The Retail Journey
Welcome to the Retail Journey where we will cover important topics, interview industry stakeholders, and address emerging trends as we journey through our mission of helping our listeners thrive in retail. Your hosts for this show are CEO James Harris and CGO Charles Greathouse.
The Retail Journey
Crafting a Relevant Brand in the Digital Age with Toby Teeter
Embark on a digital odyssey with Toby Teeter, a former law student turned internet entrepreneur extraordinaire. As Toby narrates his transformation from a legal eagle to a digital marketing maven, he spills the secrets behind creating an online business empire that started with humble one-page websites. Journey with us through the origins of Toby's forays into affiliate marketing, the serendipity of unexpected partnerships, and the thrill of taking his ad network, Valid Click, to the public stage. It's a story that celebrates the boundless potential of the internet and the relentless pursuit of an entrepreneurial vision.
In the realm of e-commerce, strategy is king, and this episode unpacks Toby's masterful pivot from low-cost goods to premium product launches. As the architect behind brands such as Urban Cycling Apparel, he shares the gear shifts needed to thrive on Amazon's complex playing field. Listen to the tales of collaboration and creativity that forged partnerships stretching from furniture to fitness gear, and grill parts to high-end puzzle boards. This chapter is not just a chronicle of e-commerce evolution; it's a blueprint for any aspiring entrepreneur looking to craft a brand in the digital marketplace.
Venture into the innovative heartland of Bentonville, Arkansas, where Toby is shaping the future of entrepreneurship at the University of Arkansas and beyond. Discover how initiatives like the Greenhouse Outdoor Recreation Program fuel the fire of innovation and how embracing both success and failure is crucial for growth. Then, take a turn towards the personal as we explore health optimization and the empowering journey of taking health into our own hands. This episode isn't just a podcast; it's an invitation to be inspired, to learn, and to transform with us. Tune in for a conversation that's as much about navigating the vast e-commerce seas as it is about charting your course towards health and wellness.
Hello and welcome back to the Retail Journey podcast. I'm one of your hosts, charles.
Speaker 2:Greathouse and I'm James Harris, and today we are talking to Toby Teeter. In addition to serving as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Economic Development at the University of Arkansas and as the Director of the Collaborative in Bentonville, Arkansas, Toby's launched several multiple virtual native brands and really excited to get to talk to you about it today. Thanks for having me Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Digital native entrepreneur and educator. Educator yeah, kind of I teach.
Speaker 2:I love it, yeah, and connector yeah Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Collaborative entrepreneur and educator. Educator, yeah, kind of, yeah, teach, I love it. Yeah. And connector yeah right, yeah. Collaborative. And toby teeter, that's the man, the myth, the legend, thanks for joining us today thanks for having me really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:So what, uh, what got you into retail? Uh, sure, and when? When was that?
Speaker 3:and so I was in law school in the late nineties. Uh, so I, here I was. It was like in my mid twenties and the whole world, everyone my age seemed like, was getting rich off the internet. That was, like you know, web 1.0. So it was like back in like the Mark.
Speaker 3:Cuban days and they cash out with the billion dollars. So I feel like I was just missing out. So I felt like I was just wasting away at law school and I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a lawyer. But I stuck it out. But along the way, while I was in law school, I started figuring out how to build websites. I would literally just right-click on websites and started building websites. And then, while I was working for the state of Missouri, while in law school at the University of Missouri, I started building one-page websites using affiliate links from Amazon. So it was the super early days of affiliate links. So even back then you could sign up and get a tag and it allowed you to link back to Amazon and get 50% cut of the sales. So I started creating one-page websites about a book topic. You know the best books about Spain and here's the top 10 books. It's just so cheesy.
Speaker 3:But, back then it was so easy to actually just create random content like that. It would get indexed by Excitecom and Yahoo. People would click on my site, go to Amazon, buy a book and before you to know, I was making a couple hundred dollars a month mailbox money as a law student that was a really big deal.
Speaker 3:That's where I started getting the juice. I was like, okay, what's next? Maybe I don't have to be a lawyer. So that's how it all began. I did finish law school. I did practice law with a law firm for about a year and a half. I did litigation and lobbying in Jefferson City, but along the way I continued to build a network of online city guides. It's kind of a precursor to Craigslist. It was all text. It was sort of like online yellow pages, and I built those for 250 different cities and I built those for 250 different cities Collectively. It got a lot of traffic and I was trying to figure out how to monetize it and ultimately I developed a relationship with Yahoo. I actually flew out to Yahoo, explained what I had. I was getting like 500,000 to a million people a month on my site, but I didn't know how to really make money at the time. I just charged $14 to be on my site, like literally $14, and a local realtor can be listed on Fayetteville's website, right like a yellow page.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, I bumped it to $89. I had more people signing up, so I learned about elasticity of demand Totally.
Speaker 1:I was like how did $14 come about as a?
Speaker 3:retail guy.
Speaker 3:I was like $ 14, come about as a retail guy I was like 14.99 touchdowns like come on, yeah, yeah, and then went to 89.99 and more people signed up, uh. But but what really happened was I, I figured out how to um add pay-per-click advertising, uh, contextually into the content. So I went to yahoo and I pitched this idea of taking their pay-per-click search keyword-based advertisers. This is back. You know, this goes way back, and people that are geek out about pay-per-click advertising overture, overture actually invented pay-per-click advertising. Overture was bought for a billion dollars by yahoo in 1999 or 2000. And this is right about when I flew out there and met with overture, slash, yahoo and um and pitched the idea of taking all their advertisers and not only displayed it on Yahoocom but displayed the results on all my websites and allowed me to do this kind of conversion, where I took basically a directory hierarchy of yellow pages and converted keywords that are associated with each of those categories and subcategories and allowed me to basically create this map so people are bidding for mortgage refinancing in Bentonville and on Bentonville's website that I owned I would display that on the banking listings in my directory and I quickly got to like five, 10, 20, $30,000 a month, and that's when I quit my day job in 2003.
Speaker 3:Uh, so I got into, um, really on paper click side, on the ad side, and I built a publisher network and ultimately I did the similar deal with Yahoo. Uh, and then I got the rights to put those ads not only the sites I own but sites I didn't own. So I built an ad network and it's called valid click. Uh, it grew and then 2006, it went public. Uh, and we got to about we got to about 30 million in revenue, eight employees in Kansas city, missouri, yeah, um, and just a matter of a couple of years, and we merged with another company and went public in April of 2006.
Speaker 3:Um, and after that I was an attorney for the Apparent and I did M&A. I basically bought and sold online marketing companies and eventually that company became Anuvo, which, coincidentally, is based in Little Rock. So it came to Arkansas, independent of me coming to Arkansas. When I sold my company, we relocated to Florida and then it was in New York City and, through some connection with the then governor, the company was paid $3 million to relocate to downtown Inuvo and anchor a new tech park. So my company relocated to Little Rock in 2009 or 2010,. Somewhere around there, yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's what brought you back to Arkansas.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Well, not me, no, I actually I was able to work remote from Joplin, missouri, and while in Joplin, I would fly down to headquarters and meet with my coworkers and my old team from Kansas City all relocated to Little Rock. But what happened was there was a gentleman there named Eric Kissel, at Anuvo. That was just really, really nimble and he came from kind of consulting world. He was like an Accenture and so on and he was just kind of our cleaner. He would like we'd go into a subsidiary that we just purchased and he would clean them up and learn the ops and quickly kind of just cleaned up the business. Problem problem hole fix, yes, yes, yeah. And all along he's like you know, one of these days we should get back together and start a business together. So a few years later we created an e-commerce business and what happened was we started putting product on Amazon. The first product was textbooks real estate textbooks Through a connection we. It's a random product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 3:We acquired a small business that had the rights to distribute real estate textbooks. So, no matter what state you're in, if you want to become a realtor, you got to go through an exam and a test and every state has a textbook that correlates to that exam. And we had publishers rights from the publisher to distribute and sell them online anywhere. And we started selling these textbooks on Amazon against the publisher. So the publisher was selling direct and we sold Fulfilled by Amazon and our publisher was still doing FBM Fulfilled by Merchant. So we win the buy box because Amazon gets a bigger cut and due to their algorithm, we're actually beating Dearborn or OnCourse the publishers at the time. So we started selling a lot of textbooks on Amazon and then we just started to run with it. We're like, well, what else can we sell on Amazon? This is 10 years ago. So 10 years ago we're like, well, let's start just throwing stuff on Amazon and see what happens.
Speaker 3:But we started to think through as like an algorithm, like, okay, what does this really look like? Amazon's broke up in categories. There's category leaders. That's easy to see. You can type in any word or go through the directory and see what is the best-selling item. So you go to type in mountain bike shorts and you go past all the sponsor listings, the paid ads, and you can see, pretty much in order, the best-selling items, and from there we find product categories that had weak leaders, just something that we could either replicate, really close to or improve upon or add additional sizing or color variations that the competition couldn't do.
Speaker 3:So we got into about 80 different products. We did everything from furniture, home furnishings, we developed a brand in mixed martial arts equipment and apparel, and then eventually, along the way in about 2015, I was commuting to work in Joplin, missouri, and I wanted some layperson clothing for commuting, and so I basically developed a kind of a daddy style cargo short with an underpad for commuting by bike, and so I found a source in Pakistan. That source happens to also already be doing mountain bike shorts. So I created the brand Urban Cycling Apparel, I got it brand registered on Amazon and I launched with two products a cargo short for commuting and also a second short, mountain biking. Because this so happens, the, the manufacturer, already made those, so we made some tweaks to their other style and customized it, uh, and launched the single tracker short on the mountain biking side.
Speaker 3:Uh, and the pub crawler, um, on, uh, the commuting side. That's, that's a good name and um, and that was, that was a lot of fun. What happened was is the mountain bike shorts took off like a good name and um, and that was, that was a lot of fun. What happened was is the mountain bike shorts took off like a rocket ship, yeah, and and became the number one selling mountain bike short on amazon and probably in the world. Wow, at the time for a good run 2016, 2017, 2018.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic so, on the on the original 80 items yep, were they branded? Were they your brand? Were they somebody else's brand?
Speaker 3:So it was a mix. Uh we we always developed our own product uh with our suppliers. Uh, we sourced from various places, uh, almost all international, a little bit domestic uh, but there was actually no correlation in the product category. Eventually we got better because we started inching up on the retail price of the item. So early on we were doing items that were $20 or $30. On Amazon, that's a very difficult range to play in because of the fee structures. We were also doing almost exclusively all FBA. So that means that we are sourcing product, we're bringing it to our warehouse and then we're shipping it by the case to Amazon. Amazon's distributed it across their network and Amazon's doing our fulfillment for us. But that fee structure is very, very high stack and at a 10, 15, $20 price point it's really hard, unless you have crazy volume, to make those SKUs work. So over time we got to start creating products more in the $150 to $200 range.
Speaker 3:We did at-home ballet bars. Ballet bars in-home was a thing and a trend, and we also started developing all kinds of pretty unique products a puzzle board that doubled as a coffee table. So basically it's a coffee table where you can put your puzzle inside of it, and then we've done bed tents. We did a lot of shells. Eventually we got in trouble with Amazon Shells, yeah. So my business partner had a connection in Florida with seashells, oh gotcha. So we were basically making products with seashells. Eventually it was illegal. It was against Amazon's rules to sell body parts of animals and technically a shell is.
Speaker 1:Body parts.
Speaker 3:So we had to shift away from that product line, had to shelve it, had to shelve the shelves. But what we learned over the first six, seven, eight years is we find a niche and we ride almost like a wave Totally, and sometimes it's three months and that's it, and sometimes it's three years, and so it's a matter of getting to number one, staying at number one and that's it, and sometimes it's three years and and so it's a matter of getting to number one, staying at number one or close to it, and kind of riding the wave. And eventually we got good at the other aspects of Amazon. We got really good at title and description and product and then photography, eventually video and brand registry. It allows you to do all the stuff below the fold and build out your story, your branding. We're developing full-blown brands. So we had three or four brands and within them we had dozens of SKUs.
Speaker 2:And did you sell those brands anywhere other than Amazon?
Speaker 3:Not until 2019 or so. So the first six or seven years we were just Amazon hustling yeah. We just fly out Amazon hustling yeah. I mean just flat Amazon hustling yeah.
Speaker 2:Why not?
Speaker 1:Opportunities there and you didn't. You owned that inventory because you brought it to your warehouse and then shipped it case. But that first round you did those books. You didn't own the inventory.
Speaker 3:That's a good example, yeah, good example. So we did two different lines and that's a good point. We started out as a distributor with textbooks. We eventually added one more distribution client. We found a gentleman in nashville that cornered the market in aftermarket grill parts. So this guy, all he does is he's been doing this since the 60s he buys every major brand's grill part or grill, he takes it apart and he clones the, the, the parts in china, nice, uh, and built his own skews because they don't sell the pieces that are going to break right.
Speaker 3:Nice, and he is the aftermarket catalog for, and so all the way until 10 years ago, you would go to a grill store and they would order these parts from this guy in nashville it's called music city metals. Uh well, I love that he never got.
Speaker 1:There's so many ways I mean, we were at uh kohler today for a little team off site where we biked over there and there's a lot of people out, like it's a beautiful day in bentonville, people are riding their bikes and you always wonder, like what, what do people do that they're here and then we're there. So it's like, well, we're on a team outing. I was like well, they might be cloning grills and manufacturing them and then shipping them drop ship from a place in Nashville.
Speaker 3:I was at the military launch with Eclipse and I'm like, what do these people do for a living? This place is packed, yeah, totally. What do they do? It's like, well, there's things to do like podcast, interesting retail journeys out there for sure. So we found this older gentleman that never flipped into e-commerce, uh and and so, uh, we did a deal with him where we took really high resolution photography of his thousands of grill parts and put them on amazon, uh, and manage that whole channel for him for a percentage of revenue. So we did a lot of, again, hustles, creative, creative hustles. But our bread and butter was we're actually creating new products in categories where people the eyeballs already were, and we talked about this the other day.
Speaker 3:But the big shift in e-commerce, I've noticed, was pre-2010, you were driving traffic to your product. Right, it was literally almost all of your time as an e-commerce person or straight D to C person. Pre-2010, 2012 was basically PPC arbitrage. It was 100% a Google game. It was driving traffic from Google at a profit, and what switched was the marketplaces, the rise of the marketplaces, and then the game was, instead of driving traffic to your product, you drive your product to the traffic, and at one point a majority of product searches happened on Amazon instead of Google. So how we looked at Amazon was it was just a firehose, and there's already product categories that were just I mean, this is top SKUs. There'd be 1,000 of them a day being sold, and so we were just trying to get in front of that stream and not really try to recreate the reel too much, and so we were just creating products in categories that already were very high-volume categories for Amazon.
Speaker 1:That's so cool, and your e-com journey started out of FOMO as a law student. Exactly, I got FOMO. There's something to do here.
Speaker 3:So keep in mind that, eric and. I always had day jobs. So we started. This is like something like right out of what you hear about. It was my garage and his garage. I'm in Joplin. He was in Florida, yeah, so half the SKUs went through his garage, half the SKUs went through my garage. Florida, at least north.
Speaker 1:Tampa, tampa, tampa, right on the bay. Logistically got to love Florida as a primary ship point. That's true it helps North Florida.
Speaker 3:So what happened was we were just doing this Amazon hustle and really just product category agnostic, and it was just more about just seeing opportunity, seeing margin. And then we got better and better at what we used to do, which is paid ads, not only on Google but eventually, obviously, on Amazon. And we grew with Amazon as they created more ad units inside of their marketplace and we basically doubled our revenue every year and then in 2020, we got to about $5 million. So we got $5 million. We still haven't hired a single employee.
Speaker 3:I had a day job and Eric had a day job Along the way. I did a lot of other things. I ran, I built software businesses. I created localracescom, an online registration platform for running and cycling events. In 2018, I was asked to be the chamber president for the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce, and so I led everything from business attraction to talent attraction and trails and connectivity initiatives and industrial park. But I worked all day and at night I would ship cases into Amazon, and that got us all the way into 2020. And in 2020, we actually bought a real little tiny warehouse not much bigger than this studio actually and hired our first employee, and we got to nearly $5 million in revenue before we hired an employee. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yes, retail journey is nonlinear. I think we've said that before. That is like a very non-linear uh, because in digital you can be very, very, very non-linear. Yeah, um, what was the biggest thing? You thought, oh man, the traffic's here, this thing's gonna sell um that you probably still have ownership of today. Did you overbuy something real?
Speaker 3:oh, yeah, we've. Yeah, we had some failures, so um early on we had a run where as a merchant, like that's a lot of what merchants do, absolutely.
Speaker 1:There's some legendary stories of like, oh, we're gonna send, sell 10 million of these things.
Speaker 3:Yes, and then we had a run where we couldn't do any wrong and we got more and more aggressive and we got away from, uh, the blocking and tackling. Uh, we got to where we thought we can put anything on amazon within our, within our rules. We're like, okay, if this happens and this happens, it's a win, it's a go. And one of them I tried to do and I talked eric into in 2015, 2016, it was nutraceuticals nice. So at the time, uh, there was a whole lot of um, uh, we're talking about like ginkgo, bicoba and things like that, right and so just unregulated, totally legal, really boring stuff that you see at every walgreens, uh, and cvs, um, and so we found the company in atlanta that makes it for everybody, uh, and we negotiated and we created a brand, um, and we I was really proud of the labels and I was all into this and and we're like, let's just go big Cause, we're going to crush this thing. Famous list yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:We're, we're, we're getting these things on average, we're probably making, we're getting made for about less than three bucks a bottle and sell them for $19.99 or $24.99 and that's was the going rate on amazon for the stuff. Yeah, um, and, and we were just going to eat these guys up and we went 10 products wide and we bought I think our first order is around 20 or 30 thousand dollars and we never did, we, we always did tiny little micro test and grew uh, and we didn't. We didn't get to that big on reorders, until it was a reorder, like we knew we had a winner, um, and so two things we failed at is is um, we took a very big risk in a category we're not familiar with. And two, two, for the first time, we had products that had shelf life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally Time bomb.
Speaker 3:The gun to the head. If you flip at the bottom it's like, oh wow, you didn't have nine months to sell this stuff, Right? What happened was during the production of our product, in time we got it to our warehouse, which was only like six months, just from the idea to creating the labels, to finding the manufacturer.
Speaker 2:It's just a different label to the manufacturer. Everything else by then.
Speaker 3:Um, the the supply and the competitors on amazon are so broad that the price point of the products we're selling we're all the way down to like 699 for the bottles. Oh wow, so we had no margins. Yeah, we had no margins, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, after the fees.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I had to sell this stuff by the case on Facebook. Marketplace Totally.
Speaker 1:I did. Craig's listed it. Yes, ah, shoot. Yep, sorry, didn't mean to. Sometimes you just got to dig into the like wow, a lot of things worked. There had to be. I had a day job and I'm doing this. Oh, there's going to be some good stories we had a lot of failures, just this.
Speaker 3:But they're all small failures. Yeah, so the reality is actually one of maybe three of our products. We tried, worked, worked like really took off. Uh, in baseball terms, we had a lot of singles and doubles, a few home runs, but we had a lot of strikeouts. But we got to where. No matter what the mlq is supposed to be for the supplier, we talked them down to almost nothing. You could put 10 items into FBA and if you sell through them, all right, let's go.
Speaker 2:So it's a low risk test.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we actually got the habit of almost creating like two or three products a month was the cadence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really. It sounds like it would be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:It was I've got some fomo over. Yes, well, we're in a new era of marketplace. Um, do you have? Uh, I mean with the collaborative, with the things that you're doing now? I'd love to hear your thoughts, with firsthand experience and some of that formation. Sure, um, to like all digital retail as it is today, what are you seeing? And then, what's your involvement? Sure, if you would Well post-2020,.
Speaker 3:We did get to where most of our sales are off Amazon. So we basically build real brands. We have a bunch of Shopify accounts. Each one of them is one brand each. We shifted our ad dollars to our own sites. We got really good at email and building relationship with our customer. Along the way.
Speaker 3:The big shifts I've seen, especially post-COVID, is really really hard and has been really hard to drive ad dollars, and there's two big reasons.
Speaker 3:One is it was like shooting fish in a barrel from all the way until 2020, 2021, especially on Amazon, where the ad markets were very unsophisticated. So it was pretty easy to get sophisticated with the ad targeting and keyword targeting and maintain a number one position using paid media at a profit. And then eventually everyone in the world was dumping tens of millions, hundreds of millions of ad dollars on Amazon and all of a sudden the cost per click went up and the margins kind of went away. And then the other side obviously is just the cookie third-party cookies and what happened at the end of 2000,? It became really really hard to drive traffic from social media Facebook and Instagram in particular to kind of your direct-to-consumer products. So really the game became you had to build a real brand, a mantra and a long relationship and have reoccurring revenue, have a long lifetime value with the client and do storytelling influencer-driven. Those are the big shifts over the last two or three years that I've seen across our categories.
Speaker 2:Explain that social media portion of the. I was familiar with the change within wall within amazon.
Speaker 3:Sure about the social media pieces sure, we, we, we drove a lot of traffic to our websites at a profit from facebook and instagram. Uh, so we this is zero in on cycling apparel. We're here in bettenville, uh so, uh, three of the brands we created were Urban Cycling Apparel, kona Triathlon Apparel for triathletes and Ozark Cycling Apparel. The first two were number one huge brands on Amazon for a number of years and when we did the shift to Shopify, it continued to do really really well for us. We were able to drive traffic from Facebook and Instagram targeting that demographic. We kind of know our ridership in the triathletes, so it's pretty easy to do a demographic and interest targeting on Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker 3:And we got to where we were spending $9 in ads to generate an order and our average order size is about $80, which is about one and a half units, and it was just really easy math. And, yes, we can run an ad campaign for three or four weeks and it might start flattening out and then we'd change something. But we always got back to a really healthy relationship with our ad spend to a conversion. And what happened, though, almost overnight for us and a lot of others, if you look in the consumer world, was just the situation where, because of the cookie change, facebook and Instagram's revenue dropped because all the advertisers bailed and really went back and kind of rebalanced the portfolio, if you will, back towards Google instead of just all in on Facebook and Instagram. So up until 2021, there was this huge opportunity for direct consumer brands to niche, with niche products really hyper target by demographic data on Facebook and Instagram at a very high profit. It got really hard to do that over the last three years, got it yeah?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that you had no warning that that was going to come, oh no.
Speaker 3:That's a frustrating point in this world is so much is out of our control. Yeah, a tweak in the knob with Google or an Apple phone or Facebook and Instagram or the marketplaces. The other big issue with Amazon is just the ratcheting. You think inflation's bad on the cost of goods sold side, but what Amazon's done to independent sellers on their platform has been very, very difficult. They did it again just in the last three or four weeks. Significant increase in cost as it relates to storage fees on the FBA side, and those are really eating into margins. Unless you're in a product category of just massive margins, it's getting really, really hard to sell exclusively anyway on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, as a Bentonville local, it's kind of like, yeah, that's great news, it's getting really well positioned. There's a ton of focus on third-party marketplace and I've seen the parts. I'm not at Walmart, but I've seen these teams that are now leading marketplace when they used to run central ops and other areas that identify the problems that are stopping growth from happening. They actually listen to constituents and then they go fix them. Unvarnished truth sessions as one of the things that's occurred. The last seller summit expect to hear that. The next seller summit um, now is a really, really good time to start unlocking growth across walmart's 3p marketplace. Absolutely, um, and it just feels like that's, it's like music to our ears, like all right, yeah, let's go right, yep, um. The the vitamin story is great because when I was buying vitamins, that was always my my hook. It was back before walmart was cool with. Before walmart was the world's largest organic grocer. Um, you know, when anybody in the organic good for you space looked at walmart, it's like I don't think I want my stuff in yours, in your box. Um, and then walmart's done a great job of proving no, because your customers in our box, you should come here and now everybody's. They're, they're here for it, um, but at that day they weren't. But they're still selling on amazon.
Speaker 1:So I'd always ask emerging brands like, so how is your relationship with the robot? Um, like, how is that? Because I'm your buyer for walmart, so let's talk, um, and at that time it was, uh, I, I mean make some good points. I guess we can talk about it. Now the buyers get to have much more fruitful conversations and it's more about like when's the right time, right brand, right space, and it's dealing in the physical, so not nearly the dynamic ability to turn off, turn on. I love the transition that you went through from like, yeah, we just find the things where the fire hose is pointing to well, we have to build out, like, proper brands. Yeah, because our site is the only way we're going to be able to maintain relationship exactly right, um, that that changes. Uh, that changes quite a bit. How do you balance, or how do you think about not becoming noise, uh, to to those customers that are on your platform? And then, how do you think about other platforms for your brands?
Speaker 3:yeah, so we've done it all. Um, we we've, we've done, we've sold product on everything from Etsy, ebay, walmartcom, amazon and then, of course, all versions of Amazon around the world, including across Europe and Latin America, and each one of them have a different game to play. But when our products qualify for those marketplaces, we've done omnnichannel, like true Omnichannel. That way it's been really hard to manage. There is third-party apps, that kind of sync inventory and have the order flow work for us. Most of those marketplaces can be managed within our Shopify queue, but we still also go to Amazon and do FBA and FBM there Interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean we mostly talk about retail, but we're pretty into Bentonville and the area. What's happening at the collaborative and the university A lot.
Speaker 3:So the last three years I've been focused also on the University of Arkansas. I run an innovation center called the Collaborative over here on Fifth Street in Bentonville and we do everything from workforce development to small business incubation, data science projects and our latest is a prototyping lab. We have a prototyping lab called Beta in Bentonville and mostly it's for pre-revenue startups that are kind of stuck physical product startups. It could be medical devices, it could be advanced air mobility like drones, or it could be cycling, and we have about 30 products already in the queue. We just launched this thing like two months ago. We have a full-time machinist. We've got about a million dollars of CNC routers and 3D printers. We're bringing college engineer interns up from the university to Bentonville and we have this whole system now where we're helping startups in our in Northwest Arkansas kind of get unstuck past the prototyping stage. They need a functional prototype to raise capital and to get feedback from customers. Uh, and it's been a lot of fun to see the products come through through that.
Speaker 3:We also have GORP, the greenhouse outdoor recreation program. It's ran by the office entrepreneurship. Uh, we have a number of that team up here in Bentonville. Uh, we're in our fifth cohort uh of GORP. So we've had about 30 going on. 35 startups, uh, just in outdoor recreation cycling, hunting, camping, fishing uh and climbing uh. Startups coming from all over the United States actually coming here. They're not just local companies, not just local. That's great. So that's what we're doing so far it's been a lot of fun and everything we're doing here is a generous gift from the Walton family to support the University of Arkansas's efforts to basically catalyze innovation here. We do some things in retail tech as well. We are partners with Cartwheel Studios, with the Bounds Accelerator. So there's a number of software startups in Bentonville as we speak in their first inaugural cohort. Their demo day, which is kind of how you graduate out of this program and do your big pitch at the end, is on the 29th of April.
Speaker 2:So it's coming up.
Speaker 3:And so we dabble also in medical devices, and then advanced air mobility. I'm actually going to the advanced air mobility conference in San Diego in three weeks, so I've got to study this new industry and then I've got to go there and fake it. Because I'm there to bring this industry to Bentonville.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. It'll be amazing.
Speaker 1:Yep, get up in the Game Bird. Is that what it's called? Yeah, there's Gamebirds. Gamebird 2 is now. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:That would be one way to get educated physically. It's full circle with Walmart. The movement of both product and people is important to our ecosystem here, and there's a number of drone companies that will be at this conference, drone companies that will be at this conference, and again, we're trying to add to our startup culture here and serve our incumbent corporate sector here, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, excellent.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's time for the lightning round. Yeah, I mean, is that all you got going on? Is there anything?
Speaker 3:else now.
Speaker 1:No, that's awesome, Toby. I mean it's fun to hear the stories and I'm sure there's plenty of shadow sides of all the like. Oh, here's the like, as I think through. What are the things we've done? Well, I mean, it just sounds like when you see an opportunity, you go after it and get it, and I love being able to hear stories of hey, here's how it went, here's where it goes. Main question is are there commuter cargo shorts still available? Um, are they still out there or did the mtb just just took it?
Speaker 1:they still exist they're available in five different colors um um yes, yeah, just making sure, making sure the cargo short lives on um. So we talked about a fail, but is there a greatest fail that comes to mind that you want to share, to encourage? We've got folks on the corporate side that listen, and then entrepreneurs listening.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I founded a company in my 20s that went public. I do these side hustles and I'm really enjoying being part of the Bittenville community doing all the above, but I've had more failures than successes. I probably started 20 or 30 companies and most of all of them failed. So it's just not. You can almost measure success by how many times someone fails, and so what I see all the time in startups is you see that person in the corner of the coffee shop that's just trying to get their business plan just perfect, and five years later they're still sitting there in the corner dreaming getting their business plan perfect and you just got to take, you just got to jump in and what typically happens is you fail, fail, fail, fail and you fell forward until you, you pivot and you find, you figure it out, you learn to learn, you learn to failure, and that's what innovation is.
Speaker 3:Is is is seeing constraints and and and pivoting. And so I've had a lot of failures. My biggest one, financially, is I took I took a five-story warehouse. I'm very romantic about my hometown of Joplin, missouri. I see a Class A office building and I did tax credits and it was a very complicated project, but I started this in 2008. Guess what happened in 2008?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great, oh man, great time to get in there what happened in 2008?
Speaker 3:yeah, great, oh man, great time to get. And, uh, it was about a. It's about a 15 million dollar project. Um, that I, I, I did get in, I get, I got out of it. Uh, and barely I took a haircut, as you could see, yeah, but it was uh, it was a learning, it was a, it was a, it was a big learning curve I did. 23 companies now are in that building. It is the actual cornerstone of downtown Joplin. I'm proud of it. I drive by it all the time, but I do show my kids that that's where their college fund went.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's very well.
Speaker 3:Study hard, that's probably the biggest failure.
Speaker 1:And I love that. That's why we asked the question of failure because some people feel like it's the only.
Speaker 3:In a weird way. I'd almost do it again, yeah. Because if you fear, I'm an Enneagram 7, if you haven't picked up on that.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's go.
Speaker 3:I love challenges. I love just throwing myself in things. I've done weird things before. I've done Boston Marathon. I've just done all these weird things, just see if I can do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um so yeah, yeah, and if you're afraid of failure, you just can't start, you can't go anywhere, right, yeah, yep, it's crippling. Um, what are you reading, listening to watching?
Speaker 3:um, health stuff. I've been really, uh, I i've've been watching yet another documentary on Netflix talking about why you should be on a plant-based diet, and I think I might actually give in at some. You know, at this point this one was really scary, really. Yeah, and I've been experimenting. I've been actually pretty much fasting this week, but I've been playing a lot with diet and health and so I do some reading. My wife reads two or three books a week, wow, and I mostly just get kind of the clip notes, talk to her about it.
Speaker 1:Exactly, that's perfect.
Speaker 3:Yes, teamwork, yep. But the twin study it's happening on Netflix, it's like a top ten thing right now. Check it out. It's about metabolic health and one twin is doing meat based, another twin is doing um, uh, vegan, and they track all kinds of data on them and and uh over the course of, I think, 12 weeks. It's been really fascinating yeah, and we all know what what they came up with.
Speaker 1:Right, probably heavy on the meat. Yeah, I'm at Salt Health now. I've started that journey, and so I'm into learning about what's working and what's not working. Yeah, there's a lot more knobs to turn. How to optimize versus just like. No, I don't need to be in an office, a doctor's office right now, so I'm not. Yeah, love that. That's a good journey. I think 2024 feels similar for me in the health space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I appreciate it so much. This has been a really fascinating fun conversation. Thanks for having me Appreciate it and thank you for listening, as always. We'd love if you subscribe to our podcast or watch or listen to any of the episodes on our website at highimpactanalyticscom. Thanks,
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