eCommerce Master Plan

eCommerce MasterPlan | 577: The Xero Shoes 10x Growth Story with Steven Sashen

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Steven Sashen is the co-founder and Chief Barefoot Officer of Xero Shoes. Selling via their international Shopify stores, Amazon, and wholesale. They launched in November 2009 and in 2024 did just under $68 million. 

 

Steven returns to the show to reveal how Xero Shoes jumped to nearly $68M — and the real decisions behind that growth. 

 

Hit PLAY to hear: 

  • How Xero Shoes leapt from $6M to $68M — and why it still feels like a startup  
  • The real reason they moved from WooCommerce to Shopify (and what went wrong ) 
  • Why “best practices” are often bad practices — and what Steven tests instead  
  • The surprising truth about wholesale vs. DTC and where real scale actually comes from  
  • How Xero Shoes got NBA + WNBA players training in their footwear  
  • The product philosophy that fuels their growth: make shoes that truly change lives  

    •  

    Key timestamps to dive straight in: 

    [05:00] “Data-Driven, Opinion-Free Marketing” 

    [09:07] Platform Choice Doesn’t Drive Conversion 

    [11:42] “Website Launch: A Workable Rush” 

    [14:56] “Scaling Footwear Through Retail Doors” 

    [16:39] Global Privacy Challenges Expand 

    [21:34] “Life-Changing Shoes Inspire Basketball Innovation” 

    [23:39] “Impact of Barefoot-Inspired Footwear” 

    [25:40] Listen to Steven’s Top Tips! 

     

    Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/577

    —

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    WEBVTT

    00:00.031 –> 00:07.703

    [SPEAKER_03]: If your business is not doing these two things, change in Bill’s lives and letting you tell the truth, then you might want to reconsider what you’re doing.

    00:07.783 –> 00:10.968

    [SPEAKER_03]: Now, I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t do something just to make money.

    00:11.108 –> 00:14.573

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t, I’m not arrogant enough to think that your way is not appropriate.

    00:15.114 –> 00:22.545

    [SPEAKER_03]: But when you can do those two things, it’s like having a superpower, and it’s really, really enjoyable when you have a superpower.

    00:24.736 –> 00:27.243

    [SPEAKER_00]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.

    00:27.785 –> 00:31.856

    [SPEAKER_00]: Here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.

    00:32.397 –> 00:37.933

    [SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the hide-off to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond.

    00:38.194 –> 00:40.500

    [SPEAKER_00]: Here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.

    00:43.450 –> 00:44.753

    [SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome.

    00:44.773 –> 00:45.775

    [SPEAKER_01]: It’s great to have you here.

    00:45.835 –> 00:49.583

    [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.

    00:49.603 –> 00:52.870

    [SPEAKER_01]: In this episode, we’re going inspiring to the max.

    00:52.890 –> 01:01.088

    [SPEAKER_01]: We are catching up with another one of our past guests since the last time Steven Session from Zero Shoes was on the show, which was.

    01:01.068 –> 01:04.512

    [SPEAKER_01]: 2018 to eight years ago, they’ve ten X the business.

    01:04.552 –> 01:10.219

    [SPEAKER_01]: They’ve gone from just under six million dollars a year to 68 million dollars a year and that was in 2004.

    01:11.200 –> 01:12.622

    [SPEAKER_01]: That’s the latest numbers he was able to give us.

    01:12.682 –> 01:14.745

    [SPEAKER_01]: I’m sure it went bigger in 2025.

    01:15.606 –> 01:21.793

    [SPEAKER_01]: Stephen, as you’re about to hear, is a fascinating person, a great to chat to and he’s

    01:21.773 –> 01:23.175

    [SPEAKER_01]: He’s giving us a couple of rants.

    01:23.215 –> 01:26.540

    [SPEAKER_01]: He’s giving us a couple of lovely nuggity insights.

    01:26.601 –> 01:33.892

    [SPEAKER_01]: His top tips are excellent and we’re going to start off with their recent move from WooCommerce to Shopify.

    01:33.972 –> 01:37.277

    [SPEAKER_01]: Get into some privacy stuff, get into some marketing bits and pieces.

    01:38.038 –> 01:41.324

    [SPEAKER_01]: There’s just a lot, there’s a lot in this one and it’s really fascinating.

    01:41.364 –> 01:43.507

    [SPEAKER_01]: So really pleased he was able to come back on the show.

    01:43.948 –> 01:46.752

    [SPEAKER_01]: Make sure you listen to the end so you don’t miss out on any of it.

    01:52.300 –> 01:54.343

    [SPEAKER_01]: and now to introduce our special guest.

    01:54.523 –> 01:59.129

    [SPEAKER_01]: Stephen Sashin is the co-founder and chief barefoot officer of zero shoes.

    01:59.550 –> 02:09.824

    [SPEAKER_01]: Selling via their international Shopify stores, Amazon and wholesale, they launched in November 2009 and in 2024 did just under 68 million.

    02:10.184 –> 02:11.046

    [SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Stephen.

    02:11.406 –> 02:12.728

    [SPEAKER_03]: Am I really a special guest?

    02:13.108 –> 02:16.433

    [SPEAKER_01]: You are a special guest, all our guests are special guests.

    02:16.453 –> 02:18.696

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, if they’re all special, then I’m not special.

    02:18.828 –> 02:27.009

    [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you’re kind of extra special because you’re one of our past guests who’s been gracious enough to come back on and spare us in about an hour of your time.

    02:27.390 –> 02:28.793

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I’m thrilled and happy to do it.

    02:29.174 –> 02:30.537

    [SPEAKER_01]: It’s lovely to have you back.

    02:30.718 –> 02:31.981

    [SPEAKER_01]: How dare I ask?

    02:32.021 –> 02:34.006

    [SPEAKER_01]: How have the last eight years being?

    02:34.026 –> 02:35.149

    [SPEAKER_01]: Because it’s been that long.

    02:35.365 –> 02:40.215

    [SPEAKER_03]: I barely remember what I had for breakfast two hours ago, so that’s a tricky one for me.

    02:40.336 –> 02:51.880

    [SPEAKER_03]: It all, it’s frankly all a bit of a blur, I mean eight years ago, we were Jesus, it’s 2025, so we were somewhere around five or six million.

    02:52.001 –> 02:52.682

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

    02:52.662 –> 02:57.712

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we were tiny back then, and now we’re not tiny, although in my head we’re still a start-up.

    02:57.792 –> 03:06.229

    [SPEAKER_03]: So, in many ways, they’ve been the same because I’m still the gap between where we are and where I know we can be, seems just as long.

    03:07.030 –> 03:11.599

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s just that now we have a lot more people doing a lot more things than me doing a lot fewer things.

    03:12.068 –> 03:15.152

    [SPEAKER_01]: What’s it been like going through that journey in the business?

    03:15.232 –> 03:17.715

    [SPEAKER_01]: Clearly your roles changed a fair bit with it.

    03:17.735 –> 03:18.697

    [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, awkward.

    03:19.558 –> 03:21.340

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s like going through a puberty, but worse.

    03:21.981 –> 03:24.404

    [SPEAKER_03]: And we’re still figuring it out, frankly.

    03:24.684 –> 03:27.728

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s, we have a private equity partner in a minority position.

    03:28.269 –> 03:33.696

    [SPEAKER_03]: And so we’ve been juggling that along with just the, what the company is doing on its own.

    03:34.217 –> 03:36.660

    [SPEAKER_03]: And then of course, in the intervening time, some people got the flu.

    03:37.421 –> 03:41.586

    [SPEAKER_03]: And there’ve been political things that I hear about.

    03:41.566 –> 03:45.810

    [SPEAKER_03]: something with the word territory, whatever.

    03:46.431 –> 03:51.476

    [SPEAKER_03]: Something where we’re suddenly paying a lot of money for the same stuff we were getting for much less money just a few short months ago.

    03:51.997 –> 03:58.763

    [SPEAKER_03]: So it’s just it, you know, I met some young entrepreneurs and they were complaining about how every day is just the crazy town.

    03:59.224 –> 04:02.067

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I said, I’ve been doing this 16 years, that never changes.

    04:02.928 –> 04:06.291

    [SPEAKER_03]: So in many ways, the answer to your question is, say, I’ll say, well,

    04:07.688 –> 04:15.538

    [SPEAKER_01]: It’s interesting that we feel like there’s so many new problems to deal with at the moment, but actually any year there were new problems to deal with.

    04:15.586 –> 04:16.908

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s really always the same.

    04:17.028 –> 04:26.942

    [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I will say it’s interesting that everyone in the company, but especially my wife and I who started this with no experience in footwear, certainly, the amount that we’ve learned is tremendous.

    04:27.002 –> 04:31.989

    [SPEAKER_03]: So the way we address certain problems, the way we understand certain problems is radically different.

    04:32.850 –> 04:39.079

    [SPEAKER_03]: But it’s still emotionally and psychically feels like the same thing just day after day, it’s groundhog day.

    04:39.059 –> 04:48.215

    [SPEAKER_03]: My line is, you know, I hope that we’re smart enough for no someone smart enough ideally someone within the company who knows how to put out the fire that started overnight even there’s nothing changed since yesterday.

    04:49.157 –> 04:53.584

    [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that’s quite a philosophical way of looking at, but quite spot on.

    04:53.604 –> 04:57.752

    [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to say it’s like, the more you learn, the more aware of other issues you become.

    04:57.792 –> 05:00.797

    [SPEAKER_01]: There’s a, there’s a kind of joy and naivety, isn’t that?

    05:00.828 –> 05:07.865

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, the line that I have is I’ve been an internet marketer since 1992, which means I have a lot of opinions, but it also means I just don’t give a shit what any of them are.

    05:07.905 –> 05:09.348

    [SPEAKER_03]: All I care about is the data.

    05:09.950 –> 05:14.500

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I know I know less and less in a weird way.

    05:14.561 –> 05:17.267

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m confident about.

    05:17.247 –> 05:18.229

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m trying to think of how to say this.

    05:18.249 –> 05:19.952

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s not that I’m confident about my opinions.

    05:19.992 –> 05:22.016

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m just willing to pursue them.

    05:22.076 –> 05:26.143

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I know how to do that in the most, the quickest and cheapest way possible.

    05:26.604 –> 05:28.708

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t want to spend a lot of money to find out of her wrong.

    05:29.569 –> 05:30.932

    [SPEAKER_03]: But I have no problem being wrong.

    05:31.393 –> 05:32.775

    [SPEAKER_03]: I just want to find out quick and cheap.

    05:33.211 –> 05:34.854

    [SPEAKER_01]: words to live by that, I think.

    05:35.596 –> 05:48.221

    [SPEAKER_01]: Now, one thing you let slip as we were, as we were preparing for this, and which I had kind of worked out with a little, you know, looking at source code, is last time we chatted you were a WooCommerce store.

    05:48.321 –> 05:50.305

    [SPEAKER_01]: You’re now a Shopify store.

    05:52.029 –> 05:55.135

    [SPEAKER_01]: When, when and how did that happen?

    05:57.173 –> 05:58.235

    [SPEAKER_03]: to pick up the long sign.

    05:58.255 –> 05:58.956

    [SPEAKER_03]: I did.

    06:00.679 –> 06:11.096

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m going to preface this by saying it was not my idea and not my idea for a number of reasons not that let me preface this by saying again I’ve been doing this a long time.

    06:11.517 –> 06:20.211

    [SPEAKER_03]: I have seen ecommerce platforms come and go many of them and my line is all ecommerce platforms all shop and carts suck differently.

    06:20.191 –> 06:26.883

    [SPEAKER_03]: So there’s never anything that gives you everything you want, and there are certain things that give you more or less flexibility than others.

    06:27.384 –> 06:30.369

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’ll tell you why we did it in a moment, but I’ll tell you about my resistance first.

    06:31.431 –> 06:33.635

    [SPEAKER_03]: One is that I’m just not a fan of closed platforms.

    06:34.597 –> 06:39.346

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t like it when other people are telling me based on, quote, best practices, what we should be doing.

    06:39.506 –> 06:40.748

    [SPEAKER_03]: I have repeatedly.

    06:40.728 –> 06:47.397

    [SPEAKER_03]: demonstrated with split testing that what people call best practices are not best for us and are often quite the work, the opposite.

    06:47.738 –> 07:02.719

    [SPEAKER_03]: And remember being at a WooCommerce event a years ago they invited me to go and there was a guy named Pep Lyah who has a company called Conversion XL and he was one of the keynotes and his opening slide was there are no best practices and I literally stood up on my chair and started whistling and clapping.

    07:02.699 –> 07:14.013

    [SPEAKER_03]: So ironically, the checkout process that I created for our WooCommerce shop way back went a long time ago with something that became a native to Shopify some years later.

    07:14.634 –> 07:18.359

    [SPEAKER_03]: So that was okay, but then they’ve changed since and I’m not as happy about it.

    07:19.039 –> 07:24.486

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t like when I can’t have access to my data at a very fundamental level, especially something’s going wrong.

    07:25.067 –> 07:26.749

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t like it if I

    07:26.729 –> 07:36.746

    [SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, there’s a bunch of things, but the the biggest one was that there were a number of things that we didn’t win commerce on a daily basis that Shopify didn’t do.

    07:36.886 –> 07:41.173

    [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I started looking at Shopify the day they came out and I looked at it every six months.

    07:41.774 –> 07:47.805

    [SPEAKER_03]: We had an employee young guy, like in his early 20s, who without telling me was looking at how do we migrate to Shopify.

    07:48.225 –> 07:52.753

    [SPEAKER_03]: And when I found out, I said, okay, if you can solve these five problems, I’m game.

    07:52.733 –> 07:54.736

    [SPEAKER_03]: but you can’t because I looked at it last week.

    07:54.756 –> 07:58.842

    [SPEAKER_03]: I didn’t know you were and if you had just told me I would have, you know, made us say you wouldn’t have wasted your time.

    07:59.843 –> 08:02.027

    [SPEAKER_03]: Now, things have changed a bit.

    08:02.067 –> 08:11.861

    [SPEAKER_03]: We’ve been able to code some solutions and frankly, Shopify wanted us very badly so they accelerated some things to fix a few problems that would have had us dead in the water.

    08:13.323 –> 08:17.509

    [SPEAKER_03]: But I’m still just not happy about what we had to do to get here.

    08:17.489 –> 08:24.542

    [SPEAKER_03]: There are some advantages because, you know, this is one of the things everybody thinks that Shopify has to cast pajamas, so all the developers are writing code for it.

    08:24.963 –> 08:26.345

    [SPEAKER_03]: But again, I’ve been around a long time.

    08:26.365 –> 08:27.908

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’ve seen this game play out.

    08:28.369 –> 08:32.376

    [SPEAKER_03]: Remember a few years ago when everyone thought you should be on MailChimp.

    08:32.575 –> 08:33.377

    [SPEAKER_03]: now they’re not.

    08:34.138 –> 08:46.565

    [SPEAKER_03]: It was not long ago and everyone thought you should be on one shopping cart then Volusion and then I mean these come and go and the more people writing code for something the worse the code tends to get on average because not everyone’s a good code right a cutter.

    08:47.427 –> 08:49.631

    [SPEAKER_03]: Again there are some things that it does well.

    08:50.132 –> 08:52.778

    [SPEAKER_03]: Now we had beaten up with commerce

    08:52.758 –> 09:08.303

    [SPEAKER_03]: Significantly and there’s code in the core of who commerce that we wrote or at least inspired at the very least But some ideas and it was times where there were things in the in the GitHub About who about certain things where there would suddenly be a bunch of people commenting Sasha and tell them they’re wrong and I would like to

    09:08.688 –> 09:16.227

    [SPEAKER_03]: post from a UI UX experience about why they should do it differently, and Matt Mullenwegg is a customer and I get to talk to him every now and then which is delightful.

    09:16.728 –> 09:23.625

    [SPEAKER_03]: So it happened because there were people in the company and in the private equity company who thought that

    09:24.533 –> 09:27.297

    [SPEAKER_03]: it would somehow magically and inherently be better.

    09:28.038 –> 09:40.976

    [SPEAKER_03]: And there was actually an interesting conversation we have a new chief growth officer and when she was doing a presentation of the board to get her job, someone in the company said, well, I hear when we switch to Shopify, we’ll see a 15% improvement in conversion.

    09:41.417 –> 09:44.782

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I just kind of mumbled under my breath, the same face that you just made that no one can see.

    09:45.182 –> 09:47.185

    [SPEAKER_03]: I kind of went platformer to depend on it.

    09:47.205 –> 09:52.633

    [SPEAKER_03]: And happily this new chief growth officer, she said, conversion has nothing to do with the platform you’re on.

    09:52.613 –> 09:54.818

    [SPEAKER_03]: it has to do with what you’re doing on the platform.

    09:55.640 –> 10:00.632

    [SPEAKER_03]: And if somebody sees a 15% lift, their previous site was a dumpster fire and this one obviously isn’t.

    10:01.394 –> 10:11.297

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I’ve seen in the past where people said, oh, if you switch, you’re going to see an improvements in search engine rankings and conversion and various other things.

    10:11.277 –> 10:13.300

    [SPEAKER_03]: Again, patently false.

    10:13.320 –> 10:17.026

    [SPEAKER_03]: If it happens for you, congratulations, but it’s not a given by an estrationally imagination.

    10:17.667 –> 10:28.503

    [SPEAKER_03]: So there was another one where the private equity company said, if anybody looks at you to buy you, they’re going to want to see you’re on Shopify, to which I said, the kind of people who could buy us are not on Shopify.

    10:28.543 –> 10:38.398

    [SPEAKER_03]: They have rolled their own, they’re in dot net or something, and getting out of Shopify to them is going to be a bigger nightmare than getting out of woo, where we had full database and root access.

    10:38.497 –> 10:50.937

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I would say that there was just, well, there’s many other factors, but suffice it to say it was people who didn’t understand WooCommerce didn’t know all the things we could do with it.

    10:50.957 –> 10:54.222

    [SPEAKER_03]: Look, we could make WooCommerce look and feel exactly like any Shopify site.

    10:55.104 –> 10:56.185

    [SPEAKER_03]: The commerce cannot be said.

    10:56.806 –> 11:04.639

    [SPEAKER_03]: And we didn’t have the opportunity to demonstrate that for various internal reasons that have we been able to do that might have been a different world.

    11:05.277 –> 11:11.866

    [SPEAKER_01]: So, how has it been now your on shop of this business?

    11:11.886 –> 11:13.188

    [SPEAKER_03]: We’re still in that process.

    11:13.449 –> 11:19.697

    [SPEAKER_03]: We’re still, I mean, I think that.eusite is launching, you know, as we’re taping this today or tomorrow.

    11:20.499 –> 11:23.623

    [SPEAKER_03]: There was another thing where there was a launch schedule.

    11:23.603 –> 11:24.405

    [SPEAKER_03]: Look, I’ll say it this way.

    11:24.425 –> 11:42.118

    [SPEAKER_03]: These are people who know e-commerce, who are listening, the people who were able to make this decision decided to do this right in the beginning of Q4, which, you know, we’re coming up on Black Friday, Cyber Monday now, and we are crossing our fingers in many ways.

    11:42.098 –> 11:57.096

    [SPEAKER_03]: So there’s still quite a number of things functionally that we’re working on and a very long list of things we’re working on in UIUX and legally and I mean it’s I would argue that there were people who rushed the process unnecessarily.

    11:57.176 –> 12:08.730

    [SPEAKER_03]: I mean we could have just waited until we had done serious, serious load testing in UIUX testing and gotten a lot of things fixed and then launched rather than doing it now at a time where

    12:08.710 –> 12:18.425

    [SPEAKER_03]: We’re scrambling, and frankly, leading up to through Q3, it took all of our growth team off the project and what we’re doing in woo that would have generated additional revenue.

    12:19.066 –> 12:25.316

    [SPEAKER_03]: So, it’s a work in progress, and of course, like any website with the company’s growing, it will continue to be a work in progress.

    12:25.897 –> 12:31.967

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I’m waiting to see when we get into that, let’s say more normal cadence and then I’ll have a better answer.

    12:32.470 –> 12:36.076

    [SPEAKER_01]: And for the benefit of the listeners, we are recording this the first week of November.

    12:36.136 –> 12:40.763

    [SPEAKER_01]: So I think you probably all agree that that’s a bold time to be prepared.

    12:40.963 –> 12:45.871

    [SPEAKER_03]: And you say, do you think bold was that on your euphemism of the day calendar?

    12:45.891 –> 12:47.433

    [SPEAKER_03]: Because you can rip that page out and throw it away.

    12:48.435 –> 12:52.261

    [SPEAKER_03]: I will say there’s one thing that Shopify is giving us that is super helpful.

    12:52.781 –> 12:56.587

    [SPEAKER_03]: And it’s something that I, I mean, I talked to the guys at Wu and automatic all the time.

    12:56.688 –> 13:00.874

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I said, the biggest thing you don’t have that we need is a really good POS system.

    13:00.854 –> 13:04.926

    [SPEAKER_03]: And that’s something that is, you know, Shopify native practically.

    13:05.487 –> 13:10.201

    [SPEAKER_03]: So, um, and similarly handling, uh, handling wholesales a little easier.

    13:10.622 –> 13:16.078

    [SPEAKER_03]: But again, we could have written all that code and made it even more of what we needed than something off the shelf.

    13:16.565 –> 13:29.022

    [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I hope that, I mean, what do you say to I’d say, you don’t really know how a site migration has paid off until 12 months in a relatively, in an averagely complicated business?

    13:29.342 –> 13:32.326

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but then you don’t really know because you’re comparing apples and orangutans.

    13:32.366 –> 13:35.631

    [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you can’t, you can split test migration.

    13:35.671 –> 13:38.154

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t recommend it, but it is possible.

    13:38.855 –> 13:41.138

    [SPEAKER_03]: And we have kept the website,

    13:41.118 –> 13:48.135

    [SPEAKER_03]: You know, on hold, just in case all hell breaks loose, I don’t expect that to happen, but they’re better in worse ways to handle a migration.

    13:48.195 –> 13:50.200

    [SPEAKER_03]: This was not done as elegantly as it could have been.

    13:51.062 –> 13:52.225

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I don’t think I’m speaking at a school.

    13:52.245 –> 13:53.608

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t think anybody here would disagree.

    13:54.213 –> 14:00.741

    [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I hope that in 12 months, time, six months time, it all becomes business as usual.

    14:01.321 –> 14:11.433

    [SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, and again, I would be the first guy to eat crow and say, I was totally wrong that we could have maybe managed it a little differently, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us.

    14:11.834 –> 14:15.478

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t care, as long as this is doing what we need for the business, I just don’t care.

    14:15.798 –> 14:24.068

    [SPEAKER_03]: But I also recognize there are just some fundamental issues or fundamental constraints placed upon us now

    14:24.048 –> 14:33.619

    [SPEAKER_03]: restrictive, I believe, then what people have predicted because they didn’t know the the inner work is what we had done on Wu as well as I and two other people on the team do.

    14:34.493 –> 14:35.194

    [SPEAKER_01]: fascinating.

    14:35.315 –> 14:37.239

    [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Steven.

    14:37.339 –> 14:38.842

    [SPEAKER_01]: I’m going to change to take a little bit.

    14:39.864 –> 14:47.540

    [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned that about on Shopify, it’s somewhat easier to deal with the B2B and the wholesale sales.

    14:47.560 –> 14:50.607

    [SPEAKER_01]: Because that’s a big part of the zero business, isn’t it?

    14:50.687 –> 14:54.595

    [SPEAKER_01]: Is the relationships with distributors wholesalers and so forth?

    14:54.575 –> 14:55.757

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

    14:56.378 –> 14:57.540

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, no, no, no.

    14:58.061 –> 15:02.929

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s a small part percentage-wise, but it’s a significant part because in footwear, that’s where the scale happens.

    15:03.449 –> 15:11.503

    [SPEAKER_03]: So you can do as well as you want to do online direct, but where the scale happens is when some, I mean, there’s a company that we have been talking to for a while.

    15:11.843 –> 15:13.746

    [SPEAKER_03]: They control, I’ll give you the Lingo.

    15:13.766 –> 15:15.269

    [SPEAKER_03]: They control 15,000 doors.

    15:15.589 –> 15:17.773

    [SPEAKER_03]: So stores can have multiple stores, those are doors.

    15:18.314 –> 15:20.116

    [SPEAKER_03]: So they control 15,000 doors.

    15:20.617 –> 15:21.679

    [SPEAKER_03]: If they put,

    15:21.659 –> 15:27.548

    [SPEAKER_03]: three products, just three, and every one of those doors, it’s a hundred million dollar project or whatever number it is.

    15:27.588 –> 15:29.251

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m not saying math in the head.

    15:29.612 –> 15:38.706

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s a big number, much bigger than what you do by having something viral happen online, and a viral online things are not always sustainable anyway.

    15:39.127 –> 15:41.170

    [SPEAKER_03]: So retail and in different parts of the world,

    15:41.150 –> 15:41.991

    [SPEAKER_03]: very different story.

    15:42.151 –> 15:59.513

    [SPEAKER_03]: Europe is much more retail friendly than the U.S. China has a completely different story when it comes to retail and it’s online but in a way that for most people know a lot of live shopping and key opinion leaders, whole other universe and some of those differences are showing up more and more markedly in other parts of the world.

    16:00.034 –> 16:07.123

    [SPEAKER_03]: So it is important to have something where we do have a very simple and robust

    16:07.103 –> 16:18.727

    [SPEAKER_03]: way of addressing those people’s needs and invariably the more you get into wholesale the more you have people who insist that their needs are better than everybody else is even when their company is one tenth or one hundred the size of everybody else’s.

    16:19.628 –> 16:26.783

    [SPEAKER_01]: So in it’s very much a case of finding the right method for each territory.

    16:26.999 –> 16:37.371

    [SPEAKER_03]: Um, yeah, it is and in Europe, that place that used to be connected to the, you know, don’t take, don’t, don’t, don’t point that out.

    16:37.391 –> 16:39.793

    [SPEAKER_01]: You’ll make me depressed.

    16:39.813 –> 16:42.136

    [SPEAKER_03]: I hear there was some like a tunnel or something.

    16:42.156 –> 16:42.737

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t know.

    16:42.757 –> 16:43.858

    [SPEAKER_03]: I haven’t been there.

    16:43.878 –> 16:48.283

    [SPEAKER_03]: But, um, we find that even in different countries, there’s different ways you have to manage that.

    16:48.323 –> 16:56.432

    [SPEAKER_03]: Now, granted, it is nice having a company aka Shopify where they’ve done the heavy lifting about a lot of that, but not all of that.

    16:56.412 –> 17:02.101

    [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, pros and cons, but, yes, every different territory, there’s something you need to deal with.

    17:02.462 –> 17:05.467

    [SPEAKER_03]: And that’s changing very quickly, especially having to do a privacy.

    17:06.048 –> 17:15.062

    [SPEAKER_03]: That’s expanding and changing in weird ways, like right now in Texas, there’s a law that is so vague, there’s no way it’ll ever be…

    17:15.042 –> 17:29.362

    [SPEAKER_03]: challenge or never ever be tried in court and found to be meaningful, where you could be someone who doesn’t live in the state of Texas, but if you’re driving through the state of Texas, and you get a text that you claim is unsolicited, you can sue the company who sent you the text.

    17:29.523 –> 17:30.064

    [SPEAKER_03]: Right now, that’s

    17:30.044 –> 17:31.226

    [SPEAKER_03]: the way the law is written.

    17:31.446 –> 17:32.507

    [SPEAKER_03]: It will be changed.

    17:33.008 –> 17:39.738

    [SPEAKER_03]: Or you can be a citizen of Texas and be out of Texas and get a text that you think is unsolicited.

    17:40.619 –> 17:50.533

    [SPEAKER_03]: Or you can have a phone number that used to be in Texas even though you’ve never, I mean it’s like it’s, there’s all the stuff that’s trying to, people are trying to figure out how to

    17:50.513 –> 18:04.311

    [SPEAKER_03]: handle privacy and then there’s people who are trying to say whoa you’re talking you’re asking people who have been known to opt into something get that thing and complain you just spam them for sending the thing they just asked for.

    18:04.872 –> 18:11.841

    [SPEAKER_03]: So you’re putting a lot of power in the hands of people who are going to misrepresent reality and anyway it’s it’s a mess.

    18:11.901 –> 18:19.491

    [SPEAKER_03]: I think the 12 month from now thing you’re fantasy about where I’ll be I’m hoping it’s on an island sipping a drink

    18:20.011 –> 18:23.236

    [SPEAKER_01]: I think the point about the privacy is fascinating.

    18:23.256 –> 18:33.271

    [SPEAKER_01]: It makes me think of when the, like, a little while back, when the tech bros were called in front of the, I can’t even if it was the British or the US government.

    18:33.552 –> 18:35.254

    [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that’s the US.

    18:35.395 –> 18:38.299

    [SPEAKER_01]: I think it probably was the US one to answer questions.

    18:38.439 –> 18:43.487

    [SPEAKER_01]: And the lack of knowledge that was apparent amongst the lawmakers,

    18:43.467 –> 18:44.949

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, can you explain how cookies work?

    18:45.029 –> 18:46.070

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s like, a little bit of a, what?

    18:47.232 –> 18:47.592

    [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

    18:48.073 –> 18:51.798

    [SPEAKER_03]: But you know, this is a fundamental thing that is more pervasive than that.

    18:51.838 –> 18:54.401

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, the lawmakers don’t know what they don’t know.

    18:54.421 –> 18:56.544

    [SPEAKER_03]: And that is the stunning cruiser syndrome.

    18:56.564 –> 18:59.027

    [SPEAKER_03]: And there’s nothing worse than being confident about your ignorance.

    18:59.628 –> 19:05.736

    [SPEAKER_03]: But it’s also true about customers and consumers because the privacy stuff is like, I don’t want you know who I am and sending me ads that are targeted to me.

    19:05.996 –> 19:07.939

    [SPEAKER_03]: No, that’s exactly what you want.

    19:07.919 –> 19:09.741

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need to get another tampon add.

    19:09.761 –> 19:12.743

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’ve bought all the tampons I’m going to use and I’m not going to tell you what I’m doing with them.

    19:13.324 –> 19:26.375

    [SPEAKER_03]: So what you’re saying when you say, I don’t want to have people sending me targeted ads, is that you’re somehow so unable to resist an ad that you’re going to go broke by seeing things that you think people think you want.

    19:26.896 –> 19:30.900

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s really quite perverse and a little upside down.

    19:30.920 –> 19:37.065

    [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, what they think is that someone is going to get access to that information and do something nefarious.

    19:37.045 –> 19:42.635

    [SPEAKER_03]: But, which I almost literally can’t imagine, we don’t need to go back to previous wars to imagine that.

    19:42.695 –> 19:44.960

    [SPEAKER_03]: But I don’t see those things happening.

    19:45.280 –> 19:48.446

    [SPEAKER_03]: But literally the argument people make is, I don’t want you sending me targeted ads.

    19:48.506 –> 19:49.668

    [SPEAKER_03]: Like, what?

    19:50.390 –> 19:51.692

    [SPEAKER_01]: Just what the generic ones.

    19:52.453 –> 19:56.100

    [SPEAKER_03]: People have been sending you targeted ads on your television for years.

    19:56.182 –> 19:58.125

    [SPEAKER_01]: and through the post and through.

    19:58.145 –> 19:58.426

    [SPEAKER_01]: And right.

    19:58.526 –> 19:58.786

    [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

    19:58.926 –> 19:59.087

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.

    19:59.587 –> 19:59.928

    [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

    20:00.008 –> 20:00.168

    [SPEAKER_03]: Wait.

    20:00.269 –> 20:01.150

    [SPEAKER_03]: One of your one of my predictions.

    20:01.591 –> 20:01.851

    [SPEAKER_01]: Please.

    20:02.292 –> 20:06.959

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I don’t know if you can do this in the, well, I don’t know where else you can do this other than the US.

    20:07.801 –> 20:08.983

    [SPEAKER_03]: But you can.

    20:09.043 –> 20:12.027

    [SPEAKER_03]: They’re a number of companies who provide a service where someone comes to your website.

    20:12.048 –> 20:13.670

    [SPEAKER_03]: They do not, they do not opt in.

    20:13.750 –> 20:15.473

    [SPEAKER_03]: They do not give you any information.

    20:15.453 –> 20:18.799

    [SPEAKER_03]: But you get their IP and you get their MAC address and you know, maybe you get the browser.

    20:18.819 –> 20:26.875

    [SPEAKER_03]: They’re using and use some third party databases and you can resolve, say, 40% of those to physical addresses and send physical mail to those people.

    20:27.536 –> 20:30.682

    [SPEAKER_03]: And at the moment, people get those mailings and think, oh, so weird.

    20:30.962 –> 20:32.846

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m getting their national advertising campaign.

    20:32.886 –> 20:33.788

    [SPEAKER_03]: I was just on that website.

    20:34.329 –> 20:36.533

    [SPEAKER_03]: If they knew what was actually happening,

    20:36.867 –> 20:38.731

    [SPEAKER_03]: their people will ride in the streets.

    20:38.771 –> 20:41.617

    [SPEAKER_03]: The people who run two of those companies are people that I know.

    20:41.637 –> 20:44.282

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I say, I hope you’re running this company with a trailing stop.

    20:44.382 –> 20:50.775

    [SPEAKER_03]: Like don’t have any debt because when the feces and the fan have a mutual interaction, it will not be good for you.

    20:51.413 –> 20:57.465

    [SPEAKER_01]: think here in the UK you can do that for B2B data but not for B2C data.

    20:57.525 –> 21:02.935

    [SPEAKER_01]: There’s quite a lot of, well tell you who’s been on your website so you can call them up and sell to them type stuff.

    21:03.135 –> 21:07.684

    [SPEAKER_01]: We don’t have the direct mail element of it because we don’t have the consumer legality.

    21:07.850 –> 21:15.220

    [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it’s simply that we all as consumers are various things, not just products, but social media and gunners, what else.

    21:15.660 –> 21:24.391

    [SPEAKER_03]: We have given away our information to so many people in so many ways that to triangulate and figure out who’s who is just a simple and be irreversible.

    21:25.152 –> 21:30.039

    [SPEAKER_01]: So Stephen, the last eight years, you’ve more than 10x the business.

    21:30.860 –> 21:34.144

    [SPEAKER_01]: What’s been the best thing about that journey?

    21:34.580 –> 21:52.926

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s the thing that got us started in the beginning is that we hear from people every day saying You’re shoes have changed my life and and changed the lives of people in my family and my friends and and Professional athletes saying the same thing now actually the eight-year market this is perfect way pointing this out eight years ago

    21:52.906 –> 22:00.356

    [SPEAKER_03]: a professional women’s basketball player reached out to me and said, I’ve been wearing your shoes and sandals off the court and my feet ankles have become indestructible.

    22:00.757 –> 22:01.958

    [SPEAKER_03]: You should make a basketball shoe.

    22:02.659 –> 22:13.294

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, it just so happened, we had made a kind of prototype shoe, long story, and we sent it to her and she said, well, I can’t play in this because it doesn’t quite fit me, but I can tell you that I couldn’t spring my ankle in this if you paid me too.

    22:13.274 –> 22:34.489

    [SPEAKER_03]: and I spent the next six and a half years trying to get that shoe made everyone told me I had my head firmly up my butt and nobody cared it wouldn’t happen but about two years ago we had a bunch of NBA and WNBA players and coaches and managers and trainers say you got to make the shoe and we did and we’ve been in the NBA and WNBA.

    22:34.469 –> 22:40.296

    [SPEAKER_03]: And so, that proof of that that we can do things that people thought were completely impossible.

    22:40.577 –> 22:43.320

    [SPEAKER_03]: Both for us as a company and practically, like why would they want to do that?

    22:43.380 –> 22:48.467

    [SPEAKER_03]: I think we have maybe five or six teams where all the players are training in our shoes.

    22:48.948 –> 22:52.993

    [SPEAKER_03]: With the coaches and trainers trying to get them strong enough to be able to play in our shoes.

    22:53.814 –> 22:59.561

    [SPEAKER_03]: So, that was a kind of proof of concept that is one of the few things that I am proud of.

    22:59.701 –> 23:02.485

    [SPEAKER_03]: And I say a few things just that I don’t pride as not one of my things.

    23:02.465 –> 23:09.537

    [SPEAKER_03]: but that was a really big deal and it demonstrated something about what we can do as a brand that no one ever believed.

    23:09.557 –> 23:12.823

    [SPEAKER_03]: But again, the only reason we’re doing this, my wife has the best line.

    23:12.843 –> 23:14.446

    [SPEAKER_03]: She says, there’s enough shoe companies in the world.

    23:14.746 –> 23:18.533

    [SPEAKER_03]: You don’t need to shoot another shoe company unless your shoes are changing people’s lives.

    23:18.513 –> 23:25.705

    [SPEAKER_03]: And what I can tell you is that we’re doing it for people that don’t know just by getting out of the way of the things that cause problems.

    23:25.725 –> 23:29.150

    [SPEAKER_03]: So our shoes don’t squeeze your toes together, which cuts off circulation in your foot.

    23:29.531 –> 23:31.394

    [SPEAKER_03]: They don’t elevate your heel that mess with your posture.

    23:31.814 –> 23:36.522

    [SPEAKER_03]: They aren’t stiff so that you can’t move the bones and joints in your feet, which means they get weaker over time.

    23:36.502 –> 23:56.067

    [SPEAKER_03]: They aren’t super thick, which means you can’t feel the ground and that means that the nerves in the bottom of your foot of which there are a lot more than anywhere But your fingertips and lips, you know, they need to communicate to your brain and if the brain can’t get that information It makes you prone to fall, trip and fall injury and various other problems It literally shuts down a part of your brain when you don’t give it the information.

    23:56.108 –> 24:04.939

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s looking for so we’re just doing the opposite of what shoes I’ve been doing for 50 years now People might know this by the time this podcast comes out Nike

    24:04.919 –> 24:11.610

    [SPEAKER_03]: Just announced a product that, yeah, yeah, it’s Nike’s version of a barefoot shoe.

    24:12.211 –> 24:22.929

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s a big thick foam soul with a bunch of little spherical things in the soul and bet it in it that when you step on them, they protrude from the bottom of the soul.

    24:23.249 –> 24:26.334

    [SPEAKER_03]: When you step on them, they push up on your foot in a few places.

    24:27.817 –> 24:31.703

    [SPEAKER_03]: You can do the same thing just by going barefoot.

    24:32.206 –> 24:49.017

    [SPEAKER_03]: Or you can wear our shoes, which instead of just in those whatever 20 little spots that they have seemingly say they’ve identified that are the most important, which they’re not that you get the same thing with our products, but it takes your whole foot and puts it in the play and so basically.

    24:48.997 –> 24:53.544

    [SPEAKER_03]: while the big shoe companies have been publicly saying that what we’re doing about natural movement is nonsense.

    24:54.145 –> 24:59.894

    [SPEAKER_03]: Nike just validated our entire business proposition by doing something that’s supposed to stimulate your foot.

    25:00.375 –> 25:02.118

    [SPEAKER_03]: Guess who’s been doing it for 16 years?

    25:02.478 –> 25:03.260

    [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, that’s right us.

    25:04.061 –> 25:05.784

    [SPEAKER_03]: And guess who’s been doing it for both her?

    25:06.164 –> 25:10.431

    [SPEAKER_03]: I think a couple hundred thousand years every other human being since the beginning of humans.

    25:12.706 –> 25:17.553

    [SPEAKER_00]: Ecommerce most of the land is supporting by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.

    25:17.693 –> 25:25.664

    [SPEAKER_00]: Here’s a reminder of who they are.

    25:25.684 –> 25:27.847

    [SPEAKER_00]: It’s time for the top six round.

    25:30.831 –> 25:31.672

    [SPEAKER_01]: I love this section.

    25:31.712 –> 25:36.078

    [SPEAKER_01]: I have to ask you these questions whilst I’m my mind boggles at the horrendousness of that Nike show.

    25:37.060 –> 25:42.527

    [SPEAKER_03]: Steven, are you ready for the top tips?

    25:42.625 –> 25:43.106

    [SPEAKER_01]: Excellent.

    25:43.166 –> 25:44.588

    [SPEAKER_01]: Let’s start with the book top tip.

    25:44.628 –> 25:51.657

    [SPEAKER_01]: Then if everyone listening to this podcast, agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?

    25:52.078 –> 25:55.822

    [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it won’t make your business better, except that it might well, it might.

    25:56.223 –> 25:59.307

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m going to say, in the same tile of his first book, Fooled by Randomness.

    25:59.848 –> 26:01.270

    [SPEAKER_03]: And the subtitle is the hidden role.

    26:01.490 –> 26:02.872

    [SPEAKER_03]: I might be butchering it a little.

    26:02.892 –> 26:05.275

    [SPEAKER_03]: The hidden role of chance and markets and life.

    26:05.255 –> 26:18.976

    [SPEAKER_03]: And the reason it’s so important is that highlights how much luck is a factor of what you’re doing and when you put, when you balance luck and hard work in the appropriate way ratio, which is mostly luck.

    26:18.996 –> 26:23.603

    [SPEAKER_03]: And then it gives you a little bit of, you know, humility and perspective that’s helpful.

    26:23.863 –> 26:28.490

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m actually going to recommend another because I can’t, whenever someone says give me the top three, I have to do 10.

    26:28.611 –> 26:30.233

    [SPEAKER_03]: So if you asked one, I’m going to do two.

    26:30.213 –> 26:36.163

    [SPEAKER_03]: Come on, come on, come on, stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which I’ll do the TLDR version.

    26:36.924 –> 26:42.614

    [SPEAKER_03]: Human beings and I’m going to TLDR cut in half because he talks about both the positive and negative aspect of what I’m going to say.

    26:42.634 –> 26:46.100

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m going to focus on the positive one because that’s what entrepreneurs tend to do.

    26:46.140 –> 26:54.634

    [SPEAKER_03]: And that is we spend the majority of our brain cycles trying to think about what will make us happy in the future, whether that’s a moment from now or a hundred years from now.

    26:54.614 –> 26:56.757

    [SPEAKER_03]: The problem is we’re really, really bad at it.

    26:57.277 –> 26:59.440

    [SPEAKER_03]: We’re horrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future.

    26:59.841 –> 27:02.944

    [SPEAKER_03]: The only thing we’re worse at is remembering how horrible we are at it.

    27:03.565 –> 27:06.048

    [SPEAKER_03]: And the only thing worse than that is that we think we’re special.

    27:06.609 –> 27:09.893

    [SPEAKER_03]: And if we find that there’s a million people who got what we think would make us happy.

    27:10.374 –> 27:16.942

    [SPEAKER_03]: And they are no more happier than they were to begin with, or less happy, or less happy than we are, then we still think, yeah.

    27:17.383 –> 27:19.305

    [SPEAKER_03]: But if it happened to me,

    27:19.285 –> 27:45.259

    [SPEAKER_03]: I’m not like those million people, and the reason this is important is that the more you really dive into the thought experiment of recognizing how bad we are, predicting what will make us happy in the future, the less you get swept up in focusing on the hyperoptimistic opportunities and less on the risk of, for example, overextending and doing other things that could put you out of business in lightning speed, back to that luck factor.

    27:45.239 –> 27:54.713

    [SPEAKER_03]: So entrepreneurs, we fall in love with our babies, usually not our children, just our visit, your product babies, I say this is someone who doesn’t have children, so I’m just making it up.

    27:56.215 –> 28:06.991

    [SPEAKER_03]: But we fall in love with the imagined future and we don’t pay enough attention to the risks that we are creating for us every moment that we are paying more attention to the imagined future that’s the one that we want.

    28:07.351 –> 28:08.513

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I recommend that book as well.

    28:08.915 –> 28:10.497

    [SPEAKER_01]: marvelous recommendations.

    28:10.517 –> 28:17.106

    [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either price above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?

    28:18.347 –> 28:27.559

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, word of mouth, obviously, just under half of our orders come from existing customers and out of the remaining like 57% and half of those come from people who met those people.

    28:28.140 –> 28:35.209

    [SPEAKER_03]: So if you have a product that is changing people’s lives and by the way, if your business is not doing these two things,

    28:35.189 –> 28:39.595

    [SPEAKER_03]: changing bills lies and letting you tell the truth, then you might want to reconsider what you’re doing.

    28:39.635 –> 28:42.860

    [SPEAKER_03]: Now, I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t do something just to make money.

    28:42.900 –> 28:46.465

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t, I’m not arrogant enough to think that your way is not appropriate.

    28:47.006 –> 28:54.096

    [SPEAKER_03]: But when you can do those two things, it’s like having a superpower and it’s really, really enjoyable when you have a superpower.

    28:54.837 –> 28:58.362

    [SPEAKER_03]: So the things that we do to encourage

    28:58.342 –> 29:03.388

    [SPEAKER_03]: people to spread the word and do it in the right way without being obnoxious to your friends when you have a life changing event.

    29:04.049 –> 29:06.812

    [SPEAKER_03]: That’s frankly the biggest thing that we do.

    29:07.273 –> 29:13.160

    [SPEAKER_03]: And then after that, it’s no different than it was when I started internet marketing in 1992 content content content.

    29:13.700 –> 29:15.843

    [SPEAKER_03]: And there’s just always new ways and new places to put it.

    29:15.903 –> 29:27.657

    [SPEAKER_03]: And my gosh, I don’t know if you saw this not too long ago, a lot of people were posting and selling courses on doing meta ads, where

    29:27.637 –> 29:33.930

    [SPEAKER_03]: like we did 25 years ago, what’s old is new again, and frankly, it was never old.

    29:33.971 –> 29:42.088

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s just people thought there was something that worked better, and so they stopped doing it, and then people were like, oh, wait, why don’t you try that thing that, you know, there’s old guys that, you know, we don’t think what they do works.

    29:42.108 –> 29:42.769

    [SPEAKER_03]: But let’s just try it.

    29:42.789 –> 29:43.892

    [SPEAKER_03]: Oh my God, it works.

    29:44.293 –> 29:45.375

    [SPEAKER_03]: It always worked.

    29:45.355 –> 29:47.939

    [SPEAKER_01]: Awesome, an extra bonus tip in there as well.

    29:48.460 –> 29:59.295

    [SPEAKER_01]: The tall top tip, maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in, a phone app or just a way of working, is the recall little tool you use that makes you and your team at more efficient from day to day.

    29:59.936 –> 30:01.458

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I have an anti tool.

    30:01.679 –> 30:04.663

    [SPEAKER_03]: I refuse to get on slack.

    30:04.863 –> 30:05.544

    [SPEAKER_01]: me too.

    30:05.564 –> 30:07.929

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need any more interruptions.

    30:08.069 –> 30:09.552

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need any more multi-tasking.

    30:09.572 –> 30:10.413

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s not multi-tasking.

    30:10.473 –> 30:12.637

    [SPEAKER_03]: I already got enough stuff that I keep in my brain.

    30:12.698 –> 30:13.499

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t need any more.

    30:14.140 –> 30:19.210

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I’m trying to think if there really is a tool that has changed.

    30:19.230 –> 30:20.552

    [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, here’s the tool that has changed my life.

    30:21.133 –> 30:25.461

    [SPEAKER_03]: I got a really good black check application on my phone just for training.

    30:25.581 –> 30:28.086

    [SPEAKER_03]: Just to learn basic strategy and how to become a card counter.

    30:28.066 –> 30:31.251

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s, as my wife says, it’s better than candy crush.

    30:31.451 –> 30:34.155

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s actually something you might be able to make money with at some point.

    30:34.175 –> 30:45.513

    [SPEAKER_03]: So I think, and I say this all these semi-facetiously, because I decided to learn to play blackjack or try to learn to play jack, blackjack, as an intellectual exercise.

    30:46.074 –> 30:53.185

    [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, to see how you learn these, not these simple but not easy tasks to do this very interesting procedure.

    30:53.926 –> 30:56.790

    [SPEAKER_03]: And it’s actually changed the way I think about

    30:56.770 –> 31:13.090

    [SPEAKER_03]: a lot of the way I look at data and not in any, you know, like, oh my god, hundred-native degree way, but I definitely think about risk differently and I definitely think about how to look at information differently because here, this is a weird thing I can say about blackjack that is actually relevant.

    31:13.110 –> 31:17.295

    [SPEAKER_03]: I would argue to the way people think about tools and advertising.

    31:17.976 –> 31:21.580

    [SPEAKER_03]: So because every hand of blackjack is effectively random,

    31:21.560 –> 31:30.962

    [SPEAKER_03]: There’s no difference between you playing for a hundred hours straight or you playing for one at one hour a day for a hundred days, we’re having a hundred people playing one hour at the same time.

    31:31.744 –> 31:33.969

    [SPEAKER_03]: Mathematically, it’s the exact same thing.

    31:34.451 –> 31:35.613

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s a weird thing to think about.

    31:36.014 –> 31:39.282

    [SPEAKER_03]: But when you think about people who say, focus on one channel,

    31:39.262 –> 31:59.953

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, okay, that’s one way of doing it or you can focus on a whole lot of things and find out which are the ones that are popping and you’re going to have some that win and some that lose and then it’s going to average out in on the black check world you’re very small edge turns in way very large amount of money over time in the same way when I think about when people say, you know, well, why don’t you redeploy.

    31:59.933 –> 32:08.809

    [SPEAKER_03]: The money that’s going to that thing that’s delivering a 3x to the thing that’s delivering the 4x, the answer is because we don’t know if adding that money is going to make the 4x any better or not.

    32:08.829 –> 32:16.643

    [SPEAKER_03]: Let’s just keep doing these and just build on those until they hit diminishing returns and then try another thing or 5 or 10.

    32:16.623 –> 32:22.250

    [SPEAKER_03]: Now, I will also argue that I like to say all companies rise to the level of the neuroses of their founders.

    32:22.871 –> 32:28.297

    [SPEAKER_03]: And as you may have gathered, focus and organization and prioritization, not my thing.

    32:28.938 –> 32:29.559

    [SPEAKER_03]: I don’t do that.

    32:30.180 –> 32:36.808

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s worth that okay for us now, and it’s worth not even better, because we have some people who now can add that to the equation when I can’t.

    32:37.168 –> 32:39.551

    [SPEAKER_03]: So they’ll say give me the top three, like I said, I’ll give them 10.

    32:39.972 –> 32:43.356

    [SPEAKER_03]: They figure out which of those three they want to do first and leather instead of repeat.

    32:43.994 –> 32:44.516

    [SPEAKER_01]: Nice.

    32:44.817 –> 32:46.121

    [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the carbon top tip.

    32:46.141 –> 32:48.128

    [SPEAKER_01]: Now this is new since the last time you came on.

    32:48.650 –> 32:52.603

    [SPEAKER_01]: What’s your favourite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?

    32:52.870 –> 33:03.006

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, first let’s be honest, most products, most categories when they talk about what they’re doing to be helpful to the environment is all greenwashing aka bullshit.

    33:03.647 –> 33:12.220

    [SPEAKER_03]: So there are very few things, especially in footwear where the amount of energy that it takes to process and produce these things is actually producing a net carbon benefit.

    33:12.861 –> 33:16.847

    [SPEAKER_03]: And even more, the argument the customers will pay for that depends on your customers.

    33:17.148 –> 33:20.633

    [SPEAKER_03]: Some categories, some colors will most well.

    33:20.731 –> 33:21.752

    [SPEAKER_03]: they say they will, but they don’t.

    33:22.493 –> 33:37.771

    [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I can say what we’re doing, and this is what we’ve been doing for 16 years, is we looked at what footwear, a lot of footwear ends up in landfill, so there’s two things that we’re doing, soon to be three, or variation of two.

    33:38.312 –> 33:40.074

    [SPEAKER_03]: The first is that we make our products differently.

    33:40.755 –> 33:45.861

    [SPEAKER_03]: So in most running shoes, they say you need to replace them every two to 300 miles.

    33:45.841 –> 33:56.679

    [SPEAKER_03]: Whatever they say, the research shows that by 150 miles, the average running shoe is already deteriorating and causing problems with your gate and with your alignment, which cause a bunch of physical problems.

    33:57.340 –> 33:59.725

    [SPEAKER_03]: The new super maximal shoes even faster.

    33:59.765 –> 34:04.352

    [SPEAKER_03]: They’re wearing out, you know, they’re, we’re going to be at an event called the running event in a little while.

    34:04.893 –> 34:11.224

    [SPEAKER_03]: There will be shoes there because they were there, they were there last year, that are designed to be used for one race and then thrown away.

    34:11.204 –> 34:12.065

    [SPEAKER_03]: That’s all they can.

    34:12.706 –> 34:13.147

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s horrible.

    34:13.667 –> 34:19.815

    [SPEAKER_03]: So we developed a rubber that we call field true rubber that we back with a 5,000 miles sold warranty.

    34:20.496 –> 34:26.964

    [SPEAKER_03]: When we developed this rubber and went to the rubber manufacturer, the manufacturer said, but this isn’t how they make rubber for running shoes.

    34:27.024 –> 34:31.390

    [SPEAKER_03]: We went, yeah, I know that’s why we’re going to do it this way.

    34:31.370 –> 34:36.256

    [SPEAKER_03]: So we have fewer materials in a minimalist shoe.

    34:36.596 –> 34:38.138

    [SPEAKER_03]: So that’s using less energy and production.

    34:38.859 –> 34:40.381

    [SPEAKER_03]: We have fewer layers of things.

    34:40.421 –> 34:41.743

    [SPEAKER_03]: That’s using less everything.

    34:42.383 –> 34:44.626

    [SPEAKER_03]: And we make stuff that last longer as much as we can.

    34:44.646 –> 34:46.348

    [SPEAKER_03]: So that’s our biggest thing that we’re doing.

    34:46.949 –> 34:50.794

    [SPEAKER_03]: The second biggest thing is that we’ve already had a, especially for kids.

    34:50.834 –> 34:55.239

    [SPEAKER_03]: We had a bicell trade, Facebook group for parents who bought our kids’ shoes.

    34:56.140 –> 34:57.782

    [SPEAKER_03]: And we are,

    34:57.762 –> 35:06.275

    [SPEAKER_03]: building in a, I don’t know what to call it, our scratch and dent or stuff that gets returned for exchange or for whatever reason that’s resellable but not as new.

    35:07.076 –> 35:14.408

    [SPEAKER_03]: We’re building out a secondary site to be able to offer that to people and we want to just give this shoes as much life as we can.

    35:14.929 –> 35:17.893

    [SPEAKER_03]: So the biggest thing we’re doing frankly is just keeping stuff out of landfill’s runner.

    35:18.454 –> 35:22.200

    [SPEAKER_03]: And FYI, we even, this is something that’s really important.

    35:22.180 –> 35:30.520

    [SPEAKER_03]: We contract with the company that said they had a ingredient they could add to the rubber of our shoes that would make them biodegraded faster in a landfill.

    35:31.402 –> 35:32.865

    [SPEAKER_03]: And so that was great.

    35:33.306 –> 35:34.509

    [SPEAKER_03]: And we decided to try it.

    35:34.649 –> 35:39.160

    [SPEAKER_03]: And at the same time, we did our own independent testing and found out they were lying.

    35:39.140 –> 35:52.174

    [SPEAKER_03]: So just because someone tells you, if you’re a manufacturer, just because someone tells you do not believe them, the motivation for them to sell you something and give you data that may have worked under certain conditions, but not necessarily normal conditions.

    35:53.195 –> 35:56.578

    [SPEAKER_03]: So they can make money off everyone’s desire to go green is very high.

    35:56.598 –> 35:58.080

    [SPEAKER_03]: Greenwashing doesn’t stop with the brand.

    35:58.100 –> 35:59.842

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s, I guess, the best way I could put that.

    36:00.442 –> 36:05.788

    [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of comes back to your point earlier about they’re being no best practice, you know, like there’s things to test.

    36:06.072 –> 36:07.615

    [SPEAKER_03]: You’ve got to.

    36:08.056 –> 36:08.657

    [SPEAKER_03]: You have to.

    36:10.200 –> 36:16.594

    [SPEAKER_03]: Keep in mind, many people wear producing products, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in China or in India or in Bangladesh or in the United States.

    36:17.215 –> 36:18.057

    [SPEAKER_03]: People are motivated.

    36:18.097 –> 36:23.608

    [SPEAKER_03]: The manufacturers are motivated to squeeze a few sense out of things that you don’t specifically call out.

    36:23.588 –> 36:31.443

    [SPEAKER_03]: And so if you don’t say this piece has to weigh this with this density and these materials, you know, they might find a way to do it a little bit differently.

    36:31.924 –> 36:37.395

    [SPEAKER_03]: And you’re going to get a different product than what you expected with different characteristics and they’ve just made a few extra dollars.

    36:37.455 –> 36:41.783

    [SPEAKER_03]: So it’s, I mean, I hate to sound whatever I sound like when I say that.

    36:41.763 –> 36:52.295

    [SPEAKER_03]: like Debbie Downer, but I’ve just lived it too many times and so we are hyper vigilant about not believing a word people say and testing it even with people we’ve worked with for years.

    36:52.615 –> 36:54.117

    [SPEAKER_03]: The next production run we tested again.

    36:54.738 –> 37:01.345

    [SPEAKER_03]: We just are very, very cautious because even people who are looking out for our best interests have their own interests as well.

    37:02.066 –> 37:04.408

    [SPEAKER_01]: So Steven, we have to wrap up very soon.

    37:04.448 –> 37:11.196

    [SPEAKER_01]: But before we do, could you please let the listeners know whether they can get in contact

    37:11.615 –> 37:12.836

    [SPEAKER_03]: It’s really simple.

    37:13.056 –> 37:16.039

    [SPEAKER_03]: If you’re in the UK, zeroshuse.co.uk.

    37:16.179 –> 37:22.445

    [SPEAKER_03]: If you’re in the EU, zeroshuse.eu, if you are anywhere else, you can start at zeroshuse.com.

    37:22.805 –> 37:29.591

    [SPEAKER_03]: And if you’re in certain places, you’ll find, find us, we have distributors in various parts of Asia and Australia, New Zealand, in South America.

    37:29.931 –> 37:31.673

    [SPEAKER_03]: So you’ll bump into us kind of anywhere you go.

    37:31.873 –> 37:33.775

    [SPEAKER_03]: Kind of hard to miss us if you’re jumping looking online.

    37:34.015 –> 37:39.580

    [SPEAKER_03]: And just keep in mind, zeroshuse is X-E-R-O-S-U’s.com or.co.eu, or.eu.

    37:39.948 –> 37:42.982

    [SPEAKER_01]: Steven, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

    37:43.063 –> 37:45.836

    [SPEAKER_01]: It’s been an absolute treat to get to catch up with you again.

    37:45.856 –> 37:47.745

    [SPEAKER_01]: So thanks for sharing so much of your knowledge with us.

    37:48.287 –> 37:48.568

    [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.

    37:48.589 –> 37:49.131

    [SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.

    37:54.562 –> 37:59.690

    [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I can’t believe it’s taking me eight years to get Stephen back on the podcast because that was fascinating.

    38:00.311 –> 38:10.428

    [SPEAKER_01]: And out of interest for you guys listening, those two books, which he gave such thorough recommendations to are the exact same two he recommended eight years ago.

    38:10.468 –> 38:17.599

    [SPEAKER_01]: So some consistency of recommendation, which I think puts them should put them higher up on all of our to be red lists.

    38:17.579 –> 38:20.003

    [SPEAKER_01]: lots and lots to unpick from that.

    38:20.444 –> 38:29.059

    [SPEAKER_01]: I suspect it’s when you might need to listen to a couple of times, but I think the big big things are, you know, how a business changes as you go from 5 million to the 68.

    38:29.179 –> 38:35.149

    [SPEAKER_01]: I think his focus is he’s outlining in the carbon top tip there about how

    38:35.129 –> 38:39.556

    [SPEAKER_01]: It’s about making your product, keeping your product out of landfill for as long as possible.

    38:39.596 –> 38:41.178

    [SPEAKER_01]: It’s a really cool way of thinking about it.

    38:41.198 –> 38:50.913

    [SPEAKER_01]: And I think the bits he was saying around, you know, have a healthy level of skepticism, test, explore, and have that healthy level of skepticism.

    38:50.974 –> 38:56.462

    [SPEAKER_01]: The big ones for me immediately taking out of that, but I suspect that will evolve over the coming days and weeks.

    38:56.442 –> 39:16.155

    [SPEAKER_01]: You can get your hands on the notes from this episode including those top tips and links to what we mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterpland.com You can use also use even our director episode short links just put ECMP dot info for such the number of this episode into the URL bar and you’ll be redirected straight to the right page of the site

    39:16.135 –> 39:23.605

    [SPEAKER_01]: When you get to the website, you can also add yourself to our email list, that way you won’t miss out on any of the other things I share to help you improve your business.

    39:24.026 –> 39:28.832

    [SPEAKER_01]: And if you liked this episode, then do go and check out our first chat with Stephen.

    39:28.872 –> 39:34.920

    [SPEAKER_01]: Episode 188, we get into a whole load of very different stuff to what we talked about today.

    39:34.900 –> 39:43.848

    [SPEAKER_01]: You can also find all our episodes with footwear and other fashion retailers at ECMP.info for such fashion that will take you to the website.

    39:44.269 –> 39:48.953

    [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for tuning into this and every episode that you do of the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.

    39:49.353 –> 39:59.082

    [SPEAKER_01]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help Ecommerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses including progressing along that past a carbon neutral.

    39:59.502 –> 40:04.587

    [SPEAKER_01]: So if you know someone this show can help please tell them to listen to

    40:04.567 –> 40:05.550

    [SPEAKER_01]: I hope you have a great week.

    40:06.071 –> 40:19.690

    [SPEAKER_00]: Don’t forget to keep optimizing.

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    eCommerce Master PlanBy Chloe Thomas