Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep. # 58 Overcoming Challenges to Revolutionize Branding: Ben Kiraly's Journey with Kira
Ben Kiraly's, the innovative mastermind and driving force behind Kira, shares his dynamic journey from Long Island to Hungary and back, offering a riveting narrative of resilience and entrepreneurship. From overcoming family challenges, including his mother's battle with cancer, to seizing pivotal opportunities in the fashion industry, Ben's story is one of grit and determination. His experiences, from securing a significant order at Birchbox to navigating the complexities of the retail world, underscore the tenacity needed to succeed in building brands from the ground up.
Kira, "Your Brand Bff" offers a white-glove service to those looking to create or launch products with style and efficiency. Ben unveils how Kira's comprehensive, vertical service system caters to a wide range of clients, from local businesses to viral influencers. Through strategic marketing and community building, Kira not only helps its clients gain market placement but also ensures that their brand presence translates into sales. Additionally, Ben teases the introduction of AI software in 2025, set to revolutionize the brand-building process with tailored, supercharged solutions.
Listeners can gain valuable insights into the art of brand creation and development as Ben discusses common pitfalls, like the overvaluation of social media popularity without sales conversion, and introduces Kira Retail Link, a feature designed to connect products with suitable retailers. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, Ben's perspective on personalized service selections like consultation, logistics, or fulfillment can transform the way you approach brand building. For those interested in further collaboration, connecting with HeyKira.io is just a click away, promising more engaging discussions and opportunities in future episodes.
Kira
Ben Kiraly
ben@heykira.io
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast, live from Bergen County, new Jersey. We are joined today by well, ben Corrales is with us today. He is a Bergen County guy not born and bred We'll get into that and he's the owner of Kira, hey Kira, and we're going to talk a little bit about what that is and what his company does. So welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean, I guess, why don't we get into what Kira is? And then a little bit about yourself I mentioned. You're not born and bred in New Jersey. You come a few thousand miles away from a galaxy far, far away in Europe. But let's talk a little bit about Kira, the evolution of your company and why you started it, and then get into where you're from.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, actually I that that's an interesting story too.
Speaker 3:Actually, I did a born here left and then came back, so it's a little ping pong back and forth, but yeah, so Akira is a unique company that you know.
Speaker 3:Hopefully I can explain in brief, but our slogan is your brand, bff, and what we mean by that is there are a lot of people in the world and a lot of companies, a lot of clients, a lot of individuals who get to a point in their life where they want to create a product, they want to create a brand, they want to do e-commerce or they have a retail operation, but they want to add new product categories to their business.
Speaker 3:Add new product categories to their business, and Kira, as their brand PFF, provides a fully vertical service system that helps people bring product to market or to build brands from scratch. It's a daunting thing to start a brand. There's a lot of steps that are involved and there's a lot of know-how and there's a lot of mistakes that happen during the whole cycle of brand building, and we're here to like offer a white glove service to help individuals, businesses and retailers make it an easier process for them. So that's what kira really does, and what we're doing this year, in 2025, is we're implementing AI software to help further make the process more seamless.
Speaker 2:Okay, I mean, you know you're talking to a brand guy right here. I always talk about the power of a brand.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and why you know it's not about putting an ad somewhere, it's about having a brand and why you know what a brand means to consumers. And we live in an area where people, I think, value brands and I'm talking to local businesses, right, I mean, you could easily shop around for the cheapest product or service, but if you have an established reputation, when people think of your name, there's a certain connotation that they attach to that. That's positive. That allows you to not only keep your customers, it allows you to charge more, it allows you to upsell. They're more likely to be loyal and then refer you to other people.
Speaker 2:So it's really important for companies to have a brand rather than just a name, that you're competing on the latest analytics on Google and and trying to, you know, go to the lowest common denominator, which is price. Yeah, um, but it's not easy to to explain that to people that are in instant gratification worlds uh, so when you have, uh, you know a tagline about supercharging your brand, what kind of companies are you working with? Like? Who's your key client group?
Speaker 3:that's a great question and I agree with you. Um, it is. It is a little bit. You know, we get a lot of different clients, and I'm talking we have. We have local businesses child bouncy houses in long island who just need, you know, um promotional goods for their business. Or we have clients who are viral creators, tiktok influencers with millions of followers who really want to build a brand from scratch, or gas stations in Texas looking to do private label.
Speaker 3:There's a wide range of clients and our job is to be able to service them all in the same way. And when you really dig deep into the foundations of brand building, there are certain elements that are all the same. Regardless if it's merchandise, private label, brand building and swag, there's a foundational system that's the same. And one of those things are like you have a creative team, you have a network of factories pre-vetted factories that fit whatever product you're looking for and the operational side of the business. When you connect those three elements and those three pillars together, you're able to create whatever you want, right? You're able to create any type of tangible product that you want to bring to market. Now, when working with specific clients, we're servicing them in a way that's specific to their needs. We have clients that just want price point. I'm buying this t-shirt at, let's just say, $4 and I want it for $3.85. Can you make it happen?
Speaker 3:I right, we'll look into it. But then we have the client. That's like you said wants to build a story behind their product, wants to build an entire lifestyle and have brand equity be showcased to their community. That's a longer process. That's a longer process 's a really building, or adding our whole team of creatives next to them and giving them the opportunity to build something of substance and that's, and then the product comes after that. Right, and then the product is built into that brand story. Yeah, but that's why we mean by supercharge is we really kind of dig deep into what the project is and then design a plan that works best for them?
Speaker 2:We. Last week or two weeks ago, my wife got this huge kind of magazine book in the mail and it was pictures of like people hiking, kayaking, mountain biking and I'm talking maybe heavy-bottomed paper, maybe 30 pages or more. And somewhere within these images, on some of the pages, was a Range Rover. So it came from Range Rover, but it was a total lifestyle brand play. It was not about here's. The attributes of the car were, you know, zero to 60 and whatever it was all about. Somehow they identified my wife, who recently bought a Q7, as being somebody who'd be interested in that and I told her listen, we just booked a ski trip to Beaver Creek. They got our data there somehow, whether it was our Epic Pass or it was our hotel or our airfare.
Speaker 3:Or just speaking to the phone.
Speaker 2:Speaking to the phone, yeah, but the interesting thing about their approach and I want to bring this on meetings that I go on is that where in this 30-page expensive direct mail marketing piece do they talk about the car, or are there images of the car? So obviously they're going after a lifestyle, they're going after an emotional feeling. But, to your point, you're not necessarily running out and buying a car the minute you receive that in the mail. It's a longer process, absolutely. But, um, so you got. So you mentioned white labels. So what, what's the? Tell me about the maturation of your company. And but I guess, before we get into that, so let's go back. I wish I had like dramatic music. So we're going back 25, 30 years, when you were born in New Jersey and then moved back to um Eastern Europe, in Albania. Is it no Hungary, hungary, sorry, that's not Hungary. Sorry about that, no worries, yeah, so tell us about that story.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my parents, we come from a music family.
Speaker 3:And my parents living in Budapest at the time, born, raised, grew up in Budapest. They were fortunate enough to be musicians and the reason why I share that is if they weren't musicians, they wouldn't have been able to escape Hungary. Being a musician at the time, and being a successful musician at the time, like my father was, gave him the opportunity to travel all around the communistic blocks, so like Cuba and like Eastern Germany and stuff like that. So for him to get on a plane wasn't all that unheard of. So when he met my wife and they got together, my dad's dream was always the American dream and he wanted to pursue his music career in america. So they they were able to get on a plane and escape and, in other words, for their honeymoon, they left hungary and defected, yes, and they never came back, um, and which also meant in that time they would not be able to come back because they rejected and uh their their dream of doing music ended real quick when they hit uh new york and um realized that they have a kid on the way, which was my sister, and uh realized they need to make money. So, just like a lot of the other stories I'm sure that we all heard of um. They started at the bottom. They, you know, did everything in their power to get their paperwork. They got their citizenship and you know that first green card citizenship and then, you know, did everything from waitress to waiter to bus boy, fast forward.
Speaker 3:We were born in 84 with my brother and my twin brother and my sister was a year before us, and then we grew up in Long Island, in Great Neck, long Island, and we were there for until we were 15 years old. And when we were 15, my mother actually was going through pretty bad cancer, actually was going through pretty bad cancer. So she had stage, stage four ovarian cancer, you know, and the doctor at the time kind of gave her like a 50, 50 chance of survival. So my dad asked her what do you want to do? You know, like, I'll do whatever you want. What would make you happy? And she said I want to move back to Hungary. I want to move back to Hungary. I want to move back to Hungary. I miss my friends, I miss the lifestyle, I miss that European lifestyle. We packed our bags and we left.
Speaker 2:It's 1989, so the wall is falling and communism is disintegrating.
Speaker 3:Now we're fast forward to. 1999 is when we packed our bags.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:So they came in 82. And then 1999 is when we packed our bags and went back to Hungary. So the walls fall already no more communism, they were able to come back. So we packed our bags and we moved back to Hungary, or they moved back to Hungary. We joined them, we followed, and I lived there with my siblings for 12 years and then, after 12 years, I decided that I wanted to come back to New York and try my luck here and see what happens.
Speaker 3:And you know, obviously I was able to come back and, being American, and I just knocked on doors until I got a job. And I got a job at a, at a, at a clothing company called Mark Echo. I'm not sure if you heard of them. They're like a big hip hop brand in the nineties. Okay, they had the big rhinoceros logo and basically they were the only the only company that gave me a job. And I was so persistent that at the end the owner said, like, if you're this persistent in sales, and you got a job, Um, so basically I was begging, my begging for the job and then I did really well there, it did really well there and, um, I got um called over by Levi's to go work for them. Oh cool, Um, long story short.
Speaker 3:After that that was like a shorter stint and I always wanted to do something on my own, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And when I met my wife who's now my wife she was always very, very supportive in me trying to go on my own. But again, I didn't know what I wanted to do. So my last sales job was for a another streetwear company. It was a Swedish brand, skate brand, and that was very short lived only three months and a lot of us got let go Because of whatever budgetary constraints or whatever. And that was that point where my wife met me in front of the office, got me a laptop and said now go start your own business. So that was a really good moment. It really pushed me forward.
Speaker 3:But I still didn't know what I was doing. But I was good at sales. So that's where I was like all right, let me knock on some doors, see if I can get a. See if I can get a meeting with another uh, uh retailer any retailer that would take a meeting.
Speaker 3:I finally got a meeting with um, one of the veterans in the industry and the subscription box world called Birchbox and the buyer and I reconnected and, uh, you know, long story short, he gave me the opportunity, he gave me my first break in the in my business where he allowed me to come to him with product ideas Okay, that he can buy for his subscription box. And it was an amazing experience, super risky experience because I had no idea what I was doing, and he basically said I need a hat, I need a beanie hat for my January delivery, I'll give you $4 and I need 10,000 units. So rambling like, okay, let me go figure out, find a factory. I did all my research. I called factories up. I didn't know if they were good or bad. I eventually found one in China and I took a huge risk. I bought the inventory up front. I didn't even get payment on it.
Speaker 2:So you didn't have a PO.
Speaker 3:I got a. Po but I didn't get payment up front.
Speaker 2:It's a huge risk.
Speaker 3:And luckily the risk paid off and I was able to put a margin on it that was healthy enough to say that I'm in business. That's where the whole idea came up of, like let me help others bring product to market, and that evolved into multi-category products, and obviously not only beanies now, but we do anything from apparel to beauty products to really, if there's a factory that makes it makes it, we'll find it and we'll make it happen.
Speaker 2:Wow. So when your wife said here's a laptop, start your own business. She didn't say what to start, she just said start selling.
Speaker 3:No, she's just like. I know you want to do something, just figure it out.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, I think you know, when it comes to retail, people don't understand how that all works with POs, but then also returns, right, you know? Yeah, so if they don't sell everything, the retailer can send them back it was a huge risk.
Speaker 3:Fortunately, in the subscription box world they are, they were, they were quite new to retail. They're. They perceived themselves as um, software companies and e-commerce okay, so they were new. That was kind of my. They were kind of new to the retail world, so they didn't even, they didn't even know about returns at the time.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:But, but to be fair, if I screwed up the order, or if I didn't deliver, or if the factory ran away with my money? Yeah, I would be, I would be in deep trouble.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And how did you find the factory to manufacture that I?
Speaker 3:used everything that I had available, all online resources, connections in the industry. Again, like I did work at Levi's, I did work at the other apparel company, so I was able to tap into old, old acquaintances Like I would call up. I would call up the sourcing guy who worked for Levi's and say, hey, can you introduce me to a factory? You know anything. And everything was like I have a PO, I need to make this happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'll talk to you offline. Cause my 11 year old son came up with a product idea and then I told him to come down and watch shark tank with me last night, cause there was a 10 year old girl pitching a product that Lori actually invested in. It was a little spoon for kids that would hang around their neck and it was shaped like an elephant and they could eat with it and then the food. You know, it didn't fall over the place, they didn't drop the spoon on the floor because it was tied to like a little, almost like lanyard thing that you put around your neck.
Speaker 3:And 10 years old. What's that? Was it made from silicone?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:I thought so.
Speaker 2:And she started going into the process of like the density of you know, if it's too dense, it's too stiff, if it's this and that, and the shark guys were like really impressed. Um, she's from hawaii, she was there with her mom, but anyway, I told my son to come in and I said, hey, pitch that idea to your mom again. Yeah, right, so then I looked it up on. You know, online it's like there's a lot of companies that do something like this, but you know there's a little barrier at entry. You know, maybe there's a way to just distinguish it a little bit, or it's the brand name, uh. But if it's a low-cost product and we can get it manufactured and we get a decent margin, who cares if there's 10 other people, you know, uh, in the marketplace? Or you know me coming from the licensing side. Maybe we do a deal with nickelodeon and put spongebob on it I love it yeah, but yeah, I know I love and he's like well, how do we?
Speaker 2:there's a guy we have to do some research, see who manufactures these things.
Speaker 3:Come up with a prototype, so I'll talk to you about that, uh so that's where, that's where we come in, that's where we become your brand bff right that's where we help you with all that.
Speaker 3:And, like you know, obviously, like you know, there's always a question that people have is like oh well, is this going to cost more to work with a Kira versus going on my own Right? And kind of like what you said is like Not necessarily because we've been funneling business so much to factories over the years that our rates are really good. So if someone if someone comes in with a product like what your, your, your, your son.
Speaker 2:Yeah, son son, yeah, my son, your son wants to do.
Speaker 3:You know, not every new project is going to be taken on by a factory, you know so, right, they might be like okay, but I want to raise my minimums to a thousand units because I just don't have time for this. So if I do it, I'm just I need to make a return on this project, so they'll raise it up at a thousand units with us. They'll like, yeah, they'll like yeah. You know, you guys have been funneling business to us for years. We'll do it, we'll do it for a hundred units, 300 units, um, and we'll give you the price at a thousand units. You know so we have a relationship, right? So, ultimately, ultimately, what the customer gets is like their their own product team, right, being on their side saying, hey, let's focus on this Now, let's do the prototype, let's build out the logo, let's build out the website, let's build out the story, and that's that's what they get.
Speaker 2:So how are they protected? So the their IP? They come up with this idea, but you're going to help them actually create the prototype.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and every client can do. Every client can you know whatever requirements they need, if they need, if they need us to sign NDAs to protect their, their, their, their product, their IP, totally fine. But I got to tell you, doug, there's a lot of clients who ask us to help them with the trademark process, right? So you know you have clients who are that new to the project you know you're an 11-year-old what do you know?
Speaker 2:But then obviously, if you're going to place an order for 1,000 units, you better hope you already have a customer or a PO. So you come up with this idea how are you going to sell it and market it? So you help with that as well.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and we'll also honestly give feedback on whether or not to invest in that thousand units and I will do everything in my power to push the client in that position to buy as low as possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when I was in the record industry and then even in the TV licensing industry, when self-authored, self-published book options came out, or when you could create and produce your own album and sell it yourself, why do I need the record company, why do I need a publisher? But you try getting a book on Amazon that you publish yourself, getting it found. It's one thing to create, it's one thing to write and publish your own book. But how are you going to get? You know, how are you going to land on that first page or second page when there's you're competing with thousands of others and the same thing the music industry if you don't have the power of the labels behind you putting money into promoting it, marketing it? You can create your own album, but it could be like a tree in the forest, like how am I going to make sure somebody actually hears it on spotify or can find it on amazon if they want to buy the physical product, so that you know that.
Speaker 2:It sounded great when it happened at first. It's like, oh yeah, the power, I could take control of this. I don't have to pay the middleman. Yeah, um, so you know you, you hear this a lot on shark tank it. It's like OK, well, you want to get into the food space, you want to get the whole foods with chips. You know Stacy's Chips the founder of that, you know she, they dealt with that all the time. Well, the chips. You're dealing with Pepsi and Frito-Lay, and how are you going to get shelf space Right? So you know, how's somebody going to get virtual shelf space on Amazon with their cool little product, you know, and I guess that's where you guys can come in and help with that as well.
Speaker 3:We take all our years of experience and try our hardest to make it that much easier for new brands to get some actual sales and get some placement in the market. One of our new features is called Kira Retail Link and that's exactly what kind of you're talking about is. We have an extensive experience in the wholesale industry working. You know, through through our years of experience working with buyers, working with retailers, whether that's Amazon whether that's Macy's, whether that's whoever, and if the product is a good fit, we'll make introductions.
Speaker 3:It's better for everyone, you know well. It's better for everyone If they sell to Macy's and they require more purchase orders. That's better for us and better for them. It's a win-win for everyone. So we try our hardest to make it again, make it as easy as possible to actually turn sales. Exactly what you said is really spot on. I have a lot of clients who think that if you make the product, it's going to sell. That's not true. That's not necessarily true. You might be an exception where your product is so unique and so different that one one, one video will sell itself, but that's the exception.
Speaker 3:That's the needle in the haystack. You know, um, majority of the products are not the needle in the haystack. Majority of the products are not the needle in the haystack and you have to do a lot of grinding to actually get that to sell. And that's very important to note when starting a brand is is your product viable, Is it going to be able to turn sales, or what other strategy are we looking at? Maybe our strategy today is to just focus on retailers and do a wholesale business.
Speaker 2:I don't know it could be. Yeah, I see that all the time with businesses locally that they have an idea, whether it's a coffee shop or it's a kid's play space or whatever it is. But I heard somebody use this term they buy their inventory, they buy their furniture, they buy their space. They forget to buy their customers. In other words, they don't put any marketing and they think, oh, I have a Facebook page, I have an Instagram page, I'm going to get people are going to find me and I'm going to get referrals that way. So it's a mistake a lot of people make and they don't have a big runway of cash to get them through that startup phase. It's always like a chicken and the egg. Well, I don't have enough money to pay for marketing. So once I start making money, I'll invest in marketing. But if nobody knows you're there, then how are you going to grow Exactly? And you do hear these one-offs or these stories, whether they're telling the truth or not.
Speaker 2:Oh, I figured out an algorithm algorithm on instagram and every time I do a video, I get a thousand views. Or you know, I I met with an agency uh guy at a networking event and he showed me this post he did for a, a deli client of his that posted a sandwich and it had, like you know, a thousand views and shows. Like, all these likes, I'm like, okay, that's great, but what does that mean? Like, did he sell more sandwiches? Like, if that sandwich shop is in South Hackensack and I'm in Wyckoff, I don't care how hungry I am, I'm not driving to South Hackensack for a sandwich. So I might have liked that post, but did that drive sales? And I think people get really enamored with likes and you know, views and even clicks, but can't correlate that into sales. It just makes them feel good and certainly the agency that's selling them and they're paying a monthly fee. They're going to talk about how great, look at all the views you got. But at the end of the day- they didn't generate sales, right, right.
Speaker 2:So it's an interesting so how it works. Can you kind of pick and choose? Can I just hire you for consultation? Can I hire you for logistics, or do we go through the entire process of consultation, brand discovery, design and development? Do you have like a kind of our cart suite of services?
Speaker 3:So it all starts with the exploratory call and it's all starts with the consultation. It's all starts about, you know, not to sound cheesy, but it's the human touch here, you know. That's why I say it's the white glove service also is because it's where white glove service first, and then we're adding the software to help the process more seamless once you become larger and you scale Right.
Speaker 3:But it all starts with the consultation and learning about what the idea is, what the product is, and then we'll come back with a specifically designed plan, which they can either go for the full package, or they can do a la carte and say you know what? I just need fulfillment, okay, right. Or I just need sourcing. I already have, I already have everything set, I just need a factory. Cool, we'll get you a factory, you know. Back to what you were saying about the followings it's interesting One of our largest growing channels, as of last year, has been working with, as I mentioned earlier, viral creators, and that's something that I learned while working with them how important it is to have that brand behind you, how important that is to have a community, to have a following, to have people actually interested in who you are.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because when these creators have whatever half a million, a million, 2 million followers, they actually convert sales. Yeah, they can convert sales and when they when they create a product, they're creating a product that fits into their lifestyle. Yeah, you know a creator that loves sleepwear and shares it to their entire community for years. It's pretty obvious that we're going to launch a pajama line. Yeah, and the pajama line launches and she sells out in one hour. It's so important to have a following.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Get the customers first and then sell them whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you see this. There was a podcast I listened to where they did interview a young girl who had gone to college and became this influencer and gets paid a lot of money by brands to promote their product, whatever it is. So, yeah, I always thought, is there an influencer I could team up with that would be a brand ambassador for my company? But we can talk about that. So you know, before we go, ben, you know, I think as you're talking, I'm like we should do. I should have you back on the show and I'd like to go through a story of a brand that you helped launch.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, like, let's focus on one company or one product and then take us through that. You know the process and where they are today. Right, I think that would be really cool because you know it's one like I mentioned Stacy's chips and there's a podcast. This is kind of built around or I modeled this after called how I built this. It's on Wondery, now it's. It's I think it was NPR at the time, but the host name is Guy Raz and he interviews entrepreneurs and business owners and business leaders about their origin story, like how they built what they did, and you mentioned grinding it out, and most people you know Damon Wayans and not Damon Wayans, damon Johns and Mark Cuban always ask what's your grind?
Speaker 2:You know he had a podcast called Rise and Grind, and if this guy in front of them or woman in front of them isn't grinding it out every day, they don't want to invest in them because they're not investing in the business themselves.
Speaker 2:But, um, you know, one thing you realize is that every business, whether it's you, whether it's me, whether it's somebody starting jet blue airlines or some you know uh software company that's looking for vc funding, they go through the same trials and tribulations. That, that, uh, I go through, that you go through, and I think, if you can share a story of a product, um, from start to end, that would be a really cool follow-up to this. I would love to. And, um, you know we should, you know we could table that for another, another show. And then, you know I, we don't have to get into it entirely. But you know, like your pricing model, like how people, um, I guess, if they have any questions about it, like how, how the pricing works, like, do you charge, uh, a flat fee, do you charge hourly, is there a package, is there a royalty, like things like that, and does it differ?
Speaker 3:you know it is case by case but um generally speaking, um we we ask for target prices on a product per units, per unit cost, um. If there's no target price in mind, we go get the best price available. Again, if that's something that the client is specifically interested in, a price point, and then if we're looking at clients to do really start to finish build the brand entirely for the client, then there are times we do take a royalty on top of the brand building um a modest amount. That um incentivizes everyone involved in the project and, to be fair, we've experienced this many times the the general feedback is it's so worth it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's so worth it. Yeah, it's so worth it. There's so many things, unexpected expenses that go into building a brand that, to share on the success is is worth it because, again, we make money when they make money yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2:Now, just um, because the name of this show is called good neighbor podcast, bergen county who are some of your uh like ideal or the types of customers that you might be able to help that are, in our, say, bergen metropolitan, new York metropolitan area?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I think immediately when I think about that. There's two types of customers that pop out first. There's probably more, but two that immediately pop out is there's a lot of local businesses. A lot of local businesses also need supply.
Speaker 3:They also need supply as well as merchandise swag. Whatever they need, there's a product that's needed. They all come from the same factories, so we can help them with that. That's customer number one. Customer number two is really when people dig deep. There's a lot of people, regardless if it's Bergen County or Long Island, that want to build a product and build an online business, whether that's a side business, side hustle, whether that's a dream that they've always been dreaming about. There might be a neighbor watching this podcast who's like I've always wanted to build, like that silicone spoon, or like your son's product. Those are a great customer for us too. So, immediately, those are the two directions that come to mind, but again, anything that's made in a factory that needs to be brought into market is something that we'd be happy to help with.
Speaker 2:Great. And then how do they reach you? What's the best way to contact you?
Speaker 3:Best way would be through the website heykira. io. There's a bunch of chat options on there that directs us here, and then my email as well, which is ben@h eykira. io that's great.
Speaker 2:Well, ben, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. We'll talk a little bit more after we close it out with chuck, it's great and uh, yeah, we'll have to follow up with another another episode. Thank you so much. This yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpbergencom. That's gnpbergen. com, or call 201-298-8325.