#764 – TikTok, AI, and a $3M Soap Brand

What does it take to turn a homemade product into a multimillion-dollar brand? In this episode, Bradley Sutton speaks with Joe McCutcheon, founder of Carolina Castile Soap, and Marc Messer from Advanced Bionutritionals. Together, they reveal how product differentiation, creator partnerships, AI-powered systems, and even old-school direct mail can produce remarkable results in today’s e-commerce world.

Joe began making soap for his cleaning company before testing it on eBay and eventually launching on Amazon. After years of reinvesting his profits and producing batches from his kitchen and garage, he grew Carolina Castile Soap from $1.8 million last year toward a projected $3 million this year. Joe explains how professional packaging, distinctive scents, Helium 10 research, and a community of TikTok creators helped the brand stand apart. Today, approximately 70% of its revenue comes from Amazon, while TikTok Shop has become both a profitable channel and a source of additional Amazon demand.

Marc shares a very different path to growth at Advanced Bionutritionals, a primarily direct-to-consumer company generating between $30 million and $50 million annually. He breaks down the company’s marketing-first product launch process, multichannel profitability analysis, and use of AI to create SOPs, forecast inventory, analyze real-time data, and generate dozens of advertising variations within minutes. He also explains why long-form direct mail still works for the right demographic and why brands need a proven sales message, sufficient cash flow, and patience before testing it.

Whether you are making your first product at home or managing tens of millions of dollars across multiple channels, the principles remain the same: understand your customers, create something worth remembering, and build systems that give your best people room to grow. Success rarely comes from following the crowd. It comes from remaining curious, acting on what you learn, and having the courage to build the brand your customers will never want to leave.

In episode 764 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Joe, and Marc discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 02:09 – Cleaning Business Inspires A Homemade Soap Brand
• 05:10 – Growing Revenue From $1.8 Million To $3 Million
• 07:30 – Balancing Amazon Sales With Profitable TikTok Growth
• 09:28 – Using Helium 10 To Research New Products
• 12:28 – Better Packaging And Scents Transform The Brand
• 16:18 – Building A TikTok Creator Community Beyond Samples
• 21:57 – Mark’s Multichannel And Marketing-First Growth Strategy
• 27:18 – Using AI To Improve Operations And Forecasting
• 33:29 – Scaling Creative Testing With AI-Generated Ad Variations
• 35:27 – Who Should Consider Traditional Direct Mail Marketing
• 38:28 – Building Customer Loyalty And A 70% Reorder Rate

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got two guests for the price of one. One started a side soap business while running a cleaning company and scaled at seven figures. And the other has awesome AI strategies that have helped this company generate tens of millions of dollars of sales online and even through old school catalogs. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s Podcast by Helium 10.I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. It’s a completely BS free organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’re talking AI here at this conference, a lot of stuff. But right now we’re going to talk a little bit about soap. But this is the first time you’ve been on the podcast. So, let’s first just go ahead and get your backstory.

Joe:

My name is Joe McCutcheon and I own Carolina Castile Soap. 

Bradley Sutton:

You just told me you live in Raleigh, North Carolina. Is that where you’re born and raised?

Joe:

I was born in Maryland, raised in North Carolina, carry North Carolina since I was five. Mostly lived there for the rest of my life except for a couple of years in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Bradley Sutton:

Did you go to UNC or anything?

Joe:

No, I went out to Phoenix, Arizona. I went to a community college out there, studied chemistry for a couple of years.

Bradley Sutton:

Chemistry on purpose, you know, like I know some of us have to take chemistry as well. So if you’re taking chemistry on purpose, what were you thinking about getting into?

Joe:

I really hadn’t even gotten that far. I just realized that like I kind of had a little bit of a passion for it and was decent at it and figured it would probably come in handy in something worthwhile at the time.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, but then you got your two years there and then what did you do after?

Joe:

You know, I just discovered that really school, college wasn’t for me and ended up not even completing the whole two years and went into the restaurant management business and moved back home to North Carolina. And I was a cook and became a manager there and worked there at a restaurant there for about five or six years as a manager.

Bradley Sutton:

So chemistry, restaurant, food industry. What year and how did you discover e-commerce?

Joe:

2014, 2013. I had been running a cleaning company after I got out of the restaurant business, ran a house cleaning service for six or seven years at that time. And then I decided, you know, I started making soap to clean houses with. We were using another brand of soap and I thought it’d be really cool to tell our customers that we are in our products are so natural that we make them ourselves. And so my cleaning business, I got to a point where I could hire managers to run it in my absence. And so I was enjoying making soap so much that I was like, man, I’ll just maybe I should just start selling soap. And I think I started testing on eBay just to like see if people would actually buy it. And they were in 2014. I started on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So this was all made in USA completely?

Joe:

At that time, yes. Yep. I was making it all myself, actually, for the first like four or five years.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that something you could do like in your bedroom or you had a garage?

Joe:

Actually, I started in my kitchen and I broke several stoves because these five gallon pots were like so heavy. It was weighing down the coils and they’d break. And eventually I got a 50 gallon tank to cook it in my garage. And I was making 50 gallons every other day. As soon as it would cool, I would bottle it and start another batch. I couldn’t keep up with it and eventually realized I was going to have to really I was going to have to hire it out because I didn’t have the expertise to make it much larger batches than that.

Bradley Sutton:

So the chemistry actually did come in handy here. Here we’re talking chemistry and we’re talking batches and barrels in your house. All of a sudden I’m thinking Walter White Breaking Bad action going on here. But like during this time, your main income, I assume, was still running the cleaning business. At what point were you like, hey, this could potentially be a full-time gig or a lot even more profitable than I thought it would be, not just a little small side hustle?

Joe:

Well, I absolutely lived off of the cleaning company income and that’s what enabled me for better or for worse to reinvest all of my profit into the soap business and really be patient with it. And it was probably or maybe around 2020 when people started panic buying soap that I mean, it was it wasn’t that we just got a temporary surge. That temporary surge led to more customers, more exposure. And really, it was probably after that time that I started to see that this was something that, you know, could do much better than my cleaning company. And now I’m about to sell my cleaning company and our soap revenues triple what we do in house cleaning revenue. And yeah, just the last few years really have I started to consider exiting the cleaning business.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you always growing or was there another year other than last year, let’s say, or what you’re projected to do this year that was your biggest gross revenue for the soap company and about how much was it? 

Joe:

How much was it last year? 

Bradley Sutton:

Or how much was your peak? Or if this year’s projected is your peak, how much are you projecting?

Joe:

Projecting three million for this year. Last year was one point eight. And we’ve we’ve grown pretty much every year. But leading up to 2020, it was like just barely growing.

Bradley Sutton:

One would think that soap is a pretty competitive niche, you know, like any any kind of product like that shampoo, you know, soap, you know, things that people can, you know, the huge billion dollar companies are in. How have you been able to have been successful, especially at least in the beginning? You know, maybe you’re about to say that you have moved manufacturing somewhere else. But how in the world were you able to be profitable and compete in such a difficult market?

Joe:

That’s a good question. I mean, soap in general is very competitive, but we sell a particular niche of soap called Castile soap. And there wasn’t at that.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s that mean? 

Joe:

Castile soap is so technically soap made from olive oil. But over time, that’s evolved to mean really just soap made from any sort of fatty acids, from the saponification of any fatty acids, vegetable fatty acids.

Bradley Sutton:

So what’s the benefit? What’s the benefit of that? Or like, I’m assuming that there’s some kind of purpose or value.

Joe:

Sure. I mean, people like knowing that they’re using soap made from coconut oil and basically foods, things you can eat and, you know, feel like it’s, you know, safer because of that. But Castile soap, one thing I think that’s really special about it is just how multi-purpose it is. Our soap, you can shampoo with it, body wash, hand soap. You can scrub your dishes with it, clean your house with it, do your laundry.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. At what point or did you outgrow your home manufacturing side of things?

Joe:

Yeah, that was like in 2017. And at that time, we were only making liquid soap. We were just outgrowing it. Like I said, we couldn’t make it fast enough. We would make it as soon as it cooled, we bottled it. And eventually I started reaching out to other manufacturers. And once I found, I actually, I found one that was making one of our competitors products. And I thought, well, man, if they can do that, they must be pretty good. And so when they started making our soap, that’s when I started going, getting into bar soap and really Castile bar soap is kind of unique and special.

Bradley Sutton:

The projected millions that you’re doing this year, what percentage is Amazon USA? If not a hundred percent, or are you on other Amazon marketplaces or TikTok shop, Walmart, things like that?

Joe:

We do about 75% or 70% of our revenue on Amazon. I guess it kind of varies month to month, but we’ve tried Amazon Europe in the past and realized there’s just so many regulations to get through in Europe to start selling there. And our soap is so heavy and bulky to ship over there. We may revisit that at some point, but we’re 70% Amazon US approximately. And the other 30% for the most part is TikTok shop.

Bradley Sutton:

Any Shopify?

Joe:

Well, I kind of bundle my Shopify and TikTok. So let’s say maybe 5% Shopify, 25 to 30, and the 30% is mostly TikTok, some Shopify.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you profitable on TikTok or are you running it for the halo effect on Amazon or a mixture of both?

Joe:

You know, I’ve heard people say how, you know, TikTok’s just to get the halo effect on Amazon. You don’t really need to go into it expecting to make a profit. And I just, I think that’s just completely not the case for us. You know, our margins are just as good on TikTok. Fulfillment by TikTok, their fulfillment fees are so much better than Amazon’s that we are able to, you know, take that extra savings and put it into, you know, working with creators and things like that and ads. So yeah, we’re definitely profiting on TikTok and we’re also getting the halo effect. No doubt we’re getting the halo effect, but selling on TikTok, especially fulfillment by TikTok is definitely profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

I like that. I like that. You know, and we’re talking in 2026. This is in 2023 when TikTok was basically paying you to ship, you know, a product out. So even with all that stuff gone, it still sounds like it could be profitable and good shipping. When did you start using Helium 10?

Joe:

Around 2020, I think we started working with an Amazon management agency and they recommended Helium 10 and started working with it then.

Bradley Sutton:

What are the tools and use cases that we’re using? Are you using it to look for, you know, new, I don’t know what you call it, flavors or new kinds of soap? Are you looking mainly for keyword research, listings?

Joe:

Yeah. I mean, that’s really, I think maybe our biggest benefit from Helium 10 is the Google Chrome plugin where you can, I mean, I was just showing somebody this downstairs, you know, to be able to look at any product’s revenue over the last 30 days is like pretty neat. And I don’t know, it seems like a lot of people don’t realize you can see what people are selling, you know, what their sales are on Amazon. But we’ll use that to, you know, evaluate getting into different categories where the biggest thing we’re using Helium 10 for is just to be able to evaluate other products and use that to determine where to go next with ours. And not only just new product categories, but like, you know, one of our biggest things we do in a new product launch is just changing the scents of our soaps. And so evaluating some of our competitors and what their best performing scents are using the Chrome extension has been really helpful. That and then I get my daily email with, you know, our ranking and then the alerts, you know, and, you know, something changes on our listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Has something happened where you got the alert and you were able to take action? And if so, what was it?

Joe:

You know, one of the biggest ones, I mean, it’s not even that big, but it can add up to a lot of money is like when our dimensions change. Sometimes we’ll, you know, just like randomly changes to something that doesn’t make any sense at all. And I’m like, I’m glad I didn’t miss it because God knows how much that would add up to over the course of years.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Something I like to do for the ones who are open to talk about their brand. Say your brand again, how people can find you and the website. And if you can give us a discount to the listeners, but also like, hey, if they’re just getting into their first kind of soap, like which one should they get? Like what’s a good starter pack to get?

Joe:

Yeah. So our brand is Carolina Castile Soap. You can find us at castilesoap.com. That’s Castile with one L. C-A-S-T-I-L-E soap.com. And we’ll do a Helium 10 coupon code for 10% off. You’ll just put Helium 10 as the code. And my current favorite is our Patchouli Bergamot Liquid Castile Soap. You’ll love that blend. Our best seller is Tobacco Vanilla. So if that sounds like something you’d like, that would be a good one too.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. I think I’m going to have to use this coupon code and get, I’ve been searching for new different soaps and I got some popular ones and I was like, this soap is terrible. So my free agency continues for getting married to a certain soap brand. So I’m going to give this one a try for sure. Now, not any company can just get on Amazon, scale up to millions of dollars of sales. What are some of the unique strategies other than having a good product? Having good formulation and being in a good niche, obviously that’s important. But what are some of the unique things that you’re doing that maybe the average person might surprise them?

Joe:

The things that have really been working well, one has been just working with creators on TikTok, just sending out as many samples as possible. The other strategy I would say would just be that one thing that really, two things made all the difference for us. One would be, when I first started out, I was designing my own packaging. I designed my own labels. And for me, the designs I came up with were okay. But if you look at what our label looks like now and compare it to what it was before, it’s almost a little bit embarrassing. But just finding a really good designer to make sure that our labels just look as good as possible. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to cuss on here, but there’s some cuss words I can think of to think of when I describe kind of like how much I love our new design. But that is what helps our main images be so good. I think just having beautiful packaging, and maybe touting our own horn here, calling it beautiful, but we get that a lot. People really compliment our packaging. And so being willing to spend the money to hire a good designer to make good packaging.

Joe:

And the other is really opening our minds up to doing something different. We used to, and I think this happens a lot in eCommerce selling, is people just kind of copy and duplicate what other people are doing. And that’s what we did for our first maybe six or seven years is we just made the same scents and fragrances that other soap companies were using. And I remember during COVID, I was playing video games with a buddy and he was like, man, do y’all have any like masculine fragrances, like a leather or tobacco or something? And I was like, no, but that’s a good idea. I should like, you know, we were so closed minded while we must have all organic everything. And it was only when I opened my mind up to saying, you know what? Maybe 100% of the ingredients don’t have to be organic. Maybe we need to open our mind up and consider using a fragrance and not just essential oils. And so I guess the strategy is just like opening your mind up to doing something different and not just, you know, following what everyone else is doing and just try to come up with something unique.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So, I mean, obviously you could, you know, use Helium 10 to like look for what people are searching for that might not be out there. Maybe, you know, somebody is searching tobacco, leather, soap, and you see there are none. Okay. That doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a chemist to know that this might be a good way to go. But absent that, you know, when it’s just a friend saying something, that’s just one person. What has been your process as far as like, how do you validate, you know, cause I’m assuming you can’t just, oh, or maybe you can, you tell me. I can’t just make 10 bars of soap as a test run and then put it up on Amazon. I’m sure there’s gotta be some kind of like minimum order and you, like you said, packaging and stuff. And so, you know, you might be thousands of dollars in when you go for a new fragrance. What gives you the confidence to do that? Do you have any kind of testing that you do or like, how in the world do you get confidence to invest that kind of money into something new?

Joe:

I mean, it was a bit of a gamble, honestly. I mean, we looked out there to see, you know, other, you know, maybe there were another Castile soap brand selling, you know, masculine fragrances. But if I looked at some other brands that sell other soaps, I could see that, again, using the Helium 10 Chrome extension, I was able to see that like people are buying a ton of soaps that have, for example, for us, again, it was diverting from natural essential oils to a fragrance that might be a blend of natural and synthetic compounds. And, you know, looking around, I could see that there was brands with their whole ingredient list with synthetic ingredients, and I could see what they were selling. And I was like, there’s no way that this won’t work. I mean, I don’t know that I was like, there’s no way, but I was like, it seemed pretty promising. And so, you know, I forget what our first batch size was, but it sold out very, very fast. And we quickly realized that like, this is going to work. Then, yeah, our batch sizes increased every time we’ve reordered.

Bradley Sutton:

You mentioned a target of 10 samples a day on TikTok shop. What are some other strategies? Like, once you get these 10 samples, are you like engaging with them? Do you try and get their content information? Or it’s just like, all right, here’s a sample, go do it. Are you telling them what kind of video to do? How are you even looking for these, you know, creators? You’re looking for ones that have made videos on soap or just random, you know, certain demographic?

Joe:

Yeah, actually, it was really interesting. Earlier, I met someone where I learned some strategies of what we’re doing from this podcast. And I got talking with him. I was like, oh, you must be the guy that was on this podcast. 

Bradley Sutton:

Talking about Josh, maybe?

Joe:

Yeah, yeah. I remember hearing he said that he, you know, when someone signs up to get a sample, they send them and here’s what we do that he does is we send them a form to fill out where we basically get their email. We started asking them to give us permission to reuse their videos. We discovered that most of them didn’t want to do that. And so we stopped doing that. And we’ll kind of do it on a case-by-case basis. But we get their information. We add them to a newsletter that we use for our creators. And we invite them to a discord. What we try to do is like, use them to use that discord group to, you know, let them know when products are back in stock. I mean, we’ve definitely faced a lot of in and out of stocks with our products. It’s been like I said, it’s been hard to keep in stock at times. And so when things come back in stock, or we do a new product launch, we always use the discord to try to communicate that to them that like, hey, you can do a video and announce it such and such is back in stock.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. All right. So there you have it. I mean, some of his strategies you learn right here on this podcast. Now he’s paying it forward. Maybe you guys haven’t heard that other podcast. You just heard it from him. And you guys can implement some of these strategies here. That’s what I love hearing stuff like that, where people think, oh, yeah, I learned this from this person. Then they ended up meeting them in person, like here at a completely unrelated event. I love that. Love that. What’s the future hold? You know, now that you’re exiting your cleaning business, like, are you going to have more bandwidth to go more in on the soap business? Or are you going to take this extra time maybe to like, you know, enjoy life a little bit more without having kind of two jobs or two businesses?

Joe:

I mean, to be fair, my cleaning business, I haven’t really worked a day there in probably 10 years, and I don’t spend a lot of time on it. But I guess if nothing else, it definitely frees me up to just keep leaning into my I mean, really, what I’ve been doing for the last years here is just been like going all in on the soap business. And so I’m going to keep doing that. We’re like I said, we’ve been selling liquid and bar soaps, but I’ve been working hard at getting into some new categories. I want it to be under this brand and still be personal care products. But I feel like we’re on the cusp of finally launching into a new category of product. And again, when I say category, still beauty and still personal care, but just not soap. I feel like we finally built up enough of a following with our brand that people love our scents that they use in our soaps, and they want to experience those and other products. So that’s what I’m hoping to do is like just add on our product, keep launching new ones and really improve some of our existing processes. That’s why I’m here at this event is to try to learn how to improve my processes.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re here at Market Masters. We’ve had some great sessions today. What’s one takeaway today that you’re going to be that you learned that you’re going to be implementing in your business could be something you talked about from networking or from one of the sessions?

Joe:

You know, it was really a question I heard one of the experts asked someone and that was on the hot seat. They said, what do you what is your dream organizational chart going to look like in a few years? Like what what do you foresee it looking like if you want your brand if your goal is to grow your brand to such and such revenue? What’s your organizational chart going to look like then? And kind of like the implication is why is it not starting to look like that now if that’s where you’re trying to get to? And so that’s what I want to I’m always really most recently been really trying to evaluate how I can free up my time from doing things that are not helping our brand grow. It’s not helping launch new products and free myself up so that I can do the things that are really going to help us grow and not be like I don’t do a lot of this. But here’s an example of like stuff I might do is like in a like in a pinch. If there’s a return or we need to replace someone’s product because it got damaged. I might even pack that box up and label it myself and take it to the post office. And I mean, I’m not opposed to doing that, obviously, but I think I my time would be better spent doing other things. And finally, just in the last year or two, we’ve we’ve hired people. My wife’s involved with the business more now and we’ve hired a VA and I’d like to keep hiring more as you know, assuming money allows. But I’d like to keep freeing up my time. That’s one of the things I’ve taken away from this.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, it’s nice to meet you in person here and look forward to maybe, you know, reconnecting in a year or two and see where the business is at. And I’m going to go ahead and go buy some of this stuff right now. And who knows, maybe this is my new go to soap. I’ll let you guys know in a future episode how it worked out. And you guys let us know if you bought some of it in the comments below. We’re continuing our series here in the ridiculously hot Austin. I don’t know if you guys can see this. It is 101 degrees outside. I don’t know how people can live in this, but we have people here from Dubai. They’re probably like, oh, I need to put on a sweater. It’s a little bit a little bit nippy here. But anyways, I don’t even know where this gentleman is from. We’re about to find out his first time on the show. Mark, welcome. How’s it going?

Marc:

It’s going pretty well. And I’m actually from Atlanta. So very similar weather than here.

Bradley Sutton:

Atlanta is where you live now. Is that where you were born and raised? 

Marc:

No, I’m originally from Cincinnati.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Cincinnati. And when you graduated school or high school, where did you go to college?

Marc:

So I graduated like after my freshman year of high school.

Bradley Sutton:

And then did you go to college or do something else?

Marc:

No, I started a business.

Bradley Sutton:

I like that. Entrepreneur from an early age. What did you do?

Marc:

I had a consulting firm. So I had mostly doctors, dentists, lawyers at the time that were clients. And I had one big one, a company called Merrill Lynch.

Bradley Sutton:

What were you consulting about? 

Marc:

Mostly back then, there wasn’t a ton of software like there was today. So I was helping to put software in place to solve business problems. So every business had a different issue. For example, like at Merrill Lynch, most of those financial advisors, they all had their own little individual businesses just under the Merrill Lynch banner. They’re all running custom CRMs, things like that. So I was kind of putting those in place for them.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, in what year did you discover e-commerce? And what was what aspect of e-commerce was your first entry?

Marc:

So after about four years of having my consulting business, I actually went and joined a larger consulting firm. So I went from about 20, 25 clients to about 100 overnight, 85 different verticals. So there were some e-com clients there. And then in 2008, the company that I actually work for now became a client. And I wrote the software system that still to this day runs all of the online sales and pretty much the entire company.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you ever sell on your own or it’s always been as like a consultant and working for companies and managing what they do?

Marc:

It’s just been selling services on my own. So I never sold goods myself. But obviously for the last 18 years, I’ve been selling supplements, skincare, publishing, that kind of thing.

Bradley Sutton:

The companies you’ve been working for? 

Marc:

Yep. 

Bradley Sutton:

What percentage of what you do for people is Amazon? Has that changed over the years now that there’s newer things that didn’t even exist a few years ago, like TikTok shop and other things?

Marc:

Yeah. So e-tail, as I call it, or online retail has become a larger part of our business. It was nonexistent four years ago. So we primarily went on to Amazon to defend our brand, defend our turf, and then accidentally started making a couple million on Amazon a year. So I’m like, oh, we should probably manage this and grow this. So we’ve now grown Amazon up to about 10% of our business. We’ve got TikTok kind of getting launched this year. We’ve got Target Plus coming online. Walmart Plus has been on for a while, but Walmart’s definitely much smaller than the Amazon game.

Bradley Sutton:

And across all online channels, for this entity here, what would you kind of project this year’s sales to be gross?

Marc:

This year is going to probably be a little bit better than last year. We’re typically in the $30 to $50 million range. We’ll probably be right in the middle there this year. We kind of did some restructuring. It was kind of more strategic. So we’ve been pulling back on some of our meta spend and a few other areas to be a little bit more profitable this year, just to get some decent cash flow for some new exciting product launches. I think we’ve launched six or eight new products over the last two years, which probably is more than the previous eight years combined, for example. So we’re really putting an emphasis on kind of changing the types of products we have and the image of the brand.

Bradley Sutton:

You just mentioned launch. I think over the last eight years, that’s been one of the things where strategy has changed the most in the Amazon world. So thinking back six, eight years ago to now, these latest six to eight products, what has changed with your launch strategy? What’s working for you now? What has stopped working?

Marc:

So previously, when we would formulate a product, it typically came from a doctor formulation, a protocol, something like that. And then we would go and formulate the sales message around it. Now we’re looking, we’re working with state-of-the-art ingredients. We’re working with like a research chief science officer, that kind of thing. And then we kind of know the messaging before we even get the product and we’re getting all of the marketing landed. So that’s been a huge boost for us, because we’ve been able to go straight to like an Amazon, for example, and have marketing from day one. Whereas previously, it was like, we know this formula exists. We know why it needs to exist, but how it’s going to land in the market, we didn’t necessarily know. So it’s been kind of a complete 180 on getting the marketing done first and then having the product arrive in a very short time after that.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you launch on Amazon at the same time as other channels? Or do you get some activity elsewhere first or vice versa? Do you launch on Amazon then on their channel?

Marc:

So typically we’ll do a pre-launch with our house list, right? So we primarily 90% DTC. So we’ll get a good read of how the product’s going to work. And then from there, we will launch on Amazon next. And then TikTok would be third. We have been lately toying with the idea of doing TikTok exclusive launches or Amazon exclusive launches. We haven’t done that yet, but it’s definitely on the horizon.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here at Market Masters, you were talking about AI. Talk about how AI has changed your business and what’s been the biggest unlocks. Is it like just being able to look at data that you didn’t even have time to do before? Is it automating a task and lessening the amount of humans that work for you? Is it on the graphics side? Well, what is the biggest unlock? And then talk about what you, maybe just give us a little tidbit of what you were talking about here.

Marc:

For us, AI is not really reducing workforce. We’re actually increasing workforce with AI. It’s allowing us to get SOPs and stuff like that in place faster. It’s allowing us to look at data, like you said, that we typically, it’s like I kind of knew the numbers on average and they don’t change that much. But now it’s like I can verify that in real time, right? The other thing we’re using AI for is giving some of our A-plus players their time back by helping to move some of the minutia off of them that was really hard to actually either move to a VA or an EA or automate before. Now, with some of these modern day tools, like I talked about one today, like Rockbot, for example, it’s like you can record your screen and just show it what you need to do. It doesn’t even need to have an API. It can literally scrape, do whatever. And we’re using tools like that. The workshop I did yesterday is a process. I used to write a lot of software way back in the day that over the last year I’ve been using to build internal tools.

Marc:

So like, for example, my purchasing director now has a supply track software that we now know is projected stock outs. And not only is it a projected stock out from like a normal inventory management sense, but it has our entire business model around seasonal sales. It knows about direct, we still do direct mail because we’re a dinosaur. So like, and when I say direct mail, I’m not talking about postcards. I’m talking about like 24 page magalogs, right? And so like that’ll have a huge bump or utilization of units on a certain product, but it’s not consistent and it’s a long burn rate. So sometimes it’ll be like 45 days to get the full response back in. And so now we’re able to project all of those things in like basically real time. Sync from NetSuite, sync from ShipBob, sync from Amazon, sync from Walmart, all these various vendors, sync all of our sales at the same time. And then look at like, okay, did something change? What’s the rolling seven day burn rate? What’s the rolling 30 day? What’s the rolling 90? Kind of go from there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. When did you guys discover Helium 10?

Marc:

I found Helium 10, it was either at Amazon Accelerate last year, or it might’ve been at Prosper the year before. And like I said, we were kind of accidentally doing sales on Amazon and I just needed a better way to view my metrics for Amazon. And I think I just walked in. I remember whoever I talked to at the booth, I can’t remember. I just shook their hand. I said, yes, I want the diamond plan. And I think I walked away and the next minute it was set up. And then I think I’ve only ever logged in and looked at the dashboard. I have the team members of two other things in there, but that’s just kind of like a single pane of glass easy for me to pull Amazon numbers.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you know, now, especially you guys being an AI forward, you know, company should definitely start leveraging the MCP if you haven’t done that.

Marc:

So I just saw that you guys had released that, or we’re talking about it this week. And I’ve got my Amazon analysts like Rockbox, for example. And I’m planning on getting that into the MCP, probably before the end of the weekend. So I like to do, I like to implement a couple things at each event I go to before I leave the event. I think that’s super important. So that’s one of the things that’s on my shortlist to do.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Supplements, you know, this is one of the things that’s maybe competitive, saturated, people might say, like for TikTok and things. So how have you guys been able to still scale up despite, you know, there being many supplements? I mean, do you guys have completely unique value props? Or is it something unique about, you know, some of your strategies that you’re doing?

Marc:

Yeah, so it’s a combination of things. One, we’ve been doing this for like literally over three decades. So we’re very good at honing in on the story and the hooks and getting the marketing right. And then on top of that, with our, especially with our newer formulas, all of, and we’ve always had unique formulas, but the new ones especially are really, really hard to replicate. And part of that is because of, honestly, the cost of it is to manufacture these things at the scale that we’re doing. So we’re able, thankfully, to introduce a product at a lower MOQ initially, maybe eat a little bit of that gross margin, but then rapidly scale it up to get it where we need it to be, you know, long-term for successful growth. A lot of companies that are smaller, haven’t been around as long, are going to have a pretty hard time doing that. It’s not going to make sense on a balance sheet initially.

Bradley Sutton:

I think, you know, like 10 years ago, people were DTC brands, people were Amazon brands, you know, mom and pop never went Shopify, never went anything, there was not even a TikTok. Nowadays, it’s almost like a must that you need to be multi-channel, you know, be on multiple platforms, even if you’re sub-million dollars, arguably you should be. For you guys managing different, you know, channels, I assume, you know, you sell the same or similar SKUs. How are you managing like inventory, production, profitability? Like, do you have it just at the marketplace level? Like, I’m only looking at profitability here, I’m only ordering inventory for this channel and then we’re making another run for this channel. Or are you guys combining everything into like master SKU and like, hey, trying to make one order and hey, maybe we’re not so profitable over here, but we think it’s helping, you know, profitability on Amazon, we’re looking at one profitability number. Like, how do you guys look at multi-channel?

Marc:

So, we look at it all those different ways. That’s pretty much one of my things I do daily, usually first thing in the morning. So, I’m looking at our individual marketing channels for our D2C, right? So, we have our own software stack, right? Own custom e-com platform. So, for that, you know, we look at direct mail by itself and then I look at meta by itself. I look at YouTube by itself, native, right? And then we look at house traffic and see how is that fluctuated with it, you know, spend levels and things like that. And then we look at Amazon kind of isolated. We look at Amazon and Walmart, like TikTok kind of all is one right now. And the other two are small, but obviously Amazon’s large enough. And then the last thing I look at is I roll all of those numbers up to the parent SKUs, actually exactly how you mentioned it. And I look at the spend, how much it costs to fulfill that SKU to the month. And is that number in the black or in the red? And there’s a certain, you know, level of margin I need to hit to pay overhead.

Bradley Sutton:

How much AI are you using, if any, for your visuals? I mean, obviously you’re doing, you know, traditional Sears catalog, you know, type stuff. You’re doing Amazon images, you know, advertising, maybe Facebook ads and stuff. How much of this is AI generated? How much are traditional photo shoots, et cetera?

Marc:

So we still do a lot of stuff non-AI. So I’ve got in-house graphic designers. Most of our images that we’re testing on meta statics, those are AI generated. It’s a fast way to test hooks, obviously. Most of our videos are not. We still have our agencies either shooting studios, either in the Tampa area, or like I actually will film and go on site with some of our doctors across the country. And we do film with them. So we’re still a little bit old school that way. I do find that, you know, AI is trained on everything, right? So the definition of everything is kind of mediocre. And so for companies that were really bad at it before, I’m sure AI is helping them to get where they need to be. But I think for a company that was really good on creative, it may not be helping them quite as much. Now, I will say that you can get some magnitudes of scale going on and some faster iterations. But like we have a custom piece of software where we can take an ad that we like, we see in the wild, and it breaks down, analyzes it. And then it goes across, I don’t know, let’s say 20 different hooks, 20 different, you know, CTAs across that. And I can generate probably 100 images in less than two minutes from something I just happened to scroll by and see on my phone a nd just go click, click. And then next thing I know, I’ve got it for our products, showing our product, not showing our product, top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of funnel. It’s pretty wild stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So I would say that’s one of the more unique things about, you know, you guys, other than your structure, you know, other than Kevin King, I’m not sure how many are doing direct mail these days. So there’s a brand listing out there. Maybe they’re a seven-figure brand. Maybe they’re an eight-figure brand. Is there a number of gross sales you need to be doing, or, you know, which all obviously would turn into brand awareness and things like that, where it makes sense to look into direct mail? Or is it a type of product or, hey, no, it’s only if you’ve been in it for a while. If you try to start today, it’s hard to buy a list. Like who should be considering, if anybody, direct mail?

Marc:

Well, for one, it’s definitely based on demographic. The Magilove style, it’s going to be an older demographic for that. Direct mail under an older demographic would be like a postcard, right? Like I’m sure Chewy.com, they mail postcards certain times of the year, things like that. As far as like a gross revenue goes, it’s not so much that, it’s more the tolerance of paying of, everybody’s used to instant results, right? I go spend money on meta today. I’m gonna look at my results tomorrow. With direct mail, you’re ordering a mail drop. It needs to be a certain number of pieces and not be prohibitively expensive. It mails out. It usually you send a third class. So it’s getting delivered over a period of several weeks. Then you’re watching the response rate. People set it aside, right? Like I’ve got mail from two weeks ago, probably sitting on my island at home.I haven’t looked at yet. And so you’re looking at a 45 plus day for the initial response to come in. And so that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And it also requires quite a bit of capital to do a large enough mailing. So it’s really more about cashflow than I would say gross sales, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Then if somebody were to start to look into it, where would they go? I assume the first step would be for, I mean, they gotta know their demographic and then buying a list. Like are there websites out there or how much should they invest? How do they know if it’s a good list or not?

Marc:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a small kind of world in the direct mail space. So a couple of quick Google searches, you’ll find most of the main list brokers and companies that do that. The actual first step to stepping into direct mail is having a killer sales letter because it’s not a VSL, right? This is gonna be on paper. It’s gonna be print. So you need to have had that tested in other channels and have like a crazy response rate before you move on to direct mail.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you notice a bump on Amazon at all? Like when you send a catalog out, maybe people look at it, but they’re like, hey, I wanna get it tomorrow. So let me just buy it on Amazon or most of these people are going ahead and calling a number or I don’t even know. What is the call to action on your catalog?

Marc:

Yeah, so for direct mail, call to actions to phone number. We also have a website on there. QR codes actually suppress response with our audience. So we don’t have a QR code. And then there’s a special code to call in. So our agents are trained when you call in to get that code so we know. And then there’s also something we can do a back-end match against a list if we end up with people that can’t find the code or whatever we have, like we call you and K like unknown codes, those kinds of things. As far as like a bump on Amazon, we definitely noticed a bump on PPC and Google. I don’t know if we personally have seen it on Amazon where I could say this direct mail package drove these sales. I have seen that with native though. I find that interesting. I know TikTok has a halo effect as well on Amazon. And I think it’s product dependent. So I think the more in this particular niche and space and the supplements, the more expensive the product, the less likely they’re going to go to Amazon looking for it. The cheaper the product, there might be like, oh, can I just get this on Amazon?

Bradley Sutton:

Any other e-commerce related, but non Amazon unique things you can talk about to close this out to our audience?

Marc:

I mean, one of the things that makes us successful is a great house email list. And just really building a cult around your business. I think a lot of people, when I take a look at our customer service tickets or things like that, and I’m working with our customer service director, I go in there and I’m like, oh, what’s our return rate this month? We have a really low return rate because we are, first of all, solving the problem at the product level by having efficacious products. But then on top of that, it’s like, okay, well, we have a certain return period for money back. We make exceptions to that all the time. And those are the types of things about the, that’s how you build crazy fans. And when you have a cult and you have fans, we don’t push subscribe and save that hard. And last I checked, we have close to a 70% reorder rate, which is pretty much unheard of out there. And so those are the types of things that I would say, if I was working with another brand, I would say first, how do we make this brand want to have a cult-like following? And that’s the first thing I would probably try and tackle.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. How can people find these products or maybe even get on your mailing list? I haven’t looked at a Sears catalog in like 20, 25 years. I almost want to feel what it’s like to go there. I used to get excited when I would get the Sears and JCPenney catalogs and look through it, show my parents what I wanted.

Marc:

And so, well, first of all, it’s going to look like a health alert. It’s not going to look like a catalog. It’s going to look like a piece that you want to read and you’re like, oh, wow, this is super important. Then you’re gonna realize you’re reading marketing. No, you can go look us up. It’s advanced by nutritionals.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you very much. And we’ll be seeing you maybe Accelerate or when’s the next conference? 

Marc:

Accelerate next month. 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Catch on there.

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