A comprehensive go-to-market strategy for DTC brands involves a structured process beginning with product prequel work (conceptualization, sample creation, packaging) followed by go-to-market planning, which includes executive product summaries, marketing summaries, channel briefs, creative mood boards, shot lists, and final channel execution. Organizations typically categorize launches into tiers (tier 1 being most comprehensive with 9+ weeks preparation, tier 4 being simpler with shorter timelines), with product marketing teams responsible for creating detailed creative briefs that guide all channel strategies. Centralized project management systems like ClickUp or Notion help coordinate cross-functional teams, while post-mortem analysis after launches enables continuous improvement by reviewing performance data, customer feedback, and identifying areas for optimization in future campaigns.
Go-To-Market Strategy for 9-Figure Product Launches
Added:All right, we're back. Episode 60. Um, Connor, you're calling in from someplace new. Where what are the new digs? Yeah, so the the call box is the same, but we got we're in the new Hexcloud office right now. So, I don't know if if anyone um doesn't know the the evolution of Hexcloud. We have been fulfilling out of LA in the Arch District for a really long time. So, like when they got traction back in CO, they moved into this new warehouse to do so. Um, and they kind of like forced their way into this like office space over there as well. No windows in the entire building.
So, it's all this just like no natural light, just it's a warehouse. It is in no way an office. So, we uh with a lot of pentup demand, finally moved into a new office in downtown LA. Um, which is a gorgeous new space. Um, definitely a space we're going to be able to like fill up over time. It's the the third floor of the the Spotify building right across from Girl on the Goat and it's a it's a gorgeous new space. So, uh yeah, morale with with Hexclad LA employees is quite high right now because we got this gorgeous new space to come into every day. So, I'll definitely be out here more frequently now that there's there's space for everyone and space for the remote employees to come visit. And how much does this increase the chance you move from Denver to Los Angeles? I still think the the mountains are too far away. So I think uh 0% zero I'd say no impact increases the chance of a a few percentage points but small incremental lift small incremental lift. Um I also want to shout out like the boys are coordinated today.
Black t-shirts for those gang.
Uh yeah we look like we got like a boy band vibe going on. Mhm.
I love it. Who's whose uh whose shirts are you guys wearing? This mine's Flint and Tinder from from my favorite online men's curation brand, Huckberry. I don't know about mine. I for It's some sort of like kind of trendy brand. I I but I got it thrifted, so I always forget.
Whatever. I'm not going to be able to figure it out now. What about you? I got True Classic on, dude. I could tell it was a True Classic T. It's just like the ads. I'm like, you look buffer this week. Appreciate that. Heat. Heat.
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Uh, all right. Sweet. Well, guys, let's let's get into the episode. I've got I've got a bunch of notes pulled up. Um, this has come up on a couple calls. It came up with um Christa from Tokovas. A couple weeks ago, we were talking about kind of go to market, the process of bringing things to market, like, and and I'd love to dive pretty deep around that. like what are the meetings, what are the deliverables, how does that all come together at the end before you're launching a new product. Cody and I have some examples. Conor's got a bunch to talk about. Um, so I kind of wanted to start there. I've got a bunch of stuff to screen share. So for those listening, we'll tight we'll we'll talk through it.
I think this this will be a uh palatable enough episode from an uh audio perspective, but if you want to tune in, there will be some visual examples.
Um, so I'd love to start like super high level, Cody. Um, how do you guys define go to market at Jones Beauty? Is that even the term that you use? Like I'd love to just start there. We we don't say go to market. Uh, we probably just say like product launch strategy, product launch campaign, but yeah, it's our, you know, starts with our product calendar. Um, and then our first process um, which which I think is getting much more strategic. Um and and we're even toying around with like do we want a product marketing function because right now it's really the brand team that does that with some you know product development but it really starts with we have like a deep dive which is kind of like or we call it a kickoff now which is like product marketing team copywriter Bobby marketing operations just like kind of brainstorming understanding you know asking questions just about what is this product why is it out there like just kind of like diving deep on everything. Um, from there we do like a two-eek meeting after that where usually it's the brand team will pitch kind of like the campaign idea. If that is, you know, goes well and is accepted, they work on that. The next step is we have a we have a we call it a PMC positioning messaging copy.
Actually, no, we have the creative briefer. Sorry. So, the creative brief is essentially this giant document.
Currently, it's in in a slide. Um, and really that that is what uh our brand team briefs to the entire company, the entire team. Um, so it just has everything about the product, all of the details, right? So like prices, what markets it's going to be in, the launch date, but it also has um all of the copy. We call it, you know, positioning, messaging, and copy. So what is the product, what's the copy that we're saying about it, or this is what what briefs the copywriter. Um, but it's very similar like what else is on the market.
is like what you know what we have on on the market, how this is different, what we're saying about this, what we're not saying. It's like it's like an 80page document usually that gets briefed. So that is the creative brief. Yeah. Yeah.
So that's 80 page document probably. It depends on the size of the launch, right? It could be five pages. And who's putting that together? Our brand team owns that. Our brand team does our product marketing. Okay. And that is because I was also wondering what you would define as product marketing. like if you were to build that function out more explicitly like what type of person or like what would their responsibilities be? Yeah. And and we might we we had a board meeting this weekend and we're considering it um of like actually hiring a product marketing person. Um that I think it it is wise and what we're learning is we should have marketing in the product development process as early as possible. There are certain attributes that mark marketers know really well and do really well and there are certain things that product people do well and there's some overlap and there are probably some gaps between them. Um so a just getting marketing more involved in the product process from ear earlier stage has a lot of benefits. Um it can even influence your your you know go to market strategy and like what you're going to develop. Um but then also like how you position it, how you talk about it, how it's different. So I just think that's something that is not really like a brand marketer's like um expertise or skill set and they probably they have the awareness of the market. They don't necessarily have the awareness of the product and the competitive landscape as much as a product marketing person would. Totally. Yeah, it makes total sense. And then another like I want to like kind of lay it out really broadly and then we can kind of punch in at different pieces. Um, you have this meeting interfacing with the product team. You're getting the download on what the new product is, why it exists.
Brand team owns then a creative brief, big document explaining all the key points of the product. Pretty much everybody in the company, so it goes to marketing, goes to creative, goes to copyright, but like our retail team gets it as well. Got it. Um, yeah. And then from the creative brief assets are created. We we have one step in between which is strategy. So, we call it like in integrated strategy where every channel owner has probably about two weeks to pretty much present their strategy and pitch their strategy and be like, "Hey, for for this launch, here's what I'm going to do. Here's my creative strategy or here's my media strategy.
Here's my, you know, email strategy, whatever it is." And then that gets reviewed pretty much either by myself or um head of brand and and one one of us will kind of input um it. And then once we approve a line on it, you know, adjust the goals, then people go and and do that. Usually we have we do this all in uh we do a lot of it in like a weekly marketing team leads meeting that we have. So after the creative brief, our creative director will share um like creative assets. So all of our hero images, we just we're trying to do everything in Figma now. We stole this from you guys, but just trying to have everything in Figma. We have all of our assets. So, you know, team knows what we have to work with for what videos we have, what uh, you know, ecom assets we have, like what are our hero things, what's like the creative, you know, kind of like vibe, you know, for this campaign. Um, so they'll share like their inspo and stuff like that. And then, yes, people will have a few weeks to kind of put together their assets.
Eventually, that gets put all into a big Figma board or Fig Jam board, which is stolen from you. That's kind of, you know, what you call the go to market board, I believe. M uh and we review that. I review async first and then we go over everything in that weekly Thursday meeting. Uh and it's a great time. I'm loving the process because um it people have more visibility into what other people are working on and it's just great to just have it all in one place and see see the whole campaign together. 100%. Okay, cool. And we've got a couple example of those that we'll walk through. Um okay, so you've laid out the highle steps. I'm curious when does that when does the kickoff meeting with the product team happen relative to the launch of the product? Dude, I don't know. I'm so like like this is like knowing your strengths and knowing your weaknesses. Like I have a great team who handles all of this. I could not tell you when the the dates are. It's probably 3 months out and we're we're I feel like we're consistently trying to move it up and we're trying to always play catchup and move it up, but it just doesn't seem like it's always that doable. But we're trying to move it up 100%. Here, let me let me share my screen. I could talk through like our key steps. So I I'll talk quickly about like how we define we call this go to market at ridge. Um I the full process really happens in two steps. We have something called product prequel which is like conceptualizing products getting iterations approving samples like all of that feedback creating SKs. We put creating packaging as a part of the product prequel. So like at the skew level all the steps that you have to do to prepare we have like mapped out within notion and that's part of the product prequel guide. Um and and importantly that's kind of that happens at the individual level. Uh you need packaging for each individual product that you're launching. If you're launching, I'll give you an example. Um, if we're launching a new color in a wallet, pen, and knife, then product prequel will be broken down by those three SKs. And everything that we do is like related to is is done at that granular level. Um, then we switch to go to market where we are launching those three products together. That might be the base camp orange, you know, launch is like that new color in these three new styles. Now all of a sudden we're really just talking about that colle that campaign collectively rather than each one individually. So it changes a little bit through the whole process, but that's how we talk about it. What we're looking at here is just the time in between and the steps. So what Cody just laid out, I'll talk through as well. It's extremely similar um for a uh a product launch like a base camp orange colorway launch. So nine, we have different tiers. So, we say uh and you know what I'll also say here is this is all based off of our go to market review. So, we're hoping to review these items um at least two weeks before the launch of the product. So, that is kind of what we're like backing into from a timeline perspective. And the way that we structured, we have different tiers. So, a tier one launch, we want to be preparing earlier.
something like a tier four launch, we can begin preparing later just because it's way simpler and doesn't include nearly as many steps as we otherwise would. Um, so in the case of tier one, we want step number one is we want to write the marketing summary. This is also when we don't always do the product meetings that Cody you described. Um, we have an executive product summary. We'll get like written details from the team. team will get these like really large briefs about what the product is, why we created it, who it's for, etc., etc. That's all done at the executive product summary. So, the marketing summary can take that information. We're developing the summary. We're talking about what is the channel strategy, what are our K key KPIs, things like that. That happens nine weeks before go to market. Where does that come from? Great question.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, tier one currently comes from me. Uh, some of the other tiers we'll divvy up with my VP of marketing. Um, okay. I with the way you said that first, I almost got the impression that came from like product or somebody else saying it's like the executive summary. Exe Oh, executive product summary. Executive product summary comes from the product team.
Product. Okay. Okay. And that is like details, right? That's not like strategy. It's not strategy. No, it is just details of the product. They'll mention comps. It's like it is the equivalent of your product kickoff that you talked about. It just happens more asynchronously at Ridge. So, it includes all the information that we want. So the executive product summary does come from the product team and that's almost the equivalent Cody of uh your product kickoff meeting. It just happens more asynchronously at Ridge. So just straight details, has comps in there. Um has specs of the product, all of that stuff. Um marketing summary will come from myself or our VP of marketing.
That's who handles all those summaries now.
Um which works pretty well. I could see in the future us having more like marketing campaign director or something. We don't have a lot of like generalist positions at Ridge. Um, we have like CMO, VP of marketing, and then we have a lot of channel directors, so they don't naturally become like marketing summary writers, which I think is a little bit more of a general position. So, something we're thinking about. Um, but yeah. So, anyway, so tier one campaigns, the most important stuff, we're delivering summaries nine weeks out. Tier four, we're delivering five weeks out. And then you can see the different steps here which like more or less align with what you just described.
Summary becomes channel briefs which is the strategy point that you hit on. Then it becomes creative mood board which I guess is a little bit out of order.
That's more the creative brief shot list shoot retouching. Then we have basically two weeks to design like channel execution. We're actually designing emails, designing ads, designing social posts, whatever we need to do in that last two weeks before go to market. So that's that's roughly ours. Even our most our biggest most important tier one campaigns were starting you know whatever just over two months out from a go to market review which if you include the buffer we have between go to market and like the true launch of the campaign I guess gets pretty close to that like three month target. Yeah. I mean I mean look no one's going to have the same exact process. It's actually like very similar. It's actually like pretty pretty wild how similar it is. like there's some slight differences based on team structure, but like you're hitting the you know so many of the same things.
Um and again we've stolen from some from you.
So North Beam just released this new attribution model called clicks and views enhanced and I am really excited about it. I think it is really really gamechanging for brands measuring the performance of viewheavy channels like Tik Tok. So I want to explain first what is the difference between this new model of attribution and North Beam's other models of attribution. Northam's other models of attribution are probabilistic and they're probabilistic because they're doing machine learning to make their best guess about where purchases where revenue is coming from. What's different about this clicks and enhanced views is that because they're working directly with the platform it's now deterministic. they're actually able to connect an real impression to a real purchase, which just means that ultimately this data is is real data.
It's not model data. That has really serious implications. What it means is that now instead of only getting a 24-hour look on view-based attribution, you now get just as long of windows that you're getting on clickbase. So now if you go into if you go to clicks and views, you'll notice that no matter how long you extend the clickbased window in North Beam, that viewbased always stays out one day. When you now go into the clicks and enhance views, you'll notice that whatever time window you're selecting is for views and clicks. So now in Tik Tok you can actually measure a conversion 30 60 90 days from that impression which again is really important for brands that have a lot of top offunnel happening through videos and really important for brands that have longer consideration periods where that conversion often is not going to happen within that first 24 hours of seeing that video. I was just looking at this last night. I was simply selecting the same period of time and clicking back and forth between the 90-day click, one day view, and the new enhanced clicks and views window that has 90-day click, 90-day view. And the amount of attribution in rorowaz increase and revenue increase that I saw was was really, really insightful. And I can't emphasize enough how important this is for channels that don't garner a click as much as a Facebook or Instagram ad or Google ad and are a lot more video viewheavy like Tik Tok. So right now the clicks and views enhanced only covers Tik Tok and it's still in beta, but this attribution model is rolling out to other platforms very soon. If you want to check out the incredible results of the Tik Tok beta and just get more information on it in general, check out Northbeam's landing page at northbeam.io io/clicks- and- views-enhanced.
How How do you come up with the tier?
So, I'm assuming tier one is biggest revenue, you know, for the for the year.
Like that's your biggest opportunity.
Tier four is like a pretty small thing.
Is that is that how it works? That's a good question. Some of it's kind of gut and feel. We're going to talk about the our power bank go to market, which we considered tier one, but that's not necessarily because it was a huge revenue opportunity. It was almost like the comprehensiveness of the campaign required it being a tier one. Yeah. So that's actually an example of like commercially not necessarily the most important launch that we have but comprehensively it's like it it requires the most leg work. And then the flip side is like yeah Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Father's Day, things like that.
Those are tier one campaigns. Um so it's more about some some waiting of like scope and commercial viability. And how do you know like because so we tier and we go A B C you know B minus stuff like that. Um one thing we're we're we're trying to figure out like so ours is essentially based on revenue but a little bit scope like how do you know how big to go like is it is there a templated playbook where like tier one this is how many ad concepts you create tier two this is how many you create or is it more of a conversation cuz that's something we're we're running into even though we have tiers like it's not probably as clear as it should be. So like we've got a you know uh what for us would be a tier three but like a B minus launch and we're creating five ad concepts and then we've got an A and we're creating like seven and it really should be like 20 and two probably dude totally. Um so here I I'll share my screen for this other example too which is like kind of answers your question.
Um this is like our tier summary list.
So for each of the tiers we have an associated amount of tasks. It doesn't answer the question of uh how many image ads or video ads to create.
Like that's something more recently we've been discussing in the channel strategies where we say and again it's there's a little bit of gut feel here.
But given the tier, given the type of product, uh given what we know, all the historical information we have about previous launches, we could say like, oh yeah, we think this will require more video or require more static ads or you know, something like that. Um, but what I'm sharing my screen here is like it's almost like this waterfall where tier 3es have the fewest amount of tasks.
There's 17 tasks here and you're getting summaries, you're getting an unboxing video, you have some amount of hero creative, there's a studio shoot, etc. Um, tier two is when we say, okay, now there are image ads, there are video ads, there are display ads, there are things like that. And then tier three is only when you begin adding in a landing page or this is when we start getting into like true campaign execution where we need updated email captures, email flows.
Uh we have if we're partnering with everyday.com, we're typically doing partnership ad reads for tier one. So we get the partner ad read dock. So this is how we've speced it out so that and again it's not perfect but it's a decent starting place of uh myself and the VP can go through we can nail down tiers for all the launches for the rest of the year and then the team can say oh hey based on that I can like roughly prepare that in Q3 there's eight launches that will require video ads and now I can better prepare for that and that's how we kind of like connect the deliverables at the channel level to the tiers and then ultimately that's getting supported by like well how much inventory did we buy how much do we expect to sell is kind of informing all of that for sure.
Very similar. Yeah. So, Connor, I'm curious where how do you guys interface with the product team if you I know you guys are launching a lot of new uh products pretty frequently. So, like what what does that process look like?
When does it start? Yeah. So, same as you guys like the you know Cody, I totally resonate with what you said about like knowing where your zone of genius is. Like I am not great at like saying, "Hey, here's the launch date and then here's the 50 things we need to do to get to that launch date and then backing into like the date that all those things need to be." I'm like, I want to be the one coming up with the list of things and like talking about the strategies that we're going to use to sell these things. We have an amazing PMO team that really like organizes and manages the process of all these things.
But I'm like looking at one of the new products we la or are planning to launch in the next few weeks and it all starts with our like product brief and that's led by product marketing that was due like roughly 6 weeks out. Now this is a this is what I would consider to be like a a a B launch for us where we're going to mainly sell it through retention. We might do some acquisition but very light acquisition if at all like static images probably. We might run like a product hype reel um that we're shooting for the website as well. We're not necessarily going to go out and shoot like a bunch of video YouTube ads or like build funnels and landers. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So, we're not going to do anything crazy like that. Um, so that's happening about like Yeah. Call it 6 weeks out.
Um, if it's like a A+ launch, that's happening way further out, like 3 plus months out because it's going to take a lot longer to produce those funnels.
That is all led by product marketing. So this is like product name, product fact sheet, you know, description, features, um we'll have like key differentiators.
We'll have like value prop hierarchy.
We'll have messaging um like risks.
We'll have like general assets like content assets that we need. Um we'll have like a comparison chart if it's like a variation of a new product, like here's what the, you know, barbecue pan is, the the OG product versus this new version of it. Once we have that, then it comes to me and then I'm going through all of our growth marketing channels and saying, "All right, we're going to do like a like our launch campaign uh strategy on email SMS. We're going to do our sustain strategy. We're going to add it to this automation.
We're going to create a block." And doing that for every single channel like very high level like how are we going to activate on these channels that then goes to each channel lead to review and either like add to it or say, "Hey, you said we should do like an email block. I actually don't think we should do it for A or C reasons. And then once that happens, we will all circle up as a team to actually like chat through the strategies and make sure that what growth came up with is aligned with what product marketing thinks. Um, and then from there, that's when we really said, "Okay, great. Here's the things we're going to do." And that's when it gets pumped into our like project management system. So, we actually make sure that all the different things are happening to lead up to that that that launch date. um and all the right people are tapped in at all the different phases and as you guys know like you know launching a new product even if it's like a B or C launch can have like you know 150 subtasks with you know 25 different people contributing to them and like one person blocking it one subtask blocks another 20 down the line so um that's when it goes into like our PMO system and they're really good at having like very very granular subtasks and due dates like to the to the point where it's like revisions round two and then there's like three subtasks under that with like director of product marketing, head of growth, director of design and like same thing if it requires a round three and then you basically get a notification or a task shows up in your ClickUp when it's your time to come in and contribute to this larger project. So that all kicks off that way. Um we do call it go to market.
So like anything that's like a sale or a new product or like a larger campaign like sweep stakes, we call it go to market. So all new products start with that that product brief from our director of product marketing lead and then anything like sale or or evergreen campaign or non- evergreen campaign that starts with a brief from me. Same thing.
It's just like here's all the relevant information. Here's the activation we're doing. I'll I'll provide like specific channel level details if it's different than what we've done in the past. Great.
Once we've agreed that that's the thing we're going to do, then it gets kicked over to our to our ClickUp system.
Totally. Okay, a couple quick questions.
Product marketing, what does that person or team roll up into?
Product marketing is under the brand team. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I think it more commonly like that's something I'm kicking around is like if we hire it, is it under branded? Is it is it under product? I think I've seen it under under, you know, marketing more often.
But yeah, we hired like we we've kind of like beaten around the bush of this issue for years. At one point we had someone whose title their title is now product manager but they were just called like product communicator or something like which is like basically yeah who is taking all the decisions that the product team just made are made for very specific reasons but sometimes those are just made like sitting around a table you know discussing it or it's spread out over email threads or whatever and like who's actually consolidating all that information who is like the expert in this like new silhouette that was just designed and actually communicating that out. I mean, it's obviously a a and then who's also making it compelling to a consumer at the end of the day and I feel like that's where product marketing becomes like a little bit more of the lead. Um, but just that that like handoff is so key. Um, we've kind of been solving it from both sides. Well, we had we had problems with that. Like this has gotten so much more advanced today than it was a year ago because what we like one for example like value prop hierarchy like that seems very simple but prior to that it was like no here's just like the laundry list of the value props. They're not necessarily in any in any order and then you come you like get into your channel level production and like your emails and your ads like feel very different in terms of the things that they're emphasizing. So, it's even little decisions like that where it's like here's here's like the thing you should always lead with no matter whether it's a paid ad or on website or an email which has just ultimately made everything so much more cohesive. But like you you figure out those things along the way like wow our ads and emails are both emphasizing very different messages right now. And like even like key headlines now like we'll like product marketing will build have like three key headlines as a starting point that then our like senior like like copyrightiting lead will then go and like take as a starting point.
Great. Now you have like consistency across like the the actual marketing messaging you're using across your stack too. um like all these little things like I feel like this product marketing brief just gets iterated on over and over and over and over again but only through figuring out like god we did a terrible job of like message cohesiveness on this product like why is that? Well it's definitely like upfunnel in the process and in terms of what was included in that brief. So we're constantly adding new new rows to this thing. It's probably double the amount of rows in this like marketing coffee table than it was a year and a half ago.
Yeah, 100%. We uh I've I've brought up this example a couple times. I brought it up with Christa too. One of our I wouldn't say worst launches ever, but the launch that didn't perform well that we learned the most from was watches at the end of 2022. And like that was one of them where it was like we didn't properly we didn't lay the foundation of the campaign well enough so that like when we actually went to review it before going to market, it was like oh yeah, the creative doesn't quite highlight the same value props that the email does and the email doesn't sound like the SMS. So it's like a lot of this is like you start with this initial idea and then what are like the processes and the checks and balances that like keep that consistent like across multiple teams across months of work. Um I think that's kind of like the the ideal. Yeah.
Yeah. You have to like really spell it out and like especially because these cre these briefs are so long and there's so much information like you have to market to marketers. Like really that's what the product marketer's job is is like to do the marketing to the marketers. Like Bobby talks about this all the time because they had, you know, their wholesale and everything like that and like they would create assets and like videos like to get the sales people at the stores excited and stuff like that, but like it's the same thing internally and it's all about like how clear you're you're being. And I think sometimes marketers don't think about that when they're just doing like internal communication. It's almost like it's not as good as it should be versus if they're like writing copy, they're like this is my hook, this is my headline. But like you need that for clarity sake even internally. Like good communication is just good communication. And yeah, I found that like just a list of value props doesn't work. You have to be very clear like this is 75% of what I want you to focus on. This is what you absolutely can't say. Like this is primary message. This is this is secondary messaging. 100%.
Yeah, absolutely agree. Um a couple one other question I had Connor on the workflow that you described the summary that you deliver to your channel managers and then they kind of like you guys iterate on it from there. Like how is that done? Is that just like a like a word document that you're jotting notes into? Yeah, basically it's a it's a word document with tables included. So it's like all the all the product marketing information lives above that and that's what the director of product marketing is running lead on and then it gets passed off to me and it's like email SMS is its own row, paid paid socials its own row, affiliates its own row, influencer. So I'm basically making comments across every single channel.
Um, and the whole point is to like have done some thinking so when we get into this like final meeting, which is like the final step before it goes into the actual like project management system that we can have a really constructive conversation about it versus us getting to that call and and our director product marketing being like, "Oh, and Connor and Noah like what do you guys think we should do on email?" Say, "No, no, we we've done that work asynchronously." So then we can actually have a very like fun collaborative conversation on like well what what does like the sustained strategy look like or whatever it is. So um yeah like it's it's been an iterative like we used that's not how it always was right like it I had to be there sitting like sitting there and being like wait it's not efficient for me to like I didn't know you were going to ask me about this on this call I haven't thought about it yet like this isn't a good way to like think through strategically right now.
So even that like a simple thing like that um is so important and then we bake that into our our PMO system, right? So it's like I know before that call gets scheduled that like our template now has those steps written out in it. So every time now I know that I'm going to do that thinking before we get into that like final decision-m call. And I cannot emphasize how important and valuable having like a really solid PMO team is.
Like the amount of time I've had to like I've been able to not think about just like worrying about if so and so did the thing they needed to do by this date has been amazing. And like it really lets your marketers and strategists do what they're best at which is like be marketers and not you know project managers and like knocking on people's doors and saying like hey did you write this copy yet? Hey did you review this asset yet? Like I hate doing that stuff.
Um there's other people that love it and are like really they thrive that way and I having that systematization that you can lean on and like just be confident that the thing's going to happen is I mean it's been probably one of the most important things we've done for all of these like very involved crossunctional cross departmental campaigns is PMO uh project management and organization.
Yeah. Yep. Strong strong acronym. Yep.
Awesome. All right. Cool. Oh, I had one last question for you Connor. You do the summary. Do you talk about it with your team? When does that happen in relation to the creative? Cuz it sounded like it might be are you informing the creative shot or are you typically able to execute on your plan post creative having been shot? Um yeah, good question. No, we are creative happening after after the um outline strategically, right? And that like very different creative requirements for like an A+ launch versus a a C launch um or a B launch. So yeah, it's like get the product brief from product marketing, outline the growth tactics, and then we go into I shouldn't say that. There is some like creative outline happening during the product brief, but the actual shoot that we're doing in studio is happening once we've outlined all the activations we're doing across all of our channels to make sure that we're not missing anything. Totally.
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One thing I I was going to say and then I have a few questions. Um, you know, I know I know you like to say uh naming conventions are the heart and soul of a DDC brand. I I think you know the uh the project managers are really the unsung heroes. They're they're also pulling as much weight I think as important to a DDC brand. They're like the offensive line doesn't get a lot of credit, but they're doing a lot of blocking and tackling and work doesn't happen without them.
100%. Like they and they they have like this level of nuance and understanding and how things work together more than anyone else in the organization because they see the interplay between everyone.
And I'm every once in a while like our PMO team will like drop these these bombs. I'm like, "Dang, like that was really like a really good idea or like that's a really strategic direction to take this and it's just the the amount like if you're a PMO it's actually kind of a unique I think would be like a unique early career choice in marketing because there's no probably better way to understand how paid and email and brand and growth and all these things work well together because they are the conduit between all these pieces. So Cody, I fully fully agree with that. And I think if I ever start my own brand one day, like a solid PMO lead is going to be like one of the first people that I would hire. Maybe potential operator spin-off or fourth fourth installment project management operators. That'd be good. I like that. You know, I love it.
Um do you guys do do you guys do any sort of like postmortem after launch? Uh good question. We've only done a handful. We've done it for tier ones for the last year and we're just crossing. I think the first one we ever did was last Father's Day, so I got to review it just recently and I'm like, fantastic. I'm like, this is so good to have. So, now we're we're starting to do more and we're just beginning to actually benefit from having done them. How about you guys? Yeah. Well, um, it's not super systematized. I will what I'm doing a better job of now is ahead of launch I'm actually outlining like reports that I want to pull and then that actually gets baked into our project management system. So for example like we just launched a kitchen tool set and there's some products that are natural products to upsell that on. So I in the brief before launching I was like hey make sure there's a task for me to pull the upsell take rate like a week after this thing's launched and then I can be like all right great here's the take rate and now we have like a I can go to my CRO lead and be like hey you have a new KPI it's like get the take rate from this percent to this percent. Um, but I think something we should probably do a better job of is just like more of a always on like here's the 10 things we we pull after every product report on these intervals. I think that's something we we need to work towards. We we do uh like we do wins, losses, and opportunities. Um, and like one of the extremely helpful data points was Q2. I talked about it on one of the podcasts we did in December, I think.
Um, we had a really difficult Q2 and I was trying to remember the exact details of why, but I mean there are a bunch, but there's one in particular and it was on meta. We saw uh men disproportionately underperform early in the Father's Day period. We saw women giftgiving get pulled back a lot and it was like we had that we had that data laid out really clearly in our postmortem. So it was super easy to reference and now we're going into this period like understanding exactly what what we want to be looking for by gender across you know meta or biggest ad channel. It's just like it ended up being extremely valuable. So that was like the exact it wasn't something that we typically pull. We were mostly just like jotting down the anecdotal experience that we had so that we could reference it again in the future and we're going to be slightly more prepared this year because of it. Yeah. No, I'm I'm finding it really helpful. Yeah.
Same for like Black Friday stuff like that. we will do they're like a slack canvas or something like that where it's just like like what I realized is like if I'm tasked and I get like a you know a task to like sit down and add things to a postmortem board I'm like whatever.
So, I just need to have it available early and like even before launch and we just have a board. We we're now trying to do everything in Figma where we just I just screenshot anything I see like customer complaint feedback things like that like any random note that just like pops up either before the campaign, during it, you know, customer feedback or obviously when we go formally pull data and we're just like tossing it in there. Um yeah, I find it invaluable and I think we started probably like around Black Friday last year. So, I'm excited to have those insights. The other thing that we've done that's really helpful, we had um Cat Cole, CEO of AG1 do like a lunch and learn with our team and she shared this with me like personally a few times is made my week difficult. So we just have actually our our uh senior manager marketing ops. So she runs our our you know marketing operations which is our project management function just just puts uh in our like marketing leadership slack channel. What made your week difficult and any channel owner is just encouraged to go in and really just share any blocker right and as especially as it's related to something that they can help and solve with. And I think both you guys mentioned just like iterating and like how like your briefs or your documents are are much longer than they used to be and different. Like to me that's why I love this process is cuz like I'm like never satisfied and there's always something you can do to improve upon it. So I just like have really wanted to have this like feedback culture where people are willing to share like hey this is my blocker. This is mine. And like I don't know about you guys like I do like async one. So I do like a status update every week. And part of it is people will send me their blockers or they made my week difficult.
And so many of them were operations things and I would literally just screenshot them or like go talk to our head of marketing ops. So I was just like I'm just going to go and send it to her. Like let me just have the people bring it to her anyways. Like obviously if they're my reports they they'll send it to me but like they know if it's like a marketing operations related thing like hey you know I didn't have these assets in time or I didn't have clarity about this thing like whatever it is and and our marketing ops team is so great at that they actually share it on the weekly meeting which like I think takes a lot of courage to be like hey this is a feedback that we got this week. Um, and they don't always act on it.
Sometimes it's like, hey, you know, that was a one-time thing. But, um, I just find that like weekly iterative feedback process and and cycle like over the long term has has been so helpful. So, what made my week difficult is is it shared publicly? Uh, it is shared publicly amongst like our 10 person marketing leadership team. So, in the channel and then on the meeting.
Yeah. Super cool. So I um Cody, I really like that you just send it right to your head of marketing operations is that person like when when we when we hired our PMO lead I don't know a year ago, a year and a half ago maybe. Um one of the first things she did she just sat down with me. She's like I'm like what she's like what do you need help PM project management? The big thing is all these cross-dep departmental things, right?
Sales, new products, c big campaigns.
And I just like word vomited to her and explained like here's the things that need to happen for us to like launch a sale. Here's all the stakeholders involved, yada yada yada. And then she just like took that and like went and built out a system using like ClickUp.
Is that kind of what I mean she's head title or their head title, so presumably pretty senior, but is it kind of the same thing? Like you send them these problems and they're like, "Oh, cool.
now that I know what the problem is, I can build like a system or a process that will avoid that problem in the future. Is that has that been your experience with this person? Are you actually also helping build the system?
Like what's that involvement? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, she's been here for probably two and a half years um and has kind of grown and and you know, advanced in her career. So, she's taking on more and she you know, wants to be director. So, I'm definitely no longer saying, "Hey, this is the this is the solution I want you to implement."
It's more like, "Hey, here's the problem. I'm going to drop it on your lap. Come to me with solution. Yeah. Um so yeah, like she'll do that. Like one of the things like even that time like this entire process like she she had a big part in creating. Um but we realized stupidly I don't know why we're just doing this. We were actually doing the creative brief after some of the creative things had to be shot and done.
It was just like the creative like like our like uh large scale like campaign stuff was done ahead of time. So that was a different process. So like we, you know, I was I was like, "Hey, this is the problem. This is what it is." Like come to me with suggestions, you know what I mean? So yeah, she'll do that and then I'll obviously just like provide feedback and approve. But yeah, that's that's to me the job. And it's just like how can I make everybody else's life easier? How can I make sure they have the info they have, the assets, you know, that that they need, like whatever it is. So there's a there's a marketing operations person. Um, is there the equivalent of a product person? like a pro a product project manager there used to be yeah because I I'm just curious we've always had for it's been a couple years now marketing operations essentially and then they basically got absorbed and we like centralized the project management function across product across marketing across operations like every but those all those people kind of roll up into the same it's our director of remote who oversees project management now which is interesting because they're like they're all experts in notion right so it's like they all have similar skill sets they're just using it to support like different facets of the organization. We just consolidated marketing and creative operations. So we had them separate and we realized like they it's really one process and they have to really have be on the same cycle and timelines.
Totally. So do you do you have Connor is your team basically like um like one one thing one piece of inspo we've taken from from Ridge and from a few other brands is we are in the process of building a more central um creative department that reports into brand and then they service different parts of the or now instead of like the creative strategist or the email strategist be having to like dig all the way deep into like the nittiest grittiest of details they're basically like here are the problems to solve in this email or this ad. And then it's it's up to that designer to like create the version of that that fits that that mold, right?
So, um, and we're not quite there yet, but like that's where we're headed. We just, like I said, hired this design director. So, we're going to have all like our our designers report into him and have them service different parts of the org. We've done that similar thing with PMO where basically PMO is its own its own organization and then within PMO they're basically servicing different parts of the or like we have a single PMO from the PMO or a single project manager from PMO that does all things web and CRO a different one that does all things email SMS are you basically saying you have like the centralized project management or that does that they service everything 100% and it's a good uh the creative team's a good analogy like centralizing the designers and then you have like dotted lines to email and web and whatever else. Exact same idea, centralized project managers and then they're like it's technically like a dotted line. The marketing project manager is a dotted line to me.
She's helping me execute on what we need but ultimately like there's the director of remote is is doing her one-on ones and stuff. Yep. Yep. Got it. Okay. Um cool. You guys want to look at a go to market board? Yeah. Uh all right. Here, let me pull up I'll go through. So like this will be and I'll talk through if everybody listening uh but just an idea of like everything we just described Cody mentioned this is basically getting centralized in what we call our go to market board for this is a tier one launch. So this is this was the power banks which I mentioned um you can see the executive product summary up here who what how why uh we have a silhouette description and then three to five key features and benefits. Connor, you bring up a really good point. Like I don't think this is a great example of like a great hierarchy or a great there's not great guidance as to like this is the key message. We ended up like kind of nailing that down in our copywriting document. But it was a really great starting place. It's just brain dump of all the stuff we want.
Three to five key features and benefits.
Then we have like literally all the feature features and specifications. We have the packaging. This is all the stuff that comes from the product team.
We've got some comps of some other photos from other brands. Um, what I don't have in here actually is like the actual marketing summary doesn't live in the go to market board. The steps in between the product summary and then these images that we're looking at are marketing summary, channel strategy, informing, mood board, shot list, and then this is what ultimately gets delivered. So there's like I won't go on a whole spiel here, but like uh there's a lot of steps in between product summary to images um that happen kind of offline and in different documents all get tracked within notion. But then we get here and we say these are just selects and then you get linked to the full digital asset management folder here. Um but you get a sense of what the vibe is. We've got the power banks shot.
Marquez Brownley played this really key role. Um, and then what is a better example of, and I mentioned this earlier, we go from product summary to marketing summary. We end up generating creative and then the two weeks before the go to market review, we have the ability to execute on all of the um channel deliverables that we need. And all those channel all the channels have separate sections here to talk through what we're doing. So you can see like we have the full homepage mocked up.
We have the full uh landing page built out as well as PDP. We have custom like below the fold elements. Um we've got the highlight of Marquez here. So that's all kind of a creative and ecom deliverable. We have an ecom op section which is like hey this is how we're rolling it out. We've got the landing page. This is how the PDP looks. Um we have details here on where it's being upsold. So where are we building kits?
uh whether it's our PDP or cart or post-purchase upsell, those notes get added here. So, we just understand from an ecom perspective once the products are built, how is that actually like coming together and being merchandised on the site? Got all of our PDP photography here. And then, yeah, I won't run through all of this. We don't need to see it like uh detail by detail, but email has a section in here. We look at organic social strategy. We look at our paid strategy. So, we're looking at new ads. Uh I don't know why we have previous ads here. I think we did two go to market reviews here. So we've got some new options. We've got some older options. Um we have videos linked in here. So we'll watch some of those. We had a partnership strategy. So that's linked here. Steven Shapiro MKBHD were timed with the launch of the product.
And then paid search just talking about just talking through the strategy. And we're going through this on a call, channel by channel, saying um you know whether there's an opportunity to launch this in search, shopping, display, YouTube campaigns, things like that. And that is basically what we'll run through. And I think what this helps ensure is visual consistency is probably the biggest thing. Like them literally living on this board allows us to understand like does this look like the same visual representation across all these different channels? as well as from a messaging standpoint, like are we making this are we making the messaging as coherent and cohesive as possible.
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Cody, you said you have a similar Figma approach. Yeah. Yeah. Can I share? Yeah, sure. Also, any feedback on mine and any Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, you think you think we're missing anything? Any obvious? I love it that it's in one place cuz we have a very similar things but it's in many different places.
Totally. Yeah. We've been like what I say all the time any key deliverable should live in either the the Figma go to market board or that go to market board is linked in notion where that's where the marketing summary lives. And like basically everything the company ever does as it relates to launching anything should live at the end of day in one of those two things. like it just shouldn't be like buried in some drive or shared in Slack or whatever like just single source of truth and frankly because the go to market board is linked within notion that is literally the source of truth you can get to whatever you need from power banks in notion and I've just found that really valuable I I agree with that it's it's so simple but I think yeah having one place where people can look otherwise there's like so many slack back and forth wait what's the price of this product and what's that it's like just just go look at the document totally okay so you're seeing this so this is our creative brief you seeing Awesome. So, this is it, right?
So, it'll have, you know, tier, uh, launch date really just starts with, you know, table of contents, all of the details. So, what is the the product, why are we excited about it, um, some calendar stuff that we'll we'll lay out if because if we're doing like a different teasing strategy, you know, or different announcement strategy, we'll do that. Um, you know, kind of like this was like a big one. like what's our we we differentiated our brand marketing strategy from our product marketing strategy was a little bit different but this is kind of like hey this is the focus 75% of this we talked about who we're trying to reach with this campaign um you know this was a little bit like for the creative team going into like the personas you know our creative team will have a bigger kind of inspo visual board elsewhere um that they'll use for like their their creative but have it a little bit in there you know we'll have some assets that we have um some models you know, we'll go into just, you know, timing of the launch and and and things like that. Again, this was like our biggest launch of the year. So, this was like our biggest one. Um, we will go into again, you know, we call it pillars, but these are essentially our value props, right? And it's like we try to kind of do the hierarchy. So, it's like here's what to focus on for each of them. Um, we'll compare it like if it's similar to another product, here's how to talk about it, you know, and here's how we're comparing it against another product because that's important for us.
here's like the market and how this is different from what's in the market.
Here's who we're trying to reach. Again, here's more product differentiation between our other stuff. Um, you know, what we're saying about it. We have to change our our other ones. What's the title of this section? Product differentiation. Got it. Or or uh what's slide 26 here? Ah um product overview.
Oh, product overview. All right. Yeah.
Just deep product. Yeah. Probably the equivalent of like executive product summary for us. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is like again it's done by our marketing team. This is probably what like a product marketing team would do, but our our brand marketing team is doing it.
Got it. Um, messaging and copy. So, this is essentially what it is, why we love it, how it's different. So, we call this, you know, positioning, messaging, copy, you know, taglines, how to use, just like all all of the different copy to pull from, PDP copy. Um, usually we just have some quotes in there that people can pull from from Bobby, you know, ingredients, pricing, all that stuff.
Um, and then you know more this is we're we're only on page 45 you know pricing availability by region all this stuff.
Um, additional considerations you know this is tier. So we even have a slide where we tier it by channel cuz like for some launches maybe it's an A for paid social but for influencer it's a B. So we'll even you know we'll even do that embargo. So like hey this is like our teasing strategy or our announcement strategy. we gave it to influencer early or press early or something like that just so people know uh you know retail we'll brief them on some stuff um again we're on page 53 and then this is where we get to the integrated marketing slide so I think the creative brief can probably stay in here I would like to pull these into Figma these are essentially people will uh put their strategy you know by each one and then again this either gets reviewed by me or head of brand um where it's pretty much everything you know that we have in here in terms of just like pretty much what you showed in Figma. So, we have that all in there. Um and then we go into um our our creative director will share, you know, so we have this just in Figma.
It's a different launch, but like here's all of our images we have just so everybody can pull and like we had them in Dropbox before, but just found it's really helpful to have it in one place, you know, so we can just kind of this these are for some upcoming ones. Just here are the all all the assets. And I've also found this is really helpful to have to send to an agency or something like that. Um, like what I fi found is when we have this and we have some like even of like the direction of the campaign like even sending it to like an agency who's building some statics like they were able to get things looking much better and more on brand than if we just like sent them a Dropbox folder. Totally. Um, so we've got that and then again once the slides are done and the integrated strategy is done, you know, people have the two to three weeks and this is very similar to what you have where we just have things split out. Um, so I'll usually go in there, you know, async like the night before the meeting, just kind of leave some comments. Any feedback that I have, we'll go through that live in the meeting. But pretty much same thing, right? You know, you got emails, you got uh video, uh any landing pages, homepage, um emails, social, all that kind of stuff. Um and then here's like an example what we did for a postmortem. So just had it overall, how do we do against overall forecast, had our data team, you know, data person. Pull some stats, some retention stats, top emails, bottom emails. Uh link to some motion reports in here, some screenshots, links to them, top ads, motion reports. Like we look at quiz data, just like any data we have. This is a little bit more of like the subjective feedback. What well, what would we customer feedback? What are what are they saying? Just like any bits of feedback that we have, any review data. Um we ran like a lift test on meta, so we have that in there. I just think this can all be in one place.
So, I think that the three things I shared, like you do a really good job having them all in one place, and we have like different uh Figma boards, like three different ones. So, I I I'm going to steal what you guys have a little bit further. Yeah, dude. It is so good. Um my first question is, was that a top tier launch? A++. Yeah, that was like one of our biggest of the year.
Yeah. Was that the one that you that came out in April? Yeah, that was Okay, got it. It looks fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. How has it gone?
What's the postmortem? It's gone all right. It's It's gone all right. Not not exactly what we wanted. It's um not We didn't hit the same Again, it's just a challenging time in general. We didn't hit the same peak that we wanted like launch week, but we've actually been catching up and like beating it in the following weeks. Cool. Which is interesting. Not entirely sure why. Um we're catching up, but like we had the postmortem I think probably a week and a half ago. Um and you know, we're trying to think about like what's our what's our strategy going forward and like what can we learn from it? Where do we need to pivot our messaging? and how do we share what's working on email to paid social or ecom? Um, so got some work to do, but got got some promising signs.
What you laid out was like so comprehensive. My first thought is like how many times can you possibly do that a year for like that full thing? I mean that's a a so we probably have four a launches a year. Yeah, pro probably. So great. I think that's fantastic. But yeah, that that that's our big one.
We're not going that in depth. We'll probably do that. Like for example, we did getting our results back tomorrow, but like out of home, like we'll probably do that like three, four times a year. So that's probably like once a quarter. We we have the bandwidth to be able to do that. Yeah, it makes total sense. Are those results through house Cody? Is that what you mean by you're getting your results back tomorrow?
Yeah, I can't wait. And and I am so bad with patience, but Nick slacked me today and he just said, "Oh, results looking solid." Dot dot dot. Dude, I actually Nick's done that to us, too. And I'm like, "Dude, you can't do that." It's even worse when he's like when he's not giving the actual data. That's hilarious. And I'm like, "What does solid mean?" Okay. I have one other question. You kind of hit on it. You guys had brand messaging and product messaging.
Um, we've gone back and forth around that also. We have like we write copy at the silhouette level. So like if we're launching knives, like what do we want to say about the knife specifically? And then the brand messaging would be like what do knives mean for the Ridge brand?
Like you know if it's a matter of you like being prepared that's a little bit different than like the drop point blade on the knife. Um so do you guys often distinguish between that? Is that the same copywriter working on that? How does that work? Same copyright. We only have one copywriter but I would say like our brand team will write some copy too.
Um no I think we're trying to do we're trying to do brand campaigns. What we consider a brand campaign like around the big launches. I think we realize like we're not big enough or have the resources to do like separate brand campaigns. But I think big launches that we think get like the full A tier thing which is like like this one we had net new TV ads. We had out of home for you know we had a much bigger strategy like we had a brand campaign um that was how were we yeah well I guess I don't know how to describe without saying the name but like not just here's this product it's here but like um you know the campaign was just enough for and it was kind of for the different personas that it fits in its life. So we wanted to be really clear to our team like this is the brand campaign here's just like the lifestyle vision almost like Tokovas right they had a brand campaign with their work work boot you know where it wasn't just product focus but it's like here's a lifestyle we want to get people to buy into the lifestyle that you want people to buy into stemming from this new just enough product. Yeah. Yeah. But that's very different messaging than the the product marketing of differentiated 100%. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think that's a really that's just a distinction we've been trying to make more and more. It's like when do you want to be speaking literally about we call it the silhouette of the product? What are the what are the specifications of the just just enough tinted moisturizer versus Yeah. I said what do knives mean for the Ridge brand?
But it could just as easily be phrased as what is the lifestyle we want someone buying into. Yeah. But but like if we're launching, you know, two new shades of right like a lip pencil, right, which we did later like earlier in the year, like there's not a brand campaign associated with that, right? One social video. So it's it's it's almost all product marketing at that point. 100%.
Yeah, that's a great point. Connor, what do you think? I mean that's Dude, that is so thorough what you just shared.
That is so like that is like such a good thing to work towards for any brand out there. And that's, you know, that's why I asked you guys to send me this a few weeks back cuz that's what I want we're trying to work towards. And we have everything in a single spot in the sense that like if you want to go into our Mother's Day sale board in ClickUp, everything you need is going to be in there. Pricing, the brief, the copy, it's all it's all going to be in there.
like all the information you two just shared will be in there. But what I don't like is that it's not visual at all, right? I mean, it's literally ClickUp's just literally a list of tasks and subtasks and there's files embedded, which is good because you have like a single source of truth to go to find whatever information you need. And then it's also obviously a project management system so you can see what's done, what's not done, what's being worked on, yada yada yada. But what we're working towards is trying to build some sort of like Figma board that's organized by funnel. So, you know, like visually speaking at the top, you know, you have your ads, you have your influencer post, you have your affiliate content, publisher articles that a little bit lower, you have your emails, you have your your text a little bit lower, you have your your web experience, your collection page, your homepage, your checkout. Um, so we're going to start organizing like as a final step into launching a sale like that and then come back in at the end and add in some data the same way that you did Cody where it's like here's how ads perform this year versus last. Here's total business performance this year versus last.
Here's the revenue and RPU on all the emails. So that's what we're working towards is getting it like we already are doing it in the sense that it's all organized in ClickUp. Now we just need to take it out of ClickUp, put it all onto a Figma file. So, it's actually set up in a way that how a funnel is set up and it's visual in that sense. And I think that'll also help us fill in gaps where it's like, oh, actually the web experience isn't cohesive from the emails and ads here. And sometimes you can only get that by seeing them right next to each other versus those two separate ClickUp items where you're never going to be looking at that email with that landing page experience side by side. Dude, it's crazy cuz like even having it in Google, you know, presentation Google Docs where like you have ecom on one and then like the next one is like email people like just just one above each other. People don't see them or you don't see it at the same time versus just having them on the same board side by side. It's so simple but it makes that big of a difference. Totally. And we finally just got this director of design who is going to own like bringing all these things together. One of the things he did for memorial for Mother's Day sale is he created this design toolkit which is it's it's basically just like elements that you will see then throughout our our entire funnel.
So like the the green hex color that you see across like our website and emails like that's in the toolkit. There's this like like headline lock up. There's like a call out badge. um just the overall like background with nothing on it is in there. Um there's a few different treatments of that. There's a like he actually did make some fleshed out ads that we can then pull and like swap in new products and in different copy. Um there's some end screens in here or end cards for for various assets. So we are starting to do that as a as a preliminary step to actually building out like the all the channel level assets. That way there is just a lot of cohesiveness and a lot of consistency across email and ads and prior to that like it that wasn't really happening.
There was some disjointedness. So having that toolkit to start and then it goes with the channel level designers and then that makes their lives easier too because they're not designing all these things from scratch. They're taking the toolkit and you know pumping it into their channels. Um and it just makes our whole team more efficient.
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you know, one uh I so we've been hitting on that a lot too, which is a little bit different. Like I've been telling my creative team, I honestly think we rely too much on asset production and we should be more creative with like what we would dis what I would call what you're describing is like graphic treatment. And here I'll share another screen. I've got this super sloppy art and inspo board that I like throw examples on, but I bring this one up all the time. Uh it's from Huckberry. I think Huckberry is the best at this.
You, so you probably realize this, Connor, but like this was their Memorial Day sale last year. And I'm like, look, I don't think they shot Memorial Day, I'm sure, is a really big period for them. I don't know if they shot one new asset the whole time. Like this probably existed and then they're just creating like a visual strategy to like tie everything together. You get the orange, you get the font that they're using, you get the highlights. Uh, and then these are three emails. And like these are think I think different parts of emails are ads. I've got another example on here. Even down to that like that kind of like scratchiness in the orange like you have it in a single place and now that infiltrates the entire marketing stack. Yeah, 100. That's a good point.
Uh yeah, totally. And then they do this like their winter sale was like equally.
It's like, okay, you've got some colors, you've got some selects, these assets probably existed, these like guys with this Jeep. And it's like, oh yeah, you can put together a really compelling, comprehensive, visually cohesive sale without like weeks of prep and spending a bunch of money on creative. And I think at least I think we have overlooked that for a long time. And I'm trying to like push my team more in that direction of like let's let's um creative problem solve like much later down the funnel versus trying to figure out what is like the the sexy new campaign that we need like a three-day shoot for or something. Yeah. And also how many how many uh if you don't do this like toolkit this like branding toolkit up front you likely end up with multiple designers or editors trying to solve the same problem in a silo like and like the email designer might be trying to solve a similar problem that your paid ad designer is and like that's just inefficient. So I it's like allowed us to it it it seems like more work, but in reality it's just a little bit more work up front. That should save way more time as you get into all the channel specific stuff. So you know what? I'm trying to find the example. Uh here if you guys give me one second. All right.
Well, yeah. While while while you're do that, I'll just like piggyback on that.
Dude, totally totally agree. For whatever reason, we were idiots and we decided to launch something called the beach vacation kit as part of our holiday collection last year. We always had like a winter summer vibes. We had like Aspen in Miami one year sold out.
So, whatever. So, we had 25,000 beach vacation kits left after holiday. So, we're going to like bring them back this summer. Um, but obviously all the stuff we have shot is we shot in November as holiday and I don't really feel like taking, you know, the time and and the money to to do a shoot for it. So, we did some internal stuff. I don't have like the full vision because it's this is a perfect example of all having it in different Figma boards or different places, but like we our our creative team has that that like toolkit that's like here's our visual identity for this campaign. Um, but I can at least show you like the emails that turned out from it. So the only new shoots that we did um were internal just like our internal video and design team with like they got these like chair and props and stuff like that. But like this is all the same thing. a lot of lot of AI in there as well. So like this is obviously AI where it's just like we had the box just gets in that and like that's all AI that was shot but like that's becoming like a hero for it. So um just just an example to kind of show the point that you're making that like it's very possible and and doable to like be scrappy with it 100%. Okay. So I'm going to make like a super similar point here. We're preparing for our Memorial Day sale.
Memorial Day is one where it's like it's an important period. It's not tied to any any new product specifically. So, it's like we probably like I I I don't love the idea that we'd have to rely on a ton of work in the studio or hiring models or any of that where I'm like really this is about our core products being on promo for the first time in a couple months. How do we hit that with the sort of summer type of feel while utilizing like we've been shooting assets for 10 years or whatever? Um, so this is like we pulled out this is a very old photo. Uh, that's our this is originally from us. Um, so like that's our ridge duffel and it's just like cool. Feels very summery. For those listening, it's this guy jumping off of a dock and then there's a ridge duffel there with some canoe paddles like leaning on top of it. I was like, this kind of sets the thisoretically could set the tone for Memorial Day. Like this feels like a hero shot. And then just with like prompting that into chat GPT, I was like, can we just create more complimentary stuff like what what would it be if we like zoomed in on the buoy?
What would it be if we removed the dock?
Uh what is a shot of the shore? So these are all different assets that we created with AI from that original image. And so Cody, you just kind of hit this point, but like we're at this period of time where you need even less of like that content seeding to like pull it even further across channels. You used to have to get really creative. Like the Huckberry example, it's mostly relying on colors and fonts and like styling.
Um, but now we're at this point where like if you have one image that you like, you can kind of prompt that into at least three or four or five or six assets and you could very quickly see how that becomes like a very compelling comprehensive campaign across all channels with like I I did these shots uh during standup for like 30 minutes. I was just like plugging away in chat GPT and it's like if you spend more time doing that I mean it's it's uh it could get even better. This is all this in all all in chat GBT. No like this was not using any other separate tool just in like the core. Mhm. Really? That's awesome. I love it. Yeah. One thing too dude that you said that stuck with me. I think this was in like January where you're talking about icon for the first time and you're talking about like like somebody in your like your creative strategies making ads with it and you're like it's not excited that it's not that exciting that like anyone can make ads.
It's like exciting that he can do it, right? And like that's how I feel with a lot of the AS stuff. Like it's cool that you can do it and you can just go prompted or or I can or somebody else can. Yeah, dude. And I would love to go we'll have to go deeper on a on an AI episode in the future. You were talking about copyrightiting today on Twitter, but like where I think this relates to go to market is like we're talking about like weeks of work and all these handoffs.
And one of you guys made the point really early on that it's so easy to lose like dilute the meaning or like the original concept or like what makes it unique like what is the message you want to say? So easy for that to be diluted over time across different copywriters, different channel managers, etc., etc. I think AI is at this point where like we I like I write a lot of the copy with AI and I'm able to go straight from marketing summary to an incredibly comprehensive copywriting document in like 40 minutes or something. I and I think there's even a scenario where that becomes like the e-com briefs and it's like one person can sit there and take their initial idea and concepts and pull it really far down funnel and get what is multiple handoffs and weeks of work done in like a sitting and I think that's kind of crazy. Oh, dude. I'm like, so I'm I'm trying to help um like my my brand team and like copy team to to streamline because again, you see that beast of the creative brief. And so um I'm going to sit him down like later so we can just show like how I would use AI to do it. But it's pretty much like taking the uh Fireflies recording or like voice note of the kickoff where you have like an hour brainstorm talking about the product, you have all the product details, ju giving that to chatbt say, "Hey, this is a past creative brief. use this information about this, you know, you put it in the format of this creative brief and go do it. And I know I think you said you did something similar. I know you said you like up take you record a loom, you upload it to Gemini, do that. You know, I'll do I'll do a very similar thing. Um I'll use this app. I think it's called Flow or Whisper where it's essentially just like a you click a button on your computer and it just like you you speak and then it just transcribes that and and put it in. So I'll do that with chat GPT all the time. So yeah, I agree. You can just take past work that you've done, give it a little bit more context, and then just get a ton of output. Yeah, 100%. Um, can I say one thing about the the the design toolkit cuz I just want to second Connor's point to that. Um, that's something we are working on as well for for our design team as it scales. We've got, you know, more designers. We're trying to do a lot of web testing and I realized especially like we've been struggling with the like some new PDP rebuilds and working with like a new UX designer and dev team and we finally got like probably way too far into the process and like it just wasn't totally looking right and um and we were just like we just need to take the time and and the dev team even gave us feedback like it would help if we had this from your team you know if we knew exactly what it was and so we did it we essentially had our internal design team like redesign the PDP We kind of fixed our typography cuz like we never love some of it u and kind of like redid the PDP. We're working on that kind of design the toolkit or system. We're starting with ecom, but like we're going to go into everywhere like here's what we do for email things like that. Um because we're really we're really trying to scale and add more designers and and move faster. Um and so far, dude, it's been insanely helpful. like um the the UX designer from the agency sent some designs back and like they were just like so much crisper, so much more on brand and things like that. So I I I can't you know I can't like uh stress the importance of that and like it's one of those things where it's like too much process sucks. Like don't add too much process but like sometimes you got to add enough and like it actually helps you move faster when you nail it%. I mean, I liked what you said earlier about looking at the go to market board and you're like, it's helpful to send to agencies because you've like completely connected the dots for the just enough launch where it's like these are the personas. This is what we wanted to look at. You can look at all these things together and you're just going to get a way better sense of what our, you know, it's like the equivalent of a did you call it a design playbook? It's either like a toolkit or like a design system.
Yeah, sure. Design system. It's like the go to market board for the just enough tint moisturizer is basically the equivalent of the design system for that one launch. You can just share that and be like this is what stuff should look like if it's going to fit into our ecosystem. Yeah, I've been big on that.
We we're also working on like a ad creative agency thing where it's like we just have like like cuz I I found I found that we were like pull like anytime we brought on a new agency and we brought on a few to test out like we were pulling the same stuff over and over. They're all asking, "What are your top ads? What are your value props?
Where's where's your research? Give us your reviews. Give us your brand fonts.
Give us your dos and don'ts." So, like we just been stacking it all together and just like continuing to add it. So, then if we have a new employee, new agency, it's just like boom, here's the thing. Yeah. You know, okay. So, I'll say one thing quickly and then we can put a wrap on this pretty soon, but it's related to go to market. I'd love your guys' thoughts because what we just talked about power banks or just enough are great examples of like hey we've put together key value props key messaging that's across all channels. You can ensure that at the initial launch you have that cohesiveness. You'd like to think that 9 months from now 12 months from now we will have identified new value props or there might be a different hierarchy or a different sort of like visual language that we're finding to work better. So, do you guys have any systems in place for like it's almost the equivalent of, you know, Connor, if you guys were going to relaunch uh one of the pan sets like that you would do that and ensure that everything you've learned over the last year, two, three years um is like reconsidered and reimplemented across all channels. Do you guys do any sort of like refreshes like that? And like something where we take all of our learnings and like put it in a single spot so we're not like reinventing the wheel. Yeah. It's almost like recreating a go to market like event but given all the new information that you have. We're we're in the midst of doing it for travel. We've had travel for 18 months now. We had a certain understanding of the product and we rolled it out in a certain way at the end of 2023. But today we've learned so much but those learnings aren't properly appi applied across all channels. So, it's almost like we need to redo the executive product summary, the marketing summary, and then reimplement so that we have like what we feel is the best information consistently across all channels. I wouldn't say we have like a great system for doing it. There's been cases where we've gone back and and done a retrospect and then created like a new strategy based on that. So for example, last year when we were when we were thinking about all right, what what takes knives to the next level like what what are the things we need to do like the first step was just looking all right in the last 12 months like what have we done for knives? Like what's the performance of knives been? When have they like sold the best? What are the tactics that are performing the best and all the KPIs associated with them? And then using that as like a jumping off point to decide all right the next 12 months looks like this. So not necessarily a relaunch as much as a hey how do we continue this growth here and that involved like doing a retrospect to understand what we have done and what we've learned and what's working and not working and then that guides the roadmap moving forward um we've done it for I should we have done it for hex mills like when we launched hex mills oh man um I think it was early 2023 like it was a very underwhelming launch and we all were like this is one of the coolest products we've ever made and we probably just didn't like message this thing the right way or or activate on the right channel. So that was a situation where we were going back and doing a retrospect from the perspective of this launch sucked. We know we can be better like so we audited the messaging, we audited the channel level tactics and then we rolled out new new like new tactics to like really enhance growth and it worked really well. So we will do it but it like that situation was a lot more reactive than it was hey we have this always on like information gathering and consolidation process that we just always do for every single thing but we should Yeah. Yeah. I was just curious.
It's something I I frankly I don't think we do really well at all. Our paid social team which is like that's obviously the channel that is iterating the most. there's like a hundred ads a week going up or whatever. So, they always have the freshest stuff. It's how does that kind of trickle back up or whatever. I don't know which way it's going. Trickling down, trickling up to refreshing the email welcome series for wallets or rings or travel or our landing pages and things like that.
Like, how are we just making that that feedback loop as fast and then once we have something significant like as comprehensive as possible? Just things I'm thinking about. Uh, dude, I think I think this was a super fun episode. The last thing I'll say, what I think will make for good episodes, and we'll see if this is one of them, is what is the information that the three of us are always asking for from one another. We were all, we all separately like, yeah, hey, I'd love to see what you guys are doing for go to market. There's something else recently. We do our our performance teams do weekly reports. We just shared that there's there's probably good episodes in the future.
So, depending on what people think of this one, this might be a more common format. We did KPIs a few months back. I don't know what people thought about that one, but that was that was another one. True, true, true. Um, so yeah. So, we'll see. Uh, any closing comments from you guys? I liked it. What color shirt are we wearing next week? Yeah, for sure. We just go back and forth between a light and dark. More outfit coordination. I like it. Awesome. Well, that's a wrap on the episode. Sweet.
Thanks, guys. All right. Thank you again for listening. Hope you found this episode thankful. If you did, let us know on Twitter in the comments. We'll do more stuff like this where we'll share each other's internal documents and just chat through them. Uh thank you as always to our sponsors Motion, Rich Panel, Afterell, Preient, Northbeam. As always, share this with your friends, your family, your pets, your colleagues.
Uh anyone who you think might be a marketing operator listener, we would appreciate. Uh we'll see you guys next week. Bye.
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