Right About Now with Ryan Alford - 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. 

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 the other companies that you've had on the broadcast.

They all know where they stand stand and they're not as cool as sheets and giggles uh i uh raleigh our producer and i talked you know when she found you guys and and i was doing research and i was like i i gotta talk to this guy and i gotta meet this company because uh anyone with a sense of humor that's also killing it in d2c isTC is already my best friend. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. People ask me how I came up with the idea, why I started a bed sheets company, and I do often say that a solid 70% of the reason is because I was just that obsessed with the brand name and that into the brand and the company. I had to do it once I thought 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 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 the sheets themselves. Is that it? I am indeed.

I'm just, I get my mint green eucalyptus sheets, our gray comforter and a dye mask. And yeah, I like doing these from bed whenever anybody will let me. I 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 uh because there's like a weird guideline that apparently is like an actual guideline which is the 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 tip. They're now building an intent. They know what you're intending to have on underneath that bathrobe. That's news to me. I thought it was great. Thanks for letting me do the interview from bed. It's kind of where I do 90% of our work anyway. I feel very natural.

Yeah. No kidding. You're a product in development here. Yeah. Well, Colin, let's, let's give everybody, you know, we're going to have a good discussion, but I do like to tee it up. Um, if you haven't heard of sheets and giggles, you definitely have now. Um, but let's, 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 early you want me to start. I was born in South Florida. 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 in good and bad ways I don't know how long is my non-disparagement clause I got a I got fired in like five months which was probably the best thing ever happened in my career even though at a time when you're 22, you think the world is, you know, 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 those early stage companies going through that accelerator. And then I worked at that company for three years. I got laid off at 1 PM on a 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, uh, 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. Do you, 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, which is, 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 dad is an attorney. He started his own law firm.

My mom is an acupuncturist. She started her own practice. 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 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 start a 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 the corporate world,

and that's why I've been fired so many times in my career. Touché, touché. And I think we're even getting further from the corporate world with everything COVID's done. It's got everybody working from halfway home or home or whatever. It's such 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 to commute is going to be like world changing for some percentage of the population. It's going to be incredible. Let's talk about how you started Sheets and Giggles. 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. I own a digital agency. We work with a lot of D2C 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 problem, solution, business model. I realized at some point when my last company was kind of, you know, when it didn't work out, I realized earlier that that's actually a really flawed way 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 it every startup week i go to and every time i do mentorship hours i did i mentored 10 companies last night for something in denver called the commons on shampoo where i do every quarter i mentored 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, and then I backed my way into a product that plugged into that business model. And so after I got laid off, I said,

what have I learned from this experience? Really emotional, gut-wrenching experience. Well, I learned that I'm either going to start my own company or I'm gonna go work at Amazon and actually have a good salary. I was like, I'm never working for somebody else's startup again. 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 the 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 was 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 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 zagging. I wanted something that was highly fragmented. So I didn't have to chip away at some market leader. And I wanted something that was largely traditionally physical retail. So I could

help bring it online with a 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, doesn't have software engineers. And so I really wanted something that I could bring to market without having to hire a whole technical team. And so I looked at my perfect business model, and and this is a true story. I looked at, and sorry, the last component I want to mention is I really wanted to be a physical, sustainable good so I could be proud of what I was making and so I could have a positive 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 market growing 10% year 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 and 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 it was and it was always white sheets on a white wall exposed brick with a fern in the corner of the bedroom and a french press copy that you can literally see the instagram in your head 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 you'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

at any stage of their brand or development. So many people get so emotionally tied to a product. To hear that you had no emotional tie to a eucalyptus sheet, it warms my heart that you actually did this from a smart perspective of analyzing the market. Now you're obsessed with them. I'm the best sheet 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, you know, I do hear the, I do hear them talk about you. They say that Colin guy, he's full of sheet. I mean, do you ever get tired of the jokes so do they because you you gotta 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 brooken and Boland Branch and Parachute, these very highfalutin brands that talk about themselves in these very grandiose terms. I mean, they're just making bedsheets, but they can build whatever brand they want. And I respect their business a lot.

They built a hell of a business. But they will start to copy us, and they'll start to put the puns in the ads, and they'll start to put the crazier in the ads and they'll start to put the crazier imagery out there and that sort of thing. But it's such a dichotomy with the brand that they 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 it creates this sort of like brand moat around uh the company and this 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 bit um but um 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 into 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 we split king which is like 0.9 of the mattress market. We'll do it all in order to make our customers happy, and people really love that. How's scaling been for you guys? Talk to me about the stages of scale over these, what, call it three and a half, four years. 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 two hundred eighty four thousand dollars for bed sheets on a crowdfunding cloud holy shit and and you know that it's probably 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 2000 people to wait five months for bedshe sheets is the proudest marketing accomplishment of my entire life. And I think that there's something to be said 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 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. I was on the phone in the warehouse packing boxes, negotiating our valuation with 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, and I kind of yada, yada, yada through all the in between there, but it's been a, it's been a pretty, uh, it's been a pretty fast two years for sure. How big is the team? I mean, you're all in Colorado. There's two answers to 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 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, 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 D2C, all Shopify, website, marketing, all the layers that you did. You're now in Amazon. How has that transitioned or addition to, 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 the 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, but. I have zero leverage over Amazon. We do own actually amazon.com slash sheets. Oh, nice.

So quick brag 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 yeah 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 like 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, I think that, and there's actually these, you know, Thrasio and other, there's, 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 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 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 D2C

perspective in the business model that I wanted to build, yes, the right way would be to own that customer relationship and 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 legwork to build the content, run the Facebook ads, and do the podcast advertising. And then somebody searches for Sheets and Giggles on Amazon, or they search for Eucalyptus 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 mode of reviews around the products.

Can you, or do you mind sharing your mix of DTC versus Amazon sales? In November, because we were doing heavy email marketing, it was about 90-10. January, it was about 85-15. And then February, it'll be about 80-20. Traditionally, it's been about 70-30.

But as we've grown, we've really scaled the.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 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're great small business support. They allow us to reach new customers, like new markets. All the stuff that Amazon will pitch you on is true, right?

Then there's the darker side of it.'s the the margin share the advertising cost the difficult part of the technical support not but the thing is that they're 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 you know 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 it as a channel that we have to be on. 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 it is. Yeah, exactly. Talk about the marketing side.

I mean, we're a marketing and business podcast, obviously. So I know at this stage, you're doing a million dollars in revenue a month. You've got a lot of levers 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 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 comment about, like, hey, aren't you the Sheets and Giggles guy? Or there will be some nugget about Sheets and Giggles somewhere. And it's a nice way to add value to the platform and make people smile and laugh and get good value out of the comments I'm doing without advertising overly.

So Reddit's been good from our organic traffic flow um 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 good 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 um we haven't really done ads pre-roll before YouTube we're going to invest more heavily in video this year um and then we've also done podcast advertising through radio.com,

Colorado public radio, I heart media. 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 gotta be a pretty big driver. I imagine. For sure. We do. We do a lot of, you know, I have a 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 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. of flow is really big and has a really nice long tail to it as well. This isn't a pitchy conversation, but I will just tell you a tactic that you should look into that we're doing a lot of search retargeting. We can get the keyword searches and retarget people so we don't have to run a paperclip ad, we don't have to be an SEO. We can get the search made IDs and run it on Facebook or programmatic for anyone real time that's doing searches. So if I search for sheets, I can retarget 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, I get it. It is tricky because our sheet sets are super high end. 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, hypoallergenic. They're 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. And our manufacturing costs are four times that of cotton, they're 10 times that of polyester, and we're still beating, you know, Bolland Branch on their pricing, we're still beating Parachute on their pricing, we're beating almost everybody that I really care about beating. From a pricing perspective, I don't want people to have to pay to try and pay more to try a new material basically, even though our margins are a lot lower. But at the end of the day, like they're the bedsheets market is a $12 billion market with thousands of

options. And 60% of what people are buying is 20 and $30 polyester bedsheets. 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. There's 19 results on Amazon research for clean sheets. 50,000 reviews or 100,000 reviews or whatever which is an absurd amount of volume on Amazon and you know it we're competing in that market so I 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 sheets 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 eucalyptus sheets today right fucking now. I would go after that long tail keyword.

I want to buy eucalyptus sheets right fucking now. Yes. 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.

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 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 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-year-old woman, even though a lot of guys on our sheets do, obviously. I think our split's like 70-30 women, men.

And the number one demographic is that millennial demographic. And you're exactly right. Sorry, I got something in my throat. 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 bed sheets. They don't know why some sheets cost $50 and some sheets cost $100 and some sheets cost $500. Like, Bowling Branch is 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, 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 uh 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 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 where the last place i bought sheets but i am gonna 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 they're the let me

say this i will spend money on on because you sleep in your bed more than you do anything else. So we'll spend money on, I mean, obviously. 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 love the story. I love the perspective. You're a likable guy, and you're easy to root for. So, hey, there's all your pats on the back.

No, I'm very flattered. I appreciate that. I will say if I do a deal with 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, 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, it's 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 2022. I don't think physical retail is a good play right now. No, no, it'll be really interesting when we branch into physical retail, probably probably 2022. I don't think, I don't think physical retail is a good play 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. If there's any, if there's any retail buyers out there listening to this, hit me up and maybe we can do something. So, Colin, as we kind of close out here, you just mentioned a little bit physical retail. I mean, where are we headed?

I mean, where do we want to take this? Where do you want to go? Like, what's the vision here? We have a really interesting opportunity where, um, just to speak transparently, uh, I like most companies. I don't, I don't, there, there are longterm plans where there's like sell more shit, add more products. Um, and I think that's a good plan.

Like, you know, you're, you're an apparel company. What are you going to do? You're going to sell swimwear. Like you're a bra company. What do you do? You sell bikini or you, if you're a bra company, what do you do? You sell bikini. If you're a shoe company, what do you do? You sell socks. There are very obvious complimentary products that you add in over time. Those are all $40, $50, $100 type incremental

LTV ads. For me, I'm actually really interested in, we have kind of an interesting opportunity where we've cultivated this audience of, I think we're approaching 100,000 customers in a couple of years who love us, who like us, who dig our authenticity, who we've got 4.8 star rating

with 3,000 reviews on the website. We don't hide our one-star reviews on pretty much every other direct to consumer brand out there. We just reply to them and fix the problem. Um, 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, um, sustainable bed frames, sustainable, uh, mattress toppers. And it's really hard to do a sustainable mattress topper without polyester with that plastic sheathing 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, you know, introduce a, I think a better mattress than, than, or a more sustainable

mattress, a better mattress. I have a herniated C4, C5, 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 thousands of dollars range with this product line, which is a very rare opportunity for B2C brand to have an existing customer pool they 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 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 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 in 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 shelters. 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 you know this much money and have this much success and have this much fun um but we also like materially improve the world and measurably and and so that's kind of the 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 checking my list over here going, have we given back enough yet? It's good, man. I will say this. Recovery, which is 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 tracker, the most advanced fitness tracker in the world, that you wear.

And it tracks your sleep a lot better than an Apple Watch would. It digs into every detail of your blood pressure and all these things. Anyway, I'll get the acronyms wrong. No, no. Yeah. 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

to give 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 are so many things that people don't know about sleep because it's a very, I mean, it's boring, right? It's sleep. Like it's, it's naturally just a boring topic. But like the, the thing that I've learned as someone who does have a C4, C5 herniation, as someone who I've woken up, I've been 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. I've had three epidural injections to try to 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 on 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 sleep starts is in the morning. And I think that a lot of people don't realize that what, you know, 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 new set 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. Um, even if you got, you know, uh, eight and a half hours of sleep, you should have slept till a nine hour mark. And so there's different, there's different things that are pretty esoteric about sleep and how helpful it is for you. But these, you know, it's, it's weird because we built the brand that was not built around this type of information. And we built a brand that was built around fun and just, you know, Hey, they're bedsheets. You know what they are. We're

going to entertain you while we sell them to you. Um, 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 C4, C5 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 been my number one thing is like being able to, uh, 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. Um, I am always blown away and it's not something I ever anticipated when I found out sheets and giggles.

Obviously I found that a pun based bedding company that people would reach out to us and say, Hey, I have fibromyalgia. Your sheets are the only thing that allowed 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 that you sit up and you put your head in your hands and you just say, you just say, I can't like, like I'm, 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 be just be wonderful for people in general. I didn't realize what an intimate impact it would have on, 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.

When we released the mattress mattress the tagline spoiler alert is going to be a bed above the rest i love it i love it we're we're known for a few puns around here you know uh no one loves a good pun better than me but uh colin i can't 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. 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 red, lavender, deep purple.

Some people are always like, these sheet colors are terrible. Other people are like, I love these. I can't get these anywhere else. That's what I like about them. They're very striking. For the viewers out there, this is my bedroom. This is my painting above my bed. I'm very you get a

nice colorful you gotta you've got the the mint green the purple and the blue painting going on we're you know like i love it where can everybody keep up with you colin where can everybody keep up with you i'm really easy to find uh just sheetskiggles.com is our website there's no and in the url sheetskheagles.com. Then I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. Those are the easiest ways. Let's catch up on Clubhouse.

Dude, yeah. Let's do one of these live on Clubhouse. That'd be super fun. I'm Colin McIntosh on Clubhouse. I'm doing one tonight, actually. I don't think this will be live. I'll get Raleigh to shoot you I don't think this will be live. But, you know, I love that one. I'll get Raleigh 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 him, sheetsgiggles.com. And we will see you next time. Yo, guys, what's up? Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it.

But do us a favor. guys. What's up? Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening. Really 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'd 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, if 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. Let's get your business going. 864-729-3680. We'll see you next time.