on how quickly you know we can get real estate approved and and get stores set up it Is it 100% franchise?

It's not 100%. It's mostly, I think, probably at scale it'll be like 95-ish, I think. I don't remember the exact number, but it'll be primarily franchise. Some company-owned but primarily franchised. Right. So our corporate stores right now, we've got some in Memphis, which is where the company was 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 uh our denver market is also um corporate right now but everything else right now that we have is franchise owned and so but the e-commerce site is being tailored to where franchisees will share in revenue that they're, you know, say you come onto the site. And, you know, we're in Greenville, South Carolina. So let's say we have a store that opens in Greenville hopefully soon. I think 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 was that's one of those like five-year infrastructure projects that we had i was about to say that actually seems like a long-term play that's that's a very difficult uh play i you know on the we don't have to get too geeky on the technology side of that but that's that's pretty Long-term play. That's a difficult play. We don't have to get too geeky on the technology side of that,

but that's pretty high development stuff there. Our CTO, his name is Brandon Powers. He is like a wizard, like a technology wizard. I wish I could have a 10th of his brain power. So that was like when he came on earlier this year or at the beginning of the year, he, his five-year vision was like to be able to build that model. Um, we piloted it or pilot. Yeah. We, we tested it throughout COVID. So when the stores shut down or like, you know, it was kind of variable. We, we, we started doing, um, rebates. So, um,

basically using the store customer database to cut like you know checks to stores like okay this is like the customer was acquired at your store or it was processed online you can't be open legally so like here's you know here's the money yeah um that allowed like some stores were able to continue to grow through it. I guess if they were able to do curbside, um, other stores, they were from those checks, at least able to pay rent, which is so critical. Like, um, 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 like very, very difficult for retail to exist at all. Long-term. So we're calling this program ship 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 I don't, we, we don't, we haven't worked out 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.

Like they're the ones making it and shipping it to you. Or, or if they have like a delivery vehicle, for example, they'll deliver it to you so it's that's the future state we're working on that's probably when we leave like the shopify ecosystem go build a custom uh ecom setup that's really deeply tied to our store point of sale system which is unified across the system yeah um and that's like the core and 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. Is there anything else on the marketing side that's 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 so 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 online. And we basically just have a kickback. It's like, here's 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 $0.17 to send a postcard.

It's super cheap. So that's been really effective. Influencer has 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 basically influencers doing parties with their followers in the stores, getting people in the stores. Again, that's like the primary thing that we want to support and grows like all the stores that we have. 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 um and you know they'll post about it here's our here's my code um we got some like, it's 80-20 rule to the max. So we've got a ton of people who like, onesie, twosie sales here and there. And then we've got a few that are just like massive returns. And they've got like 4,000 followers.

It's not a crazy follower count. For us, like the local communities, like our model for for the stores works well in 10 000 um like populations of 10 000 people and you know much more than that we can support such a like a wide range of folks um 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 really crank yeah um we see it with campaigns we run like a couple thousand three thousand followers and they get the best results you just need a bunch of and they're cheaper so you can spread it out um talk about who's your customer who's who is the i mean i know there's probably

different but who is the buff City customer? Like what's your profile? So, um, so I'll use the kind of some of the terminology that we have in our brain guidelines. Um, she is, you know, someone who is scent obsessed, um, and wants something that is good for her skin. Um, like just like conscious of that like skin conscious i think is the terminology there um the scent obsessed part is the really critical thing we are a scent first brand um our fragrances are amazing like we've got such a wide range of them too and we can customize a lot of things um 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, and skincare products, but really like they're, they're primarily motivated by, 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 um that we have um so yeah it's just like from an age range like it's it's so weird um i from a client services perspective hated talking to and said oh everyone's our customer um like we don't have like one specific customer profile we can splice

and dice our customers in a variety of ways we do um but there is a lot of evenness in the size of of our customer demographics um apart from like gender is probably like the most polarized one it's i think it's uh 75 25 female to male um but our age range is you know little kids all the way to 65 plus 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 to smell good you know 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 dare say

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 maybe touch on product development a little. Sure. So I'll do product development and I'll do the long, the endgame kind of stuff. So our CMO, his name is Chad Brizendine, who I love that guy. I really do. In his off time, he runs bourbon companies and he just,

he just had his like first bottle launch for his new bourbon company this week. Um, he, uh, he and our first soap makers, our founders of the company, Brad Kellerman and Jen, um, they work together really well and coming up with new products, new product categories that can still be manufactured within the store. So that's like the context that we always like to take things back to. But like really like the, the, the goal is like how do we kind of PNG it and, you know,

kind of own everything in, in your, your bathroom and then, you know, 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 um and then it's literally the best stuff i'll make sure to get y'all 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 and the plans that we've put in action again, like trying to contextualize that as much as possible to, can it 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 yeah um for for the company in general like like thousand stores 2025 um in the united states but like long-term goal toledo to tokyo like we're going to be everywhere globally um we're trying we're very like aggressive about um or very intentional not aggressive but intentional about trying to break into um asia and uh and europe i'm really keen on

trying to break into africa i just i just something about that continent that fascinates me um 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 um and then for me personally like i'm trying to ride the soap game as high as i can go and um you know maybe buy some apartment complexes and self-storage units all along the way but apart from that just just keep cranking in the soap game, build a really beautiful omni-channel experience. I mean, that's like the buzzword of the century right there,

omni-channel. But I truly believe giving customers the ability to buy their stuff from anywhere, whether it's in-store or 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 real-time cross-selling,

up-selling decision systems to just increase their revenues. Because ultimately, systems to just increase their revenues. Because ultimately, 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, uh, where can people keep up with all things buff city and all things? Sanjay was what's, what are our best destinations? So, uh, for buff city, buff city, soap.com. Um, uh, please, uh, get you some soap as it were. Um, and social media at buff city soap soap if there is a buff city soap near

you they'll have their own local instagram and facebook pages um you can follow our corporate buff city soap on twitter and then if you want to hit me up i'm pretty active on on twitter at sanjay at play is my my twitter handle um dm me just just uh message anytime happy to have a conversation with anybody sweet man sunjay it's been a pleasure let's do it again man let's let's follow up a little follow up maybe beginning of the year i want to see where this all this yeah and uh you know it's it seems like like you said, I mean, you're fortunate. Yeah, I believe people create their own fortunate. You know, we're in a time where there's hypersensitivity to cleanliness and those kind of things, which is helping things.

But it sounds like you guys are also kind of creating and and generating your own path. So congrats to all you guys and really appreciate you coming on the Radcast. 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.rad.cast. Look forward to seeing 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.