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anyone out there that listens that runs startups and works on startups and stuff like it's hard you know also you always want stuff to look cool but you're always just testing stuff building in public there's a vulnerability and insecurity to that but I think that's kind of the game right now so like try to build a profitable not taking a lot of money I find it's hard to get over that like 50 and 20 million hurdle I love entrepreneurs and I have so much empathy it's a beautiful life and it's

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so hard [Music] Emmett Shine welcome to the Pod man really privileged to have you on honestly if I could just set the stage a little bit and you know as usual we're going to Dive Right In we have a longer episode today just because there's so much ground to cover and there's so much Synergy between us and you and your companies we got our start in brand Identity Design customer Journey design digital products a lot of what Jin Lane kind of started and really made popular in the d2c space and now you know we're

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much more gross strategy Venture building pattern you're you're now on the brand side with pattern so I think you have a lot of a lot of the bird's eye that most folks don't have either being just on the brand side or just on the agency side you have both and we work together uh dark room and pattern work together on a Performance Marketing basis so there's a lot of kind of tethering going on and and so we want to cover everything from you know that 2010 to 2020 d2c era and like how that

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evolved and what your take on that is now but also like where the state of venture building and marketing is today post covet and your experience with that so let's go back to the beginning of Jin Lane I actually don't know you know to be honest that much about the founding or like that initial zero to one for Jin Lane as a business itself like how you got those first few big clients Harry's sweet green smile direct Etc like how that happened and also how you how maybe your process of working with those

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Brands may be changed in the first phase of yourself as an agency so just take us there set that picture for us paint that picture for us and I'm sure we'll we'll like unpack a lot from that jumping off point cool what up thanks Jackson thanks Lucas thanks Team Dark Room thanks everyone for you know hopefully listening in and I'll try to make this you know interesting hopefully some good storytelling and applicable professional lessons within it I've talked on jinlane stuff you know a bunch but I think like

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trying to always add like a new spin to same kind of story I think something I haven't talked on a ton there was a book that someone gave me in like 2004 somewhere around that time so I came to New York City in 2002 to go to college at NYU tis for photography that's kind of my background is more like art and someone gave me a book maybe around like 2006 2007. I don't know that kind of Errors just like blur a little bit but it's called the Warhol economy and the book was made out of I think of Columbia

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graduate students senior thesis and so it's kind of senior thesis style written but the concept of it has stuck with me you can like get a pretty good understanding of it without having to read the book and her thesis was that economically New York City had been known the SEC well New York City is a city of constant reinvention right so as a major city within the world it has you know stood the test of time for x amount of hundreds of years through multiple periods of reinvention it was a major

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you know manufacturing City it was a major port city it later became you know a major real estate and financial City and the second half of the 20th century you know New York City Post kind of going bankrupt in the 70s and being reborn kind of into the 80s out of that your Gordon Gekko Wall Street movies it was really seen for its real estate and finance with the economies that drove you know arguably one of the most important cities if not the most important city you know the second half of the 20th century into the 21st

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century we'll see where they come it plays out the book argued that if you aggregated the economies of hospitality publishing media art in aggregate they rivaled the sectors of other aggregated which was real estate or Finance right and so like alone they're you know pretty small but if you looked at all the people that worked in hotels all the people that worked in restaurants all the people that worked in media and Publishing and the Arts that was the Warhol economy and the Warhol economy

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was this quite large and under represented from an acknowledgment perspective to the Vitality of Economics of the city perspective so in 2004 2005 2006 I'm coming out of art school and I learned you know about all digital stuff I'm like oh websites digital this is cool like I can you know do digital photography I can do digital design I can do digital development I can try pitching this to people to like get money on something I kind of like and no one really knows how to build good-looking websites I have an art

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background I have a design background and learned enough to get myself in trouble on web design and development usually just got smarter people than me that I could talk to but the Warhol economy was where I tried to focus on I tried to focus on the creative sectors of business it could be Hospitality you know hotels restaurants it could be all the art galleries in New York City it could be all the artists that's where I kind of found my crowd and just kind of tinkering away we got introduced one

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thing led to another to Stella McCartney's her team and someone that we did a website for a guy named Tim Barber recommended us on a photo shoot to their team who was looking for a new digital agency they had a collaboration with Adidas called Adidas by Stella McCartney and they were speaking to RGA sidley you know some of the the larger agencies of the day and we were able to throw our hat in and we were probably five kids in our mid-20s and they selected us and we were completely not mature or ready to

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do that um Adidas hated us because we were so unprofessional and so unsophisticated and so it but Stella McCartney had the deciding factor for choosing an agent see and they just said we want to work with them they're cool and get downtown aesthetic like Adidas train them and so Adidas had to train Us in terms of like how Global Commerce worked how region deployment worked how language translation worked how you know codes and standards worked we didn't do any of that so through Adidas we just kind of

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learned a sense of professionalization we also got another job with AOL which was a big publishing entity for a lot of people in New York City at that time through an agency called Partners in Spade which is now known as mythology they also just recommended us we ended up redesigning aol.com when we were like five you know 25 year olds because again they just thought we were interesting and we were showing up late to meetings the CEO of AOL is yelling at us how unprofessional we are and we're like

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dude you know like we couldn't get a cab and so through AOL and Adidas we like learned more professionalizing our services but we still tried to stay within the Warhol economy of fashion media publishing past Hospitality the inflection point of trying to tell kind of History was graduate students in the early 2010s at a business school on the East Coast at Penn on the west coast Stanford looking at you know Zappos really and saying wow Commerce can be done online diapers.com posted the 2000s.com crash and saying there's

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probably a different way that we can do it and that became you know bonobos Warby Parker everlane and so we had the chance to work with all them because they all moved to New York City that was the center for kind of like a culture as Commerce and digital as it related to culture as Commerce right so like there was an old drawing and it said like San Francisco West Coast and it was like a Twitter empty box and that's what the West Coast was more known from a technology perspective and then it was

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the content that you would put into that box you know the New Yorker or BuzzFeed or whatever all your media and Publishing houses were in New York that also was for fashion and shooting they had the hypothesis that you could make stuff look really good because that was direct and had awesome customer service but it really looked terrible right and so their purview was make it look good and do the nerdy CX ninjas and rock stars as well and so that's where we kind of spoke to those folks and really

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that just began the next 10 years of our career was understanding venture capital I never heard of what BC was I didn't know what a startup was I had no idea I'd watch maybe the social network or something you know like I didn't understand Equity or cap tables or how any of that kind of world worked I just thought that these were really thoughtful smart people cool thank you for that context when did you know let's let's jump and fast forward now to the brands that you used in jinlane

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marketing that we're all aware of so like the Harrys the hymns smile direct you know at what point did that Playbook that d2c Playbook and all the services that you provided with those or to those clients become you know maybe not rinse and repeat at that point but it was really getting dialed you know were those Brands were you still kind of cutting your teeth on those processes and figuring stuff out with them alongside them or at that point were you like really comfortable and you're like

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this is we you know we know what the Playbook is we're gonna run it I just listened to um the Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast and best like the best last week with uh Josh Kushner from Drive capital and he doesn't do a lot of like interviews or public talking or whatever so I was kind of really excited to listen to it he was a really big like Steward of Jin Lane Kirsten green and Forerunner Chris piku was at Thrive there was a few folks that were really investing in the consumer sector in what would become D to C and

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they saw this opportunity and I think they both have really parlayed those chapters into incredible careers right so Kirsten green is you know a Forefront DC and a lot of regards for a lot of Industries but really kind of developed her name in the modern Incarnation around consumer Brands like a glossier or you know early investors and um I think uh Dollar Shave Club and Josh Kushner you know he led Warby Parker is series a and was super involved in Harry's and hymns and the list kind of goes on obviously he's you know built

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in-house Oscar all that they really were guiding forces for us again I didn't understand the Playbook I didn't understand the space they saw us as really astute thoughtful designers for building cool websites and doing good branding that was digitally native so we did Harry's with Partners in Spade which is called mythology out of Warby Parker where we had both worked with them and partners in spade and Anthony sprouty one of the founders who now heads up mythology they had led the branding for

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Warwick Parker and did Harry's and they asked us to do like the digital equivalent of that for the website so we had to translate some of their branding to be digital first because this blue there wasn't a hex code for it this font wasn't a web safe font you know so we had to mirror what their style sheet was off PDFs and translate it so that it could work in code in responsive web browsers We additionally had to think about storytelling for razors which was kind of boring and so we used you know

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Sprites in motion where on mobile the Razer would spin or it would Auto load a video we built what's called like a long scrolling PDP these were kind of like early landing pages or prototypes of them we're also doing the custom front end coding Shopify didn't have as robust of kind of themes and back end you're you're hacking and cheating to make it kind of work so I think we always tried to be really creative and we were given really thoughtful entrepreneurs that gave us space to explore because a lot

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of the Playbook wasn't developed yet and there wasn't when Harry's launched there was like uh an acquisition campaign that everlane ran something similar which was like refer a friend and you can get a certain amount of dollars off or early access and I was built for Facebook and Twitter there was no paid marketing on Facebook and when there was it wasn't sophisticated right so 10 years later it's such a sophisticated game of like Arbitrage day trading and back then it was just figuring out how to get in

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front of people with websites where people even buy stuff on mobile and then sweetgreen you know they're thoughtful similar circles we've just done something for reformation we were just trying to think of what e-commerce could be we're using motion we're loading images fast we're doing responsive break points we're going to people's Studios and setting tape on the ground for how to shoot stuff so that it works in different viewports we're just trying to make these holistic beautiful

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experiences to some extent like I don't feel are as represented today there was just a tweet where I forget what the site is and it was a video model walking onto stage left of the screen if someone was like this is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen I had like 20 people send that to me because that's what Jim Lane used to do in yesteryear post flash all the time you know and we learned that from the Stella McCartney team which was you know high production video shoots where everything was on

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flash as soon as Steve Jobs killed flash you had to figure out HTML5 canvas and like making stuff kind of work now everything is so conversion funnel kind of optimize that it's hard to do like beautiful storytelling I think that just like the pendulum always swings and I would take a strike that a combination of smart intelligent understandings of like optimization and conversion funnel what works mixed with beautiful storytelling and higher Fidelity content is something that I think takes from

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yesteryear and takes from now that will be delightful for customers yeah I think we talk about this a lot just in terms of where the Market's going when you look at those early years in in direct consumer like there was a certain type of innovation where basically e-commerce was taking traditional purchases that would happen in store online yeah and like that was the entire Innovation that was it and like not a lot of people were doing that and digital advertising allowed people to you know you just had

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an endless distribution and so it wasn't it didn't need to be a game of day trading because you had so much margin there but the other Innovation that people really forget is the storytelling aspect and so when you had a combination of great economics just by virtue of new digital channels and then an awesome opportunity to storytell in ways that cpg Brands just hadn't in the past you had this awesome wave of of new businesses and new brands and new ways to advertise I think that's like the

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Special Sauce that you guys really cultivated and pioneered in many ways now when you look fast forward to 2023 my general sense is that it has been such a game of optimization recently that in order for like there needs to be the next Innovation there's not much more incremental gain to be had just sort of remixing similar things yeah I think um we were able to be really creative and I think that like zero to one you don't want I like Tony Fidel's book build I just talked about it to our

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team on Monday and like our weekly kickoff that like myself Nick ensues my partners and Angela our CFO do each week and he talks a lot about like when you need data and when do you not need data and like him being serial kind of startup guy like a lot of zero to one you don't want to use data you know you want to try to trust got an instinct and just take a crack at it and I think once you start iterating and doing versions and stuff that's where like you really want to look at the information

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understand it really I think that era was an error not necessarily of data and that it made a shot like Jin Lane able to really Thrive because we were really creative and we were like really good problem solvers to through storytelling you know I would say this more modern era we're in now you know for pattern I think were and myself are still finding our voice and our footing of where storytelling fits in because it is such a data Centric way of operating you know and I always say like you know don't

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hate the player hate the game kind of on some like that is the game memory type stuff right so like I don't ever get mad at like a person or not really I think it's like just understanding the game and to your point Lucas I think like when everyone's digging it's always a great opportunity to zag I don't know I mean I think also another thing with like Lane is that like it was 12 years you know like I started when I was really young I had been doing freelance stuff before that and I think we really

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kind of hit our stride and got known the last few years and that's when I kind of wanted to end it because I was like okay I accomplished something cool in my life I never thought I would amount to anything or do anything you know I had no delusions of grandeur I thought I'd just be a broke loser living in my town like you know so I kind of when we got to a good place I was like I'm done I don't I did something cool I don't want to it up and I think for pattern I kind of looked at it like a probably a

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20-year journey and I think pattern will be cool in the future in a very well regarded and respected capacity and I think myself Nick ensues we're just heads down we're just heads down trying to like build something that we have a hunch could make sense and for anyone out there that listens that runs startups and works on startups and stuff like it's hard you know because also you always want stuff to look cool but you're always just testing stuff building in public you know and there's

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a vulnerability and insecurity to that but I think that's kind of the game right now I think that's also part of just being a Founder today that has become part of the storytelling like if you look at the brands that launched in the 2010s and a lot of the businesses that you worked with those Brands were faceless in many ways which is where you see Brands today succeeding they're very personal I would say most of the businesses that we've talked to recently they're I mean you and I have spoken

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about this the importance of community and like building loyalty they're becoming more personal um yeah and I think that's just part of of being a founder and what the Playbook has evolved into yeah I think there's like a a retro futuristic Miss I'll just say quickly of like fundamental good practices never go out of style and I think you can always surround them with modern efficacy but fundamentals are fundamentals I want to get into those fundamentals I think like that is what

00:17:43 - 00:18:40

we're really interested in and you know obviously we can talk about to your point the pendulum and where the the marginal stuff or the the surface level stuff maybe swinging today I just pulled up this HPS case study on pattern which we've read and I recommend anybody in this space that's interested in e-commerce d2c or Venture building in general reads this is really cool I just highlighted this this one line it says as jinlane's success grew the team felt exhausted rather than energized

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nickeling the CEO acknowledged that we had reached a level of Mastery and rather than feeling challenged it was more like a rinse and repeat mode I don't underscore that to say like oh jinlane became like manufacturing these Brands and it became played out by no means am I am I highlighting or trying to underscore that I think what's interesting is that the space became very saturated and I think Lucas was noting earlier before we got on the podcast that in this article you know you guys talk about how there were

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basically twin Brands like multiple Brands launching like the same product with very little reference very little Innovation yeah and so so we're kind of we're circling around this this idea right now which is that D to C and the proposition surrounding you to see there are fundamentals in there that are so true it got oversaturated and that there were business level things that became sort of exploited or whatever and now it's a matured more matured channel that needs to be approached differently and I

00:19:11 - 00:20:08

think a lot of the things that you guys did in those early years still actually hold true like making great customer experiences getting you unit economics right and and if they are solid through unit economics scaling D to C to get to product Market fit get to Seven figures maybe even eight figures in revenue is still not only an excellent Playbook but sometimes required for some of these Brands to even scale into other sales channels and so I just want to like unpack that you know there's a lot of

00:19:39 - 00:20:39

talk about d2c being dead d2c companies not being profitable there's a lot of critique about d2c and so I just want to like dispense with that a bit talk about that a bit and talk about maybe how that pushed you into pattern if at all and how you see things today now being more on the brand side and like looking at the bottom line of your own companies does that make sense I can start and Emmett was anticipating some some friction here I'll provide even more backstory too because I I think about

00:20:10 - 00:21:09

this a lot most people when you ask them why they shop online which is traditionally you know what people mean when they say direct consumer they say because of delivery to their doorstep that's 60 of the reason why people purchase online and that's nothing novel like you could get milk delivered to your door in 1960s you know that was a a mode and I think there's just not a lot of of room anymore with at-home delivery like you can only get things delivered so much faster and I I think when we

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talk about customer experience like that's just one part of the the pie and yet it's one of the major reasons why people purchase but the real I think Innovations on the customer experience side really happen with storytelling and a lot of these digital touch points and ways to cultivate community in in ways that just weren't possible before so that's where I think a lot of we you spend our time as marketers and I think as the business just consumer in general matures every vertical I think in that

00:21:08 - 00:22:04

HBS article what you guys were experiencing on the agency side seeing multiple Founders launch literally carbon copies of the same brand is what's happening across every major consumer vertical and it's only the consumer verticals that are growing at outpace or outpacing those those growth rates that where there's like real real opportunity I think on the direct consumer side like when you look at Industries like like collagen like certain health and wellness areas cosmetics and so again not to speak in

00:21:36 - 00:22:36

in platitudes but there are definitely macro economic cycles that are really at play here that are very relevant to understand if you're an entrepreneur trying to launch a business today um or even if you're the eight to nine figure direct consumer brand that hasn't Diversified into retail or other distribution ecosystems where there might be more upside so I I want to just provide that context too it's very interesting to me that especially post covid you have more people online than

00:22:06 - 00:23:08

ever they're digitally native and yet Ecommerce penetration is still at this like 16 uh spot and I think that's really because people only view the main Innovation as like getting things to their doorstep which isn't necessarily an innovation yeah I think um so I just bought a bunch of uh I like Keels as a brand I don't know why I just like their like creams and I bought like 200 worth the other night and you know I was kind of like should I go to kiel's website or should I go to Amazon where I know

00:22:37 - 00:23:31

Amazon's gonna be like you know two days and they have the products and stuff but I kind of don't wanna Amazon style sometimes I don't trust Amazon for like closed containery like things and also I don't want to order from like multiple different Amazon vendors because I want to buy like five different one I'm between New York and L.A a lot I'm always I just try to like have my like stash and so I ended up buying it off Keels and I bought off kills because I think I like peels as a brand and they

00:23:05 - 00:24:07

have short they have stores and they have shops and I wanted to further my relationship with the business I got a discount code you know it was like 15 20 off um they had two day delivery which I felt or was fine as well and I've been to their stores multiple times where you know I'm in the system and they know what I like and I can reorder it and so I I think that's that's where I think e-commerce also is really valuable is if you can have a brand or as a brand you can get people to want to deal with you

00:23:35 - 00:24:32

directly versus maybe some of these other really larger very convenient one click away or delivered to your doorstep parts of the ecosystem such as like you know Lucas and I were talking on on you know meta or Google's ad kind of networks the rise of like micro websites that pop up out of ads so you're not only like not leaving the platform you're just kind of staying right there almost like nested where the ad would be versus the prior rise of landing pages where you're being directed to a

00:24:04 - 00:25:04

specific extension of a website and so I think like for Kiehl's as an example for myself like I see a direct relationship with that brand over a long term that I want to invest in and I want to directly do that with them and so again fundamentals of like good customer experience good products Community loyalty ease safety that's where like e-commerce is just a channel there's no way that like d2c is dead or can die or whatever like how is that possible Right like how could retail die how could any

00:24:34 - 00:25:22

of these things die they're just massive massive channels that like it is more mature than when we were talking on a decade ago and there wasn't as defined of a Playbook it'll continue to evolve but like I think that like I'm also not like a cynical guy I am I think optimistic and stuff and I think there's always you know room to Tinker but like on the jinlane side I think the best practices that we had and knew were front-end how to tell stories right we didn't have to worry about the unit

00:24:58 - 00:25:58

economics we didn't have to worry about the business models and I think part of what we saw was that era disregarded some of the fundamentals of yesteryear on consumer businesses and there was thinking about how software businesses work the Venture model Network effects you know these are things that work on the software side they're West Coast software-centric business models of getting you know moonshots and investing in 10 and one gets to this level and it takes you know market share you know and

00:25:28 - 00:26:18

then you can turn up the kind of cost models and build your mode and there's your business and that's what people try to do on the consumer side and it didn't have the results and still doesn't have the results and I think that's the d2c is dead is that Playbook of that era and part of the reasons that we started pattern was we saw that happening because we were getting so many people approaching us and we you know Nick ensues my business partners sues is a great operator and has pretty pragmatic

00:25:53 - 00:26:53

mindset and Nick went to HBS who was at BCG like he's smart and also has a a good understanding in the fundamentals of like finance and business it was like this is crazy this is like there's no this is not sustainable and for pattern the thesis was why don't we just own and operate multiple home good brands which pre-covered we saw home as Millennials you know aging into that which had been delayed because of the Great Recession in 2008 and just have them profitable just profitable and we've we posited

00:26:22 - 00:27:16

that you could get low eight figures 10 to 20 million that's like the natural kind of like concentric Circle for these type of businesses organically profitably relatively organically profitably but we could build a large business we looked at it we're like we don't know how to build a 100 million dollar profitable business that's direct to consumer-centric you can do it we just don't think we're that smart to know what the next you know collagen or whatever of a hot area is and I think we

00:26:50 - 00:27:48

were nervous to put all of our eggs in one basket but we felt really good if we said multiple shots on goal we could build a 100 200 plus Million Dollar business profitable by Distributing it kind of out and going back to fundamentals of how businesses should run and that's what patter has been focusing on the last few years is Union economics and your cost of acquisition and your marketing spend and your team and your head count and your burn and just trying to get the fundamentals right that's what we've been on since

00:27:18 - 00:28:15

2018 there's many people that have done it way better than us and smarter than us but I think we're just like tortoise in the hair tortoise kind of just plodding along and I do think that like there will be more opportunity for people to Skyrocket and grow you know and get a big you know acquisition or IPO but fundamentals of building a business they don't change in pattern we bought six businesses six businesses we bought have almost none of them have taken in any outside capital and they we

00:27:47 - 00:28:49

bought all of them on ebitda multiples and we minted multiple multi-millionaires that none of them have taken in any VC money we're rewarding people that are Americans building fundamentally Sound small businesses that are getting better exits than many Founders that have taken tons of money and built super notable high-flying Brands they're just low under the radar fundamentally sound DDC Centric home good brands so that's the narrative that I love that's my Guy Fieri you know Dives and diners is like

00:28:18 - 00:29:06

entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City that are just building quiet multi-million dollar businesses that are profitable and sound and the last thing I'll say is like all people listening it's like where do you want to go with your business right like do you want it to be a lifestyle business do you want it to be a hobby do you want to try to get an acquisition do you want to go public like not saying these are easy but that's another thing that people don't talk about it's like where are you going you just get in the

00:28:43 - 00:29:42

car and you're filling it full of gas but where the hell are you going I always ask you people like where are you going you want to start this up why why that's where we start our Consulting relationships understanding that question because it's so fundamental to understanding your growth and the tactics that you're going to employ to get to that end goal but Point totally taken that the abundance of opportunities are in front of entrepreneurs today to be able to carve out their own path and build their own

00:29:11 - 00:30:12

life and the Venture moonshot is just moving in from Market to Market you know and we see this with it was a d2c crypto it's in general AI now yeah and that's just the nature of that I think that's actually everything thing is is what it is I think it's just important to like take steps back and look at like the bigger picture of stuff you know so I think like hot moments of super moonshot VC crazy stuff like yeah it's not consumer 101 there's not been a lot of massive exits Acquisitions IPOs but

00:29:42 - 00:30:37

we've bought six businesses in like 24 months and like they're solid right and so like I think I always say to people like yo like try to build a profitable not taking a lot of money five to ten million dollar business you know 10 to 20 million if you can get there like it's hard I find it's hard to get over that like 50 and 20 million hurdle businesses that are like profitable and well run you know 30 to 50 million it's really hard we've bought all these businesses on ebitda multiples which is

00:30:10 - 00:31:04

just our kind of way of doing it because they have it and so we can pay them these good prices that also fits our model you know you can get private equity and stuff and they more start playing in like the 20 million and above range and they can do Revenue multiples but a lot of them are like you know one times Revenue right and so I think if if you build a a Commerce based brand which sells physical Goods Commerce usually that we talk about is physical Goods right and if you can do that in a profitable way that isn't just like

00:30:37 - 00:31:31

flashing the pan kind of hacky style you have a world of of options you know and you can continue to kind of build that and work on that if you can figure out your ways like against solopreneur style of being effective and you can draw down a good salary like why not just kind of keep kind of doing that but if you think that maybe you'd want to pass it off or you know take in money that you can save for your grandchildren or to buy a new house or to take care of your parents like life-changing a few million dollars

00:31:04 - 00:32:02

not high tax if you can build a profitable business you have so many more options and if you build a high growth not profitable business and I think that's the part of the narrative where d2c is dead it's that model which is high growth not profitable just for the sake of getting market share here's the thing if you reach a plateau at that 15 to 20 you know between that 10 to 20 million is really hard I agree if you don't understand how you're oriented towards the ultimate outcome that your

00:31:33 - 00:32:34

stakeholders are looking for and hopefully that outcome is longer term and not shorter term hopefully but to each their own then it's really hard to scale because you're gonna be at the whims of the leadership basically coming up with random Revenue targets and profitability targets that they want to hit that have really nothing to do with externalities and economic forces that are going to come up and like we see this with some of our clients where they they don't really have that Compass they

00:32:04 - 00:32:58

don't have that picture that they've painted and that's why Lucas was saying like this is where we start we literally have a one-page document where we just go through very simply like five questions that help us Orient ourselves to the long-term roadmap for that business guidance counselors yeah because when things get hard and profitability you know when things get hard and the economic environment gets hard card you have to focus on profitability which means you're going to lose out on some of the hyper scale

00:32:30 - 00:33:18

just Revenue pumping the numbers type of mentality and if your stakeholders aren't prepared for that or comfortable with that or see that long-term roadmap they're going to freak out and it's going to be bad for their agency partners and it's going to be bad for their culture it's an expectation setting exercise and with like guidance and and reality I think Founders just need to have this conversation more with themselves does something Jackson and I talk about like between our business

00:32:54 - 00:33:46

it's like let's just really align on like what the the plan and strategy is and it's had unbelievable I think effects on our relationships and the way that we've been intentional about growing the business so we try and Infuse that with our clients because you'd be surprised at how many people just don't they don't even think about that and Emmett I love that you brought up that's super true and I love that you brought up buying a house getting married like just the Practical stuff

00:33:20 - 00:34:12

that you want to do that's what at the end of the day as a stakeholder yeah yes you want to have impact through your business on a large population you want to make great products and do all these things but selfishly too you want to just live your life in the ways that you've dreamed up when you were a kid and when you're a young adult and I hope that more of the business Community sees business as this great win-win where the customers and large swaths of the population can have a huge win in the

00:33:46 - 00:34:46

form of products and services and goods that provide value and then the stakeholders get to win because they get their lifestyle improved or whatever and so I really love that you said that you know for again for a pattern we bought six businesses and we've spoken to like I don't even know how many hundreds and like Benny ones listening that we did a phone call like I love you you know like I love entrepreneurs and I have so much empathy it's a beautiful life and it's so hard you know it like being your own

00:34:16 - 00:35:10

boss and working for yourself or working with Partners or family like it's really stressful and it's really challenging and I think again just having like empathy and sympathy and trying to do knowledge share and trying to not talk down to people and trying to you know a rising tide raises all boats is what I always say it's just getting as much information out to as many entrepreneurs on how to navigate you know e-commerce and how to make sense of this and there's a lot of fear and anxiety you

00:34:43 - 00:35:33

know like Tech moves fast right like I try to lead with vulnerability that I don't understand a lot of this stuff you know and I try to ask people who I can trust or think are smart and then that's why I just built back the fundamentals you know it's like I don't know like macro level Warren Buffett is a great investor and he's not all like quanted out crazy right like just has solid fundamentals and so I think for a lot of people like if you're listening and there's parts of Performance Marketing

00:35:08 - 00:36:08

or you know landing pages and conversion funnels and optimization and Google you know for whatever this and iOS 17.2 million like I think having the solid fundamentals asking questions and the last part I'd say is like knowing where you want to go either you can have this focus of like I want to try to use this business as a vehicle to bring a return for myself or I want to use this business as a lifestyle engine because I love doing this and I want to return the cost back and have a life around it or

00:35:38 - 00:36:26

the last one is that like I don't know what I want to do I just want to explore this I do think you should choose a lane and not mix them and you should kind of go at that whatever that is I always just last thing I'll say is in in sports like inside I played soccer or basketball and there's 50 50 balls it's when two people's go for them and knowing it's just like a loose ball and if you go in kind of like soft that's where people get hurt you know because it's like their leg sticks out or their

00:36:02 - 00:36:55

arm sticks out you actually get like dangerously hurt less when you go in hard you may get bruised more but you're not as likely to like twist or break or sprain something and I kind of think of that for like decisions in life even if you don't want to don't know what you want to do go in hard at not knowing um because when you kind of mix the things is where you you can get into trouble Lucas I see you want to ask a question I just want to clarify something back to pattern real quick did you buy Open

00:36:28 - 00:37:31

Spaces in equal parts or were those yours we started we started those in-house and then covet hit and like our whole business plan for how to satisfy our business model kind of went out the window it became way harder in 2020 and 2021 to spend time to build out an alias brand which we were doing for you know Facebook and Google and landing pages to get materials at cost effective prices and then manufacturer small runs which is what we're doing for people parts and Open Spaces the cost of raw materials

00:37:00 - 00:37:51

for what we were working with for Home Goods skyrocketed and then manufacturing these you know categories I said it was like trying to get into like the hottest nightclub in Paris or something all of a sudden you know you needed a minimum order of 50 000 when it used to be you know 2500 and so at the same time that we're figuring out well what the hell do we do you also there was a lot of brands in these spaces which were wide open the market penetration for Home Goods commerce was was lower significantly

00:37:25 - 00:38:16

than e-commerce but when everyone's staying at home that just bumped it up and so all of a sudden overnight there's like players that were doing one two three million in Revenue now they're doing you know seven to ten ten to Fifteen fifteen to twenty so there became imbalance on how we had viewed the opportunity to move into these categories way slower and then some businesses just started hitting us up and saying we know you guys from Chilean we know you guys raise money we know you're professional we're doing too good

00:37:50 - 00:38:44

we don't want to be doing this good we don't want to remortgage our house we have two kids we don't want to be working 70 hours a week the demand is too much like you guys should buy us we have solid fundamentals we could probably use your guys good marketing and operating think about it and we had enough people hitting us up saying that that we said shoot why don't we think about it and a friend contacted us with Samantha Rose who founded gear gir get it right which is like a silicon unibody

00:38:17 - 00:39:13

based spatula startup again self-funded built a really profitable multi-million dollar business and she wanted to with her husband had a few kids get into a 3pl type startup and they were being overwhelmed by the cost and time of doing this and we ended up getting on really well and said shoot let's try this out use some of the money we had left in the bank to a debt provider and and bought it and gear has been like a phenomenally performing brand for our portfolio and that really opened the

00:38:45 - 00:39:43

doors of like wow maybe this is a way where we can get pre-existing really solid fundamentally sound good unit economics you know great manufacturing Partners built-in communities these solid base is that we can do the stuff that I think we brought over from jinlane and have hired which is operating asking questions doing branding and marketing and trying to combine those two in a portable capacity where we're taking a new playbook internally and and applying it to each of the businesses we have do you see

00:39:14 - 00:40:11

that just Trend continuing like you've obviously started your own businesses on the pattern side and now we're acquiring businesses in like a small cap PE kind of way would you make that recommendation to other operators either on the e-commerce side who are interested in Commerce I'm kind of like Theory guy you know and so you have your like clay Christensen like disruptors and innovator dilemma and you know he talks about how there's like Market disruption which I think was a lot of

00:39:42 - 00:40:38

the early d2c era where Lucas you said it was like a novel way to purchase and get stuff sent to your home you know but when things aren't disrupting they're consolidating and again it's a pendulum swing I just I think of like I always think of everything in fashion and Society and communication and marketing and politics there's a societal reverberation and sometimes it's like a season and sometimes it's you know a generation sometimes it's a lifetime and so I think there's a little bit of like

00:40:11 - 00:41:07

within our world the last few years we're not the only business that's kind of like hold code style I think a lot of hold codes are more known in Commerce on the FDA fulfilled by Amazon side where people bought like a bicycle pump company they bought an ice cream cone they bought you know women's you know underwear they bought hearing aids they're just so Random it's just kind of like data sheet business analytical and some of those have had kind of some challenges because there's for a variety

00:40:39 - 00:41:32

of reasons there's not as much of moats and you know it's hard to figure out kind of how to operate all these specific nuanced businesses and stuff and that's another conversation for another day but I think for pattern we've tried to stick to one consumer in one category it's primarily you know households that are led by a female making the purchasing decisions that are usually between like 30s and 40s and mostly live in like cities and there's a whole kind of like Persona with

00:41:06 - 00:42:00

different degrees of Venn diagrams for Our Brands but we've tried to really just focus on that it's not easy I I would just say like I don't like on podcasts when people talk about like how successful and smart they are I don't find that helpful cool story bro good for you you know kind of I think pattern has been really hard I think covet was really hard trying to operate multiple businesses while working remote building out a global team dealing with all of the changes in the landscape it's not

00:41:33 - 00:42:25

easy I think that the portability in the Playbook we're developing we still have a long ways to go working with you guys on dark room and some of you know hires we've brought in looking at Performance Marketing and direct to Consumer and how we can talk a lot about like needs versus wants and how to Market more from a need perspective and how to build these funnels out how to you know create storytelling how to look at retention the list goes on and on and on so it's not easy for doing it for one business

00:41:59 - 00:42:58

period or else there would be way more kind of success stories and I think trying to do it across multiple is magnitudes harder I think for us we saw it as a defensible moat and that we don't have really an intellectual property mode we don't have a technological moat and so a moat that we could kind of just dumb do is doing something really really hard and if we can get that to work it'll be harder for others to kind of copy Jackson and I talk about this a lot we're like you know because we're seeing a lot of

00:42:29 - 00:43:20

different businesses come through as as you guys are too it's like in the consumer space what what is the mode really what is it especially when you're dealing in highly competitive Industries where the switching costs for the consumer are super low and then yeah barriers to entry for a competitor are also crazy low and so like you know we were just talking about this we were like a lot of times the moat and like when you're talking about Commerce which is really just like goods and services

00:42:54 - 00:43:50

that people buy or Goods that people buy because they need them and they like them it's really in at scale like it's an ecosystem play like that's what yeah apple is that's what I agree a lot of other places are and it seems like that's what you guys are building that's what we're aiming I think it's kind of like in the early days I would compare it kind of to like um I always liked when when Tesla was first kind of really like getting its legs there was this novel T2 you know software-centric cars

00:43:22 - 00:44:18

versus like mechanical engineering cars and because of software centricity to Tesla as a company they would push updates just like you would get an update to your phone or your computer but for the car and then all of a sudden on a Tuesday you know you shower and have your breakfast and go to your driveway and see on your phone or in the car there's a notification that all of a sudden there's a pretty cool new feature for how you drive your car you had bought the car a year ago and now there's this whole cool new thing which

00:43:50 - 00:44:41

is really awesome but they had that road mapped out you know often quite a few years ahead I mean I have a lot of friends that have or work at Apple and I love that they think in these kind of you know three to five plus year Horizons and so I think for pattern really the only way that this kind of thing would work for us was these three to five ten year kind of Horizons and we're nowhere there so that's why I'm not kind of like trying to get on podcasts and be like yo rule we've got

00:44:16 - 00:45:11

it all figured out you know I'm always like man I gotta make the websites better we got to figure this out whatever like constantly just working on it but I think the goal is this ecosystem the goal is how I was talking about Keels is for people to talk about pattern in the same way versus going to buy another brand or going to buy one of our products somewhere else is buying them within our own properties or finding ways if you buy them at retail or wholesale whatever extracting you as a user back into the ecosystem but

00:44:44 - 00:45:45

that's going to take a lot of time we still have a lot of blocking and tackling to do in terms of best practices and just still post covet understanding like how to navigate this landscape in an efficient and effective manner what gets me really motivated is thinking 2020 5 26 27 28 29 2030 is having a maturity ecosystem of one dozen two dozen home life brands that people trust and we incentivize them we reward them we know who they are I think that's awesome and I think that's like a really

00:45:13 - 00:46:05

cool defensible moat to have that is also kind of really hard to to build you only get there by doing the fundamentals right people have to like our products over many years you can't just like it once we've got to have good customer service good customer experience articulate the value props we have to fundamentally run the business right we have to build a community and tell their stories I think these are all things that we have like passing grades at you know I don't think we're like world

00:45:39 - 00:46:39

class at any of them but I think the model we're trying to do is cool and that's like the fun part of this as a startup it's very cool you know you don't you don't really see this and I think it is really novel I want to zoom into some of your properties so get it right you mentioned do you know when that business was actually founded what year so I think 2012 I think um 2012 2013 something like that on Kickstarter wow okay and then so and you don't have to share hard numbers but were they at a

00:46:09 - 00:47:15

seven eight nine Revenue range when you purchased them um like healthy mid seven healthy Midsummer and that was in like 20 21 22 I think like uh spring 2021. that's incredible like let's just pause for one second that took 10 years to get to Mid sevens healthy business though very healthy yeah they did eight figures in business that last year but a lot of it was off of like their silicon manufacturing they also did masks and so that wasn't kind of Insider baseball here but whatever that wasn't part of

00:46:42 - 00:47:37

per se the purchase price and deal coveted Revenue yeah but just to give them some credit like this is your point like they and I and I'm not saying like oh wow so long they should have been yeah they should have been going a lot faster I'm saying that is like I have a lot of respect for that and but it's just good to know for anybody listening like that took 10 years to get to a place where they were purchased by a pattern now did you take 80 or more or did you take a minority share I'm just

00:47:10 - 00:47:58

curious what your deals are usually like our model and again like when I say stuff I I don't ever think it's like a right way or a wrong way it's just some people walk like this some people walk like that you know like The Way We Walk is it's a hundred percent purchase order acquisition so we're buying the brand IP the assets just the whole kit and caboodle um it's a full there's like a a moment where you know like Nick ensues and stuff they'll like they're literally

00:47:34 - 00:48:31

like pressing a red button and it like switches from the founders ownership to our ownership like in a split second 100 and there's a few reasons for that like how our financing is kind of set up but also from a customer data perspective right we want to own all the information you can't take a percentage share and own all the customer information we now you know we own all that we own in all the emails we own all you know that's like another part of the moat which like isn't like today we're like lighting up

00:48:03 - 00:48:50

the switchboards of like deep machine learning AI blah blah blah like but from a long-term perspective we've aggregated to you know a pretty large customer base with a lot of information on our customers we have the information we have in our customers is above our pay grade at a company that we're gonna like you get hand-me-down pants or something and you're like five but they'll fit you more when you're seven it's like we're gonna grow into these pants that's a

00:48:26 - 00:49:23

great position to be in I'm gonna just to sidebar a little bit away from like just pure growth how do you think about installing new leadership or like taking over leadership once that red button is pushed yeah the first five businesses we bought the founders all more or less on their own decided like I'm gonna do my next thing like this was like I'm the business is going off to college kind of was a metaphor often that was used with us and the founders you know and so they're kind of like waving in the car

00:48:55 - 00:49:54

with like a kind of you know like a reverential here kind of going down their their eye yeah but proud for that growth of the business the last business we just brought on the entire team is is staying on board it's a significantly more scaled business than um what we had purchased and they are doing a fantastic job and also doing a fantastic job in some areas that I think we can kind of learn from and improve from so it made a lot of sense is that Onsen it's not Onsen I can't say yet the

00:49:24 - 00:50:24

name of the brand I guess you guys will be working working with it in our ecosystem soon so you'll find out but onton is also another incredible brand where the founders didn't come on board and they just stay as advisors yeah no I know I know Anson's doing pretty well I was just talking to to Luca who's working with uh with your portfolio on our side and so was that a similar story like they founded you know back in early 2010s it's not even that long there's two main Founders there's really one

00:49:54 - 00:50:49

founder Shane and he brought on a business partner Connor her his friend I would say they're like they were like five years old somewhere in the five four whatever and they were a larger business they were at the time of purchase the largest business we've Acquired and also extremely profitable probably the highest ebitda margins of any business we have bought and more or less run just the two Business Leaders you know they had a bunch of contractors and teams they worked with but they just

00:50:21 - 00:51:16

ran such an efficient well-managed well-run business and they were the second business we bought out of the greater Salt Lake City area for you know that there's just an incredible cohort of Home Goods e-commerce entrepreneurs that have fundamentally Sound business practices so shout out to all those folks that we've spoken to I think it was really inspiring for us kind of coming from the quote-unquote D to C is dead New York VC you know Playbook to really see how many entrepreneurs there

00:50:49 - 00:51:38

are Across America that are building these you know 500 000 1 million three million five million 10 million 15 million businesses and they're running them responsibly you know and they're doing the hard work they're putting their reading glasses on with blue light at night and they're reading you know blog posts and watching YouTube on trying to figure out all the stuff that you hot shots are kind of really good at you know but what they're really good at is like they found something that

00:51:13 - 00:52:10

annoyed them and they wanted to solve it and they just OCD went down a rabbit hole and they did it in a very conservative poker player mentality grinding it out over years and three years later you know what was a hobby turned into a business which turned into them quitting their job and focusing on it full-time which then turns into them hiring a friend or someone they get in contact with in a modern Incarnation I think post covet more people are finding folks to work with over the Internet could be you know what one would call a

00:51:42 - 00:52:38

virtual assistant or could it be different contractors I think that's like another cool Trend that both pattern has done and other folks within the the owner operator space you're kind of diversifying your talent pool to work with where you can also keep your costs while hopefully relatively in line I this I'm so glad you brought this up and I know Lucas is really obsessed with this too I want to ask you about what trends about the future of work or Venture building you think are going to

00:52:09 - 00:53:19

last so like obviously how does AI integrate into you know kind of the fundamental operations how do you see like building a team and using outsourced offshore onshore people remote work office life like all these things that are going through some Evolution how uh are you guys really remote at at pattern yeah so when covid hit in March of 2020 just under one year in to pattern we had Ben jinling before that we were all working in this office in Chinatown on East Broadway Division Street you know call it like Times

00:52:44 - 00:53:31

Square you call it jinling triangle it was like a studio no you still you still have that nah well we have a studio that's in Williamsburg that we like we shoot content from we still have like so our whole team was in New York City we were like 3 three dozen folks in New York City covet hit we sent everyone home you know like you're not coming back to office just like everything kind of normal and we'll probably come back in a few months once this kind of passes and that wasn't the case and it didn't

00:53:08 - 00:53:54

pass and we never went back to the office and at least ended that year we ended it we haven't gotten an office since but we were growing and had to keep hiring during that period while we're working from home and at this chapter for us building out our company we started seeing that there was some pretty great talent you know there are some folks that we hired we said you know what they're great they're in the greater San Francisco area someone had moved to Montana there are some folks in

00:53:30 - 00:54:33

New England people in you know uh New Mexico Arizona a bunch throughout California we were just looking to get the you know the best talent we could kind of get and so all of a sudden you know half our company that we hired they're in all these different states there was at that point no really kind of going back to get back to work you know Tuesday to Thursday because our business was kind of really born into kovid and then the next chapter has been this past year dipping our toes more on the global side where you know there's a

00:54:02 - 00:54:57

lot of folks there's you know Talent there's oceans there's these startups that are popping up where they have great pockets of curated Talent they could be you know uh Engineers designers assistants researchers business managers and you can just be introduced to Great folks kind of all over the world there's obviously different Pockets where people specialize in different stuff in different places and kind of Dipping our toes in that water for some roles that we thought could make sense now we've

00:54:29 - 00:55:19

we've got you know people in many many states across the U.S and people in many different states across the world so as I kind of said in document Lucas that you and I worked on at the end there's pros and cons of it you know I think like my assessment of where work goes is I freaking don't know you know I was talking to someone about commercial real estate in New York and what's going to happen with that like those buildings are at really low capacity and have these pretty big leases in the next few

00:54:54 - 00:55:58

years I think there's going to be some Rec beginnings of what happens there I know other countries are way more back to work industrialize whatever you kind of call it than the US is but for us like I love the freedom of working from home but I missed desperately solving problems whiteboarding being in one room walking down the hall Gathering people together I very honestly and vulnerably do not know how to replicate that for multi-faceted problem solving in-person conversations it's really it's something

00:55:26 - 00:56:18

that we're trying to deal with we have a very very global company I think 50 of our employees are outside the United States at this point I'm in Portugal right now with our team out here doing an off-site my recommendation is for anyone starting a business today if you're in Professional Services if you're in e-commerce technology like it is a necessity to have a global Workforce that has implications for for the U.S economy which you know for the past 10 years has really been driven by

00:55:52 - 00:56:54

by services and technology and that's where a lot of job opportunity growth has been but um I think to be smart uh as a Founder you need to figure out how to diversify and leverage a global talent pool but that means that you need to be extra extra organized from a project management and a culture building perspective and it's not just like using slack and notion and Google drive because you know we did that for the first two years of our existence and like people just didn't do their

00:56:23 - 00:57:11

you know so you need like systems and they didn't feel bought into the mission so I think you need your systems and you need to be very intentional about it but you can definitely build a highly engaged global global team I will say though to your point Emmett we've never we had an office in La we were I think in person just for a little bit of our existence and then kovid really hit and we were like all right marketers want to be everywhere they want to leverage the opportunity to travel and we're going to

00:56:48 - 00:57:40

kind of pioneer that that future for advertising but um like you need to be in person you need to have in-person touch points so we're trying to figure this out right now it's like what is arcadence for meetups like how often do we need to be in the same room what are budgets that International hubs need to have and I think that's something that those were not I mean at least for for like e-commerce or you know less than 100 advertising agencies those were not problems that you had to consider you

00:57:14 - 00:58:12

know in the past but they're fun challenges it's just different opportunities for for Founders to to solve yeah I again try to be smart of what I know and humble of what I don't and I think I have no idea how it plays out for pattern or for other folks but I think that's the 50 50 ball we're we're kind of going hard into the the Known Unknown I guess in figuring out as we go because I do think that we feel it's the best path for us as a business but we got to figure it out as we go and I

00:57:43 - 00:58:31

think a lot of other businesses and people are figuring out as they go and a rising tide raises all boats as I said before about like e-commerce and entrepreneur and operators and I think the same thing as just being social creatures knowledge sharing looking at other information that's out there Aaron and forming you know new foundational best practices I think that that stuff will more and more I think emerge and right now I'm just not trying to say like do this or don't do this I'm just

00:58:07 - 00:58:59

trying to listen and absorb as much from other people that are out there trying to figure figure out 2023 2024 you know similar situations as you said sub 100 where it makes sense to have some people in different states have some people in different countries there's gonna be a lot of different takes on it and I think we just need to listen and figure out what's best for us yeah well it's it's interesting because like Commerce is definitely a it's a social activity it always really has been the stuff you buy

00:58:33 - 00:59:26

almost just cursed there the stuff you buy is uh you know it's it's what your friends like you know it's it's how you're socialized it's obviously utilitarian and things that you need but I think the psychological part of what gets people to buy is a lot of the reason why we're in the game and you know are on the marketing side and do what we do when you think about your own and the reason I'm bringing this up is because when you have a global organization that's touching products or

00:58:59 - 00:59:53

functions that are meant for a certain demographic of consumers like that's a that's an interesting thing to consider and to get right for your own like I guess consumer Behavior how is that changing and I guess what are what are you excited about it's a broad question but I am just I always relate like the way that we market and the companies that we're excited to work with like based on what we're most interested in so I just would love for you to talk on that I think what I really I'm like I'm

00:59:26 - 01:00:25

like fascinated with the last few years and again like just try to take a humble approach to all this stuff especially like I'm not super marketer person or definitely not data Centric performance marketer but I think I'm like fundamentals person how he talked about you know in the doc we worked on is like how Community kind of was something that is important around you know retention for iOS 17 being rolled out and having those the sticky kind of customers Etc that don't have to go through all the

00:59:55 - 01:00:53

the hurdles and groups of tracking and privacy I think another fundamental is there's there's no stronger advocate for your brand than a customer and like word of mouth and third-party validation again fits into those fundamentals of like you can do all this and all of that but if people aren't really talking positively about your product or your brand you know you're not really building a sustainable business of course and like I you know Jackson at the beginning was like yo don't talk

01:00:25 - 01:01:22

into a platitudes and I'm like in my mind I'm like good luck you know but we're getting I'm getting there no he said it tells the same thing to me come on um but so what I was going to say my Meandering Way of what I'm excited about I think is like and it doesn't sound new in it but like I love user generated content and I love seeing it more on websites and in ads and I I think there's like look like I like high fashion and stuff and I think that's where you're really controlling a

01:00:53 - 01:01:50

narrative and that's where like I think really beautiful photo shoots and editorials you know it's tapping into kind of like the Creative Vision within someone's head for how they see the world right and that also could be not fashion maybe it could be video games or something but I think for like probably for what a lot of the brands you work with and definitely for pattern or for you know even some of the other brands I advise for invest in or I'm part of the teams and design capacity just like

01:01:21 - 01:02:25

helping out I think having people in the marketing people in the ads people on the website people in the emails that's what I really light and that's what I'm excited to see more going back to 2010 2015. look Harry is in reformation and sweet green and you know that whole kind of cohort everling Warby Parker hymns like thinking about storytelling one thing we did for him that was cool is we just Street Cats skaters you know like we got this photographer Creighton Olsen he shot um glossier stuff and we just

01:01:53 - 01:02:48

Street cast like guy skaters that look like cool guys in the city they weren't too modely they had chipped teeth they were sweaty and cool hair or whatever and so I really am excited to like construct Commerce narratives across entire user Journeys that are really comprised of like real people and real customers and some of them can be paid some of them can be content creators some of them can be more professional at it and some cannot but I think that's like I've been fascinated in like you

01:02:21 - 01:03:18

know Elon Musk just rebranded at Twitter into X and him and the CEO he brought on Linda I forget her name talked about like wanting to build this this super app right and you know again I'm not trying to like get into think boy conversations on it but what like they're alluding to is in Asia and the Eastern parts of the world there are these super apps and they do do a lot from Financial transactions and payments to culture social and and commerce and there's also live Commerce live Commerce

01:02:49 - 01:03:50

in in China and other countries is a massive business and in the US and you know some Western you know States or countries we don't have as much live Commerce and we don't have kind of super apps and it's semi and aside from where I'm getting to but what I like is this notion of just thinking about people talking to me when I go to websites you know showing the products showing them using it the reviews are a higher Fidelity the PDP is above the fold are more people the home pages are more

01:03:20 - 01:04:17

people the socials more people there's kind of a late night to UBC schlocky way to do that and then there's also like a thoughtful doing a brand shoot having guidelines you know being curatorial way to do that I think in some ways you can look at like I thought I take a lot of Trends from like Health and Beauty and you can look at like you know what glossier did back in the day to what the post that all the brands that pop up in Sephora or a bigger one would be Jones Road or another mainstream math success

01:03:48 - 01:04:45

could be skins or a lesser one is parade you know they just feature these diverse casts primarily of women in you know Comfort wear or health Beauty personal care and I love their brands and I love the brands are so much often just showing cool people really using the product hey you've got a your star facing you've got zits or whatever like put a little stars here or you want to see how this affects your cream for your you know skin tone or you have a different body type and you want to you

01:04:17 - 01:05:10

know look and feel your best I think that's something that I I hope and want to see more for kind of Commerce is this one-to-one hearing back of people in situations and so I'll just round that out for pattern I've been trying to say to our team think of our products more as tools less as like Decor how would people use how do people use our products in their homes let's show that versus doing maybe a pre-covered way of just making them look really nice and these are nice photographs it's not

01:04:42 - 01:05:47

really showing people in situation using some of our storage or our cooking items let's show that more across the user Journey so that's my imitating it all data Centric but like that's what I like didn't you guys do that for was it our place where you shot there was like like almost like 35 millimeter like film photos of just like people cooking and having a dinner party we did that for equal parts which um is our like our oh sorry equal parts my bad yeah our our place I think does does great great work

01:05:16 - 01:06:13

though that was an excellent work that really inspired me and we we took inspiration from that and brought that into some of the work that we did after I had seen that so I completely agree with you you mentioned this word Community like it's this is like one of the words du jour right now and I think it's um it always has been and it's still really important but I kind of want to I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to while you're here uh for at least a few more minutes

01:05:42 - 01:06:41

to unravel that word and really talk about what it means and like how to really create it because when I hear Community I think about the times when my aunt and uncle who are like Windows um you know like Dell people they're like you know kind of on me for having a Mac because they think it's for like simple people and I fire back and I'm like no I love apple and like all the things I can do with it I'm like fanboying and stuff like that and so there's kind of like these two camps

01:06:13 - 01:07:07

these two communities built up through these product ecosystems through these Brands so like I kind of relate it to that and I think nowadays A lot of people talk about community and they talk about like having a Facebook group or like a slack Community or whatever it is but I just want to I want to hear what you think about Community how do you build an effective Community what is an effective community and like what does that mean yeah I think like two ways I'd kind of high level answer it I

01:06:40 - 01:07:42

think like America and you know capitalistic kind of societies and stuff it's funny that we find a lot of our community Through Commerce I think you know we go to church last and third spaces and stuff are less of where we spend our time I think it's always important to you know personally and support others to make sure people have community in the truest sense which is usually family friends and you know people that like love and care for you I think in the the sense of like Commerce and for businesses I'll go back to kind

01:07:11 - 01:08:23

of fundamentals and I think the difference between like customers in a community I think on the community side there's a bit of an interesting recipe of like inclusive exclusive or in Insider Outsider where people feel at home for something important to them with other folks that share a similar Viewpoint or sentiment and that again you can take that definition and you can apply that to religion politics you know a certain way of living we're just dealing with a singular swath of this around brand building and commerce but

01:07:47 - 01:08:48

you know for me I was inspired when we were kind of starting pattern around Rafa and tracksmith and you know Rafa is like a bicycling company or they make gear for basic bicycling enthusiasts and then tracksmith similarly for running enthusiasts and so I think you find a lot of passion in people's Hobbies you know that's kind of when you get into adulthood it's like where you define yourself or find identities for yourself that like you can do and it's not a boss or a spouse you know making you do it

01:08:18 - 01:09:18

you're choosing this on your own and they did really good jobs I think of of playing to hardcore enthusiasts and listening and saying we're not the everyone bicycling company we're for the people that live and breathe and sweat and have mud and dirt but we're doing it with a unique sensibility that maybe isn't you know Tour de France you know European elitist or whatever and we're gonna you know build a community around that and and I think that's in that sense like there's a blueprint for if

01:08:48 - 01:09:47

you're you're a brand you know you should be solving a problem right you go back to the DNA of why are you doing anything you think that what you have is superior you know or what the Market's missing and hopefully people you know say you know by George you're right like this was missing from my life or this was inferior and so if you get enough people that feel a certain way that you're solving a problem it's stoking that and saying to them you hear them you see them you appreciate them and

01:09:17 - 01:10:17

connecting them and so again I don't think pattern is by far like world-class best community Unity Builders or whatever but for gear you know there's just so many passionate home chefs and cooks that love our tools they love our products they make their lives better and so if you could fundamentally build a product that people love I think a lot of it is just stoking and capturing and playing that back that's why I love third person validating content because it's mirroring back what people are

01:09:47 - 01:10:45

feeling and seeing or hoping for themselves and again I don't think we've like cracked the puzzle a hundred percent you know outdoor voices and I love you know tahini and stuff and there are challenges they had in business and this that and from that era but man like what an incredible Community Builder where people want to be a part of this and they want to you know that that's where you kind of blur this tribalism kind of you know of it it almost like usurps capitalism but I think for normal

01:10:16 - 01:11:16

folks and normal businesses it's just trying to build products that really solve problems and trying to show people and hear people and connect other people that want to solve that problem you being a Mac User that serves different certain problems for who you were and where you were growing into you know as a young adult you could identify as you know exclusively like I don't associate with PC right and then there's an inclusive group that says hey we're like you screw those big gray boxes like we

01:10:46 - 01:11:40

care about detail we care about typesetting we care about design we care about thoughtfulness you do too we're the minority not everyone sees a world like us let's get together let's go in a forum let's talk about this and that if they're this where the t-shirts let's go to the conventions you feel like you found people that see this part of the world similarly to you yeah I would agree and just to emphasize that I think it's like the word Community it's just becoming a measure for like the degree

01:11:13 - 01:12:08

to which you have product Market fit and brand Market fit and then also the level of Engagement that I think the founding team has with that demographic like yeah and yeah the level of Love That Emmett like that you're describing is like how you're building your business and your brand to solve those needs for for that cohort of customers that segment we've talked to so many Brands recently that they are they talk a lot about Community or they're very interested in community and the ones who are building

01:11:41 - 01:12:33

communities successfully are just they're just like they understand the customer they know them and they're interacting with them and they're doing more gorilla type events where they're like hosting events in-person events and they are developing programs around that in real life things and I think to your point I'm around like the pendulum swinging right now Community is popular because we're going back to fundamentals and like building businesses around customers and they do them developing

01:12:07 - 01:12:55

love for for that community and for the products that you're building it's becoming less about we've I'll just say anecdotally I talk to a lot of Founders who come to us for Consulting and for marketing services and you know we can talk all day about Performance Marketing and you know different sort of Tactical things that we can do with landing pages and hooks and ads that was the stuff that was getting people really excited three years ago which they would pay top dollar for now the thing that's getting

01:12:31 - 01:13:22

people excited is how you're building Community how you're doing out of home ads to speak to your community this is stuff that's been around for for years it's nothing new yeah again I just my narrative always is kind of just like history doesn't repeat itself but it Rhymes and like you can just find so much about what you should do with your life for Whatever It Is by understanding whatever you're doing where it's coming from or where you're coming from and so I think for really at the end of the day

01:12:56 - 01:13:52

what we're on a podcast you know talking about like just how to run a sustainable business you know it's just like it just so happens the areas of expertise for us are you know marketing and brand building but like people have been building businesses and running businesses for hundreds and hundreds of years I mean arguably thousands but probably in a modern Incarnation you know there's General Store and consumer good playbooks and stuff that the fun Mentos are you know if you look back all

01:13:24 - 01:14:13

the 20th century and there's just so much you can kind of learn so I think like just being a student of the game that's why I kind of like you know the Gen Lane stuff it's like I kind of like talking about it because I was you know trying to understand uh the internet right like when I was in the 90s and early 2000s I was you know a young person and that's what I kind of got me into digital stuff because I was so fascinated of growing up watching that I I didn't really have as much of a

01:13:48 - 01:14:38

background in in business you know or any of that I kind of stumbled into it through creative and digital but once I kind of got into it I just tried to read books and listen and Jin Lane really was a vehicle for me I had a clothing company before that I just wanted to work with smart people to learn more about business and so still today like I love working and talking with people of just being curious and I just guess why I was like I don't know the answers I don't have this figured out but there's

01:14:13 - 01:15:14

fundamentals there's fundamentals that never really go out of Vogue that's a perfect place to wind the conversation and and thank you so much for coming on perfect sentiment Emmett what a privileged man been watching you from afar for a long time it's glad to get up close and personal and chat thanks for coming on really appreciate you man thank you Emmett yeah this is awesome one of our longest and our first uh episode yeah thank you thank Lucas and if anyone ate at this bar on the podcast you know thank

01:14:44 - 01:15:34

you and dark room is great and does great work and are thoughtful and again I think just like not trying to be elitist or snobby or knowing the answers just trying to build I like doing these because I like just talking with people and people always hit me up after and I try to talk with them so that's my community you know my community is is entrepreneurs and business owners and managers and operators and designers and that's that's where I like kind of hanging out so if you're listening to

01:15:09 - 01:15:43

this you know be a part of our community 100 go check out pattern lots of amazing Brands and an amazing brand in its own right Emmett thanks so much man and we're gonna have to have you on again because there's just so much more to uh to discuss for sure thank you