Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to check in to check out the E Commerce Growth podcast from Mobile First.
My name is Justin Ehrenstein and my co host is Connor Burke.
Thank you for joining. Check into checkout and our guest this week is Tom Funk, E Commerce director at Ann Clark limited And we're so excited to have you, Tom. Really excited to get into this, but really before we dive in, I just want to check in with you. How are you feeling today?
[00:00:34] Speaker B: I'm feeling great, thank you. I am refreshed. I just returned from a long weekend vacation. We're headquartered in Vermont and we spent a handful of days in Quebec in Quebec City and a place called the Saguenay Fjord National Park. So I got a good dose of Canada.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Did you get to practice your French?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Un petit peu. The best phrase is je ne parle par francais. Pardon est moi. Parlez vous anglais.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Okay, then that's when the conversation starts. That's how that ends. That's how long my podcast would be if it were.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: That was 100% more French than I know. So perfect. Awesome. So in your current role as E Comm director, what do you own? What are your roles?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm the E commerce director at Ann Clark Ltd. We are a pretty small company, you know, 50 people at peak production. We're fairly seasonal but you know, as small as, you know, 30 slow times of the year. We're the country's biggest maker of cookie cutters and we also sell food coloring for baking, for frosting and icing of cookies and cakes and have baking supplies and ingredients. So we basically serve a cookie baker and cake decorator audience and yeah, what do I own? 85% of my focus goes into Amazon. So that's, that's our primary e commerce channel. We do operate a website, it does some commerce but it's mostly there for engagement and tutorials, inspiration videos, how to's recipes we sell on Walmart. I operate an email and SMS campaigns and you know, am responsible for a certain amount of content development that we syndicate out on social media as well. Awesome.
[00:02:25] Speaker C: I saw something online that had said I think about 70% of your business goes to Amazon stores and then about the other 30 is Shopify the shop store. Is that correct?
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Somewhere around there? Yeah. I don't know if the, the percentages are about right, but it's, it's certainly directional. And you know, of Amazon, we also operate in 18 different countries worldwide. Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia. But yeah, the bulk of our business is on Amazon.
[00:02:57] Speaker C: Kind of curious, what was the, the thought behind that transition and have y', all, y' all plans to maybe kind of move more into Amazon or maybe move back to Shopify? We see a lot of people in this space, I think, who are moving to Amazon right now. I think it's an interesting migration.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Every marketer and strategist will tell you that you should be growing your merchant website business. Right. Because you own the customer and have the ability to communicate with them.
We are sort of contrarian in that respect in that we recognize, recognize that Amazon is really ideally suited for the customer use case and our website never will be. And one of the primary reasons is, you know, we sell into the holidays. You know, like people make cookies for Halloween and they make them for Christmas and Easter, but they also make them for Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day and graduation and back to school and any sort of thing you might want to have a party for. And you know, right now it's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel and it happens also to be the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws and we are selling an awful lot of shark cookie cutters. And you don't know that much in advance that you plan to make cookies for an occasion. And so, you know, most of our sales happen, you know, Sunday or Monday for the upcoming weekend or even just a couple days before. And so we're a little operation, you know, on the slopes of a ski mountain in Vermont. It takes us a long time to ship a cookie cutter to the Pacific Northwest. So we really rely on Amazon for that free two day shipping to customers who, you know, thought about it in the last minute. Cookie cutters are kind of generic. You go on the world's biggest shopping platform to see what there is, you know, then later you're going to have some brand recognition maybe of Ann Clark. But yeah, we realize that, you know, that just in time nature of the biz means that Amazon's going to be our best platform even with all of the, you know, fees and challenges that we all know about Amazon.
[00:05:07] Speaker C: Yeah, it's awesome.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: That's probably the only folks that you are going to talk to on the podcast who have Buy on Amazon buttons on our product detail pages on our Shopify site.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: It's very interesting.
[00:05:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I love it.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: And is that used heavily? Are those buy on Amazon on the.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Site about equal measure. So about half of the folks who come to the website who buys online do it from Shopify and the other half go over to Amazon to do it.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: I love the, the Shark Week Thing, I don't know. This is just an off note. Have any of y' all ever seen the show 30 Rock?
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: There's a really good line in there where Tracy Morgan says he gives a piece of advice to somebody and he says, I'm gonna give you see what my dad told me live every week.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Like it's Shark Week.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Doesn't mean anything, but every time somebody.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: Says Shark Week, I have to think of that joke.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: It just kills, right?
[00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah. That's awesome.
Yeah. And, you know, we've learned that, say, people who watch Shark Week buy a lot of cookie cutters. You know, watching it with the kids and you have a viewing party and you bake cookies. Tour de France is going on right now and not a lot of bicycle racing fans are buying cookies. Football fans buy cookies, but soccer fans know, so it's funny.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: It's got to be the carbs.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: That's awesome. So what does your day to day look like in that?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Well, you know, I've been lucky in my career to work at manufacturing businesses that sell direct to consumer. You know, I started at Vermont Teddy Bear Company, which you may know of, and the people sewing teddy bears were, you know, just on the other side of the manufacturing floor from my web team. And I have worked at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. I've worked at Gardener Supply Company and here at and Clark, you know, we've got people bending metal, you know, right on the other side of the building, people, you know, machines producing food coloring and sealing it into tubes. We have baking mixes and ingredients. So all that stuff is happening right outside.
And, you know, for me, I'm involved in product development just as much as I am in product listing creation on the website and on Amazon and setting our prices for profitability and figuring out how much we can afford to advertise and what strategies are working to promote the products on Amazon or social media or search. We do have a wholesale business as well where you might find our products at Sur La Taub or William Sonoma or Crate and Barrel. But, you know, my day to day, we're a small team, so sometimes I'm playing offense and trying to do a email campaign or promotion or preparing for Prime Day. Amazon is highly operationally focused. So a lot of it is working with my forecasting team and making sure we have the right products in all those different markets at the right time in the right quantity and playing defense. You know, Amazon will ding us for some perceived policy violation or we'll, you know, snitch on some competitor Some competitor snitches on us.
We.
It can be really random. You know, we are redesigning packaging all the time, and a QR code needs to be produced and put on the package, and there needs to be a landing page. So a constant variety of different things. And I think it's pretty creative and highly entrepreneurial, and we do tend to get our hands dirty.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: That's awesome. And how many meetings a week is that? How many hours? What percentage of your time are you in meetings?
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Very relatively little. You know, I would say, you know, because we're a smallish team and we practice lean manufacturing, and we try to have a pretty fast pace of product development, we can observe something happening in the marketplace and design a cookie cutter. You know, my graphic designer can do that in a matter of, you know, a few hours. I'm, you know, elapsed time is always different than, like, applied time. But we can get our die cutter to produce the die to make that cookie cutter and, you know, have something in the market in, like, two weeks. We don't need a lot of meetings to make that happen. We sort of know. Know what we need to do.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: That's fascinating. Are y' all sitting down and doing, like, brainstorming discussions around the products, or is it one of those you come in on Tuesday and you go, I've got an idea, and you throw it out and everybody gets together and just.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah, we do have a new product development team for the things that take a little bit longer, like baking mixes or ingredients we might see trending on Amazon. And, yeah, that pace is probably a more normal. You know, here's a slate of proposed products, and we'll do a little bit of a market analysis. What are the competitors selling? All of which you can find pretty readily using Amazon software. And, yeah, then we'll. We'll have a roster of maybe a dozen products and push forward a couple of them, you know, but the pace of that is slower because we have an R D chef, Laura, who, you know, if we say we think that we can sell crepe mixes on Amazon, she's got to come up with the recipe. So that takes a little bit of time.
[00:10:33] Speaker C: So there's not like a quick, like, you know, you come back and you're like, on Monday, we got to do an astronomer CEO cookie or something, you know, like, yeah, something topical that quickly.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: You know, sometimes we can be a little bit.
A little bit opportunistic.
For instance, there was a total solar eclipse that passed through the northeastern United States.
Couples. Was it a couple Springs ago. And we already had a pair of sunglasses, a cookie cutter, you know, we had a cookie decorator, an actual human, you know, bakes and decorates the cookie. Although we do some AI image generation now. We don't always have to hire a baker. But yeah, we had a little three piece set that had a, you know, the circle of the sun and a sunglasses and then the, you know, unobscured sun. And we had that in market right away. We sold them really well. But then we, you know, the total eclipse ended and we still had a few of those to sell at Amazon. So we changed the circle to look like a beach ball and we called it the summer beach fun set.
So we were able to, you know, sell it in spring, sell it in summer.
[00:11:49] Speaker C: It's smart. I love that.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Okay, cool.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: I love that. I also, I just want to take note of, I think you name dropped 80% of Vermont manufacturers that you've worked at. I think the only one you're missing is maybe Cabot Creamery.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I've got friends at Cabot Creamery and Vermont Creamery. And yeah, I haven't worked at Burton, but apart from them. Yeah, I've worked at most every Vermont business that has a vowel in its name.
It's a long career, you guys. I started in 1995.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Well, actually that's, that's a great transition. So how did you get started in E commerce? What was that story like?
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like you, you young whippersnappers, I'll tell you.
So, yeah, when I, I worked in desktop publishing early in my career and it was like a car, antique car collectibles magazine, like a printed magazine. And we practiced desktop publishing and we decided, hey, that's not that different from creating web pages from what we understand. Let's make a website. So we actually, at that time, 1995, you didn't, unless you were on AOL, you didn't have Internet access. So, you know, I walked down to the local bookstore and got the Internet starter kit, which was a paperback book that had a CD ROM in the back of it that would let you activate with like one of maybe two dozen nascent SPS. I mean, ISPs in the country. And yeah, we got access there and built our, you know, manual HTML pages and uploaded them one by one to that cascading sound of a modem. And so, yeah, that was my first website experience. And from there I went to Vermont. Teddy Bear Company also is now Pajamagram. We launched that brand in like 2000 I think and I was there until about 2006 and at that time, you know, we were doing like $45 million of commerce on a Yahoo store which was one of the first sort of, you know, co located e commerce platforms. And you know, the cost to be on Yahoo store was like $49 a month.
So you could be an e commerce company with $40 million of revenue doing 2,000 orders an hour on a $49 platform.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: It's impressive not only for Yahoo stores but that you guys are at that time getting 40 million in revenue a year online. I mean people weren't shopping online.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Back then our go to market. Yeah. At that point, you know, a lot of our sales were driven through live Read radio. So some live read disc jockey like Howard Stern would tell you all about how you better buy a Vermont Ted Bear company for Valentine's Day. And then they'd read our URL and people would order.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: I guess at that point the homepage actually mattered.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right, right. But yeah, and then you know, in that same era we had launched, you know, our paid search and email activities and stuff which very quickly overtook all the terrestrial radio.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: That's awesome. So what are some of the other critical points in your career to where you are today? Like what, what were some of the learnings that you've had?
[00:15:07] Speaker B: Yeah, and I feel like we've talked about Amazon a lot and I didn't do Amazon at all until about 2018. I think I helped. I, I don't know if I mentioned. I worked at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Keurig for seven and a half years and we were selling in a first party relationship, selling wholesale to Amazon and we launched the first, our first A3P account there with Amazon in 2018.
And then I was the main champion for marketplaces at Gardener Supply Company, both Amazon Walmart and then Target plus. We launched while I was there as one of the first sort of invite only merchants on that platform. So in my early part of my career I think I was like a webmaster, you know that very obscure or archaic term. And then I got more into revenue generation channels then at Keurig, Green Mountain Coffee I was more of a product manager, responsible for the website features and functions and that kind of technology plan or enhancement plan. And then my world changed a lot from being responsible for a merchant website to being more responsible for Amazon marketplace programs. You know, I've increasingly been involved in things like social commerce and increasingly involved in new product development in the context of Amazon. Yeah, I would say Also international. I never had a, had a hand in international, but in the past four years or so that's been a bigger part of my career.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: That's awesome. So you've had a lot of success, you've been around the industry.
As you look back on your career, have there been any failures of note that you learned from and able to be better because of it?
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I think that one of my big disappointments was at Gardner Supply Company.
I was recruited over there by a couple of long term friends in the industry and I really was trying to champion Amazon as a channel for us. We were able to grow it 37% or something like that. And you know, the year, that year it was only 10% of our business, yet it was responsible for 60% of our direct growth. So it was really punching above its weight. But I never could really articulate and argue and persuade to the board or you know, the larger team culture there. The value of an Amazon channel because, you know, Garner Supply was one of the premier catalog companies, direct mail catalog companies and you know, the idea of owning a customer and having a lifetime value of that customer is so ingrained and it's really hard to accept the idea of Amazon as a channel. People are very binary in their thinking too about Amazon. Like if I take that order on Amazon, it's an order that I am not taking on my website. I do try to differentiate those two things because it's not a binary choice. I think you've got to be doing both of them. But it was a really hard sell at Garner Supply and ultimately I didn't make that sale successfully, didn't persuade people and you know, I got laid off after a bad holiday season, you know, on the Merchant website. 19 so. Right, right. As the pandemic was kicking off and you know, I love that you said that though.
Yeah.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: About the Amazon and the, the store and having to look at it not as two separate things because that's what we hear, I think from a lot of other people in the industry.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean there's a lot, a lot of ways to, to do business badly on Amazon and get your head handed to you, but you can make money on your first order from somebody. There is repeat purchase even though you don't know the customer's name and address, you know, you can conduct a good ongoing business there.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: And I assume Gardener Supply Company is on Amazon now.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it was when I got there and we grew it pretty substantially. Was then a very small part of the business and still is. I think a very small part of the business. I mean, what do you think the ratio is? Should a company be 50 50Amazon and merchant website? I mean there's so many strategic advantages to having your own strong merch website business. You know, I get it, but what should the ratio be that you'll, you'll hear everything, you know, from 50, 50 to 30, 70.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: So every business is different. But if your customers are there, you probably need to be there too. You probably need to be investing in it and growing that channel. That's where your customers are.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think you need to differentiate. Like when we were at Keurig, Green Mountain Coffee, we positioned our website to have a really leading subscription offer.
And Amazon was still just getting started with its subscribe and save. So it felt like a differentiated assortment and a differentiated value prop. And then, you know, I, I think that it just depends on how you position both of those two. Like you said, if your customers are there. Gardener Supply Company, venerable 35 year gardening hard goods company, thought of itself as the leading company in gardening hard goods. But 75% of people who bought from us on Amazon were new to file. We did not have them in our customer list. So it was really a market share move that we just didn't recognize that, that so much commerce was happening out there among people that weren't our customers or that would shift from being our customers to going to some competitor.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Totally. Yeah. I mean, 70% new to file. That's incredible. That's.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: Every new customer is new.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, all brands are different probably and most brands don't know whether an Amazon customer is new to their file. We happen to know because a lot of what we were selling on Amazon was fulfilled by merchant. Like they were big 8 foot long garden beds, you know, elevated garden beds of cedar. And so we'd actually know the customer's name and address. You just pledge not to use it because that's against Amazon's terms of service. But we could see whether they were, they were new or not. Totally.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Totally. That's super interesting. Looking back at that time, what would you do differently? Like, do you know how you would explain the problem differently to the executive team? Is there anything that you think could have been done or water under the bridge?
[00:22:04] Speaker B: I'm sure that a lot of it could have been related to, you know, how to create allies and celebrate wins and articulate some of the things that I've just described to you. I think some of it is, is pretty thorny. Though, right? Like if you are celebrating the benefits of an owned customer and a lifetime value, you know, a lot of companies get in trouble by just sort of making an assumption about lifetime value that never changes. And you know, they say oh yeah, like value is $620 per customer. You know, they don't subject that and it changes over time. Behavior changes. So they still mark it as if they could acquire a customer for $300. Whatever. You know those, those are kind of deep questions of culture change and, and data analytics.
I think that, you know, data analysts are some of the most important and powerful folks in any organization. Being able to tell your story through data is probably, you know, that's a skill I still need to work on at this, at this stage in my career. You know, there's never a bad time to, you know, do better data driven storytelling.
[00:23:21] Speaker C: I, I love that I talk about that all the time. So I think I tell everybody if you can learn how to tell a story, you can learn how to convey your project. So it's all, all hand in hand. Looking back at your career, do you think ever a, a point where you had like a mentor or somebody who was a really crucial figure and maybe some piece of advice they may have given you that, that you could share?
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I was, I've been lucky to have a lot of great bosses who cultivated my strengths and sort of coached me. And also, you know, if you've gone through any of those Myers Briggs style or disc style personality assessments, we all have a type and there are ways we can contribute to a team.
Best bosses I've had were usually those able to do strength based, you know, leadership and mentoring. And I probably bias more toward the, the empathy and people side of the business and less toward the process driven. You know, I'm usually best when paired with a strong product project manager who can be really methodical and, and crisp. I was thinking less in terms of mentors as like people, visionary business leaders in my career. You know, one of them was Bob Stiller, the founder of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, who I never worked that closely with. He was sort of winding up his career when I started there, but he was a huge, you know, proponent of business as a force for good.
And we had a great fair trade supply chain and did a lot of community engagement and charitable work. Strength based kind of employee development. And then Will Rapp, it was the founder of Gardner Supply Company, employee owned company where he, you know, sold his shares to the employees and you know, he practiced a kind of Triple bottom line philosophy, where it was people, profits, and planet. So that kind of leadership, it's maybe almost, you know, archetypically Vermont, you know, but. And there's companies I haven't worked for, like Ben and Jerry's, that also famously are oriented toward business for social good or doing business in a way that you can feel proud of and motivated by.
[00:25:50] Speaker C: I'm ashamed I've never heard of the triple bottom line.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: I love that.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: That's amazing.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: People plant. People plant.
[00:25:57] Speaker A: And one doesn't work without the other. Like you can't plan it without the profits. I mean, you got to support it.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Well, yeah. And actually gardener supply company, you know, was recently went into bankruptcy and they've been bought by another company, Gardens Alive, probably know through some of their brands like Gurney's and Brex and Spring Hill Nurseries. So you can't. You can't do two, but not the third.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Totally, totally.
I love that. I've not heard that either. I love that. And Green Mountain Coffee was revolutionary in what they did for coffee delivery and online coffee and getting the pods. I mean, that was when that came out. That was absolutely revolutionary in how people were delivered coffee to their house.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: Right, right. Yeah, that was. That was giant. So most people think that Keurig, the much bigger brand name, bought Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, but it was the other way around. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was founded and took a position in this small startup that was developing the coffee pods, which went on to be so much bigger than the. The ground coffee side of the business.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Yeah, just absolutely visionary in that investment in that delivery of coffee and how people get coffee. Life changing for a lot of people. So one of the things that I want to get into, I want to check out what's special going back to what you're doing today.
What's special about selling cookie cutters versus other things that you sold in the past? How's it different?
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that, you know, it has something to do with that quick pace of product development. That expression, you know, let's not have a cookie cutter solution. The idea that it's one thing that you do repeatedly without thought or, you know, modification is kind of true. And yet it's really creative. Like the way we conduct business with Amazon.
You know, we fell into a bunch of major holidays like Halloween and Christmas and Easter, but also, you know, these random small holidays like Shark week and the 50th anniversary of the Move Jaws. We sell a lot of shark cookie cutters, but so for all of these holidays, we have shapes that make cookies that people love to decorate and enjoy. And we sort of keep our eyes out for trends that are maybe emerging shapes that are getting popular.
There was a squid game TV series came out. You know, there were some shapes that. That were associated with, you know, a highly stressful episode of that show that suddenly people were buying umbrella cookie cutters. And, you know, the cottagecore aesthetic movement has, you know, taken off and people are buying our goose and, you know, a bow and things that are homey like that. Sometimes we try to anticipate the trends. And one the summer that the much hyped Barbie movie came out, we had came up with a shape that we called the fashion doll head because we didn't have the official license from Mattel to be the Barbie cookie cutter. But the movie was a huge success and those cookie cutters just flew out off the shelves. So that was, you know, that was a example of where, you know, being tuned into popular culture and, you know, coming up with something and being able to make it in pretty quick order because everything's made in the US here. Somebody can cut a die. And, you know, we'll have that for sale on Amazon in like a week and week and a half. So it's fun. You feel like you're. You're sort of feeling the pulse of what trends and popular media and holidays are.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: But no.
[00:29:59] Speaker C: So I love that story. That's so hilarious and interesting.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: I know we sold an awful lot of fashion doll heads, you know, hundreds and hundreds a day for, you know, three months.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: Yeah. But no, no, you know, mushroom cloud cookies. No Oppenheimer cookies or.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it is tr.
Some movies are a little bit more fun and cookie friendly than others.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Yeah. We got on the COVID or, you know, front page of the living section of the New York Times one like last holiday season. It was great. It was a lovely bit of unsought coverage. But then we got a lot of New York Times readers coming, emailing us with cookie cutter shape suggestions. And one that came up a number of times was the Einstein shape, which I don't know if you know it. It's not Einstein the person. It's like some never repeating shape that is kind of tile like that has some quantum physics significance. And we thought, okay, we did a little research. We're like, nobody's selling a Einstein shape cookie cutter. But nobody's. Yeah, nobody's buying it. Nobody's selling it. Just because a bunch of New York Times subscribers think it's a Good idea. It may not be a good idea for cookie baking. Baking. So not every audience is a cookie baking audience.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm curious how much of an overlap between New York Times subscribers and hardcore cookie bakers is.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Yeah, we. We have a middle American, you know, and we sell cookie cutters all over the world as well. But age deciles are really similar. Like during pandemic, it was. Our top decile was really young moms, 25 to 34.
But, you know, now it's shifted. Probably it's more 35 to 44, but, yeah, picture families and moms, but it's mostly female. And it varies country by country. Like, you know, we see different shapes sell in Germany and in, you know, UK and Japan. Japan likes their cute dinosaurs.
Germany has a foot cookie cutter that sells well because you can use it to make a kind of cheez it cheesy cracker with. And they're called quesa foos. And those. Those are popular cheesy feet. Who would have thought? It doesn't sound that appetizing to me, but they're popular.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: How many cookie cutters do you have in your house?
[00:32:35] Speaker B: In my house, probably a few dozen, like, hanging from the pantry door.
And, yeah, we sell about 900 SKUs. Most of them are cookie cutters and sets of cookie cutters that might be themed like the numbers from 0 to 9 or a bunch of Christmas shapes. And then we also sell food coloring for icing and frosting and other baked goods. And then baking mixes and ingredients.
[00:33:01] Speaker C: Were those the food coloring and the baking mixes? Are those fairly new additions to the catalog, or have y' all always the food coloring?
[00:33:09] Speaker B: We launched about five or six years ago, and our 12 pack of food coloring is our flagship product. It's just super successful. We, during the pandemic, we had a machine, a tube filling and sealing machine flown over from Italy and assembled here in Vermont. And, you know, it makes millions of food coloring tubes a year. And, yeah, top selling product.
[00:33:36] Speaker C: Was there any sort of. Of market research that. I mean, I'm assuming there was, but, you know, what was the factor or the. The piece of research maybe that led.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: Y' all to include that in the catalog? I think we're always looking for things that are ancillary to the activity and broadening the definition of, you know, if it's about baking and decorating, there are elements of hospitality and family and, you know, creativity. So cake decorating is a bigger hobby than cookie decorating. And, you know, we. I think one thing led to Another really, you know we have a strong selling waffle mix and we have crepe mix and we have lump sugar imported from Belgium. You know, there we sell flavorings like clear vanilla and lemon flavoring and maple flavoring. So anything that you can use to bake dessert is fair game with us. Awesome.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
So kind of start to tie up. Where do you see the opportunities in E commerce for you or at Ann Clark or more broadly?
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Yeah, you know I, in addition to this, my full time job, you know I teach a course or two in business at the University of Vermont in the Grossman School of Business. And so I have these digital marketing students and marketing students and you know there's plenty of research to indicate that. Yeah, the shift from shopping on Google, starting your search, shopping search on a traditional Google search engine to starting a shopping search on Amazon and that happened about 10 years ago that that Amazon supplanted Google as the place to start a commerce search. And then the younger generation increasingly will search on TikTok or on YouTube videos depending on the nature of the search and do their commerce in a meta shop or a TikTok shop. So I think that's starting to become more and more of a thing that we need to pay attention to and invest in and then agentic AI commerce where you know, the search is performed in an AI engine, you know, like Perplexity that is integrated with Shopify and you never have to leave Perplexity to buy on Shopify. I think that's probably the future that we need to position ourselves for. You know, there's not a ton of people that are going to want to visit a merchant website and do a transaction if it can be done quicker and easier on a marketplace or within a social media platform or an AI. The website.
Our investment in our website has chiefly been trying to romance the hobby with recipes and how to tutorials and videos and inspiring images, but not necessarily being commerce first with our website.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: That makes sense. So there's a lot of change I think the TikTok shop, the agentic. What are you reading? What are you listening to? Where. What do you. How do you stay on top of this to. To be helpful for both your students, your employees? How do you keep on top of all the change in econ.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you know. Yeah, you mentioned the question of what I'm reading and ironically, you know, maybe I'm taking a break from business. My book is the Righteous Mind why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
It's a book by the anthropologist or sociologist moral Psychologist Jonathan Haid, and he's the same guy who wrote the Anxious Generation just recently. And I think about the Anxious Generation because I teach college students and I have kids of my own in their 20s. I don't think they're especially anxious. But I mean, just understanding some of the, you know, neurologies that are out there, both in the political sphere and as consumers is, you know, I found that pretty important. And yeah, I, from a business perspective, been trying to read more deeply the book Traction and understand that entrepreneurial operating system being more methodical and, and strategic and building more efficiencies and success in a business from a more fundamental way. I can't say we've adopted the book yet, but adopted the process yet. But that's my business book right now.
[00:38:07] Speaker A: That makes sense. Yeah.
[00:38:07] Speaker C: What was the name of it? Traction. Is it the Traction?
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:12] Speaker C: Okay, I'm interested.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: That sounds.
And their acronym is eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And a lot of businesses that I know of are trying to, to adopt it as a, as a kind of blueprint for how they conduct meetings, how they make strategy, how they make progress against their main goals in a kind of timely way.
[00:38:37] Speaker C: That's fascinating. I'm going to look that up.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: Love it.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Tom. This has been absolutely enlightening. Some great information, some great insights, and I agree with you. Actually, in 2025, I'm not reading any business books.
I'm actually trying to, like, kind of unplug and. Because I feel like I was just regurgitating a lot of the same stuff. So it's like, okay, let me. What happens when I just unplug and see what's.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, you're. You're a profoundly humble guy and, you know, you've been.
I, I love the way you often lead with, like, the lessons that we get from failing because we're all going to do it and we do it again and again. But, you know, you're making people so much smarter through this podcast and through all your posts. So, yeah, I'm honored to be part of.
[00:39:22] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, much. Tom, really appreciate your time.
Congrats.
You made it to the end of the show.
If you'd like to be featured on check in to check out, email me@justinobalfirst.com Want to work with us? You can also email me@justinobilefirst.com connect with me on LinkedIn Justin Aronstein and follow Mobile first on LinkedIn. Thank you for listening.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Running.
