TBPN Live - Black Friday Gigastream with Shopify | Harley Finkelstein, Noel Mack, Sara Foster, Sean Frank, Kat Cole, Peter Rahal, Farhan Thawar, Torin Herndon, Kevin Harwood, Nish Samantray, Bené Eaton, Brian Keller

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

(06:32) - Harley Finkelstein is the President of Shopify, helping lead the company’s global commerce strategy and long-term vision. He works closely with founders, brands, and entrepreneurs building businesses on the platform. Harley is also a prominent voice on entrepreneurship and the future of retail. (36:06) - Noel Mack is the Chief Brand Officer (CBO) of Gymshark, responsible for the company’s global brand, creative, and community strategy. He has helped shape Gymshark into a culturally resonant fitness and lifestyle brand. Noel is known for his focus on creators, storytelling, and social-first marketing. (47:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (59:35) - Sara Foster is the Co-Founder of Favorite Daughter, a women’s apparel brand she built with her sister Erin. At Favorite Daughter, she focuses on brand, creative direction, and product vision. Sara also brings a background in entertainment and media to her work as a founder. (01:12:38) - Peter Rahal is the CEO of David, where he is focused on building new products and brands in consumer and food. As a founder-operator, he brings deep experience in scaling packaged goods and modern CPG playbooks. At David, Peter is focused on long-term, disciplined company building. (01:35:36) - Farhan Thawar is VP & Head of Engineering at Shopify, where he leads large engineering teams building the company’s core products and infrastructure. He focuses on scaling systems, improving developer experience, and shipping fast at massive scale. Farhan is known for his practical, high-velocity approach to engineering leadership. (01:41:26) - Torin Herndon is the CEO of ModRetro, a company focused on nostalgic, design-forward consumer products. He oversees product, brand, and overall company strategy. Torin blends design, storytelling, and physical product development to build memorable experiences. (01:53:19) - Kevin Harwood is the CTO of Tecovas, leading technology, data, and digital product for the modern western wear brand. He focuses on building and integrating systems that support ecommerce, retail, and operations at scale. Kevin works at the intersection of engineering, customer experience, and brand. (02:11:51) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:19:57) - Nish Samantray is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Arrae, a wellness brand focused on targeted supplements and high-intent communities. He leads company strategy, growth, and operations alongside his co-founder. Nish is focused on building a customer-obsessed, education-driven wellness company. (02:29:45) - Bené Eaton is the CMO of FIGS, overseeing marketing, brand, and storytelling for the healthcare apparel company. He focuses on connecting with FIGS’ community of healthcare professionals through content, campaigns, and product launches. Bené blends performance marketing with brand-building and culture. (02:37:33) - Brian Keller is the Co-Founder & CEO of Rorra, a modern water-filtration company focused on designing high-performance, beautifully engineered home water systems. He oversees product development, brand, and long-term company strategy. Brian brings a background in engineering and consumer product leadership to building Rorra’s next generation of water technology. (02:46:20) - Kat Cole is the CEO of AG1 and a member of its Board of Directors, leading the company’s global strategy and operations. She brings decades of experience scaling consumer and franchise brands to the health and wellness space. Kat is known for her operator’s mindset, people-first leadership, and board experience across multiple companies. (02:56:09) - Sean Frank is the CEO of Ridge, the company behind the Ridge Wallet and a broader line of everyday carry products. He leads the company’s growth, product expansion, and brand strategy. Sean is known for his operator-focused approach to ecommerce, performance marketing, and content-driven brand building. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, November 28th, 2025. We are live from the Commerce Corral. The Commerce Corral. You might be wondering. It is good to be back. This show, of course, is sponsored by Ramp. Time is Money, Save Both.

Easy-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting a whole lot more. But we're doing a crazy Black Friday stream with none other than Shopify. That's right. That's right. We're in the green suits. We got tons of guests who are on Shopify. And a guest host today. Guest host, Carly Finkelstein, from Shopify.

He's going to be calling in throughout the show at multiple periods of time to let us know what's happening in the world of e-commerce, in the world of commerce generally. Look at this guest line up. Can we just drop the E at this point? Why do we keep calling it E-commerce? It's just commerce. I don't care about any commerce other than e-commerce, so we should just take it over. The rest should be called T-commerce, traditional commerce. T-commerce.

T-commerce and e-commerce, we're just calling it commerce from now on. It's just commerce. It's over. We won. We won. Complete total culture of victory. We lost one thing. What do we lose? You used to be able to meet up at your local retailer on a Friday.

Yes, on Black Friday. On Black Friday and fight. Still nursing a hangover from Thanksgiving. Getting a fist fight. Yes. Over consumer electronic. Yes. Nobody has replicated that online yet.

You can't do that online. That is a startup. Yeah, yeah. You can't do that online. Request for startup app that lets you fight strangers for consumer electronics deals. Nobody's done it yet. So you'd get on the waiting list. You'd be able to check out just normally.

It would just be a normal Shopify checkout. But then maybe there'd be a Shopify plug-in and post-purchase flow. A post-purchase flow. Post-purchase flow, would you like to get in a wrestling match for more, for a bigger discount? Yeah. Put the gloves on. It doesn't need to actually be violent. Yeah. You've secured the product. You're good.

But if you want to get in a fight, we can bring that experience of the traditional commerce experience. We're bringing the traditional commerce experience into the modern era, into the e-commerce era, into the commerce era. That's right. That's right. And we're doing it here on Restream, of course. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. Harley kicked it off with a video that just hit the timeline. He says he's ringing the opening ballot NASDAQ this morning, alongside Shopify merchants. Brunt Workwear, Wild One, Swim, Sweets, a boat.

There are a ton of companies that he's going to be taking us on a whirlwind tour of. We're very excited to have him calling in in just a few minutes. Toby Lookkey also hit the timeline. He said, it's officially Black Friday in the first time zones, and we're live with this year's Live Globe, now inside of a pinball machine. The design beautiful. Pull up this video so we can see it. It's fun to play and live sales trigger surprises.

The team went all out on this one. Give it a spin. And yes, very, very fun. I feel like there's been this, like, you know, the Black Friday sales tracker has been, I don't know, a decade in the works, maybe two decades in the works, almost. I mean, Shopify's coming up on the 20-year anniversary next year, I believe. I believe the first sale that they processed was in, 19 years ago. Feels like being inside a video game. Yes.

And so every year it's become a race to create an arms race, to create an eight. an even more extravagant and elaborate sales tracker, but it's a lot of fun. It's got to be, this is like a Manhattan project for front-end devs. It really is. It's like AGI for front-end developers. Seriously, if you're a front-end dev,

this is your Super Bowl. This is your Super Bowl. It really is. A lot of folks are doing crazy stuff all over the internet today. It's a lot of fun. Well, I am excited. We should read through the guest lineup.

We can pull that up again. But we have a pretty incredible lineup of guests. We have Harley joining, of course. We have Noel from Jim Shark. We have Sarah Foster, co-founder of favorite daughter and podcaster. We have Peter Rahal from David Protein, former guest of the show. Excited to have him back on. He has just put on an absolute master class with David this year. It will be a Harvard Business School case study. If it's not already. And we haven't had them on since the boiled cod thing, have we? Yeah. Because we had a mod, and then he did the boiled cod stunt where he had a whole bunch of billboards. He sold a lot of cod. Did they actually?

They actually were selling cod. They were actually selling it. They were actually selling it. I had to double check on it. Okay, okay. It was a real sale. Okay. But yeah, been on an absolute tear.

Yes. And who else we got? We have Farhan, VP of Engineering over Shopify. We have Torin from Mod Retro. He's got news today. We have Kevin from Tocovus. We, of course, are wearing Toccovus today here in the Corral of Commerce. And we have my dear friend Nish from Array, one of the fastest growing supplement brands that I've ever been aware of.

It's very excited to talk with him. Benny from Figgs and Brian, of course my co-founder over at Rora. and Cat from AG1 and then we'll wrap it up with Sean from the Ridge repeat guest and dear friend of ours so it'll be a fun fun fun show today trying to get really get a view into how brands are approaching

the production teams fired up they're fired up we got a skeleton crew in here today a lot of people travel we did let most of the team just focus on focus on commerce today and but we are here of course

this is not the biggest lineup yet in terms of total number of guests it's close but I believe teal fellow episode was really huge and then there's been a couple obviously if you count YC demo days where we've just gone through just one guest after the next after the next

after the next after the next and we sort of lose track at that point because it's so many guests let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro Google's most intelligent model yet state of the art reasoning next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Well, we have Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.

Let's bring in Harley. The man from south. Bring him in. Harley, how are you doing? Oh, look at that. Oh, where's your toe? Casual Friday over there. Wait a second.

Whoa, throw him up. Throw him up. To Kovis, let's go. That's fantastic. I don't know where you guys get. these outfits, but I'm in. They're fantastic. They're fantastic.

Looking, looking great. Some people say we look like the Riddler. I think it's very clear that... I think we look, I think we look great. I will tell you, I don't know how many suits you guys have, but I assume you have every color in your closet. Clothes. Not green.

No, I've got a darker green. Oh, you have dark green. Yes, you have darker. I went with brown. But nothing quite this green. Nothing quite this green. Shopify green. Kevin from Tocobus is coming on later on.

I just got a text message from him. He sent me a photo of their store in Austin, which I think he's going to be calling in from. And apparently, they have a fire marshal issue there because the store is so insanely packed. So he'll tell you the story of what they're doing there, but it looks really cool. Amazing. And what are you got going on behind you here? Yeah. So I'm at the New York port, our office here in New York City, the other capital of capital,

other than, of course, where you are right now. And I have the Shopify dashboard behind me, and we are doing $4.3 million per minute. We're doing 40,000 per minute Per minute. Wow. Chiching. Yeah. Yeah, I'll use this. 40,000 orders per minute.

And since we started counting last night at around 7 p.m. EST, about 26 million unique shoppers across Shopify. And then I just posted this just before I got on the show here. Let me tell you guys. You guys want this information.

Of course we do. 12.1 p.m. today. We hit a peak sale of 5.5. $5.1 million per minutes. $5.1 million. Hit the gong for that one, John. Which is pretty good. We got to warm up the gong.

I feel like we're going to be hitting it a lot today. There's going to be a lot of that. Yes, good. A lot of that. Excellent. Excellent. Maybe I would love to kind of get your view. I think people have a good sense of like the history of Black Friday as sort of like the Super Bowl of shopping for a long time now.

But I'd love to get a sense of how you've experienced it across the year. specifically at Shopify and how it's evolved from your view. Yeah. Well, look, I think Black Friday initially, as the history of it, was Black Friday actually belonged to physical retail, which specifically big box stores. And then kind of Cyber Monday was kind of the time where the direct-to-consumer startups began to take hold of it. And something sort of flipped over the last, I guess, eight or nine years or so, where ultimately these direct-to-consumer independent brands, not necessarily small ones, a large one also,

began to kind of take over Black Friday. And so I think what we've ended up with is sort of Black Friday has become kind of the Super Bowl for entrepreneurs. What we've noticed is that they prepare all year for this weekend. And what we do is we spend the year building for them. You know, we think most people, you know, associate shop with small businesses,

but we also power, you know, the likes of on running or Mattel or Birkenstock or, you know, aloe, yoga, Viore. So what's interesting is that, and we'll see this across the show over the next couple of hours, that regardless of what size of merchant you're going to be talking to, they have one thing in common, which is they identify entrepreneurs. So whether you're the CEO of a publicly traded direct-to-consumer business like on running, or you started your business two years ago, you sort of, you are an entrepreneur. And this weekend and this sort of four days is kind of when we celebrate them. I think the cool part about it is that this year in particular does kind of feel like

the first time, these first time entrepreneurs are kind of standing shoulder to shoulder with much larger brands. I think part of the reason is that technology has just gotten so good so that, you know, the most viral videos that you're seeing from brands today are not these super produced ones. In fact, often it's like some person in their car with their phone on the way to like the gym and that video ends up getting a ton of virality. I think also, you know, we'll talk about like agenda commerce and social commerce, but I think some of these new areas where commerce is happening, as opposed to sort of the big stores, physical stores, allows for more of these small businesses to get seen a lot faster.

And the end result, of course, is that, you know, things are just blowing up. But, yeah, we have the Live Globe. It's my favorite thing we do every year. You guys pointed out that, you know, it's sort of like nerd heaven here. Anyone at home can watch BFCM. Dot shop. And, you know, it's, as you can see, it's moving. We're at $4.5 million sales, excuse me, dollars per minute right now. And again, we picked it about 5.1.

And it's really cool. One of the other things I want to show you is we, you guys, I don't know if you can see it here, but we also took over the sphere in Vegas. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have a shot of that to pull up. There we go. It's amazing. Yeah.

So we took over the sphere in Vegas. We do this. We've done this the last two years or so. It is the world's largest LED screen. And the idea here is like, can we just put entrepreneurship like on stage? And so this is a visualization of global sales happening in real time. Every arc you see is actually a live order. And what's really interesting is that every one of these confetti bursts is a merchant's first sale.

So it's happening right now about every 26 seconds, a new entrepreneur is making their first sale on Shopify. That's amazing. And this is people's entrepreneurship journeys starting in real time. I love seeing this. Yeah, I love the sphere just as like a monument, but it's also just I love it when you find. a, you know, a match for what fits on the screen. Like, the globe obviously works very well. It works well.

Yeah. And there are lots of things that, you know, they do marketing campaigns on the sphere and you're kind of like, oh, well, like, that would have worked on a normal billboard. The Black Friday Cyber Monday sphere is like uniquely. Yeah, we were in Vegas for F1 and they were just, they just had a bunch of different driver views on the sphere. There was some cool ones where it was like the helmet and you could see Brad Pitt's face. That one was kind of cool.

Obviously, if there's like a tennis ball or a basketball, like that can work really well. But, yeah. What's interesting actually on the sphere, when we first went to them two years ago, we told them we want to broadcast live. And actually at that particular point, on the sphere, it had to be a recording. You couldn't actually broadcast live. And so now you can do it live, but that's basically, that's the reaction to Shopify actually building it with them. And we started two years ago. They have to have a pretty high level of trust with the company that is broadcasting live to the sphere.

Because I can imagine they're certainly not going to make that open and programmatic. I think the cool thing, but the sphere also is, you know, the sphere obviously is it's located in Las Vegas. But the vast majority of people that look at it are, you know, it's usually on social, not in Vegas as well. So it's kind of an interesting kind of thing to do because you're doing something physical in a particular geography, but the actual, like, the distribution of it is global in a totally different way. And I think, you know, having these new cool things, then you're building a second sphere. Yeah, in London. Oh, did the London one? I know there was a proposal of building one in London.

I think it hit snags with a permitting or something like that. But, I mean, Middle East makes a ton of sense. That would be a logical place to have one. I mean, the pressure and the pressure right now, right now it's a big investment to take over one sphere. But to take, eventually it'll be like, oh, well, if you're going to do this fear, you got to get all. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, that's, but I do, I do love these really, I mean, you guys, this is like exactly, you know, right in your wheelhouse. but, like, I like these really ambitious projects.

These projects that, like, in the first meeting, someone proposed it and someone else said, like, there's no way we're going to do this. And then, of course, they end up doing it. So I think more of this is good, but it lends itself really well. But in many ways, like, I think back to sort of the original question, I think, like, BFCM is, in many ways, it is a celebration of entrepreneurship generally, even if you're on a retail. It sort of just feel like we all kind of take a moment to kind of celebrate businesses of all sizes. it also feels like consumers are very much, I don't know,

there is a different connection that consumers have to their brands they love. You know, and like, do you look at Decovis, for example? I know we're going to, we'll see you Kevin a little bit later, but you know, you can't really understand if the store is a retail operation or if it's a saloon because a lot of people just go in there to hang out or have their boot shined and have like, and drink bourbon.

And that's like totally okay with them. And I think this idea that, you know, there isn't this online versus offline kind of, you know, false dichotomy, but rather retail is happening agentically. It's happening. Like, the consumer journey starts like a TikTok video and then eventually goes to an online store and then maybe they don't buy anything, but they walk into a pop-up. And then eventually they happen to Roblox and they actually complete the purchase in Roblox. Like, that's kind of what we're seeing in BFCM 2025. And I don't know, it feels like a little bit of, it feels like the golden age, a little bit of

retail right now. Has, what does the data look like from your guys aside at a kind of global or macro level? Is there a specific moment in the day that, that, uh, is the most intense from a platform standpoint in terms of demand, or is it kind of smoothed out more than, let's say, in a traditional retail world that, you know, whenever the store opens is like the sort of period of peak intensity. There was somebody here on X saying it was 11 a.m. Eastern time is the peak, which is not what I would have expected, but is that roughly correct? It always is. It always is. Yeah. It's always between 11 a.m. and noon Eastern time. So you kind of think about like West Coast, it's 9 a.m. West Coast or so eight or nine. Europe is

sort of peak, you know, celebration mode. They've already had their pints. Okay. But yeah, that usually win is something interesting is one of the stores that's on Shopify that I love is Supreme, which, you know, is a legendary, you know, flash sale. Yeah. And they have every Thursday to 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Supreme does this massive flash sale. One of the reasons that we wanted, one of the things, you guys have probably heard me say to this, but one of the things we love about these millions of merchants on Shopify is that they push the boundaries of the platform. Whereas, you know, some companies would say, like, that's too big or that's too complicated.

like, you know, you kind of fire customers. We do the opposite. We kind of embrace the most complicated merchants on the planet because we feel like they kind of stretch us in the right direction. Supreme very much does that. But what's interesting is that, like, on a regular basis, Supreme has the largest flash sale that's ever happened. And then a week later, they then break that record.

Wow. And so Supreme, you know, is, obviously has been doing a lot. They push it. We also have, like, the, you know, like Universal Music does a lot of their drops of this, whether it's for Taylor Swift or it's for Bieber or some of those type of acts. So that pulls the platform as well. But generally, like, you know, knock on wood, things have been going really well. We have an incredible team on the infrastructure side.

Farhan, who leads engineering is going to be on later to kind of tell you exactly what goes on, you know, behind the scenes on the infrastructure side. Yeah, what happens? Do you guys get a lot of inbound from bigger brands that are kind of running their own commerce stacks after this kind of four-day stretch? Because they've like, this broke me. Like, well, yeah, yeah. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to move over. a time, it's probably a time to capitulate. It's like, it's like,

well, especially if they've had an issue, right? Like, every year, I don't do this anymore because, frankly, I've, uh, I realize that it pissed off a lot of people, but often what I would do is during Black Friday, when I saw a very large big box retailer go down, I would literally just post something on X saying like, you know, neck, like should have been on Shopify. And then sometimes they would call and, it's very aggressive and it's very

passive aggressive. Uh, and sometimes they would find that to be, you know, cute. And other times it'd be like, totally, you know, disrespectful. It's like, hey, our site was down, our site was down for, just straight up aggressive. Yeah, I mean, if your site goes down for, your site goes down for 10 minutes and you could lose out on, I don't know, a million dollars in sale. If you are, if you were one of these large sort of electronic big box, like a Best Buy type retailer, and you go down on Black Friday, which, you know, has happened, it is a really big deal. There was kind of this era, to be

honest, of enterprises believing that part of their real value was owning their own staff. We're a tech company. That's the first time. Yeah. Whoa. That's a 100,000 sale miles though just happened there. Whoa. There's cool.

I love it. So that's right. So some of these merchants, like, they wanted to be, they believe they were tech companies. And I think that era is over, which is at some point you read about, you know, chat GBT and embedding commerce. And in a board meeting, someone says, well, do we have that? And then someone else says, well, no, but, you know, if we were on Shopify, we would be in that launch. launch. And that helps a little bit. The idea also, it's like running your own servers or having your own data center. At some point, it doesn't really make sense to do that. I think that error is

over. And so one of the, I, on the last earnings call, I talked about Estée Lauder coming to Shopify. One of the reasons I'm talking a lot about the Estée Laudders of the world and these much larger brands coming to Shopify is that I want to kind of begin to explain to the world that we also handle the most iconic legendary brands, Mattel or Burk and Stock or Hunter Douglas, these companies that historically wouldn't have come to shop play are now coming, and we love that. What are you seeing, what are some kind of key trends that you're seeing as far as like everything from like marketing strategy to discounting strategy? Like what are you seeing globally this year across across the platform? Discounting still is the case, although I don't actually think that

discounting is as important as people think. I actually think value matters a lot more. I was on CNBC, I was on Squawk Box this morning, and Steve Leasman was asking with consumer confidence. And I told him sort of the way that we look at consumer confidence is we just measure at checkout because you can read all the reports and all the surveys you want, but ultimately what are people doing. And Steve kind of made a joke that often with these surveys, you know, what people say they're going to do and what they actually do is totally different. They say they're not going to spend as much.

And then when they see something they love, they just, of course, go and buy it immediately because humans are humans. So one of the things that I think actually is happening is consumers are kind of voting with their wallets to buy from brands that they love. So if they love Viori or they love Allo, they're waiting for some sort of sale from those brands. And if the sale isn't what they thought it would be, they're still buying. But they're being a lot more intentional about how they purchase.

The second thing is, I think this era of like online and offline, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but this is like, this is totally over. I think we have figs coming on. I think this C-CMO, Figgs is going to be on a little bit later on. One of the things I love about figs is this is an online business, homegrown story on Shopify, incredible growth. They went public and pretty much in every hospital, everyone who's like, you know, who cares about how they look and how they feel is wearing figs. They started opening up physical locations around hospitals. And what's effectively to make it really simple for health care workers on their lunch break or on their, you know, coffee break to come down and purchase stuff there.

So if you were to ask figs, are they in online retail, they would say, work like that idea of all. We're just a retailer. It feels like that is almost a, this whole, like, we're living in like a post-omni-channel world, as silly as that sounds, where sell in every surface area. We have an integration with Roblox, and in some cases, most merchants, most of them don't use that integration. But we have some merchants who do, like, real business using the shop of integration inside of Roblox.

And so the idea, from our perspective, is, like, every surface area that exists should be a place where you're able to transact, and merchants can choose whatever is most appropriate for them. How is the POS side of the business growing? Is that growing faster than the overall business or the e-commerce side? Or is it more like an add-on where somebody starts with Shopify online and they realize, hey, we should probably unify the back end and then the POS system. From a GMV perspective, actually point-to-sell GMB is actually growing faster,

but it's on a much smaller base because most merchants on shop are using e-commerce. Look, initially, it was meant to be, if you're on Shopify for online, let us also serve you offline as well. Now what we're seeing is merchants are coming to us, like PurePlay offline retailers are coming to us, like Brick and more retailers are coming as first for offline and then expanding online as well. So it's an area, it's one of the most important areas for the business. It's getting really, really good. Initially, it was only, you know, for smaller, you know, a couple stores. Now you have massive brands like aloe, you know, using it across all of their stores as well. We just announced that Aldo is going to be using it across 400 stores, the shoe, the large shoe company.

So more and more, it's becoming a big thing. But we look at these as like on ramps into Shopify. Like, tell us what channel is your predominant channel. We'll make that really easy and scalable. And then once you're using Shopify, we're going to introduce you to other channels where we think you can probably find real success. Yep. How have brands, how have things on the macro, kind of the tariff side, settled? Thankfully, we haven't had a crazy, uh, anything.

crazy in the last two weeks, uh, or, or two months, but, uh, is, is, is, is a sigh of relief? Yeah, pretty, pretty much. I mean, uh, I would have been concerned, you know, if, uh, Liberation Day had happened like three months ago, it would have been potentially really scared. Or on Black Friday. Yeah, that would have been bad. Yeah. No, it would have been highly disruptive because, I mean, a lot of, I mean, a lot of brands today will fully sell out of, especially their hero products and be leaving a lot of revenue on the table. And so, like, having a successful Black Friday comes down to a lot

of just like high, you know, good demand planning. And earlier this year, you know, it was just really chaotic. I mean, we're, we have a good mutual friend and Ryan from Flexport. Ryan's an amazing guy. I think he was on the show yesterday or the day before that. We were reposting clips,

but he actually, yeah, yeah, that clip was from like a couple weeks ago, but yeah. Okay. So Ryan, I mean, Flexport's an incredible partner of us. So, you know, we talk, we hear from Ryan quite a bit of what's having the supply side of just commerce. Sure. In terms of the tariff side, look, I mean, we've seen merchants go through,

Shopify is 20 years old. We've seen merchants go through the global, you know, financial crisis, through the pandemic, through a bunch of, obviously, through Liberation Day. The way that we sort of, most of the merchants on Shopify seem to be incredibly resilient. Our job is sort of to make it really easy for them to navigate whatever comes their way. On the tariff side of things, we haven't really seen any change in behavior. Certainly, we did Q3, we saw about 91 billion of GMV because of the platform, that was, I think, just over 30% year and your growth. So we haven't seen that, we haven't seen any type of change in behavior.

And then on the pricing side, I said this on the call also, we haven't seen merchants change their pricing all that much. And so I think that, again, it's not that consumers don't care about it. I just think that they're being more selective, which I think leads to kind of what you'll see, what you'll hear a lot over the next couple of hours. on the show today, which is that brands really matter, like the relationship that, like, direct to consumer used to be this thing that effectively was a bit of a fad, like, oh, this is that kind of business, and this is a different, this is a, you know, this is Sean at Ridge. He runs a direct to consumer wallet company. No one calls Ridge, a direct consumer, it's just a wallet company now. I think the advantage to direct consumer is because they have a direct relationship,

they also have a direct connection, and they're able to cultivate a different type of dynamic with their customer base. And, and you'll hear that from across the board, I think, today. So generally, you know, again, what I said to Steve and I'll say to you guys is we measure consumer confidence at checkout and people are buying. It's a great way to do it. Great way to do it. I was driving in to the gym this morning before we got to the studio and there was six people outside of a target at 6 a.m. Is that low or high? That felt extremely low.

Well, there's probably 60 people outside of it, to COVID. this right now in somewhere in America so that does feel low remember those videos of like they opened the doors everyone like rushed it to get the tv like that's what i'm saying but i i never participated in that so i completely missed that and i don't i miss yeah like is it completely died off it seems like it has i never understood why people how many people needed that many TVs like the tvs the tv thing is crazy is crazy i i guess it's just like one of the bigger purchases you make and so if you can save a couple hundred bucks on it it's like worth it or something but uh yeah it was a big, a big meme, the, the, the, the, the last TV. I just, I, I think what you're saying earlier

is true. It's like, people have brand, everyone at this point, I, like, you don't even have to be, like, that, uh, you don't even have to be, like, into shopping or into the different things. You have a handful of brands that you really love. They're probably independent. And when it comes time for Black Friday, you're like, okay, what, what are the brands that I like doing? And I'm going to put my dollars there. And maybe I'm going to do some, uh, Christmas shopping, too. It feels a little bit like, like, like, we're all kind of vote. with our wallets to have more of the brand that we love exists in the world.

Like I wear a black t-shirt almost every day. It's a James purse, black t-shirt. I know I've got to know James Perce t-shirt. I buy it because I think he makes the best t-shirts, but it's also a vote of like, I want more James Persis in the world. These like kind of quirky guys, in his case, in out of California, who is obsessed with making black t-shirts. And I like, as someone that is an entrepreneur myself,

they're an entrepreneur my whole life, I just, I want more James Persis exist. in the world across all different verticals. And so I'm willing to spend a little bit more money. And this is like, I've been buying James Purst T-shirts before I gave them and afford them when I was a student. Because instead of buying like five Gilden T-shirts, which were kind of crappy, I would save my money and buy one James Purse T-shirt every six months.

And it was because I like the shirt, but I also, I like the story behind it. And I think that that matters to consumers. What, give us the update on Agentic Commerce and AI. We've obviously spent the last, you know, a couple weeks talking about the battle between Chatchip-T and Gemini, but I'm curious what the update is. You guys are definitely the ground zero for that battle, it seems. The amount of debate from all, each, every one of your guests is amazing. Everyone is perfectly conflicted, you know.

And everyone has an opinion. Yeah, that's right. Look, we are not trying to guess exactly what permutation is going to win. What we're trying to do effectively is whatever is the way that agenic is going to happen, we want to make sure Shopify is right there. We want to make sure, more importantly, that our merchants are there. So part of the reason that we built our agentic tools in a way that is more modular, like we built catalog, which is effectively every skew on Shopify.

And we built, you know, checkout kits so you can effectively customize the checkout inside of the app, the agentic application. So it looks like it's natively integrated, and it feels like it's part of the conversation. The reason we're building these sort of tools in that way is to effectively give these tools every single application. And we've, we've partnered with chatDBT. Obviously, that got a lot of attention. We're we partnered with perplexity. We're working with Microsoft as well. So our view is that in a similar way that, you know, when social commerce started to gain some steam, we didn't really know what platform was going to be the one that ended up being sort of the winner. Obviously,

social commerce is a bit different. Now it feels like it's more about discovery, less about the transaction. No one's really checking out on these platforms. The thing I'm super, the thing I'm super excited about and super bullish on is chat chbtee had some news i think it was last week around deep research focused on shopping and it feels like it feels like that is the way that people like that is a better way to do product research discovery which is just like hey fire off a prompt and then go do something else and then come back especially because it has it has all your context it knows what you've been searching for if i've been if if my particular you know chat application knows that i deeply care about you know uh on writing that's my favorite stuff if i'm looking to get gear for

you know, a camping trip or a hiking trip, it should so, first it should show me on running, you know, boots because it knows that I have a proclivity or some sort of connection to that brand. I think actually the coolest part. So, so one is we think that like it's, we think that it's going to change the way consumers shop. It may actually, remember, e-commerce as a percent of total retail is like sub-20 percent in the U.S. still. It's like 25 percent in the U.K., but it's still pretty small. So one thing that may happen is Agenic may invite non-traditional online shoppers into the online world, which we think is really good. But whatever permutation ends up being the winner, we want to make sure that our merchants are best set up. And I also

think it creates a little bit of a leveling of the playing field whereby now, if I'm using a search engine to do my shopping, I'm going to be, you know, the first thing I'm going to be served is going to be whoever pays the most for an ad. Whereas onogenic, hopefully what I'm being served is the thing that's most relevant to me based on everything the chat application knows about my personal interest. So I think it actually may help a lot of smaller businesses get bigger. Totally. I'm curious by, by, uh, this point in the day, do you have a good sense of where the platform will land from a volume standpoint for Black, Black Friday in total? Like, are you guys, no, no, not even close. Wait, really? You have, you have 10 years of data.

How can you not get the curve? I have, sorry, I should say, I'm not ready to disclose that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But like, I mean, I imagine that you have 10 years of data. I'm not, yeah, I'm not asking you to disclose. I'm just saying, like, do you have some sense, can you get it within like five bill you know like our data team is legendary i'm sure i'm sure legendary there's no way you can't predict but i mean so far things are going really well we did nine point so for the weekend so the further four days um so Thursday night till like Friday so Thursday night when sort of thanksgiving starts until Monday night I think we did 9.3 billion in 2023 we did 11.5 billion 24 whoa we'll see see what happens this year let's we got to take the over on this let's let's

I'm not participating, I'm not participating, but I will say, this, we didn't, I didn't even talk about this, this guest list we have today is stacked. Yes. And what's really cool is, it's sort of a mixture of, like, some of the people on here, I actually haven't met yet. They're shop by merchants, I don't know them. And some of the people that I, that I invited on, I don't think you guys have met yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's, I mean, I don't know if you know, like, favorite daughters coming on, Sarah Foster. Yeah.

I mean, Sarah Foster, like, favorite daughters are amazing. What you may not know is, like, she also has a hit Netflix show where everybody on the show, where everybody on the show, where is favorite daughter? And she has like a hit podcast called Yeah, it's so funny. When we introduced her earlier, I said, I said podcaster because both of our wives My wife too. It's a favorite podcast.

But a lot of people know, you know, nobody wants this from Netflix. But this, like you talk about the future of retail and how it all fits together or Cat Cole, I think you're having Cat Cole on his CEO of AG1. Cat recently, you know, she said this publicly, Kat

does like, they sell something like $600 million is what Katz says with one single skew. I mean, that is unbelievable. You talk about this exciting new evolution of commerce and retail. These are the people that are building it. And they're building on Shopify, which we feel very honored. But these are the people on the show that are really leading where this whole thing is going. Yeah, that's incredible.

We're having Brian on the sea of Rora later. New Shopify merchant, Brian and I started Rora together a while back. And this is Rora's first Black Friday ever, so I have the, I got the shop. How's he feeling? Oh, he's feeling great. He's feeling great. No, it's been, been an awesome year. And I guess that's how Brian to send me all of his feedback and product suggestions and anything else he has there. Of course. That's really cool there. Of course. Yes, you have Kat. You have Brian, uh, Nishant, you have on. Wow. I mean, I mean, this Peter, Sarah. Do you know, do you know, do you know, do you know, uh, do you know a ray yet, uh, Nisha's brand? No. I mean, I know the brand. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean,

I mean, this is very, very under the radar because they raised one round, like, right at inception, and then I won't docks their revenue because I don't know how much is public, but one of the biggest companies that's joining the show today, and hardly anyone, at least in the X world, is even aware of them. I'm so excited for that one. Incredible. Yeah, I'm just looking here. I mean, okay, so Noel Mack, who leads with Ben Francis, Aylind, Jim Shirk, he's actually calling in from his new story. in Dubai. Jim Shark is the poster child for like online, you know, multi-billion dollar company.

And now he's Congress from Dubai where he's opening a brand new store. So it'll be interesting to see like, if you've been to any of the Jim Shark stores, they only have a couple of them, but they're like gyms and like, you talk about experiential retail. They're like, they're the best of that. Well, we're going to have them, we're going to have them go for, we should have them do a one rep max on the show if they have the setup. Incredible.

All right. Well, you'll be back on. You'll be back on soon. Where are you headed out to? I'm heading right now to Tocovis in Soho. They have a brand new store that just opened. So I'm going to be calling in our next round. I will be at the store in Soho at their bar. And thank you for letting an hour. He'll be back in 1250. Incredible. Thank you for letting me co-host. And thank you for sending me this amazing outfit. I feel like I'm one of the boys. Thank you. You are. I'm very grateful for you guys doing this with us.

Yeah. It's a lot of fun. Awesome. We'll see in a little bit. I'll talk to you soon. See you guys. Have a good one. Bye. We're about to hop on with Noel from Jim Shark before he does. Let me tell you about cognition. This is a great Christmas present.

It really is. Get someone cognition. Get him Devin. The AI software engineer. Devin under the Christmas tree. Say, hey, hey, mom, I want you to crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team. Here's $100,000 of cognition credits. Thank you so much to Cognition for supporting the show.

Our next guest is Noel from Jim shark let's bring him in from the restroom waiting room how are you doing good to see you welcome to show thanks for staying up late right are you're in dubai is that right i'm in dubai but i'm on british times are so this is fine for me i'm good man don't worry you're good awesome uh how's the day been so far mellow we're just wrapping up here now right so it's 22 midnight right now here in Dubai and my plan was to do this with the store in the background there's still so many people in the store tearing t-shirts of hangers you wouldn't have heard a word or saying so yeah man it's been That's crazy.

Wow. When do you actually close the retail store? This store closes in 20 minutes. Okay. Okay. So did you do it 24 hours? Like, did you start? Did you open at midnight last night or when did you actually open this morning?

No, it opened, you know what? I should know that. Devils in the details right, but I don't know what time is still actually open this morning. But I only arrived, I only got into Dubai like 10 a. So I'm not sure. So that's going to be my excuse. So did you start the day back in the UK? Yeah, started the day in the earth.

Did the red eye last night from the UK and landed here. They call Blackfrode over here. Dubai super sales, so they do it a little bit differently to the way we do at home. And it's, yeah, it's, it's wild. There's literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people walking around Dubai mall outside right now, which is nuts. Wow. What's the shape of the business these days?

Like, what categories do you, like, how do you segment out the business and sort of understand what you sell? Well, the key difference, the key differentiated to understand about Jim Shark is there's lots of sports brands out there, right? There's been a few brands in recent years. I think Lulu kicked the door down for the yoga brands. and then a bunch of other brands came in after that. The really unique thing about us is we're not any of those things.

We're a gym brand, right? And the same way Lulu said to people, hey, you shouldn't wear sports clothes to do yoga. You should wear specific yoga wear to do yoga. We're trying to introduce people to the idea that actually you should wear specific gym clothes to the gym. So our brand platform is we do gym and we think we do that better than anybody else out there. Yeah.

What was your interview process like? Did you have to show off your one rep max or anything? What was the process? No, you know what? It's a common misconception that, you have to be some huge lifting person to come and work at Jim Sharp, but you really don't. However, one thing I would say is a lot of people fall in love with it once they start a Jim Shark and then they find themselves doing all sorts of crazy marathons for charity and lifting events

and bodybuilding and all this crazy stuff. So it's a great environment, steel, sharp and steel and all that. What about the geographical distribution? I mean, obviously a global brand, but like how global have you focused on any particular markets? Has Middle East been particularly important as a growth area? So what's growing fastest? What's the most interesting thing happening geographically for Jim Shark? So we shipped to like 130 countries, something like that, through several different Shopify stores.

The UAE's been a real new thing for us. It's been going for about 18 months. You guys went international super early. You also worked with, like, you, from my understanding, thinking back like a decade ago, you guys like did influencer marketing probably better than any other brand and did it at a scale that no one had really done it before. I'm assuming you were working with like 10,000 plus influencers at any given point. Like it seemed like you guys were just everywhere.

Did that force you guys to go international earlier than a lot of other brands? Yeah, I had a really interesting moment once where I was sitting at a border and doing some work and an intern knocked on the door. I was on my own and she said, no, can ask you a question. When did Jim Shark enter the US? And it kind of stunk me for a second. I had to stand there and think about it. And I said, we never sort of entered the US.

That seems to be a thing that old-school businesses did. Sure. We shipped to wherever people wanted to buy it from from Daddy 1 of Jim Shark. So we were technically global from the rip. But you're right, we were very, very early to influence the marketing. A lot of people credit us to some of the real early pioneers of that. But actually, where you were slightly wrong was the point on 10,000 influencers, that was kind of the opposite of what we did.

While a lot of people got into influence marketing early and just spread bet and hit as many people as they could, anybody with a few followers, we decided to sort of handcraft to this like select group of what we call Jim Shark athletes who were like the biggest names in the fitness industry, the really, really revered one. So what might have felt like a bit of a roadblock on social media to you was probably more depth as opposed to wit, if that makes sense? Yeah, just working with the biggest names in the category. And in terms of 2025 now, take me through what's working on the marketing side. What strategy, what area has been the most exciting this year for Jim Shark as a whole?

To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. it's less about, you know, it's not there's a particular channel that's ripping right now or there's a new version of It's TikTok shop or anything like that It's finding our lane and sticking to it right and being relentless about the fact We make gym wear that's what we do and we're better than anybody else at it right We noticed a little while ago everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different Lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things and you know we there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well And then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were we doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand we launched our brand platform we do gym

and people have taken to it incredibly, incredibly well. There was an article I read on LinkedIn the other day that said the world doesn't need more bland brands. It need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies. And I think that is exactly what we did. Not enemies per se, but we're willing to say, hey, if you don't rock with us, that's absolutely fine.

There's a million other brands out there that are probably for you, but if you want great gym stuff, you should come to Jim Shark. How is gym culture evolving? I feel like the story of the last couple years was this hybrid athlete movement. We don't do a lot of running. we probably should. We hit the gym as a team every single morning. We got to get into doing some more cardio. But how is that kind of impacted the product strategy, if at all?

We've got about a 500 people run club this Sunday in Dubai. So get me a green jacket. You boys are happy to. I'll have you host you down here. We'll all run together. Yeah, you're right. So the first thing I'd say is the culture of resistance training and quote-unquote sort of traditional gym work has really, really grown in the past few years. So you talk to any of the big equipment providers and they're telling you that they're going into some of the big gym chains in the US. They're removing steppers, they're removing cross-training by the balfour and they're putting squat racks in, right? A little while ago, squat racks looked like a medieval torture device to some people if they didn't know how to use it. And now people are really learning how useful real resistance training

is. But you're absolutely right, the rise of the hybrid athlete is a, it's a wild, it's like, it's a real step forward in people's understanding of fitness. So it previously, you saw a big guy, you're like he's a big guy he lifts weights but he can't run you saw a guy who weighed you know 120 pounds you can probably run but I doubt you can live weights and now the two things emerging massively I ran the London marathon last year and I had guys coming past me at like 230 pounds lean with a ton of muscle mass and I was just like man that is so unfair yeah and they're going past me as well and they're got 100 pounds on me which I thought was wildly unfair but yeah this hybrid thing this this this this you can still carry muscle and

you can be a runner and this and that and that do you know I mean like it's it's a real new development and we're leaning into that pretty heavily How are you thinking about competing with some of the older, more, like, legacy brands in the space, specifically in becoming like that household name breaking through across everything. Are you focused on just owning the next generation or do you eventually want to go and, you know, get to such saturation that you become a household name even with the older folks? How are you thinking about the different demographics that you're going after? I'll be honest, saturation and household names aren't, household name isn't something we put at the top of our Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?

Becoming the best version of us is what we do. If what comes with that is household name status and market saturation or that kind of stuff, amazing. If it doesn't, no problem, but we know we're going to be the best gym brand out there. So we're never going to beat some of the big players from your country or from Germany. You know who I'm talking about being there, but what we can do is win it being us. Yeah, that makes sense. What about 2026? Are there any upcoming marketing or growth strategies that you're excited about potentially exploring next year?

I personally, we don't have a huge plan for this year. I love streamers right now. I'm like streamers are doing a lot. And I think that feels like implements marketing to me in the early days when it was kind of untapped and we dominated early. I like seeing what streamers are doing. There's something that we are doing that we are very good at is these RRL experiences. like our last event in London had over 15,000 people come out to it. That was two days.

There was stock for sale, but it was stuff they could buy on the website. There was a few exclusives. There was their favorite Jim Shark athletes, the group of people that I talked to you about earlier on. They could hang out and lift together. We've done them in Miami. Again, the last Miami one, I think we had 13.5,000 people over two days. So those are just wild. It's almost like a rock landing lake.

The ripples that sends out across the fitness industry, across all of social media, across TikTok, everything is absolutely nuts. And that's not us, that's consumers coming along, creating their own TikToks, taking selfies with their own favorite influencers, athletes, creating their own content, and it's spreading out into the world. So, yeah, that works really, really well for us. We always say that Jim Shark's an online brand that was built offline. Yeah, yeah. In the chat, they're saying people yearn for IRL events, and I couldn't agree more. How are you guys thinking about the intersection of AI and commerce? Are people discovering Jim Shark in different LLMs yet? It feels like a really

tough channel from a brand standpoint because right now you don't you don't even have the ability to do that great of like imagery and and uh just like showing off products in the way that you might want to on on your personal site but uh what does that look like today and how are you kind of forecasting out yeah you're right i think that like literally a i have such a buzzword that absolutely everybody is using and i tend to try and steer clear of talking about them when everybody else is talking about them so my my thinking about stuff like this is a little bit buffett-esque be brave when others are scared and be scared with others are brave. But you're right, AI results, AI search is absolutely huge. We already do pretty well on that front because there is such an organic

ground swell of information on Jim Shark, on TikTok, on ready, on, you know, a lot of the places it's scraping for information, exactly. So we do quite well. But you're right, I'm not going to give away the secret source now, but we ask, well, it's not my department, but somebody else at Jim Shark is working really hard on making sure that we do even better on that front going forwards. Yep. Makes sense. Well, thank you for taking the time out of a very, very busy day. How long are you going to be in Dubai? You're doing an event and then you're going back to the UK or are you doing a world tour? Yeah, we're launching our second Dubai store on Tuesday. So we've got a bunch of stuff leading up to it. Like I said, we have a really big run club in Jamira Golf

Estates on Sunday morning. We have our conditioning club. We're doing a run club inside the Mall of Emirates, which is another mall because it's that big. You can do a 5K run inside the mall. That's real Dubai stuff. Stampede. And we open our store on Tuesday. And then I get out of him, I'm back to the UK. Nice. When you say experiential retail, is it running focused? Do you have full, like, squat racks in there? Like, what does experiential mean in the context of Jim Shark?

It depends on the, it depends on the format of the store. Like, we can scale it down and up. Like, sometimes it's just, we have a bunch of personal trainers come up. We're doing pull-up competitions. We're doing run, closing, and that kind of stuff. Our latest store that we've just announced, the date isn't out there yet, but our latest flagship store, our first ever U.S. flagship store is launching real soon. in New York.

I'm brought on Bond Street opposite Kiff. And that has, I mean, I can't reveal it yet, but that has the whole two floors of experiential. So anyway, keep your eyes peeled, and you'll see what I mean when I say, we can scale it from small stuff to really, really big stuff. Amazing. Well, great, great meeting you.

Thanks for coming on the show. Fantastic to hear your approach to all this. I love the focus and just the intensity. Makes a lot of sense. Congratulations. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

Have a good one. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI Native CRM, build, scales, and grows your company to the next level. I asked ChatGBT, BT, I put the shopping research mode to the test. I said, find me the most expensive, elite luxury goods hosted on Shopify sites, specifically, basically just one item per brand, but pull as many different products as possible. Take me on a full tour of top Shopify products.

The best overall? A $28 million yacht. motor yacht, the Mangusta 165. Is it actually? Is it actually a Shopify? It is. It is.

I can put it in the... They're selling yachts on Shopify. They're selling yachts on Shopify. This is not a joke. I'm going to put this in the timeline so we can all pull this up. It's a $28 million yacht. It's 50 feet, maybe 50 meters. It's a, they call it a super yacht.

Few consumer products exceeded tens of millions of dollars. But this is a full 50 meter super yacht. It comes from a boutique broker using Shopify, not a big generic marketplace. Third party yachting press documented the yacht, noting the N1 was the first hull in the Mangusta 165 REV series designed in collaboration with Overmarine and Labunov. It's listed at 28 million euros. This confirms it's not a speculative or unknown build. It's a real super yacht. You can buy it on Shopify.

It's available in the shop app. also uh we are of course sponsored by bezel get bezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet but i got as you say there is somebody on shopify selling a five million dollar protect philippe grandmaster chime and even though it's a competitor bezel you imagine we got to talk about it we got to talk about it uh can you it's a five million dollar you got to see this watch can you imagine the credit card fees on that oh yeah that is wild hopefully you've negotiated a fantastic rate with Shopify payments. You have the lowest possible payments.

Maybe you're doing ACH at that level. I'm pretty sure Shopify offers something like that. I'm sure there's something that you can do, but this is a $5 million Patek-Falip Grand Complications, Grand Master Chime. This is, of course, on Shopify, you save $208,000 when you buy it, this Black Friday. No way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is so generous.

$208,000 savings if you go with the Grand Master Chime. I think this is a fantastic watch. If somebody out there really wants to stimulate the economy, this is a great option. I have another. I have another one. Have you ever wanted a supercar? And if you thought, I couldn't possibly get a supercar on Shopify. That's crazy.

I couldn't get a Bugatti Shiran Super Sport on Shopify. Well, you can't, but you can get the front end because, there's someone that's selling just the front end for $400,000. An LLM source this for you? Yes. Okay. AGI not achieved internally. This is...

What do you mean? This is a $400,000 Bougatty front end. What more do you want? Yeah, I don't understand the problem. I guess this would be cool to use to build out the set here. Yeah. You could use it as like a... This is the front of a Bugatti.

She runs Super Sport. And where else are you going to get a front end if you smash your Bugatti Shiran because you're tracking it and you dig it into the gravel, the kitty litter, and you need a new front end. Where are you going to go? You're going to go to a Shopify store, of course. Doherty, of course. You go to Shopify for this. The last one is, there's a Richard Mill.

There's an RM at a different store on Shopify. $500,000 for the Richard Mill. Let's see which one this is. I actually did check to make sure that these sites are actually using Shopify. are, which is crazy. Good. It's the Richard Mill, RM 7201, black ceramic, rose gold, box and paper. Great. $525,000. Great option. On Shopify right there. You'll love to see it. And so I would, I would encourage these, you know, any, any venture funds out there. An RM would be a fantastic gift, end of year gift, you know, holiday gift for Port Co-founder. I mean, only if the Mangusta 165 RV motor yacht is out of stock. True. But yes. But an RM that's engraved on the back.

Yes. Would be quite a nice holiday gift for, like a Series A stage founder. You'd want to go maybe with the yacht for Series B and beyond. But Series A, perfect stage for a holiday. Or you can give them Bugatti Shira on Super Sport one piece at a time. Just say, one. Jobs not finished. Jobs not finished.

But maybe by the time it is, you'll have a full Bugatti. No, it's just like, hey, keep delivering, and you'll keep getting pieces of Bugatti Shiron until you have a full car eventually. I wonder if you just buy up all the random pieces, if it'll come in at lower. No. It goes way higher. Just the front end was $400,000. That's not a $50 million car. I mean, if it's, if it's, uh, that feels like a more expensive part of the car, it's probably fully, it's probably fully carbon.

I don't know. I feel like, I feel like, what about the motor? what about the what about the that's going to cost you what about the interior there's so many expensive parts that'll cost you uh over over on x uh saw a post here from colin slattery he runs uh a digital is he blackpilling agency he's blackpilling a little bit okay well before you read this post let me tell you about linear meet the system for modern software development linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products continue uh Colin uh rock Rock, strong name, says super slow start in the U.S. so far, referencing his Black Friday.

He's also managing the ad accounts for some DUSE brands. Colin says we are seeing the same, but the next post I have here from Jeremiah says, looks like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is perfectly tracking with the last two years, expecting a peak around 11 a.m. Eastern. So again, I don't think. I'll be interested to see where where today's volume actually nets out. Obviously, I think Harley had some

probably nose to within, I feel like, do you think they could get it within $100 million at this point? 100%. Like at their scale, they, at this point, past the peak, like it's, we're three hours past the peak time.

Like, there's no shot that they, that they don't know exactly what's going to happen. just from fitting to the previous curves. I mean, look at this chart. Like, it's very clear that, you know, you can fit a curve to the next, to like the previous trend and project out. I would be shocked.

But, I mean, yes, there probably is some error bar. And what was he saying? $11 billion. So within a few million is actually extremely precise. Yeah, I was saying within $100 million. Within $100 million, that's like within 1%. Like, yeah, they probably can. Yeah.

But not within like the single digit millions. Anyway, we got to get to the bottom of how TikTok is performing on this Black Friday. Sean Frank is joking around here. He says he has a seven-figure day because he made $711 on TikTok shop, all because absolutely crushing it, 700. And there's a lot of other, there's a lot of other sources. It says, buy a Ridgewallis to get my course.

Yeah, there's something, yeah, there's something odd. I was hearing that TikTok shop was scaling like crazy. It sounds like it's pulled back. We'll have to ask more people about are they getting value out of TikTok shop or any of the other vertical video platforms, short form, what's actually working. I would also be interested to see, are people actually timing up influencer marketing to Black Friday sales? Are they ramping on more programmatic platforms? I'm not. Zach Stuck, who runs a number of different brands, says, officially Black Friday, here's the media mix.

So he's sharing a breakdown. He's spending $300,000 today, $220,000 on meta, $30,000 on App Lovin, $25,000 on Google, $20,000 on YouTube, and then a handful of other buckets. But, yeah, notable that's spending more money on App Loven than on Google or YouTube. Wow. And then David Herman, who's also runs an ad agencies. He says, App Lovin too low.

So he's bullish on Applevin. people that are super bearish on Apploven. But every time I talk to somebody who's, like, actually using it or buying ads on it, they're always like, yeah, it's real, that's fine. It feels like Appleaven has a weird disconnect with either, maybe it's like retail traders that are, that are bearish or something. Or I've heard from, like, you know, competitors being like, oh, it's, it's, it's kind of like, I think it's kind of like, I think it's kind of in the Palantir bucket of like fundamentally the business is working and scaling really quickly. but it's at a 103 PE ratio right now. Okay, okay. So it's highly valued.

So it's highly values. But yeah, it's also something where I think because the Apple Levin brand and logo doesn't show up everywhere, whereas like Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, these ad platforms do. Apple Levin's behind the scenes a little bit below the surface. That just confuses people. And they're like, yeah, how can you possibly make money behind the scenes? David Herman says cut ad spend so far. far for Black Friday's Cyber Monday for one client by 48% year-over-year, and we're only down

6% year-over-year. Oh, interesting. Interesting strategy there to actually. I mean, it is a big question about, like, on Black Friday, it is probably the highest intent shopping day of the year. Very much you, every person on Black Friday, almost all of them, they're not just sitting there being like, oh, I'm bored, I'm going to go shopping. It's more like, okay, I need gifts.

for this type of person and let me work backwards. What brands do I know? What brands do I like? And so they're much more likely to react to brands that they've been seeing messaging from all year. Oh, yeah, I remember that brand. They had a funny Super Bowl ad. And then I saw what they did over the summer.

And then I stopped by the store here and I wound up getting retargeted and put some stuff in my card over here. But now is the time to go by. And so I'm going back to my favorite brands. It's not necessarily just the day where you're like randomly scrolling Instagram, clicking on whatever is coming across your feet.

High intent. It's a high intent day, I would assume. David Herman also says right now Apploven's pacing has been insanely good, essentially reflecting the ad spend change swimmingly. Meta's not so much. We're down 30 to 70% day over day on meta spend despite increasing things 4X. So we increase budget 4X, but the actual spend that's happening is down. And so, yeah, basically people are having some issues with ad.

pacing. As you can expect, this is like, I would love to know how much is actually spent on meta ads on Black Friday. I don't know if they disclosed. It actually break that out by the day. I doubt it. Someone else says, my Black Friday campaign spent 70% of the budget by 9 a.m. Eastern, so that can be a problem and these things can get unpredictable. Other fun fact I love about David, he's obsessed with police chases. Did you know this about him? Oh, does he live post them? He live posts them. He's obsessed with watching them. It's like one of these funny, fun facts about him. Anyway, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about fall, build and deploy

AI video and image models. They're trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. Our next guest is Sarah from Favorite Daughter. We might have to change hats. I have a favorite sun hat here. There she is. Thank you for joining the stream. Thank you for sending these beautiful hats. How are you doing? Hi, guys, I got to tell you a lot of tech pros. Yes. Text texting me up this morning being like, this is so cool. I'm like, all right, all right. Well, our, our wives, our wives said the same thing. They're, they, they listen, they listen to the podcast, they're fans. So, uh, everybody's excited. Yeah, we're super, we're super excited to have you on. I love it. Harley wrote me. He was like, you know, he's the, he's the, he's the

ecom king. So when he asks, we show up. You know what I mean? We show up. Yes. My co-founder is probably watching, by the way. My, my, my other known is my, my, my, my, my little sister. Little sister. She's moving, so she's not joining. Moving on Black Friday. Well, for the tech people that don't know, can you introduce the brand? Can you introduce the, I don't know, yourself? How do you actually think about yourself? Do you use the term slash? I guess like we really give like a multi-hyphenate a run for its money. We were speaking at a Bloomberg conference to their day and they're like, how do you actually describe yourself? It's weird. You know, we talk about our business as an ecosystem. We have all these things that

feed each other. The same girl or guy who's buying Favorite Daughter is listening to our podcast. She is probably following us on socials. She's listening to the pod. She, you know, Aaron created, you know, a global phenomenon and nobody wants this on Netflix. So we got that girl now. It's, it all feeds each other the flywheel. And then, and then from a product perspective, specifically with, with Favorite Daughter, how are you thinking about the shape of the business today? Where do you want to take it over the next few years? How big are the ambitions? I mean, look, we're growing fast if you had to told me that we'd be where we are right now. I mean, I said it at Bloomberg. I can say it now. We're going to

do like $150 million in retail sales next year. We were profitable. We were, woo. Whoa. Congratulations. I don't know. Is that tacky to give numbers? Whatever. No, not long. Why do you think we have a gong? Yeah. The people want numbers. We have the gong four numbers. Yeah, okay, that's cool. Yeah, so basically you're saying you made $150 million last year in your bank account. It's in my account right now as we speak. No, I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined, of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer from my sister and I.

We were like, we're not fashion girls who want clothes from us. I could have never fathom that this is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool, is our. our customer. She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influence or celebrity brands, maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear favorite daughter. We're wearing favorite daughter out of the world. Yeah, it's authentic. Talk about this year. We live in L.A. It's been, you know, it's obviously super wild, stressful start to the year.

You guys have had a store right in the Palisades. Is that correct? And then moving A few months later, you're dealing with tariffs. I mean, it's been a really stressful year, but how have you guys navigated it? The tariff thing is, the tariff thing is interesting. I mean, when it hit out of the blue, we were like, I'm sorry. And we kind of knew it was coming, but you don't really think it's going to actually happen, you know? And it really is us, the business paying these tariffs. So we had to mitigate real fast.

We're looking at, you know, India. We're looking at Turkey. we're looking to move from Mexico, but then it's, it's changing in real time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been a real challenge, and I can't take credit for it. We have an unbelievable team, Jennifer Stenderhawkins, who is like our president, she does everything. She's like, the way that our team came together in that moment was, was iconic.

I mean, it was elite. It was elite the way that the team came together and did what they did. And our profit, you know, our EBIT is looking a lot better today than it was. about four months ago. What categories are you most excited about in the future started out with an apparel focus? But I imagine you guys can, in the fullness of time, do everything for your customer, or at least everything within reasons. Yeah, I mean, look, our customer wants it all from us.

She does, and we're learning that. You know, we didn't know. Everything's been sort of, we didn't anticipate growing as fast as we did, and we didn't try to. We started sort of testing, like, would she want to spend over $1,000 for Outwear? Would she, and we sort of dipped into it, and now we know she does. We just launched shoes, a license with Caleris, because our thing is like, let's partner with the people who do it best.

They do it best. Accessories is huge for us. Obviously, like, logo, it's a different girl. The girl buying the logo is not always buying the denim. And we always said the logo is going to pay for the ready to wear. Yeah, yeah, very cool. How are you thinking about AI, specifically in AI-generated content? I feel like you're going to hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI-generated imagery

and marketing materials. At the same time, sometimes people want to see how it looks on them. And so they might want to see an AI image do something. Yeah, not all AI is created equally. Totally. I feel like consumers are going to have a massive adversion to AI-generated ads, specifically of clothing, because if you buy something and then it fits terrible and you're like, I've been

lied to, but then at the same time, AI try on has been pretty amazing. I mean, look, the thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is something that we are talking about all day.

So I will, we will embrace the right AI in certain, but like when it comes to e-com models, I don't know. think that's where it's going. Of course it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on e-com because we're perfectionist and we wanted to look great. But I'm not going to lie, it's expensive and it's time-consuming and if all of a sudden they're introducing ways to change that. But I don't know. Do you guys think the customer is going to, we're nervous about

it? I think that customers will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. I don't think customers are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm looking, I'm considering, considering buying this item and it's completely yeah it's not it's not real yeah at the same time like the line of AI is getting very very blurry there's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platform Steam has a tag was this game made with AI but the question is like what does that mean if one of the software developers and the game used AI to write a little bit of code. That's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said, like, make a video game or like the entire characters are AI generated. Like, there's this huge continuum,

and I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah, if you're out of photo shoot and there's a light stand in the background and you want to remove it, like you go into Photoshop today. You do content aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill. You technically used AI. Does the consumer care about that? There's going to be this like back and forth around trust and as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the trust of the individual of the consumer, I think you'll be okay, but you have to be more open about it. And I think that's probably where you have an advantage because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly, essentially, and then set a very clear boundary

as opposed to like some of the faceless corporations that will, you know, have to issue like PR releases when they make mistakes. I know. Listen, it's so tempting. Right? Because at the end of the day, your customers trust in you, your customer's loyalty to you. It's all you have. So we've, before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know, because it speeds up that a lot of brands do it. Moda does it and they do beautiful, you know, everything they do. I'm like, I want it. I want it. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less. But it's tough. I mean, product, obviously, number one, at the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good. So that is like first and foremost, that is our focus.

How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality? How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like our customer doesn't always even want to see the clothes on me. You know, we, and that's the thing. Like, of course, when I post something or when I push something, it sells, but it sells just as well on girls at work in our office who are, different shapes, different sizes, different ages.

And that's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video's crushing for us. Interesting. It is crushing. Like video on the page, you're saying. Yeah. Video on the page and in paid. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah, all of it. I mean, video is crushing. Is that the marketing strategy that you think worked best for you in 2025? Or is there another sort of growth initiative? that as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of so many things,

but I do think that we hit this sort of, this wide open white space for the working woman. You know, like the biggest compliment, the most, the people that come up to me the most are career women. They're women who go, oh, my gosh, my whole law firm, all we wear is favorite daughter, because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality, but that's not, you know, $1,500. You don't have to spend $1,500 on a blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good.

You don't have to spend that. Yeah. How do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably extra sensitive to this given that you guys are creators and personality. personalities yourself, and you're probably like, you know that, like, you guys represent the brand. So if you're working with another creator, they're representing the brand. And I feel like in apparel, it can be way more sensitive than a supplement brand that just says, like, hey, if you, like, share our values at all, like, we'll work with you. Yeah. I mean, you know,

we've, we've really leaned into Shopmai, which is a fantastic company, which I actually looked at as an investment, which I big mistake on my part. Yeah, I, I was talking with my wife and she was telling me about shopmine. I was like, I haven't, I haven't heard of it. And we've interviewed a thousand companies this year. And I looked it up and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then the next week they announced like a, I think a billion dollar round. So it wasn't on my radar, but they're ripping. It's genius. And it's like, it's made the whole process so much more seamless, to be honest with you. And it gives, you know, moms at home an opportunity to move product, to make a little cash.

to build some sort of audience. I mean, the celebrities with millions and millions and millions of fans have, or followers, have not sold as much for us as, like, a Dallas mom who has, like, the micro-influencer. Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. How much time are you spending on the investing side? And you guys have a fund that you run.

What's kind of the focus of the fund and what kind of companies are you really looking to meet? Yeah. I mean, we're a consumer-focused fund. It's me, my sister, Aaron, and Phil Schwartz is our partner. It's kind of a different kind of model. He, well, I could go into the weeds, but we probably don't have time. We're looking at companies that we are the customer for. That's it.

It's very simple. That's the thesis. It's not only female founders or only, you know, female. That's not what it is. It's, are we the customer? Is our audience going to resonate with this process? product, and it's that simple. Yeah, taste.

Smart. Makes 10 sense. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining on such a busy day. Really fun to have you on. We'll have to have Aaron on sometime soon. And congrats to the whole team on all the progress. It's incredibly impressive.

We'll talk to you soon. And congrats to you guys. Congrats. Everybody loves your show. All right. We're having a lot of fun. Cheers. Bye.

Bye. Let me tell you about graphite. Dot Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster and we're back in the cowboy hats and we got a cowboy in the studio peter rahal from david protein cowboy how you doing what's happened it's great to have you back good to have you back the cod king the cod king yeah we haven't talked to you since you did the cod uh i was talking to jordy but i thought i didn't know it was real it was real you actually sold cod is that

correct? Yep, and we still are selling it. No way. Wait, so are people just cooking up cod tacos at home? Where does this go? Like, what if it's actually successful and then you just have to sell cod only? Yeah, I mean, hard to outsell David protein bars. We don't have the same product market fit. Okay. With frozen blaze of cod. Yes. Amazing. How has it been since we last cut up. I know I know like that it sounds like the number one challenge for David is just keeping the product in stock. Is that true? Yeah, I would say building foundation for a big, big 26, getting the supply chain set up. Yeah, so mostly on the supply side. And, you know, this business is a little seasonal. Seasonal. Yeah, Q4 is pretty small.

slow new year new you you go on a diet is that the idea well Q4 you're just really eating turkeys yeah drinking alcohol um and then yeah at January all the shame comes and you just start get on the ground yeah it's like it's like 50% month over month from January or December to January wow yeah how uh how is now that you're what how is it two years into David or around there one one year and three months one year and three months um how is it different than uh the journey uh from our x bar like in the first year it's obviously been accelerated on the capital side but what what are the big learnings like what's what what's the what's the biggest difference um so rx bar for the first two and a half three years was finding product market fit like sure and then um yeah once we hit it it's

pretty similar actually once we hit it it was in 2016 um David was like right off the get-go so like year three of our X-bar is like year one of David um and then um I'm trying to think like markets have changed like marketing tactics have changed like influencer marketing what was the biggest tactic then and then what was the biggest tactic of 2025 for you. So Instagram and influencer marketing was sort of the arbitrage. And it was more that the influencers weren't aware of their influence. So that was like a big mispriced opportunity. So there were opportunities like if you just showed, if you just like shared someone like sent them the product and they would just post about it for free almost or or just small little little like checks here

and there as opposed to now there's like whole companies that intermediateate you know oh this person has this many followers is going to cost this much it's a whole machine now yeah totally like this is pre-stories but like if kim kardashian posted a story of our expert you we would see it right in our sales yep today i don't think you see it in your sales so i think there's like fatigue oh interesting fatigue so so it's actually becoming less effective as well as back then it was potentially underpriced interesting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense because there's like novelty of like, oh, these people, like I haven't seen them promote products. So what is working on the growth side in 2025? Um, that's a good question. I mean, it's, it's hard to attribute to

like one thing, you know, um, I think the, if you're in the health and wellness space, the health and wellness podcast are great. Huberman, of course, is really powerful. Meta ads are working really well for us. And then, like, I'm kind of old school, like, just trial, like sending product out, sampling. Like, the business is really simple. We have a bar.

It's really easy to sample it. And if you do that at scale, it really works. And so at scale, sampling means you have. hundreds of people out in the real world that are going to retail stores and and maybe fitness studios and just like physically sampling or are you saying more like sending it you know sending out sample bars to individual consumers or both both sending up we don't have much retail so sending out individual sample packs to to consumers and influencers and people of influence and then events, doing good events, and micro-influencers, I heard your previous guest talk about

that, that, like, really powerful because they have credibility. But from a, like, tactically speaking, like, everything is working for us, and it's not to be arrogant, it's just that the product is just really differentiated. No, that's the key. That's the key in CPG. I've every time I've invested in a company where I try the product and I go this product is 10 out of 10 it's the best in its category the business just crushes and the founders can you can still make a bunch of mistakes you can you can not have the best ads you can not have the best website you can not even have the best team but if you have the best product people people come back and so if you have the best product and the best execution you're pretty much unstoppable and you just see this lift across the board Yeah. And so it's really hard to attribute it's working because it just kind of works everywhere. I know where it doesn't work and it's usually like a price thing. But because our product is expensive. Yeah. What about so what is the plan on the retail side? Like I'm assuming as soon as you have the inventory, you'll flip a switch and try to be everywhere or is there more specific rollout? Yeah. Yeah. So in January, rolling out in Target and Walmart. mart so that's a huge huge lift and then um we'll be building the majority of we'll get majority of the major distribution um with great retail partners throughout 26 yeah uh and what about

new new product like stuff on the new product side you've talked before about being a being a house of brands and that being the way that you get to the multi-billion dollar scale any any uh rough timelines you're thinking about? Yeah, we have a new product we're launching in January. Is that fish-based? No, no, it's legit. Is that another fish product? Yeah, it's not enough.

It's not anybody. It's boiled trout now, John. That should be how you haze new employees, like how you ramp them up. It's like to earn a spot on like the core David team, you have to be able to sell fish online. like frozen fish on TikTok shop you have yeah exactly you got to hit a million dollars of sales on tic-tock shop um what so this is a new product under david or it'll be in a new brand under david um it's a new bar i'll flash it right here oh whoa leaking alpha right here first time you've ever seen it i was hoping you were going to pick it up with like two massive arms like it was

a Dura Flame film like a cord of firewood. It's like, yes, this has enough protein for an entire year. And you can slice off a chunk as you need. Yeah. So no, no stunts. That's a real product. Um, let me put on, do not stir. Um, and chat is asking if it's a collab with Nature's Valley granola, you know, the crumb one that like, you eat it and the crumbs go everywhere. That one's so funny. It's funny. It's like a negative trait became a meme that actually benefited the brand. Yeah, 100%. And you have to imagine that those bars are like 100% carbs, basically. Yeah, energy bombs.

Yeah. But, you know, what are you seeing? I know you have a big CPG portfolio. What are you seeing on the portfolio side? What's working? Where are brands doing well? Where are they struggling? Not everybody can have. a product that has as much product market fit as David. So it's not always. I mean, I don't spend, I, um, I don't spend any time on my portfolio and I don't, um, so I don't know. Um, I've quickly focused on David. Um, so I actually have no idea. The one that is sticking out is this THC, um, boom, the Willys. Um, oh yeah. Yeah, they're crushing. that was the kombucha the kombucha brand they didn't they like spend yeah it's you

june shine um and it's like historic pivot because like the june shine or the hard kombucha tam is like 200 million yeah they pivot this and it's like really really strong numbers um interesting yeah and i think it's you know macro trend is known people want to get high but they don't want alcohol um oh and they're seeing all that demand that is crazy What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? A 33-inch lake trout. Lake trout. Lake trout.

Let's hit the gong. We're going to hit the gong for the lake trout. Last question. What's your prediction around 2026 revenue? Are you sharing any of those numbers? Yeah, I'll share it. To moving target. it. We should do north of 300 million.

There we go. Wow. Masterclass. That is crazy growth. That's a lot of ours. That's a lot of protein. That's a lot of protein. A lot of protein.

We have a great team. We're striking on all cylinders. How many, what will the team look like next year? Um, next year, I mean, we're, we shoot for two million per head. Um, so that will be north of 150. Yeah. Um, we're about 80, 80 right now. Um, I try not to comp these things because I find they're really bad. Um, but, um, yeah, we have a great, we have a great team and super productive, um, group. Two million ahead. it's good it's a good good benchmark keeps you honest love it yeah amazing well thank you thank you for joining always always good to have you uh and uh credible to get the update on the business no black friday talk uh how's going yeah i mean i mean you mentioned that it's not the biggest day for you yeah what what's your strategy going into this i mean and what's your

philosophy even around uh like discounting i i i'm we're hearing different things from different people today uh i know brands uh that their max discount ever is 15% and they're super religious about that. They don't want to train their audience to kind of wait and buy a ton on a specific day because it hurts the rest of the year, but what's your approach?

Well, we did this at our acts. We basically conditioned our customers to a quarterly clearance of some sort. So with David, we don't do discounts. And then, yes, we don't do discounts. We just do a buy four, get the fifth, and then nice yeah so I think it's important for us as a brand um I think it's a I think it hurts the brand to be discounting um and then we just bring we do bring a lot of value like on a

dollar's per um protein perspective um so uh and then with black friday uh it's just too competitive and then um yeah so it's even worth it to ramp do you ramp add budgets at all or do you just let people... Because you're not a gift? Yeah, we basically just run steady state. And we basically kind of hibernate before November, December. Yep.

And, you know, like, our sales today are only going to be down 20% from an average. Wait, so you're going to have 20% less sales today, but less, sorry, explain. So you're just like, you're turning off. so so we're not say ads or ads are consistent at 15k uh we're not like you would think that all the consumer attention is going to black friday and our sales would be hurt pretty pretty materially but they're actually like they're only down 20 percent to a normal yeah got it got it got

yeah um which i think is interesting because like we're not participating and it's actually not that and I thought it would be more impactful because people are taking all their dollars to somewhere where they can save 30% on their favorite apparel brand or something yeah but it makes sense I mean people need to order consumer staples on Fridays wow and then they they almost see it they probably see it as like a different thing it's like yeah I got to order groceries I got to order protein bars I got to order whatever my health products are and then I also got to get that new TV and then I also got to get the gift for grandma but I'm not going to forget to get food for myself as well so I show up and I got food, and then I go and get the TV, and then I go and get the gift for grandma or whatever.

That would be my mental model. I don't know. From a, as you think about next year, from a, like, how do you think about, like, just getting enough inventory to support that kind of revenue and how far in advance are you kind of doing demand planning, given that you're on a rocket ship? And I know that you guys have a unique, unique supply chain and some unique advantages. but how are you thinking of scaling that up? Yeah, so since August, we've been preparing more or less for 26.

We've actually had a throttle back demand to build safety stock to prepare for 26. So I always think like in growth, like we don't have, you kind of want to oscillate between chaos and just like, crazy growth and um we had to intentionally do that just to make sure we service and don't have service failures in uh 26 uh and service failures are like somebody's a subscriber on on ecom and you actually cannot deliver the product yeah and and that's a failure and then what then it's unacceptable but it's more on retailers like with you open up retailers it's a deal and you cannot you can't ship your if you can't fulfill POs it's a huge problem And so there's just not a tolerance for that.

How are you thinking about the long term of the business? Like you've sold our X bar. I'm sure you know all the potential buyers in the category already. They kind of know they're a known quantity. I'm sure they can d-d-this really quickly. But do you want to IPO the company? Do you want to own it privately forever? Do you see yourself working on this in 20, 30 years?

Is this like your life's work? It seems like to pull back from all the investing stuff. Like you're pretty into it. Like, you're enjoying what you're doing. But do you think you'll, do you think that will be the case forever? Yeah. I mean, speaking personally, yeah, I mean, this is basically a platform for me to create new businesses and brands.

And if I were to sell it, I would just start another, you start another bar company. You're like the ultimate, like, I know one thing guy, which I love. Mark Zuckerberg of bars. Yeah, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg was like, if I sell Facebook, I'm just going to start another social networking. Yeah. And starting the hard part. Like, yeah, starting's really hard, so I'd never want to do that.

And like the asset, the asset becomes the organization. And that's the hard part. So, yeah, I mean, our vision is to create multiple brands to address different consumer needs and help remove a ton of excess calories from American diet. And I think I've, I think going public is something that's like a notch on the belt thing. But I would try to just be objective about it. What about like reference points throughout CPG or consumer brand history? Are you like, oh, I love the Red Bull model of like all this crazy marketing for a very narrow product? Do you like the Budweiser model where, you know, the Clydesdale's come out every Super Bowl?

Like are there certain brands or founders that you look up to throughout history and draw like inspiration from? I look at Mars we're going for Mars yeah that's a fantastic one there's that book the Chocolate Wars right about Mars versus Hershey I'm blanking on the name but it's fantastic all about the development of the Eminem

how that was Mars and another company that was like the offspring and they did some joint ventures crazy business yeah yeah I think we're we're trying to build like a house of brands and that's cool I think Mars is a great role model. I love it.

Do you think there's a finite amount of good consumer brand ideas? Like do they come in like based on consumer preferences and then innovation, like innovation on the ingredient side? Like what are the, because David was coming into a category that people thought was noisy and had a number of winners. Everybody could name like a protein bar company. But clearly you came in innovative, you know, innovative product and have just, you know, very quickly dominated. So I'm assuming, like, whatever the next brand is, it has to fit, it kind of has to fit within that same criteria of, like, it doesn't matter if the category is noisy, but there needs to be something that is, like, durable and differentiated about the product.

Yeah, and I think the both good thing and bad thing about food, and it's similar to fashion, like, There's always a need for novelty with humans. And both food and fashion, there's always going to be room for something new. The ugly side of that is there's like product fatigue. And so you have staying relevant and innovating is the challenge. But there's always room. And then there will be different sort of waves or opportunities that come, whether it's a trend or a new ingredient or something like that. spot. But in general, my my approach to something new, like we're planning a seed now for

something to launch next year. And I would say like the product has to be 30% better, like measurably better. Brand cannot be a differentiation. If I'm sitting here telling you how our brand is differentiated, like this is like so abstract and doesn't mean anything. So it has to be, yeah, materially better than what's on the market. market. And I mean, personally, I like categories that are sort of boring and what appear to be on the surface, like really competitive. Yeah. Do you spend any time at all thinking about the kind of strength of the consumer? Obviously, David, customers are all strong because they're consuming a lot of protein, but more abstract. I think if you are a Mars and the strength that

consumers aren't doing well, you're going to see contraction just because you basically are the TAM. And so if the economy is, if demand is falling, you're just going to see lower sales. You guys are growing rapidly in a big category. And so you're not necessarily going to notice the fluctuations. But any, any like feelings around sentiment and overall strength? Yeah. And I, so like in our life cycle, yeah, we're not, we're not feeling the pricing issue, but you can tell by the retail the retailers are constantly talking about it which is a reflection and then i always i tell our team internally like our product needs to get less expensive and crunchier like our portfolio needs to get less expensive and crunchier over time um and that is to

address a larger group of customers because price really really matters um like the tam for a bar will be really set on like on price like you need to get to the 10 for 10 promotion spot to get to a billion revenue. And it's that nature valley angle, right? Like, you're not

going to be buying for your family $3 protein bars for whoever to eat. You're going to be buying this 49 cent snack bar. Yeah. And so for sure we think about it and it's becomes, as our as we go down our

adventure and in our life cycle, it becomes more and more and more important, for sure. Well, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Jason Freed says, hello, by the way, to you. Oh, nice. He says, hey, Peter. Hey, Jason.

Legend. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah, great to get you up. Thanks so much for coming on. Give us the update. We'll talk again, too. It's fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about fin.com. It's AI that handles your customer support. It's the number one AI agent for customer service from Intercom. Up next, we have Farhunt. Farhunt from Shopify in the Restream waiting room. Now, he's happening. What's happening?

The TVP and Ultradam. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm trying. If you're here, who's keeping the servers online? I don't understand it. I thought you had to personally fan the GPUs. Wait, is this, is this Shopify's like advantage?

The infra team is in Canada, so it's a regular. It's colder. So the servers don't do. So the servers don't go on fire. You guys don't do normal. You don't do like American Thanksgiving, right? Oh, yeah. It's true that we are not on vacation today.

I mean, we would not be on, I mean, a lot of our American employees are not on vacation today either. But this is really why they won, because they're in Canada. It's cold up there, so the servers don't match. During the Super Bowl of commerce, they're locked in. And I'm trying to match you guys with my green sweatshers, but I don't have to be jack. You look fantastic. Thanks for taking the time out of a busy day to come talk to. No worries. What are the biggest learning?

earnings changes to how Shopify is doing Black Friday or just infrastructure or technology this year. Has it been the diffusion of AI or other stuff? What are the big macro trends in your world? Yeah. So a couple of amazing things. One is like we don't just like roll into Black Friday, right? It's an all year round thing. We start planning like tomorrow. We'll start thinking about, or I mean, after the weekend, we'll start thinking about Black Friday at 2026. And what's crazy about how Shopify's growth is, and really it's all about our merchants, it all comes from the fact that they're doing such an job for by creating great products for all of their buyers. And so what happens is there's Black Friday. It's crazy. You see our sphere. You see the globe. We're showing you all the crazy

sales. And then by April, May next year, it's just going to be a regular day at Shopify, because that's how fast our brands are growing. Yeah. And the way we handle it is we do lots and lots of scale tests, man. Like, it's crazy. We can, we build up our infrastructure so that if an entire region goes down, we can just shift it to a completely new region and have no impact to buyers emergence. That's amazing. Talk, yeah, I guess talk more specifically about like what part of the business at Shopify is getting less attention than it should right now. Obviously, people are focused on big headline numbers. They're focused on the sphere and some visuals. But like how much of a role is like the shop app and just like shop pay playing this Black Friday as a product that's

now been in the, been in the wild for a while now. I think everybody listened to this will have used it probably multiple times at this point. But how big of a role is that or kind of other parts of the business playing? Yeah, I would not sleep on the shop app. It's amazing. Started off as just package tracking. And now I know lots and lots of folks, including myself, where I just start at shop app to search for something from an amazing brand that is building something specifically for you. I mean, one of my favorite brands right now is this weights company called Motivate, MOTV-8, number eight. And it's got these adjustable dumbbells from like five to 80 pounds. Beautiful. matches my gym, doesn't roll away.

And I found it on shop. I would not have found these adjustment dumbbells any other way. And so, yeah, you should look it up right now. I want to see, so we hunted around and we found a yacht for sale on a Shopify store, a 28 million euro super yacht, mega yacht. Somebody set up a shopify site and they are trying to sell this yacht on shop by. And I want to see if the shop app has it. We're going to dig in there.

Yeah, we should check. And then, I mean, you mentioned shop pay. You mentioned shop pay, right? I mean, shop pay is the, you know, the fastest way to check out. And we see, for example, if you just have the shop pay logo, even if you don't click it, conversion goes up because people trust the merchant. Does that give me some buy now, pay later opportunities potentially? Yeah, I mean, obviously, as you know, we have lots of buyers who want to do a buy now, pay later. We have shop pay installments, which allows you to do that.

I'd love to just pay one million euros a month for 28 months to pay for my 28 million euro. Yeah, that would be fantastic. fantastic. This is the future. I love it. Yeah, what, um, uh, yeah, shop pay I still notice, even though it's, I've been using it for years at this point, like the multiple times, probably a month that I'll, I'm willing to actually just buy something on my phone because I know it's going to be so fast when historically, I'm like, if a store is not on Shopify, I'm just not going to buy, I'm not pulling out my credit card to buy your thing. Also, I just don't want to do it anymore. Yeah, it's just, it's made, uh, really, really,

Anything that speeds up that, you know, there's always those famous studies about, like, you know, if you cut down the time it takes to do something on the internet, you'll see massive conversion. And we look at it in very, like, abstract, kind of quantitative, 3% gains for one millisecond over here or whatever. Yeah. But just the pain of actually having to, you know, go and find your credit card and stuff. It just brings actual delight to the entire process. And you have an entrepreneur who's focused on, like, building a cool brand, promoting it with cool people. And, like, the customer's feeling cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, and then miserable. And so if you can pull that out, it's a huge advantage.

Yeah, and we see, for example, especially on your phone, right? It's like over three quarters of those checkouts happen on the phone, and you just want to be able to quickly check out. It's a trust builder. And by the way, imagine buying from a site that's not in your region, right? You're buying from Europe. You're in Europe and buying from the U.S. You want to make sure that's a seamless experience,

and shop pay will do that before you to show your shipping rates. You can feel like it's trustworthy. You can see the delivery times. You click, you get the package tracking right away. You get the order confirmation. You get the little cha-ching in the shop app, and everybody's feeling good. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Giving us the update.

Ch-ch-cheng. Mass-a-day. Congratulations for our progress. Yeah, thanks for keeping everybody online. We appreciate it. Keeping the orders coming in. It's not easy what you do, and we appreciate you. Unsung hero.

We'll talk to you. Thanks for having me on. Back to the war room. Back to the war room. Love it. We'll talk you soon. How you doing? Hi.

Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. GBT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. No Better Day than today to check out Profound. Up next, we have Torin from Mod Retro. Of course, the makers of the Chromatic. Welcome to the show. Good to have you. First time. First time. Thanks so much for taking the time. How is Black Friday for you? You're obviously focused on the chromatic this year. Are there other ways that you're merchandising the product how are you is this the best christmas present this must be like it feels like it feels like it feels like you kind of made the perfect christmas present it's it's this thing that we you know we on our checkout flow we have the post checkout survey and i think the the biggest thing that we've been learning on this black friday is that it's just it's such a unique and perfect gift no matter if it's for a child or for somebody who is much

much, much older because everybody can just appreciate that, that I have one right here, that simple idea of just turning it on, turn it on, no, you're in the game. No, I was experiencing this. I mean, like, there's so many tech products today. We talked to Palmer about this, where just going from unwrapping it to setting it up, to logging in with your, create an account, add two factor, like, upload your DNA and all this other stuff and it's like, can we just turn it on and have fun with it? And it's like, you can. We know we have the technology, but we've forgotten how to do it. And we, and fortunately, we can make things that just turn on and are fun in this country. Powerful stuff. So, so yeah, how is it going?

Is it surpassing your expectations just financially? Are you happy with how things are going today? Yeah, it's, it's been amazing. I don't know if you guys keeping up with this, but we also just unveil the design of the M64. That's right. Today. Yeah. And so we've seen a pretty massive spike in traffic and inevitably people coming to look at the design of M64 are the exact same types of people who want to play chromatic. Yep. Yeah, give me the rundown, the best practices for M64. I want it on day one. What do I have to do? And then my, I obviously, I want one as soon as I can get one. How do I do that? And then also So should I be digging through old crates of N64 cartridges and making sure that I have those ready to go on day one? Yes, you definitely should be doing that.

But we will also be announcing our biggest launch lineup of games that are going to be published in-house. And again, just like with Bromatic, we release classic games, remastered classic games, and we also make brand-new games that are made by indie devs and things. like that that's fantastic um and then what is the what is the value prop like like why m64 why not just go on ebay get something get a bunch of adapters like like how are you positioning i i you know i i've talked to palmer about the the the the mod retrochromatic many times and he talks about the materials and the the screen is all's one sapphire glass i don't understand how it works but uh it seems very impressive and i certainly enjoy it when i look at it um but what what what are you most

excited about with regard to the M64. M64 is, it's just like the chromatic. Like with the chromatic, it is, it is the only way to play one of these games, the exact way that the game artist intended for it to be seen and for it to be played. That's because, as you said, it has the only pixel perfect resolution display that's ever been made for a Game Boy clone, whether that's software emulation or hardware devices. It's the only one in the world that has a pixel accurate display, but it's a confluence of different factors that make it feel like this very authentically nostalgic experience. It's the exact same way with the M64. It's from the translucent color ways and the way that the design is made for the actual physical console

itself, but also for the video output. We're doing a few things that that add to the authenticity of the actual video out and what the game artists intend for you to see in those games that won't exist in any other piece of hardware. Is that because when the N64 was created, we were using much different televisions and now everybody has flat screens, and so you need to actually, like,

the video out needs to have a better understanding of, like, the final kind of, like, screen form factor? That's exactly right. The funny thing is that upscaling the video out to 4K, which the M64 will do, is actually the really easy problem. The hard problem is how are you going to have a modern N64 console video out to a CRT and to see the game exactly in the way that you used to see it? And that's something that the M64 is going to accomplish with a lagless analog video out as well.

Yeah, when we talked to Palmer, he talks a lot about the, like, pixel-perfect jumps that, like, speed runners do. It's a niche consumer in my, at least it feels like it is, but it gives me a lot of, it gives me a lot of confidence in the quality of the product. If it's good enough for the speed run, like, I can't speed run Mario 64, but if it's good enough for them, it's probably good enough for me. It's probably going to be a good experience. Do you think that there's actually a benchmark where you would like to see the M64 in circulation at something like games done quick, GDC, these like different speed running competitions. Is that sort of your internal benchmark? If it's actually good enough for the speed runners, then it's good enough for everyone? The only benchmark is that it is at feature parody in terms of video out and lag and things like that with the original consoles.

That's the only benchmark that makes any sense to compare against. And so that's what we compare against. Yeah, Palmer talked about that pixel perfect jump. And we have slow motion cameras that capture the chromatic versus a Game Boy color and make sure that that is frame by frame accurate. It's the exact same thing with M64. In fact, we will be at GameStone quick with Chromatics and M64s. Amazing. Yeah, so it's already in process.

We have questions from the chat. Any plans to do a clear case chromatic? Is that you keeping that in the chamber? Yeah, we get a lot of requests for it. That's what else said. What about reactions to more modern hardware? Valve just released the Steambox, the Steamframe. what was your initial reaction?

Are you chomping at the bit, 25 years you're going to be making one? Or are there any other kind of takes or opinions or thoughts that you can share about what that maybe means for the gaming ecosystem broadly? I'm a huge fan. I'm honestly a fan of all gaming harbor

and I think Palmer would say the same thing. For Mod Retro specifically, what we try to do is kind of dig into the past for these threads that are still relevant today. So, like, in the case of Chromatic, it's this idea that you can pick up a game and play it, and the game doesn't ask anything of you after you're playing it. Most modern games, they're constantly trying to get you to pay more money after you've already bought the game, for example. This, you know, it's the same reason that you can pick up a Game Boy game that was left in your parents' closet

today sticking into a chromatic and have the exact same experience that that is the thread that we wanted to pull on for chromatic so I think with mod retro a lot of the hardware that we're going to make is have these these elements of the past that are still valuable today that have just been kind of steamrolled by by modern times it's not to say that the devices aren't modern in their technology stack it's just that it gives you an experience that isn't common and in modern harbor ecosystems. And so, you know, all of the stuff by Valve, I'm obsessed with it.

I love it. I'm a customer of it. But the types of experiences that Mod Retro creates live alongside that for somebody who is interested in gaming. And they're also better for people who actually just don't consider themselves to be a hardcore gamer. But what's the, but don't want to play a round of Tetris on an airplane or something like.

Yeah. Yeah, obviously with Palmer, he can draw a ton of attention to the company, to the category. But what else is working on the growth side in 2025? Have you gotten into performance marketing, doing paid partnerships with other influencers? What is the growth engine at the company look like these days? Yeah, we're just starting to scratch the surface of that stuff because the product with no growth. engine behind it at all does pretty well. And what we find is that the biggest thing for

chromatic, for example, is to get it into somebody's hands. And when you have it in your hands, it creates a network effect of other people buying it, especially just, yeah, you can't fully communicate that feel, that click of the cartridge. And it's also a forgotten. It's like a forgotten feel. Like I think that people remember abstractly liking the game. boy, liking, you know, physical handheld gaming, but they don't quite remember what it actually felt like to feel it. It's too good. Last question, anything you can share around the time horizon for the M-64 pre-order weeks,

months, they're excited. Chad is going crazy. I know. I'm sorry, but not right at this moment, but very, very soon. But there is something that you can do today, which is drop your email. email and you'll be the first to know if you're on that email list, correct? Drop your email on the waitlist, which is on oddretcher.com slash M64. You will be prioritized in terms of shipping timelines.

And you'll know the second that the, that the pre-order is ready. Okay. You know, we're in the early stages of production on M64. It's just that we don't like to jump the gun too much with taking your money ahead of being able to ship the product. I mean, Palmer lived that with the first Oculus. He was probably the most successful Kickstarter campaign in history. And still, months of delays, of course. It's heart-wrenching going through that.

And, yeah, obviously a lot of other companies would have launched the pre-order today. For sure. It's very mature to say, we'll take. They wouldn't even call it a pre-order. We have a very fixed timeline. Yeah, it's going to ship next week. Who knows? But subject to delays.

Yeah, we don't have the need to take your money ahead of time. we can shoulder the burden of the development and be confident that that you're going to love the M-64. Well, thank you so much for joining the stream. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah, great to have you on finally. Have a good one, Tor.

Congrats, guys. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector in full-tech search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. You're right, built by Shopify alum.

and we have a current Shopify, not an alum. We have Harley back with Kevin from Toccovas in the recent waiting room. Now they're here in the TVPN Ultradome. Sorry, don't mind if I kick my, put my boots up on the table. Don't mind if I do, partner. I don't know if I can reach that high. This is actually the second pair of Tocovas. Somebody, a very nice enterprising young man who now works for us,

came all the way to Los Angeles to interview me and I think he'd interviewed you or someone from Tikova's because he brought me a pair of Tocovas and I was like, are you guys sponsored by Toccovas? He's like, no, I just like giving them his gifts to people and it made a really big impression I wore them at a wedding in Mexico. It was fantastic.

And we gave some Tukovas to a guest and friend of the show recently, Dylan Patel. Oh, yeah. A friend of ours is one of the top analysts in the semiconductor space. So he's always going around always going around to different data centers in the back of pickup tracks. And so we said you should be wearing Tcova's when you're out on the road. Kevin, your work is done here.

You should just log off now. Is that an married at this point? That's great. No, I just actually love it. But yes, how is the day going? Give us the update on your side. What's the latest? And you guys are in the Austin store?

Is that correct? 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Easter. Yeah, I'm here in Austin South Congress, which is one of our flagship stores in New York, in our Soho store. So the Sohor store right now is packed. It's insane, Kevin. You'd be so impressed. It's amazing here.

I was actually looking around going, I don't know if we can do a live interview in here with how crowded it actually is. So hopefully it sounds okay. But yeah, we're being doing great. We've actually got a line of about 50 people still outside the door. We've had that since we've opened this morning. So just a constant stream of traffic.

And things have been going just fantastic for us. We're having great sales online, great sale on all our stores. It's a great Black Friday so far. You'll be happy to know that Chanel is right across the street, and your line here at the Jacobus and Soho is longer than the Chanel line. across the street. I don't know what that means. I don't know how competitive Harley.

But I just like, just to say like, Chanel is not on Shopify. I knew you were going to say those. Correlation, conversation, guys. Ridiculous. Well, Kevin, Kevin, it's great. How did you guys,

how did you guys first meet? Did, uh, was, was, you guys were born on Shopify or did Harley bang down your door and shame you publicly in getting on? So it's been, I've been on shopper for almost 10 years now. Wow. and have definitely, I guess, grown up on Shopify.

But actually the first time that Harley and I did something together, he basically said that he wanted me to do a little fireside chat with him in front of a top 100 Shopify employees on a retreat they were having. And he wanted me to tell them how Shopify sucks. I told Harley, like, I'm in. Do I only get an hour? I don't know, four or five years ago. And so it was great, it was a great opportunity to get closer with all the product leaders at Shopify and really talk about some things, you know, that we have on the outside and just was an awesome experience to get more embedded with that team.

You know, I'm sure you guys have this also. I'm sure there's some like advertiser partners that you guys have that they're constantly just giving you great feedback. That's Kevin for Shopify. Kevin will text me at like Saturday night at 11 o'clock and say, I have an idea about subscriptions. It may have nothing to do with Decovis, but there's constantly this like incredible, you know, feedback loop. The one thing I will say that Kevin's quite modest, so I'm going to say it for him. You guys remember that era of like retail where for some reason every store for a while had like a cafe and then eventually had like a DJ booth. Yeah.

Like every store had it. And you kind of went in there and you're like, this doesn't feel right. It feels inauthentic. Tocobos is kind of the opposite of that. For some reason. And I think like they're very intentional about it. Like I'm sitting at the bar right now where there's like literally bourbon, beer being served to all these people to get them drunk so they buy more boots and cowboy hats. It feels so authentic here.

There is this, like, jeunise croix about the brand that makes them, the way that they handle themselves, the way that they build their stores, there's a certain thing that they do that I think is exceptional. Actually, I think, like,

and we're joking about Chanel, but, like, I think Chanel, like, lost a little bit of that. I think, you know, a lot of the luxury retailers want to, you know, try to expand it.

Be careful how hard you go on Chanel, because they're going to come on Shopify and next year you're going to be here being like, Chanel is back. Like, they never, made a misstep in their life. I love that's up with you know. Right.

And just to piggyback, that's a mindset we have here called radical hospitality. And we are always looking for ways to kind of better serve our customers. We do have open bars and all of our retail stores. I'm also sitting here at the Austin bar. That's great.

Drinking glass of whiskey. We do branding and customizations. We have branding irons. Branding irons in the store with floor torches. Yeah. And we will heat those branding irons up kind of stamped the boots right there. We've got a boot shine station as well. And so really trying to create moments for people to come into the story, even if they're not

looking to buy and just hang out and just create an awesome experience one there. The thing I'm most curious about is like how, like, how do you, how do you view your role as CTO of a retail brand when you're powered by infrastructure like Shopify? We were talking with Harley earlier. I think a lot of CTOs of some legacy brands would say like, no, I'm going to own the full stack. That's my job. I don't want to let it go. Kevin, how much, I mean, this is Kevin's favorite topic. Let's go. Yeah. I figured because there's so much, there's so much more that you can do as a technical leader that's not just like the core like commerce engine. There's so much more that sits on top of that as many things that you can optimize, marketing, et cetera. So,

but I'm curious how you view it. Yeah, there's no reason at this point. Sure, you need to have a completely custom from the ground up built tech stack. I'm almost looking at it as a, I'm like the conductor of a symphony or an orchestra, you know, trying to bring together a bunch of different puzzle pieces and, you know, operate at a higher level. You know, we have obviously Shopify as our commerce platform. We have RFID deployed into all of our stores. We have email and text messaging and data feeds and AI now that we need to plug into different parts of the organization. Our retail business is absolutely taking off.

And so there's a bunch of interesting kind of retail physical technology challenges that are out there to solve. So I'm certainly thinking in a bigger picture. I don't want to be standing at my own commerce stack. And I'd be far high handle all of those problems. And I stand on top of his shoulders on days like today and make sure that we're operating at the best efficiency possible here. How much is that much? So I was going to take it. Can you tell us how today's going for you?

Yeah, it's going great. We have set multiple records in terms of orders per hour. I think we're on our six straight hours of breaking that record there. Six straight hours. Yeah, which is fantastic. Obviously, Black Friday is always our biggest day of the year, and we're seeing some fantastic growth year over year. And everything's running great for a hundred, great job.

So you don't, on his side. You don't keep the notifications on, the push notifications on the Shopify app anymore? I mean, I had to turn those off like nine and a half years ago. go. It's been a long time since I had the little, the bell on my phone going off there. Where are you getting leverage from AI on the engineering side? Are you using to spin up landing pages faster? Like, where's the most, where are you getting an edge there? How real is it? We're actually doing exactly that. My entire engineer team also is using cursor and Claude and a few different tools to be more efficient on that front. We also just deployed a tool here in retail invent AI, and it's designed to optimize all of our retail inventory or all of our weekly transfer orders and our punishments that we need to do to all of our retail stores.

So it's doing a bunch of things for us that used to take three or four people a couple of days to bring together in spreadsheets now at our scale, and we've completely optimized that now with an AI system that we've been seeing some great leverage on here as we've brought up the holidays. What about customer service? What about customer service? Because I feel like there's the natural progression of, you know, you have some knowledge base, then you have a whole bunch of back and forth in emails, like smart email responses.

What are you doing there? Yeah, our CX team, our CX team has been working hard on our AI assistant agent on the website. Our ticket volume that actually is making the humans is down significantly year over year. Our CX team and our Black Friday channel is actually, hey, things are going really smooth this year. And part of that's because we've been able to offload a bunch of those requests directly. to that agent. It's a lot of been super valuable for that team to be lean and efficient

during our biggest time of we're here. Yeah, let me see some of those. What's your, if you can share this, what's your biggest store by volume? I'm sitting in it. Here, Austin South Congress is definitely our biggest store. Nashville will give it a run for its money, depending on the day,

depending on the country music concert that might be going on. But, yeah, our flagship here in Austin is our largest. Is it twice as much from a gross revenue standpoint as, say, like, a Manhattan or is it closer than that?

That's a good question. Yeah, so Soho, we've only been open for about three months now in Soho. So that's still a relatively new market for us as we're growing and investing kind of up into the northeast year of the country and we're super excited about that Soho store. It's an incredible, and honestly,

I think it's probably our best story ever built. We kind of take it the best of it. It's beautiful here. Like the deep, the floorboards, for example, Lee, like, it is really spectacular. Can you actually talk about your issue with opening these stores and, like, the free bar issue? Because I think the boys would love to hear, like, that issue. Yeah, I can't actually say that we have alcohol in every store. And there are some menus that are slightly curated in certain markets,

because we actually run into issues with certain city councils and kind of legalities in that area where they don't really have, like, a license for a retail store to offer hospitality, liquor, and a shopping experience without food also being served. And so we've had to get creative in some cases. We've had to actually spend some time with different city councils in other cases. And it's just... Let me explain how we do things around this retail store. Well, it's just the reason I love that story is because, like, the genius of Tocobos and business models like this is that the traditional kind of city councils,

they can't put them into any box. They don't know what to call them. Like the traditional, like, it's a store or it's a place to hang or it's a saloon or it's a place to come and just like, you know, get your boot shine. Like, they can figure out what they are. And I think that's, I think business models that are difficult to explain in that way, usually the ones that are most interesting. What's been your guys' policy around using AI on the content side?

Any strong opinions or kind of guidelines that you've been following? we've been asking some other other founders like that's a good question um we we have not gotten to the point where we have um deployed any AI produced content into any of our ads or we've certainly used it to help brainstorm and come over the ideas of how things you look or you know get some some storyboards or things like that we haven't gone all the way off like the Coca-Cola rails here and like a leered AI ads that's that's not uh that's not something that we want to get to um right now we think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the

Georgia Georgia Tech game. We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech and N-Games. And those ads like to have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty. They fit real naturally into like Landman and Yellowstone and some of the other big commercial brands that were sponsoring and being part of. And we couldn't be more happier with what we're doing right now from a creative perspective. I'm curious, how much is counterfeiting an issue for you guys? Because we are now dealing with counterfeiting we just saw this morning somebody included a TBPN merch in a gift guide that they were doing that's not we don't we haven't

sold uh we haven't sold any merch ourselves but people are making counterfeit uh goods I'm sure you guys have have a bunch of issues with that but I wonder what the approach is I mean I feel like I need to knock on wood right now it's not a huge problem we're dealing with physically we do see it more digitally with like ripoff sites and scam sites that kind of pop up around the web and even the dark web yeah yeah yeah So we've got a partner named Bolster who helps monitor those kind of site developments in real time. They also help issue take down notices and bring those things down as fast as possible. And really, since we probably started using that tool now three years ago,

and it's something that I don't really even have to think about too much now because it's just up and running and serving as our frontline defense. That's great. David, we probably need to sign up for that. Can you talk a little bit about sort of this, like you guys are, how many stores you have now? 40, 50s, 5? Yeah. The pace, I mean, that's unbelievable.

The pace of you guys are opening right now is kind of unbelievable. Can you talk a bit about how the relationship you have? Like, I think it'd be valuable for those listening and watching. Just how you think about like channels and channel. Like, you know, traditionally you think a channel conflict, online turning offline. With cowboy boots, you kind of want to go into the store first to try it on, but subsequent purchases maybe can be down the line. You have a very, I think, a really great way to kind of think about that and how you think of an expansion. Can you talk about how, when you sit around and you think about where to go, how to expand, what channels are producing, how you guys look at all that?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, we started only as D2C. So we're a website only for five or six years. And we got into retail, I think, like, it was December before COVID, which is a terrible time to start retail business. and basically open eight stores and then immediately closed them. But we kind of survived, we survived obviously that year and it came back super strong from that. You mentioned cowboy boots. It's a very unique first-time purchase for someone who has never purchased a cowboy boots before and can even be slightly intimidating.

And so having a brick-and-mortar retail store to come in and get that experience, get that splitting, kind of understand how that boot is supposed to feel when you're wearing it is a massive unlock for us as a brand today our retail business is larger than our e-com business. Both they're super healthy, but retail is actually scaling even faster. So we're seeing fantastic results there. We actually see when we open a new retail store in a new market,

we may actually see e-com dip just slightly when that store opens because there's so many customers who want to go to the store because they've been waiting so long to actually have that experience in real life, which is, I think, a unique attribute of ours. Obviously, the whole market lifts over time, which is great. And then we've also just recently started partnering with specific wholesalers. So we see a great opportunity to go outside just of our direct channels and meet the customer where they're at.

Cowboy Boots have been around for 150 years and there's lots of great independent Western dealers out there that we're excited to get our products in too. And we certainly don't look at it as channel conflict. If we can get someone in a cowboy boot, we don't care what channel it comes from. And we know over time we're going to lift the whole market. So are you taking market share from anyone? Are you taking market share from a different company, or is it like non-consumption you're competing with? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk bad about anybody, Harley, but there's only one line here today on South Congress.

But there are multiple boot shops here on the street. Shockily in Soho, there's not that many boot shops. Our store is the most crowded. What about international? Are you guys thinking about, like, what country do you think will buy more or could come close to buying cowboy boots at the level that Americans can. That's a good question. We still have not tapped international at all.

So we are still United States only and still we think we have a very large stream sold internationally. If you look at markets like Canada and Australia and Brazil and Mexico and Spain, Germany even has a pretty big tam there. So we think there's a great opportunity for us to continue to expand internationally, but we also want to do it in a thoughtful way. We want to do it in a profitable way. and make sure that, you know, it's the right decision for us to go to that direction on the new

feels. Makes a lot of sense. Got anything else? Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for taking the time. You seem like you're just cruising through. Yeah. He's like, he's steady, eddy.

Just throw the boots on getting things crazy, but throw the boots on the desk and just enjoy the rest of the day. I mean, the CTO who's on Shopify. Like, it's not going on. This is my, holy, this is my 10th Black Friday on Shopify. So it's, you know, we've come a long way and things are going really well. That's awesome. This is my 16th Black Friday, almost half my life.

This is good. Honestly, I'm not just saying this, Kevin, because you're on the call, but like, you'd be so proud. The store, the staff here are doing amazing. You can feel the energy. People are just hanging out in the front. There are people that are having, you know, their shoes, their boots personalized. You've got a lineup of people drinking bourbon here.

Like, from one entrepreneur to another, man, like, you should be really proud of this. Okay, last question. We got one more question for you. We've got to ask, what's the biggest fish you've ever caught, Kevin? You know, I heard the last question if you asked that. I mean, I think I probably caught maybe like a five-pound catfish. Okay. Okay, catfish.

Nothing wrong with catfish. Did you eat the catfish? I feel like if you catch and eat it. It was a catch-and-release situation. There you go. First catfish. Catfish on TBPN. Very on, Brian.

up on the wall and we have different the fishing wall over here. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us on such a busy day. Happy Black Friday. Yeah, I appreciate you. And thank you for these wonderful boots. Cheers.

Cheers. Have a good one. Cheers. See you. Look at that. We have a new record. We have a new record. 4.2 million dollars in sales every minute, right?

Isn't that it? Every minute. We're millions per minute. Wow. That is a fantastic amount. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing and they're trusted by millions. Apparently, someone found a company that might be slightly worse at naming than Open AI. I believe this is Samsung. Have you seen this? So they have a Q5 Max Plus, Q5 Pro Plus, Q5 Pro Max Plus, Max Pro Ultra. Have you seen these? I think these are different phones. It really makes you appreciate how hard Apple works to create. like a logical flow between all of the different phones like like it really shows you that when you're like a massive company it's so easy for it to get away from you because you're

like oh yeah there'd be like massive demand for like a mini pro version and you're like okay yeah let's do it whatever let's green light it and then you wake up and you realize you have 75 different permutations and that's what's that's what people scale this uh armes versus gap dot com I thought it was somewhat relevant to Black Friday. Aramez is pulling 25 million visits, I guess, per month or I guess from August to October. So for that quarter, 25 million. Gap, 200 million. So gap 10 times the viewership, basically, or the visits than Aramez.

And, of course, people are, this is in reaction to the difference between Claude and Perplexity in the App Store. Claude has 33,000 five-star reviews. Perplexity has 370,000 five-star reviews is number 14 in productivity. Pretty remarkable results from perplexity. I think a lot of this has to do with the pricing strategy. I think there's a lot more to the free tier of perplexity. Whereas I was even just trying to like randomly pull up Claude just to run a quick test. And like it immediately before it hit me with a with a like a sign-in page before you could even fire off a single prompt.

A lot of people. A lot of people use perplexity. A lot of people use perplexity, and there's a lot of channel partnerships. Credit to perplexity, as much as chat as chat chbtee, as much as chat chabit is AI to most people out there, there's a lot of people where perplexity is AI to them. Totally, totally. They've done a really good time.

Yeah, we'll see how they can continue to hold on and scale that user base over time. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about numeral.com. let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance is handled so you can focus on growth. I wanted to share a potential gift for the AI lover in your life. The Welch Labs illustrated guide to AI if you pre-order on or before December 15th, it'll ship. A lot of graphs in here. A lot of graphs. I thought this was interesting. I've seen this person on YouTube and just seems like a fun, like interesting book. I like these. types of books. It's like almost a textbook, but a lot of interesting graphs just documenting

some of the AI things. Also, I mean, if you need books, Stripe Press, I mean, you really can't go wrong. There's so many beautiful books there, so many interesting books about technology. Put some stripe press under the Christmas tree. I would agree. I think that's the way to do it. What else? What else is it? We have, this was crazy. You know, we covered a giant slalom, the FBI operation, to find Ryan W. wedding, they were able to capture his 2002 Mercedes CLK GTR. And I put this in here because I thought it was a good gift idea. I know.

Are they going to auction this off? Just get a 2002. The trouble is if you're one of the world's most wanted men, it's kind of hard to be whipping around a Mercedes CLK GTR. It's going to turn some heads for sure. You could make your own track. wound up turning the lease heads. It is a massive, massive car.

The back of this car is just remarkably long. Just what an exquisite vehicle. I love it. This feels like an under-discussed. You know, the Carrer GT gets a lot of love. The F40, La Ferrarianzo, like those get a lot. This is, it blends in almost like too much. But, I mean, obviously there are some people

It has a ton of fans. But very, very, very cool. Well, if you, you know, if you're not living a life of crime, you've got to automate compliance and security on Vanta. It's the leading AI trust management platform. Look at that stinger for Vanta. That stinger. You Vanta Stinger.

Cath, Core of X's, When My Husband asks how many Amazon packages are still on the way. It's a quick clip from a meme from Ilya. There's so many good moments in this. Because the answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers. You know, people were kind of dunking on Ilya for having this vague response to Dworkesh asking him, how will SSI make money? And I was just like, this is the most, like, this is not a bad answer.

This is the perfect answer because he literally did this. He went to Open AI for 10 years. They just worked on research and then wound up with a massive consumer business. They wound up with a consumer tech company that makes $20 billion a year in revenue. Did you, did you read those answers, though? They will likely release a product before. People were saying that? I don't know.

No, I don't think so. I think he's actually just going to do the open AI thing again. He did it open AI. People are like, how could he possibly be so vague that like, you know, he's these vague posting, vague podcasting thinking that like the answer will reveal itself. It's like, well, that's exactly what happened the last time he was in this role. He was in the role of, hey, go. research, you have basically an unlimited budget, more or less, because there's just

non-profit dollars coming in. You can pay the bills. You're going to keep scaling up, doing experiments, do whatever. And then at the last possible second, once he'd done a lot of good AI research, you know, someone came in and said, hey, why do we like wrap a chat box around that and put it on the internet? And then boom, $20 billion business. And so, like, for him to be saying, like, yeah, we're going to run it back, it seems very logical to me. It seems like, yeah, that's a great plan. Although, you know, $36 billion valuation, I'm sure that there is, there are some reasons why people are like, oh, this is capital incineration, blah, blah, blah, but I don't think it's that crazy given that he literally just did this. If you need a place to park $3 billion in AI, I think it's a, I think it's a, I think it's a, I think it's a, I mean, it's certainly like a venture style risk.

Like it's, it could be a zero. But just like, if anyone else was giving that pitch of like the, oh, we don't know how we'll make money, blah, blah, blah. blah, blah. I'd be like, red flag. But like, not with Ilya. Like, Ilya's the one person who's extremely qualified to say, we do a bunch of research, and then we figure out how to monetize it later. And it actually works because it worked the last time. Did you know about this movie, Battle Royale from Japan? Tim Sweeney's posting about it? Yes, I haven't seen it, but I'm familiar. It inspired movies like Hunger Games and games like PubG and Fortnite.

I've played PubG. I've played a little bit of Fortnite. player unknown yeah uh battle rail and then and then it was adapted into uh the hunger games of course in in uh but i like that quentin tarentino uh this post from variety says quentin tarentino starts to reveal his 20 best movies of the 21st century this is how you reveal a list this is what they should do with the midas list should be like they're starting to reveal it he's he didn't tell the top 20 he just said here's nine here's 11 through 20 You'll have to tune in next time to my next variety article. I like it.

It's a really good bait. Because now I'm like, well, what's his number one? I got to know. And he'll be like, okay, number 10, number nine. It's a great way of keeping somebody on the hook. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together.

Our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. We have niche, right? My dear friend. Your dear friend. I think we ran into each other. Did we run into each other in Nobu? How are you doing? Yes.

Welcome to the stream. What's up. How are you doing? How locked in are you right now? The last 24 hours? This is it, man. This is the Super Bowl, dude. So, like, you know, it's like no sleep.

It really is. Okay. Did you really not sleep last night? Do you get a couple hours? I don't know. Thankfully, we have a team that does this kind of stuff now. So it's not that bad. Yeah, but I mean, some companies, it's like January 1st is their Super Bowl

because it's like people are getting in shape, new year, new you. Other stuff heavily gift-driven, so Black Friday's really big, having a discount-driven. Like, where do you sit on the-com? How much bigger is Q-1 than Q-4 for you guys? Q-1 is always bigger than Q-4, especially the health and wellness base. So, like, they call Q-1 really Q-5. And so everyone's, like, you know, ramping up towards Q1, January to watch the Super Bowl, for sure. Sure.

But this weekend is still going to be a really, really large weekend. Yeah. And, like, these next four days, people are going to be, like, the buying and, intent is just so high. So everyone is just really excited to purchase regardless. But even after this, December is usually a little bit of a lull in the health and wellness space, but you're still spending and building awareness. And then Q1 is just like, you know, that's where you're making as much money as possible. Yeah. Take us through the product set for this. Before, before, give an intro on yourself in the company. I, we're close friends. I don't want to skip over for the audience.

So yeah, introduce yourself in the company. Yeah, hey guys. My name is Nish. I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Array. I started the company with my wife, and we were basically a targeted supplements for unsexy problems. So we started a company five years ago. Our hero product is bloated in the digestive health kind of category. And since then, we've expanded across multiple women's health problems,

so metabolic health, sports performance, digestive health. And we have very few skews, but we do nine figures of revenue as a business, and we're five years old. Oh, well, there we go. And you guys have, you raised one round back in the day. Yeah, we raised like a really small, like a couple million dollars, super small seed round maybe four, three years ago, something under that. Yeah, we've been profitable since.

Insane. What's been the, what's been the strategy this year? I feel like other categories in e-com have had like more volatility this year just like given the trade war and all that stuff. But has it been so far? No, okay. So the first half of this year was completely different than the second half of the year. So the first half, something about just buying sentiment was a lot better.

And so the way you're able to grow these consumer businesses and just marketing in general was really efficient, really strong growth. Second half of the year has been really interesting. Something has changed in just like macro environment where people are not spending as much money, just buying things online anymore. And so I'm noticing it's across the board. If you look at like macro 10 data, look at even retail, category data. Just customer acquisition costs have really, really gone up. Metacquisition costs

have really gone up. Brands are still growing, but it's just harder than it was in the first part of the year. That's for sure, yeah. And so to counteract that, you guys are launching new products, you launch Target, walk us through that. Yeah. So for us, you know, launching new products has always been a really big part of the strategy. I think innovation is so important because without innovation, you just can't really build the company and you kind of die. So we're always launching new products, but we try to launch very few products that have a really large TAM. And so this year we launched a tone, tone gummy, which is basically creatine that was built in a form factor and has certain additional ingredients that is like really geared towards

women. And so a lot of women are like so scared of taking creatine and so scared of bulking up. And so we're like, let's make this more approachable for them. That was like a really strong product for us. We have another clear protein product in the protein category. Proteins been like going crazy this year. So that was like that was another really big launch. We have a clear protein with electrolytes in us. That did really well. And more recently, it was a product line extension. We have a really strong MB1 metabolic health product. And so we did that as well. But the biggest thing for us is we've been expanding heavily into retail just because that's where the next kind of phase of growth comes from.

So we've went nationwide through Target, nationwide as sprouts. Those two are really big, yeah, big launches. No, it's been, it's been a crazy year, man, crazy year. It's really good. What about online channels? How are things on TikTok shop? I know we were in the Alps in December January, and you said it was insane at that point. Has it kept up? I know that they kind of subsidized demand on TikTok shop, or that's been my understanding of it. Has that continued?

How are you thinking about it as part of this acquisition that's going on, all that stuff? TikTok is actually pretty insane. So TikTok shop is this crazy platform where you can go from doing nothing to doing, you know, multimillion dollars a month in like three months. And so that's what happened to us. When we're in the Alps jority, like we were just ramping up by March, we were doing seven figures per month per month just on TikTok shop. And so that was like it, it was really, really cool, really fun.

But what's crazy about it is the amount of investment that you need to get that going is just a lot. So TikTok is interesting because you get this virality, you get these instant. insane amount of impression share, and you're really banking on the halo effect it has on other channels. So when TikTok goes viral, you're not really making any money in TikTok, but you're making money in Amazon in retail and even a spillover effect on DTC, and that's where you're seeing the results. So the thing about that is you do it, you know you're not going to make a lot of money, but you've got to like staff up and get really complex on like incrementality and just your overall marketing strategy and just getting really good at measurement. So you know

where you're making money. But TikTok shop is really interesting because it's actually changed Black Friday behavior quite a bit. It's in a position where it's a constant deal seeking like throughout the 12 months of the year because they have so many sales

and so many promos happening all the time. And so consumers on TikTok shop are like, okay, I'm just going to go look for the best deal. And I'm just going to go look for whatever creators are telling me are the best product but also the best value. And so it's like really change things because, you know,

you really don't want to be on sale all the time, but you kind of have to be if you want to play competitively on that platform. But it's still really interesting because you can have certain products that are like really meant for TikTok shop, other products that you're kind of on your DTC and you're cross-selling upselling. But it's a strong platform. Once it gets going, there's no denying the halo effect it has on everything else. Makes a lot of sense. How are you navigating growth and profitability? I know you've been generally profitable for a while now, but you still have have your foot on the gas from a, from a growth standpoint.

Yeah, we, I think, like, right now, we've been profitability first more than, more than growth. And so we've just been like, okay, no matter what, even on the BFCM, even we're doing, like, these large sales and whatnot, like, we're not going to go above a number if you're going to become unprofitable. Now, obviously, that profitability takes into account a lot of, like, LTV and as a mechanic's on, okay, we don't mind losing money as long as we're sure that we'll make money back within whatever, you know, one, two, three months payback period. So we'll get that type of mass and give the best possible kind of value to the consumer.

So we've still been very healthy, like, LTV on that note, but it's interesting. I mean, we've been expanding so much in retail and all that kind of stuff. You just need money to grow that machine and you just need to market a lot more. So there's a world where regardless of how profitable you are, just the pure dollars needed to, you know, market. Scale in the retail. Target. You just really money for that.

So we're considering, okay. you know, how much do we need to increase that marketing budget by maybe reducing profitability even more and just like spending more because it's what you need to get successful. There's a flywheel effect that we'll take in later. So I'm sure this might be made later on that. But right now, we're profitability first, but I think we'll maybe be more lenient on that even going into next year just because you want to grow the business more, especially with the town increasing.

Do you track revenue revenue per employee? We had David, not David, Peter, Peter, Peter, Dave. Peter Protein. Peter Protein. Peter Protein on. From David, he was saying, you know, he looks to keep like a couple million of revenue per employees. That's something that you think about at all or just kind of a vanity metric.

Yeah, we do actually. We do. We're probably like one of the leanest. I think we're sitting anywhere at like, Samara in the $2 to $3 million range on revenue per employees. So like, that's really, yeah, it's been really good. Maybe a bit of two lean though, but yeah. It's incredible.

I've had a front row seat to watching Siff and Nish Bill the Ray and just absolute, absolute monsters. Someday you'll go on like a nice podcast tour victory lap when it's all ever. Must the company's tools. Yeah, awesome, dude. Well, thank you for taking the time out of the day. Say hi to Siff and the whole team.

I will. I'll see you soon. I'll have a good one. Cheers. Our next guest is already in the roost room, What's you got from me? I was just going to say, Nish is just the epitome of golden retriever matching.

He's an absolute animal. Before bringing our next guest, let me tell you about Julius AI. The AI data analyst that works for you, join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. We will take it over to Figgs.

I believe we are inside of a store. There we go. Is this a virtual? backdrop or are you actually in the store right now? I'm so confused. I am actually in the store. Okay. Amazing. Yes. We're at our brand new store on Upper East Side here in New York City and we just opened. Congratulations. Amazing. Good timing. Hit the gong for the store. There we go. Love it. What is like what is Black Friday like in your category? I'm assuming a lot of your a lot of your consumers are like it's a normal work day. Is that true? How do you guys approach

the holiday? Yeah, that's exactly right. At things, you know, we are building a brand exclusively for healthcare professionals. And many healthcare professionals, they're working the holidays. They were working all day yesterday through Thanksgiving. And they're working nights and weekends all the way through the new year. And so for us, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's really a moment for us to show up for them. These are the people that are showing up for all of us.

And so we really approach this moment as a moment of gratitude and a moment to give back to our community. How are you positioning gifting the product? I can see, you know, it is a professional outfit but it's also a product

that people love. And so if your family member gives it to you, they're kind of giving you more work, but also it's a very nice thing to give. So how are you positioning like the marketing around who should be participating in Black Friday, the gift giver or just the person who's shopping for themselves? Well, it's all of the above. I think, you know, everyone wants to thank all of the incredible healthcare professionals in their life for, you know, people that are being treated and cared for by health care professionals.

And so it goes both ways. I think, you know, health care professionals are able to use this as a moment to stock up on their essentials and the uniforms that they need to wear every single day. But at the same time, things is a really premium brand. We've completely revolutionized the way healthcare professionals get dressed for work in the uniforms that they're wearing. And so it also is a really nice gift for, you know, someone to get another healthcare professional or, you know, to gift to the healthcare professional loved ones in your life. And so it really is all of the above. And I think it ties back to this feeling of gratitude, giving thanks to, you know, the most incredible people on this earth that are saving lives and carrying diseases. And so we position it both ways, both as a moment to stock up for yourself, but also as a moment to give back.

What's the biggest, what was the biggest unlock this year from a marketing perspective? What was one campaign or strategy that you feel like, as you look back on 2025, you feel like it went particularly well? Oh, my gosh. We've had an epic year. It's been so awesome. And I think one of the things, and I was reflecting on it with a moment like today, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. For us, it's not just about these moments. It's about how we show up 24-7-365 for our healthcare community, who we call awesome humans.

This year, we launched a year-long campaign called Where Do You Wear Figs? And it talks about all of the places that healthcare professionals wear things, which is literally everywhere. It's before their shifts, after their shift, it's to work every day. And so we've had a series of chapters throughout the year celebrating women's months, celebrating Nurses Week, most recently celebrating the holidays. And we've really shown the insights of what it's like to work with in this industry. and the space and all the different places where our brand shows up. And so I think what's so important on a moment

like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that you're building this brand equity and you're building this connection with your community throughout the year. And then that pays off in these big moments. And so showing up for them, listening to them, telling their stories throughout the year,

which we've done with our Werdie Morphic campaign, has been really incredible for us. And this is just another moment to celebrate. that. Well, congratulations on all the progress on the epic year, and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Bringing us into your new space. It looks amazing. It's quite busy in there. Yes, it's a pack. We have nurses coming in for hot cocoa. It's been a really fun, really good day. Very cool. Very cool. Well, good to me. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about

Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And let's go back to the timeline. The folks over a deal were having some fun. Have you seen this? This is an interesting trend. Heron resource. H.R. I'm executing on this strategy very well. They say, I notice one employee wearing noise-cancelling headphones, not earbuds. The big cushioned over ear kind that create a tiny personal universe. I asked if everything was all right. He said yes. He's just trying to focus. You do this in the morning. I do. You throw on your big earbuds. I told him we value focus, but isolation can misread as resistance to collaboration.

He said he's literally sitting at his desk doing his job. I told him we track human presence, not just output. He asked how presence is measured. I said imperfectly, which is why it's so important. Then I logged, quote, avoiding spontaneous culture building opportunities in his engagement profile, 10 million views. 50,000 likes, and it's an ad for deal. And it's so interesting because it feels like it's part of this new trend. Like there's that, there's a European VC guy who's really funny, who I believe is owned or partnered with like a SOC compliance competitor or company out there that does that. like a Vantac competitor, and they, uh, uh, and it's just a very funny positioning of like these like owning these accounts. We also saw, I think Polymarket bought, uh, Raw's alert for

$500,000. That was leaked on the timeline today. And so there's like a whole bunch of interesting ways that, uh, companies are engaging with like different accounts, whether they're buying ones that are already existing or they're spinning up new ones. Uh, it just, it, it feels like it's like part of the go direct story but not entirely uh you have to do it all on the founder's profile but it's definitely blurring this line between like what's in-house and outsourced media how are they getting attention what's marketing i have a friend who has a is a ad agency where he just buys you know ads for companies um and he set up an an AI based profile like years ago like as soon as as soon as the AI dropped like it was not particularly good just has like an

anonymous picture like an AI generated image and he posts just like here are the greatest ads in history every day and so it's just like great ads and people will just they go viral all the time because they're just interesting ads funny ads and then it's just a funnel to be top of funnel to just do lead gen on yeah and so there's all these different ways that that companies are like plugging into like you know social media these days very fascinating yeah well another way to advertise is of course with ad quick.com out of them advertising made easy and measurable plan by and measure out of home with precision our next guest is brian from rora your co-founder no way brian how you doing welcome to the show i'm doing great how are you guys

we're doing fantastically so great to have you so great uh to see you do you uh get any sleep last night yeah got a little bit this is a big day for rora right uh introduce the product to introduce the progress, and then take us through what some of the expectations are for Black Friday. Yeah, so Rora is a premium water filtration brand, primarily trying to build products that will extend people's lives and help people get access to cleaner water. So we're effectively trying to build like the Dyson of water filtration, so an entire ecosystem of products that helps, you know, people get access to clean water wherever they are. and first black friday but not not uh not your first black friday went through a ton of them uh maybe it'd be kind of interesting to hear like how how how black friday has changed even while you've been an e-commerce operator you had a company love your melon that that did many many millions of dollars

of revenue and and scaled profitably over uh close to a decade i believe um so yeah i'd love to get a sense of how this day and these kind of four days have changed and then we can talk about Rora. Yeah, definitely. I think it's definitely changed quite a bit. And I think this is like my 12th Black Friday. But it used to be that Cyber Monday was really the day. And you kind of build everything up to that. And you know, you could set budgets at 10X and things like that on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And you could just, you know, rip a ton of sales. Yeah. But in today's day and age, you really have to build up. the learning on those ads and you have to build a lot of that forward momentum really to maximize the

potential of it. So I think now in today's day and age, it's really about obviously capturing the momentum. And so, you know, we did a couple of key things like having a product release about two weeks ago and really using that as an opportunity to build a lot of lead gen and a lot of interest around that leading up to up to this um so yeah we did a lot of things focused on the top of the funnel leading into this it was our first you know first black friday um but it's a lot cheaper obviously to get eyeballs on your product when uh you know it's a month before so we did a lot to fill the funnel and then you know this this is also not a product that it's it's less of like an impulse buy i feel like uh is that correct like if you're if you're if you're

buying a product to that you're going to rely on for clean water for your family. Like you might just see an ad and immediately click through and buy, but you also might want to learn about it over time. And I think top of funnel is like really important because of that. Yeah. So, you know, we allow people to find out what's in their water. They can go to our website. They can find out what's in their water. Then they go through a whole series of, you know, emails and informational aspects, then to learn more about the aspects about our product. And so we pushed a lot of that leading up to this. But we also know that a lot of people have been looking at our products for quite a long time. And so we felt that it was important to do a discount

for Black Friday just to allow more people to have access to cleaner water. And so that was ultimately the biggest decision behind it. And we've seen a lot of great response from our customers and driven quite a bit of sales from it. What tactically on meta, what are what are kind of the risk we were talking earlier about how like brands are setting budgets and then blowing through them either way faster than they intended or not as fast as they wanted to what's been your approach there and how are you kind of where are you finding success yeah I think for us being you know as young of a brand as we are you know we've only launched about a year ago it was really focusing on just top of the funnel and so really

keeping a lot of that budget on prospecting and, you know, continuing to funneling your best ads into the prospecting side of it. But also making sure that we can come out of this and keep consistent, you know, consistent sales for the brand. And so really building up the learning earlier than we typically would instead of saving all of our best assets and pushing it out, you know, waiting for Black Friday or right when we start the sale. So I think we've done that fairly effectively so far. What are you seeing other brands do in terms of just approaching this four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday? Is it all just one continuous sale now? Or does it make sense to be launching like different sales at different points? Like what's best

practices that you're seeing? Yeah, I think consistency definitely is best practice. I've done so many different ways over the past, whether it's free gifts with purchase, whether you've got different products releasing, whether you've got a better deal on Cyber Monday. And I think a lot of those things worked well in the past. But I think in today's day and age, it's better to stay consistent with one sale. I think starting that a little bit before, you know, a couple days before Black Friday so that you can build up the momentum with those ads tactically. And then you don't have to decrease that spend because you don't have a big dip in overall volume. So you can kind of just consistently then scale that up throughout Black Friday into Cyber Monday. And then also you get

the lower CPMs starting that, you know, a couple days before Black Friday, then trying to start it on Black Friday and experiencing those high CPMs out of the gate. And then what about from a like this is this is the first like real holiday season for Rora and then the first kind of of like new year cycle that a lot of health brands go through where the business is like starting to you know be at a pretty meaningful scale how do you like do you think this is kind of like a lot of brands get the benefit of like they're either a gifting brand and and or like it feels like your new you health brand yeah rora feels like it's like everyone's being split as we've talked to all the entrepreneurs yeah if you're doing supplements it's like people might buy this

week. This isn't going to be the biggest thing for you. But January will be a lot bigger, whereas I feel like I expect January to be significantly bigger for Aurora, but really just because the business is scaling so quickly, but it should be a big gifting product. Yeah, I think, you know, we saw on yesterday, like, a large amount of organic sales at being Thanksgiving. And I think people go, you know, wherever they go for Thanksgiving. And a lot of people tried out, you know, Aurora system at somebody else's house. I think we'll see something similar around, you know, Christmas and the holidays. But I think going into January, there's going to be an entirely new demographic that kind of comes into the funnel that's focusing on their health again.

And I think it'll be a big opportunity for us to capture that demand. We've also got some big partnerships that we're going to be launching right at the beginning of the year around that as well. So I think it'll all it'll all tie together. but I think, you know, there's an opportunity for both from a gifting perspective and, you know, the health and wellness for us leading in January. We'll close us out with a big number, what you got for us. What can you share? This Black Friday, this Saturday, every Monday, we should go over 20,000 systems sold for the year.

There we go. We'll let people at home do the math. That's a lot of systems. Thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out on a busy day. But yeah, watching you put on, you and Charlie put on just an absolute execution masterclass this year has been an honor. And yeah, excited, excited to see you how the rest of today Nets out. Well, we've got a great team, a lot of people around us. Thanks so much for having me on.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. 8Sleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up, energized. I got an 81. Quality was not quite right. How'd I do? Thanksgiving?

I feel like I did okay. But... 83. Oh, are you back in the house? I'm back. You're back? Okay. I wasn't sure how long the renovation was going to happen. Congratulations.

I'm glad us over. Wait, what did you get? 83? 83. Ooh, wow. Came back with some authority. With some authority. Well, we have Kat from AG1 in the Reistraming.

Welcome. Former guest. She's back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It's such a busy day. Right after Thanksgiving. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

Great to see you. Since we last talked, what's new in your world? We've been sort of bucketing brands. Okay, someone's more of a, you know, this is Black Friday. It's the most giftable Game Boy possible. It's going to be under the Christmas tree. And then David Protein, you know, sales are down 20% today, gearing up for January, New Year, New Year.

Black Friday's not a huge focus for that. Yeah, how are you thinking about making the most out of today, Monday, the rest of the year, generally at AG1. You know, I think of today twofold. One is today is a day to capture demand we've been building throughout the year. When I was hanging out with you guys, I think it was in June. We had just launched in Costco. We had not even launched our new flavors.

That was the number one tip we learned from you. If you're in consumer package goods, just launching Costco, win in Costco, and then you're good. That's the tip. it's been incredible but after that we launched flavors for AG1 and we launched our first ever truly second brand and product with AGZ so we went from one product to this and so today is about capturing the demand we've been building throughout the year with these product launches investments and upgrading the formula multiple human clinical trials really bridging into retail and having multiple products.

So as we market, as we invest, as people flood into market for what are typically offers, but still to shop, to make purchases, it is absolutely a demand capture moment. That being said, much like some of the other premium brands you've spoken to, it's also a day just to be in front of people and build future demand for when more are in market at the end of December and in January. But we are, we're up almost 40% Black Friday to Black Friday. Wow. And, yes.

And I think a big part of that is bring on the gong. It's, you know, what, I shared this on X a little earlier that this is a brave new world for us having multiple products so we can create bundles. We don't discount per se, but we can add value with multiple products allowing people to bundle. and that is absolutely what's driving that year-over-year growth on Black Friday. People are adding AGZ to their AG1 orders. They're adding a flavor sampler to their order. They're bundling our omegas and D3K2. We didn't have that portfolio a year ago.

You guys were playing on expert mode, just single skew all the way. So up 40% year-over-year, Black Friday to Black Friday. Obviously, that's driven by products, new products, expansion. but if there's one marketing or growth strategy that really stuck out over 2025 is particularly effective, what can you share about a strategy or a channel that you think you executed particularly well on this year? I'll share one strategy and one channel that stood out for us this year. One strategy was shifting the marketing focus from as influencers,

and creator forward to more science forward. You know, we invested over 10 million in four double-blind randomized placebo-controlled human trials, and it makes a lot of sense to try to get credit for that and help to stand out in the crowd. So for the first half of the year, we pulled back marketing investment 40% to focus on executing product launches,

executing channel launches, and building the story around the real work of quality, science, and research. So that strategy, that approach, which colored everything we did from the actual marketing where we put up huge billboards, we invested millions in out-of-home advertising that said something like, please enjoy your dumb, your randomized double-blind placebo-controlled daily health drink. You know, with a picture of out-of-home advertising. That is, that is beautiful.

Brilliant. Beautiful. You know, I would say maybe like literally like 0.1% of supplement companies actually do like studies on their products and they're just like hey this study happened over here with this one ingredient and so we're just going to apply that yeah over here yeah it's you know and it that strategy even colored our partnership approach we instead of partnering with athletes this fall did nil deals with nutrition students college students so we just and we had them put on the hat the jersey everything and sign up so the science strategy pulled through the year the channel

that we are really starting to see the value of is actually TV. Lanier and CTV. We were on Game 7 of the World Series with our Good Morning Moon campaign narrated by the ever-epic and a longtime AG1 drinker Rick Rubin. Nice. And it was much more brand, top of funnel, emotional, like who are our people? And what do they do when they get up early in the morning? And then we created 15 and 30 subcuts of that for parents, for runners, for athletes.

And so that's pulling through to the high season as we get into December and January. And we're starting to see, again, it's tougher to track those types of things. But there's incredible AI and technology out there to help with that. We're starting to see that channel contribute meaningfully, and especially now that we're in retail. And we're in Costco today. will launch additional national retailers next year, thoughtfully, going direct to national. And so, you know, as many others have said today, when you have multiple channels, you make those top of funnel marketing investments. They have more places to contribute.

Yeah. So we can expect to see a Super Bowl ad? One day. One day. One day. One day. You can expect to see more human clinical trials. I got another 20 million going into research. Wow. 20 million is amazing. How do you rate the overall health of the consumer and just kind of the macro over the last we had a friend of ours niche from Rayon. He said the first six months of this year felt wildly different from a macro standpoint than the last five or so months. But what's been your view? Certainly if you look at the economic data, it says there's a tale of two cities in the world of consumer.

with, you know, people who have higher income propping up, spending versus those who don't. For us and our business, because about, you know, into the first quarter, but halfway through the calendar year, we had so many back-to-back launches of products, channels, and innovation. It masked what might have otherwise been bumpiness with a more mature model. And it gave some variety, again, some value creation for that consumer. what hasn't changed, and I've heard a few others on with you today, referenced this, is how deeply considered these premium purchases are. And so the investments we made a year ago in top of funnel marketing,

six months ago in clinical trials, two months ago in launching AGZ, leaning in still to our podcast partners in the creator economy, where we were early movers, and it's still a key part of our strategy today, but nowhere near the largest channel from a marketing perspective. All of that brings people to, for us, what on average is eight to ten touch points before they purchase. I mean, it is a long consideration journey, and we're seeing it play out in multiple markets. In our partnership with Shopify, we launched Australia, we launched Japan, we are launching more of these products in our European business now, and we see very similar behaviors.

So we are a premium price point, but it's also an incredible value because we consolidate date and otherwise very expensive supplement stack in both AG1 and AGZ. Yep. Got anything else? We'd love to have you back on in January when we kick off the new year. That would be a massive period for you guys, but which we had more time. And just to clarify, there's a question in the chat about AGZ. It's for sleep, correct?

Yeah, AGZ. Where's my little AGZ? AGZ. I have it here. So it's a melatonin free. nighttime rest and restore products. Just like we did for AG1, we consolidated a multivitamin, a probiotic, and greens.

For AGZ, we consolidated what most people are making. They're sleepy girl, sleepy boy mocktails with asherganda and magnesium, two types of magnesium and an incredible research-back herbal blend. So AG1 for the morning, AGZ for the night to calm and develop a restorative sleep. 24-7. 24-7. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come. chat with us.

Great to get that update. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats on Star Wars. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Happy Black Friday. Happy Black Friday. Before we bring it our first in-person guest of the stream, let me tell you about

Wander.com, Book of Wonder with Inspiring Views, Hotel Graded Men of these dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. We have Sean Frank in the TVPN. Wallet King. He's been on the show multiple times. This is the first time him seeing him in person. How are you doing, Sean? He is the world's number one wallets.

Salesman. Good to see you. How you doing? And dominating every other category now. Yes, dominating. Dominating. Dominating luggage, dominating knives. Dominating. Consumer electronics. Batteries. Battery packs, correct? Yeah, man. It's game day. Dude, I love it. Have you guys been on Shopify the entire time? Dude, since 2012. There was never like, you never played about it. You never, you never, you never like, let's just set up. Let's just set up another little landing page over here. Maybe let's just, you know, have a side, side house. shop if i die man wow the best payment processing rates okay all the perfect apps inside the app store i'm a big shop if i'm a big shop if i yeah it's great to see you thank you for taking time out of our day today is this the most mellow black friday i hopefully like you've been building the company building the team you guys are so dialed in so many different ways now i would hope that every year is slightly less stressful than the last yeah this has been the chillest black Friday by far. It's the biggest Black Friday ever, but teams bigger, process are dialed in, and, like, the world's not on fire. When something does go wrong on Black Friday, like,

how did it manifest in years past? Because it's obviously not like, okay, the website is down because that you're on Shopify. It's never gone down before. It's never gone down. But there are things where it's like, okay, we've got to be a little bit more dialed as a team today. What are you actually monitoring? Like, what is just like inbound requests? Yeah, what situations are you monitor? Yeah, what situations have you monitored in the past or do you need to monitor on it? The most common problems would be credit cards going down. Okay. Right.

So. What does that mean? So, uh, like payment processing or, or like visa network is down? Yeah. Like hitting, hitting limits on your credit card because like in a typical day a brand might spend 50 grand on Facebook ads and then you go to spend $500,000. Oh, okay. Your, so your corporate cards go.

Yeah. So it just turn off and somebody's like not at their desk that moment and they, they, they. Yeah. And, and, and, or your account gets frozen. Okay. So, like, your actual MET account gets more locked up. and they're taking the week off. I love meta, love my reps.

But if you have a junior level of service, there's no way to escalate that. And then you're a whole weekend screwed if you can't spend money on meta. So that's the most common thing. You know, inventory issues always, right? How do you make sure things are staying in stock? How do you make sure your warehouse is actually working?

You know, warehouses are in-person businesses. So it's kind of like retail stores. We have to staff up for it. But today, our store will do 10x normal volume. How do you make sure those customers get their stuff when the whole three-week period is going to be huge. Yeah. What percentage of a brands Black Friday should come from advertising versus just, there's laid a lot of demand, it built up a bunch of email addresses, their customers are coming

back with return by default. So, yeah, if meta goes down, that's maybe 5% of Black Friday. But it sounds like it could be a lot more. What do you think of? It should be your biggest spend day by far. Okay. But it should be one of your most efficient days of the year. Sure. Just because intent is so high. In 10 is so high. So we'll spend, you know, in a typical day, we might be at a 2xMER,

half of our money going to marketing for digital channels, but a day like Black Friday could be like a 4xMER. But we're still going to spend multi-million dollars today, right? So conversion rates shoot up, you can spend more money. CPMs are higher. And it just, it varies by brand, right? If you're to Kovas, you know, you might have a bigger spike because, like, oh, the boots that everybody wants

are actually on sale right now. But if you're AG1, they're not going to have any spike at all. Like, nobody's, like, rushing out to get their supplements today. And I think we heard that from the David's Protein. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was saying he was actually down a little bit because it's like, it's a January product,

and that makes a ton of sense. What, on the digital ads thing, like, what, I'm trying to think of where to actually dig in there. Yeah, take me through TikTok shop. You were saying that you made a seven-figure day? Yeah. Take me through that. $700.

actually going on because reading behind that tweet I was I was thinking like okay he's extremely bearish on TikTok shop maybe TikTok broadly like how much should I read into that okay uh explain what happened yeah the general thesis on TikTok shop is it's really really good yeah a certain type of brand if you're female focused if you are a supplement if you can make pretty you know bold claims TikTok shop's going to print for you bold claims that means people are like you restores all your hair for five dollars something like that because the brand doesn't make the claims, the affiliates make the claims. The affiliates are incentivized to say crazy stuff to try to get the affiliate commission.

So if this wallet will turn you into a millionaire. You put a $100 bill in here. It's going to change it into $200 out. You can get $200 dollars out. And there's a whole cohort of like Gen Z brands that are doing nine figures in like six months off of TikTok shop. What are the categories? It's supplements for sure.

For sure. Like get jacked look hot. Yeah, yeah, like testosterone gummies. Testosterone gummies? Yeah, they gummed everything. Dude, the biggest brand no one's ever heard of is comfort. You guys should just go on TikTok shop and just check out what comfort's doing. Publicly, so it's huddies.

And it's like, you know, price at 120, marked down to 35 bucks. And they'll do... So they're like eating into Mad Happy. They're like a Mad Happy clone. Or really like a fast fashion clone, like a Timu Shian like Zara type clone. But like really high quality. anxiety-reducing hoodies. That's the claims, man, the claims.

But they'll do over $700 million this year. $700 million. Third year in business. Third year in business. Yeah, they're killing it. Wow. So TikTok shop can totally work. Yeah, yeah.

The joke there is that for a men's, like, almost luxury good brand, it will not work at all. We did multi-million dollars yesterday. We did $700 on TikTok shop. But I'm working, dude. I'm grinding out. Bigger, bolder claims. Yeah.

Yeah, so do you think there's just, like, there's no way for you to get it to work? Like, you've, you've tested everything. You've, like, done a bunch of specific TikTok creative and hired people who have gotten into work in other categories. Like, at this point, you know it's not you. The shops program is way different in the ad program. Okay. I'll spend 50 grand on TikTok shop today, or sorry, TikTok ads today, but that's driving my website.

Yeah. To make TikTok shop work, it has to be an impulse purchase. Sure. But I haven't given it my all. In January, we're giving it our own. You are. Yeah, we're going to throw everything at it. Is it your number one, like, big opportunity for 2026,

or are you thinking, like, AI, Gentic Commerce? I would say that there's probably six things a brand should be focused on in 2026, and I'll see if I can rattle them off. Yeah, six is a lot. Yeah, yeah. But I think social commerce is for sure one of them, but then that ties into point two,

which is just getting way better short form organic video, right? You guys post clips, like, more brands need to be clipping, and it's just because watch time on social media apps, is continuing to be dominated by short-form video. Nobody's scrolling feeds anymore. And it's just going to continue to take over long-form YouTube and Twitch streams and everything else. It's just all for the clips.

Yeah, no, it feels like the Instagram feed is just a catalog now, and I don't even know if you should care about engagement as a brand. Well, dude, and also, like, the idea of a brand has also been, like, disimmediated because it's not about the brand page anymore. Like, the best TikTok shop brands have 50 TikTok accounts because it's just volume.

And if you pull up with the number one TikTok shop affiliates, there's people making a million dollars a year, and they'll post 70 videos a day. And so many of those videos get 20 views, but then one will get $28 million, and it will just print for them. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that takes you out of, like,

building an enduring brand? Like, like, will the next Hermes really be doing that? You know, will the next, like, iconic, like the Louis Vuitton or the Ferrari, be like slopping it up on the short form? Well, no, I think they're going to be sponsoring, like, you know, DJ tables at like F1 stuff, but like the rest of us are going to be slopp as up to.

And then even... Slop comes for us all. Yeah, and I know you guys love luxury. The luxury space is super interesting because Richmont's actually the only brand dominating right now because they have Cartier, they have Van Cleef, like jewelry is taking over everything, and LVMH and really curing has been wrecked for like two years.

So the world of luxury is undergoing a lot of changes right now as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure they're still having a big Black Friday since people just go out and shop physically. But so much of that is dependent on like the health of the economy. So what's you got, Jordy? Caring is up 41% year to date, but they've been struggling. Well, look at the five-year chart. Zoom out.

Zoom out. We're zooming out. It's down 50%. Okay, 50% rough. What's a white pill? Where is their opportunity? Peter Protein earlier. Peter Rahal was saying consumers will always want novelty.

And so specifically in like supplements and CBG, there's always going to be an incremental opportunity because people just want to have even the same thing is delivered to them differently. But like where are you seeing opportunity? Yeah, I think David's protein proved, and he said that, like, there's white space and everything, right? You know, nobody thought you could build a hoodie brand, like comfort, and just dominate a new channel like TikTok shop and affiliate and get to $700 million. I think it's the fastest growing apparel brand of all time, right?

And, yeah, David's Protein, two years in, $300 million, grooms, two years in, $300 million. So I think the standards are way higher. You have to be really good at operating, right? You can't just have a good website. You can't just have a good product. you actually also have to understand the ecosystem. But our fastest-scrowing channel this year is consumer electronics, right? Like doing phone cases.

Everyone told me phone cases were a stupid business to get into, right? And, like, we bumble along for four or five years doing it. And now it's an eight-figure business for us in six months or whatever. That's amazing. There's a white space everywhere, man. What do you think about my idea? Post-purchase flow, we were working this out, where you buy a product, and then you have an opportunity to get to,

to box somebody for a discount. You match locally to recreate the original physical Black Friday experience. So do both people want a discount and only the winner gets in? Or you guys, wait, no, no, no, no. I think it's like, it's like I'm on ridge.com. I check out with a bunch of stuff.

Jordy's my next door neighbor. He checks out with a bunch of stuff. We're both happy. We're having the modern e-commerce Black Friday experience except there's one thing missing. We didn't get to fight each other. So then in the post-purchase flow, it says, hey, there's someone that's opted

in to a fistfight in your area in your area walk outside meet at this address you can scrap it out it sounds asset light so i don't i don't have to as a brand i don't put up any boxers no you guys are fighting each other yeah yeah yeah it's purely peer to peer amongst you do have to give some of the margin back to the winner though that's the only thing oh oh so the winner does get a yeah a little incentive you get like a gift card or something and the rich customers they're scary man they're tough guys yeah they're tough guys i feel like you can't shave the beard now at least at least says, well, as CEO of Ridge. No, I'm going to keep throwing it out, dude.

Yeah, wait. So how did you actually win in phone cases? That feels like extremely difficult, the most competitive. Is it the strength of like the product development, the positioning, the marketing, the operations? Like how, how did that possibly work? Dude, it's possible. Yeah, it's creative destruction, right? So like, the number one name in phone cases is still Otterbox.

They do a billion dollars a year in revenue. They do more than Apple directly? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like third party? Yeah, I'm not taking down Apple. But like, Otterbox is sold into Verizon's and Best Buy and Everywhere, right? I do see them everywhere. And they do a billion dollars a year in sales.

They've been like owned by private equity for four or five years. Give it up for private equity. Yeah, yeah. Make it a deal-in. But then they're in the value extraction mode. They're just like they're never going to pay for marketing. They're going to fight tooth and nail a Best Buy a Verizon of the world, right? And then it creates a market because Verizon's like, hey, I hate working with these new owners over here.

Will you come in and take some of their shelf space? They want competition in their store, and it's incremental sales for me. It's their lunch that I'm eating. So I'm like, yeah, I'd gladly go in there. I'll take lower margin, I'll work it out. Wow, okay. You could shop Ridge phone cases at your local Verizon stores, T-Mobile, Best Buys. Did you have a deals with any of them beforehand?

No. So is there a world where it acts as like a lever that opens a door to getting other products into these places? I don't know if a Ridge wallet would make sense in a Verizon store, but probably. No, we have walked there now. Yeah, yeah, why not? And actually, I did lie. The first thing we had was wallets in Best Buy. And it's like, yeah, yeah, you told me about that.

We were the only people ever selling wallets in a Best Buy. And it's like, if we can make that work, then we can make anything work. And then we started just selling the rest of the catalog in there. You can buy our luggage in a Best Buy right now. Best practices for big influencer partnerships in 2026. What you got? I think more and more the brands need to be somewhat creator-led. And I think it's ways you to do that internally, right?

You guys had, you know, like a couple creator brands on today. You could say Mod Retro is a creator brand. It is crazy how many views Palmer gets, even though he's not an influencer, just by going around onto Rogan, onto other shows. And plugging it. He pulls it, yeah. He pulls the audience.

Yeah, so I think there's free impressions to be had, and the most expensive part of my P&L is impressions. Impression. So if you can go out there and tell a story and be good, you'll get a ton of impressions. We'd just an hour ago had an MKBHD video go live, and it'll probably get 3 million views and sell a ton of stuff.

And it just needs to be a tighter feedback look there. MKBHD on Black Friday, I'm assuming that's only possible because you guys have had like a very long-term relationship with MKBHD. And if like Samsung came to him and he didn't have that relationship, he'd be like, I'll take $5 million or something. I'm sure it would take a ton of money. You know, he's an equity partner and rich. So he's one of our co-owners. So he's on the board. we hang out and um as part of our relationship we get like 20 spots a year and he wants to maximize

our revenue too so black friday is a great spot to give to us that's awesome very very cool uh anything interesting on the on the channel side on like uh what's Connor up to today he just got like like eight monitors set up just like fully locked into the vortex yeah dude unfortunately it's not a camera show in your guys production studio but that's similar We can be running a brand. Yeah, you can have a ton of ads going right now, guys. Yeah, I mean, Conner's behind the screen. We have a great team now, so there's 70 or 80 people at Ridge just grinding out today.

But the most exciting channel is probably YouTube. They kind of, yeah, they kind of fucked around for a long time and didn't have good performance marketing. Was that the targeting or the actual, like, putting short-ball video? It was extraordinarily difficult to get programmatic ads on YouTube to work at all, right? Yes, but what about them was wrong? Just like the targeting on, like, who the person was that you're reaching? Yeah, I mean, their number one business is AdWords, and they want everything to work like AdWords,

and that ad space doesn't work like AdWords, right? And they weren't willing to make the changes to make YouTube an actual functioning ad platform. But now that it looks like, you know, the Google Ads business could be threatened or might be threatened. They're like, let's sort of actually finding all the dollars in the couch cushions, and that is YouTube ads. I mean, pull up their K-1 is the fastest growing part of their business, right?

50% year over year. And it's working. So YouTube has been like the second biggest channel for it this year. Interesting. Do you, uh, are you seeing strong results on basically vertical video, like repurposing TikTok assets into vertical video ads in the shorts feed on YouTube? Or are you creating bespoke content for YouTube? Are you at the point where you notice that an edit that works on, an ad that works on YouTube won't work on TikTok and vice versa? Well, I'll say that putting MKBHD in YouTube ads really works. Sure, because it's totally thumb-stopping. Yeah, but what you brought up is the beauty

of you should be a creator brand, right? Like the real alpha in leverage there is that a short-form video is the same everywhere. So you can run it on TikTok, you can run it on YouTube shorts, Reels, app-loven, you can put it on Twitter. Like, Twitter ads are crushing, right? Yeah, yeah.

Twitter ads are crushing. Yeah, yeah. No way, no way. Dude, I mean, the guy they hired that new guy and he's like running it? Yeah, he's crushing it, dude. He's crushing it? Yeah.

No way, that's amazing. The first person that's really called that out. Why, so why did it never work historically? Yeah. Why was it purely to brand channel where you'd have like Uber that's like we're going to, we'll give some of our budget to X? Well, it's the same thing as like why did Apple Levin go from like a $20 billion company to a $200 billion company?

It's like they built a really good ad engine, right? Like dollars will flow to whoever has the best ad engine. I think a lot of the space is the same, right? They're like, oh, no, an X user is more valuable because it's into tech or no, it's bad because all these bots. At the end of there's purchasers everywhere. and you just need a really good ad engine. And MET has had a 20-year head start,

building the world's greatest ad engine, right? And now the same people who built that are going to places like Twitter, going to places like Apple of it and rebuilding better ad engines. And as long as they, you could put it on Reddit ads, you could put it on Cridio, horrible ads,

and as you have a really good ad engine, it will find purchasers. And that's what I think they did over at X and it's been working. Yeah, and video specifically too. You've been running video ads there? You were saying you could bring your TikTok, YouTube ads, KVHD video ads all over.

Has that been successful on X yet? Or is it more link-based? We throw all the stuff in there, but everything has to link to link out and purchase on our website. Yeah, okay. Well, we got to close out with Harley. Thank you so much for...

Will you hang out for a second? Hang out. We'll talk to you soon. We got Harley back in the studio. Closing out. Where does Sean go? Hang out. You want to hang out?

Dude. What do you... You look like his... He went away. I guess Sean won't have a lot. If he sits here, he's a pretty face. You look like his boss or something. He's got it.

He's got it. Oh, yeah. Okay. We have items from. How are you doing? Close us out. Give us an update on the stats. What else is the,

what's the latest? All right, let's start with the stats, of course. Sean, can you hear me? Oh, I can hear, but how are you? You can. How are you doing? Congratulations.

We pressed it. We said, has he ever flinched and thought about even for a second using a different e-commerce platform? He said, never in the entire history. Really? bridge. Never. You know, actually, in truth, Sean's one of those guys that he gives you tough love when you deserve it, but he gives you praise only when you deserve it also.

And so that makes him a real one. He is. He is a real one. Okay, so let's check it out as we close us out. How are we doing? So $4.1 million right now sales per minute, $38,000 orders per minute, 30 million unique shoppers today across all shop. Let Sean hit the gong.

John gone. Gone, do it for us. It's a Sean gong. Let's go. We need a hit with the setup, with the prancing setup. Wow. Okay, so I also have a few other things for you. Yes, yes.

Okay, so I'm going to wrap up some trending categories for the day now that we're getting to 5 p.m. E.S.T. Skin care, vitamin, supplements, t-shirts, active wear, makeup did really well. This is really interesting. At 5 a.m., when I was on CNN, I looked at trending products. At 5 a.m., it was aloe yoga with the crewneck pullover. It was Cozy Earth with their bamboo sheet set

and Merritt Beauty with their flush bomb. When I look at it now, it's totally switched up. You have Victoria Beckham's eyeliner. You have earplugs from a company called Loop. Ear plugs, too. Interesting. Yeah. Loop earplugs. The ones that's trending is called the Loop Switch 2.

And you have Lola Blankets, the antique ivory blanket. Here's what's really interesting. If you go back to this time last year, last year was all about getting outside. You saw ski equipment, adventure stuff, outdoorsy stuff. That's over. We're going on, we're going, we're going. We're going cozy, man.

We're going cozy, we're going cozy. We're going cozy. So things like bakeware sets, blankets, wooden toys, and coloring books are all up 100% year over year. Interesting. Goose Creek candle, Christmas tree, three McHandals killing it. And caraway cookware set is also killing it. So those are the trends. It's been, I mean, the cozy era is definitely here.

We're in the cozy era. Cozy era. Dude, all those are great brands. If you guys don't know Loop, like, they're... I don't know Loop. Oh, something like really old, like them by earplugs. They made them really cool. Is it for sleeping?

No, it's for like going to concerts. Concerts and stuff. Okay, yeah. You put up the website, Super Gen Z. Cozy Earth has a bunch of stores in L.A. Like all those brands. Cozy Earth is really cool. Yeah.

Loop earplugs. Yeah, this is amazing. Yeah. Wow. And obviously, Allo is Allo, right? Yeah, we know Alo, of course. They're serious. They're serious.

And actually, they're in L.A. also, an amazing company. But I just want to say, you know, a couple of things. I know you guys have to wrap in a minute, but Jordy, John, I just want to say thank you so much for this. Of course. This was fantastic. There's nothing we love more than celebrating commerce.

It was a fun tour talking to folks who today is the biggest day of the year for them to other folks who, you know, this is just another day or they're, you know, they're just completely focused on January. It was like, you know, even Kat had said like Cat Cole versus, you know, the David's guy. David's like, no, no, no, it's January. And Kat's like, no, no, this is like, this is where you're just where you're. It was so the juxtaposition between two similar products. But I just want to say thank you to guys.

This is my 16th Black Friday at Shopify, my favorite one yet. A huge thank you to Noel, Sarah, Peter, Torren, Kevin, niche, Benet, Brian, Kat. And of course, Sean and Joy, John. You guys are amazing. Sorry, we stole your day off. Please apologize to your wives and families. No days off. No days off when capitalism is on the line.

Dude, it's the biggest end of the line. It's the biggest day of the year. It's the best. And we're still full of energy, but hopefully you agree it was worth it. Oh, 100%. 100%. I'll see you guys in Q1 for our next earnings call, I guess. I can't wait for 17.

Dude, Cyber Monday, run it back. Cyber Monday, we're doing it out of streaming with the green suit. Charlie, join, join Cyber Monday. I love to. You'll have me. I'd love to join Cyber Monday. Of course. Maybe Sean or I come on together.

We do a whole like back-to-back DJ thing. Let's do it. Sales hour by hour. I'm going to report in. I love it. I love it. Amazing. Congrats to the whole Shopify team

for another blowout, blowout day. Thank you very much. Can't wait to see the final numbers. Yeah, I want to know the final numbers. We got to figure that out. I'll come back Monday. We can chat.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. Great to talk to you soon. Have the good rest of your day. See you, Sean. Goodbye. Thank you, Harvey. Wonderful, wonderful show.

Thank you to everybody who has hung out with us today. Celebrated commerce, celebrated entrepreneurship. celebrated the American consumer. The Commerce Corral and the Canadian consumer. Commerce Corral. We, I wish we were podcasting tomorrow. We won't be. Tomorrow's Saturday. But we will be back in full force on Monday. Back in full force. And, yeah, it'll be a busy weekend. Dude. It's going to be great. Thanks for doing this. Shining some light on a small little company called Shopify. Yeah.

fledgling startup 20 years next year 20 year old company fantastic well thank you so much for tuning in thanks for listening wonderful rest of your apple podcast holiday weekend sign up for the newsletter tbPN.com and we will see you on monday cheer bye goodbye goodbye thank you