Changing the Live Selling Landscape

Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, I'm Scott. So excited this week to bring you in behind the scenes on a conversation with one of my dearest friends and one of the smartest people I know in this industry, my friend Brandon Cruz, the founder and CEO at CommentSold. Not only are we going to be talking about some insights and best practices in using Commentsold and live selling in general, but also what is happening in terms of the future of retail and what just launched as announced at the Boutique Summit by comment. Sold. Brandon is bringing us in on all the things that are coming and. And I couldn't be more excited. Talk about innovative for boutique owners on a whole new level. You guys are going to want to definitely catch this one, especially if you're already a Comment Sold user and if you're just thinking about what does live selling have to do with where our industry is going. You guys, this episode has all the answers. So get ready for a conversation with my friend Brandon as we talk about where the industry is headed and what's new from Comments. Sold. Hey guys, welcome back. This week I'm so pumped. One of my best friends in the industry, someone who I have been so, man, it's just been such a pleasure to get to watch you grow, like to watch this journey unfold. I'm so pumped that you're here today and we get to have this real and raw conversation. Brandon Cruz, welcome to the podcast.

Happy to be here. It's been a crazy, crazy ride from when I stood up as just I think maybe the only man in the audience of the Boutique of summit in 2017 until now. It's crazy.

We've got to talk about that. Let's go back. So we're just fresh off of the 2022 Boutique Summit, which we were so thankful to have you on our stage. Thank you for being a part. But we've got to go back to the origin story because I think one of my favorite things about this industry, and I'm sure you can relate, is just like the companies that grew at the same time as you, like who were getting started around the time you were Getting started and watching the rise in the growth together and just how many lives you've been able to touch and impact, to me, that's my favorite thing. So back to the beginning. I'll let you tell the story of how we met and how you ended up at that very first boutique summit.

It was kind of a crazy story, actually. One of our really early customers, Gilded Pineapple, which was run by Sierra Elitch, who's actually working for Common Sold now really as a full circle, she's absolutely awesome. She's a rock star. She's like, yeah, we're going to the summit. The boutique of Summit. You're going to be there, right? Obviously, you wouldn't miss it. I'm like, yes, yes, yes. What. What is this boutique that you're talking about? Exactly. She's like, you don't know? Oh, everybody knows. And then I. I really fell out of the no. So I quickly got to Google and I was like, this is perfect. You know, at the time, we had just launched Comet Sold after really building it originally for my wife's company, Discount Divas. And I was like, I'm just gonna go and get a pass. And you called me out right in the middle of the summit, which was awesome. I stood up and awkwardly waved my hand to everybody and said, I know how to help you sell women's clothes. Nobody believed me. And that was the very start of a great partnership and really the very beginning of Common Soul. We only had about 50 customers at the time, I think.

Yeah, I was thinking even less than that. And what's so cool watching, like, first with Amanda and Discount Divas. I remember when Amanda first started selling in Facebook groups, and people were like, what is this? This is brand new. And you guys just jumped in, went all in on this concept and idea and a service. If someone isn't familiar with Comet Sold, give us the rundown of how it works.

I really got to give Amanda props because when she first had this idea, she came to me and I had sold a company prior and was kind of in the tech space, engineer by trade. And she was like, I have this awesome idea. I want to sell clothes to women online. And I was like, oh, that's a horrible idea. Like, if you have any other ideas, I am more than happy to dig into it with you, but, like, I couldn't imagine something more difficult. You got all these huge retailers, and they have, you know, supply chain figured out cost of customer acquisition, figured out, like, you're never going to be able to compete. And she's like, just watch me. I love that she has a coffee mug that she uses quite often that says actually I can. And that's pretty much sums her up. And I'm very glad she went down that path because she started down the normal kind of e commerce shopify path of getting a store, trying affiliate marketers, bloggers, paid acquisition, organic. Just had a hard time driving traffic there and really had a hard time getting people back and really building that relationship that you're so used to in like a brick and mortar store. And so she started selling on Facebook just the most simple way. Like, hey, instead of sending people off to a site, I'm just gonna have them comment sold. I'll send them an invoice directly through Facebook Messenger. They can pay and then, you know, I'll ship it out as soon as I can. And that was the very, very beginning of the program. I told her it'll only take two hours to write. And now it's been six years and I'm still working on it.

Unbelievable. How did you know? Through that time when you really had something, you started to build it for her, you started to roll it out to others. When did you know? Oh, my gosh. This is a thing.

I think it was really with Diva. So before Common Sold started. When we were working on this in 2016, she got to about 30,000amonth in just the Facebook group. And I was like, okay. Like, this is. That's. That's amazing. You know, it's like a six figure business. You know, you're running this all out of your house. This is incredible.

Part time too.

And that was. Yeah, part time. She was still working as a nurse. Yeah, she was, you know, half of her. The very beginning of her shift, she would go in like an hour early and just stuff all these, you know, lockboxes with packages for people who had ordered from her.

Yeah.

Which was amazing. She did that for like two years afterwards, by the way. Like, she really. The nurse family really stood Divas up in the beginning. And it was at the time that we launched the mobile app and I was like, this Facebook thing is great. She got to about $100,000 a month before we launched it. In January 2017, we launched the first version of the app and I was like, I want the same experience. Maybe we can get some of your shoppers over to the app. You know, if you can get 10 or 20%, that would at least be great to just diversify from Facebook. You know, you still use Facebook as an acquisition channel, but really you can monetize them longer term in the app. And at the end of that year they were doing about a million dollars a month in sales and 80% was coming from the app. The app customer spent five times more on average. They watched two hours, you know, or two times more live on average, which is about an hour a night. Like this is. This is phenomenal, you know, like this. These economics shouldn't exist. This user behavior should not exist. It's insane. That's really when I felt like I didn't really even know. I didn't think about, hey, what company could we build? How big could we get it? I just thought, I wonder if there are other people out here selling in the same way that could use the software that we built very specifically for them. That's really where Common sold got started. That's where I really felt like we had something special.

That is amazing. You started to probably look back at that time and look at like QVC and HSN and like, what is the history of this type of sales channel? How did you, you know, use those ideas or just kind of look at that consumer behavior as you were building? Comments sold like, ah, these people have been doing it on tv. We're taking a concept, but we're doing it online in a different way.

The first thing I think that was fascinating is I really had to learn the hard way that I am not the target audience. I think a lot of people immediately when we, when I talk about this say like I would never watch somebody, you know, on Facebook or on an app for an hour just talk about products and interact with people. It's like, that's interesting because a lot of people do.

Yeah.

And QVC has this army of people, oddly enough to have very similar economics where they tune in every day, they buy something every day. They are hyp obsessed with the hosts. And I'm like. And that's when it really done. I mean like, man, this is a relationship based business, not transactional. Like you think when you think E commerce, you think serving an ad, showing a picture of a product, selling a product, I think in five years from now will be crazy to think that people buy clothing and things like home decor from a photo. It would just be like, what, what do you mean? Looked at a photo of it on somebody made a decision. Yeah, you want someone to tell you about it. You want that to be personalized, have a relationship with them. It's. It's so much more media, you know, than I realized, than commerce. And QVC was a great example there. And the the other huge example, of course, was China. The explosion of live selling there. That was very quickly, you know, coming to. To bat with regular e commerce numbers in the, you know, over $100 billion in GMV in sales. That was fascinating. And I, we immediately really started studying, like, what's working well over there. And not that all of it translates one to one, but it's really interesting to see how the market evolves. It's a couple of years ahead of you.

Yeah. So interesting and quickly, I mean, here in the United States, obviously you guys have risen to the top in this category, you know, as a, as a tech platform. And I think a lot of it for you guys is all the relationship based. Like your customers are having a relationship with their customers. Right. But you have a very personal relationship with your customers. Talk to me about your stores and what do you think? Some of the most successful stores that are in this live selling category, what do they have in common that the listeners today could take home and say, oh, I got that. I could do that too.

We really, absolutely love the retailers. The retailers are at the heart of the business. It started, of course, with my girlfriend, who is now my wife with discount Divas. And now I joke that I have 9,000 wives. My wife doesn't like that joke. She thinks it's not very funny. But it's true that I really feel the responsibility and so does everybody in common soul. As an organization, customer empathy is number one. I want people to, you know, wake up and live and breathe and like, live their life every day serving the retailer and making the best decisions for the retailer. And I think we've, we've proven this many times. But it is true, like our success is purely based on the success of the retailer. Their sales growth is our growth as a company. Their wins are our wins. So it makes it very easy to think about, maybe not easy, but very straightforward to think about. What products and features and services should we, you know, try to prioritize to help our largest retailers and to help all retailers grow on the platform? And that's been really the guiding light for us since the beginning. So it's, you know, I meet with a lot of retailers on a weekly basis. I make everybody in common soul do it kind of Zappos style. Everybody in common sold in any role has to work in support. They have to work in onboarding because I want them to really have that heart for the customer that got us where we're at today. And I never want to lose that. It's so important to be that tied to the retailer. And it makes it very straightforward to try to guess and figure out what do you think is going to help them the most in the future. And that's where we really want to dig in.

I love that it's. What is that movie the Intern? Is it the Intern, the movie about. And she's working in customer service as well. I think that's so important not just for your company. I love that example. But for every retailer to do the same thing so that they, along with everybody else in the company truly has the heart for who they are trying to serve and what is their big why at the end of the, the day.

Exactly. When someone in finance is making some call about, you know, how we should handle some thing around shipping, they need to be picturing the faces of the retailers that we're serving and how that will impact them negatively or positively and really feel that there's nobody that's, that's distanced away from the fire, you know, so if you cause a fire in common soul because you made, you know, a bad call and the retailers don't like it, you're going to feel the flames. Oh, and that's good. You know, I like that. I want to, I don't want anyone to ever be too distanced away from the customer. Regardless of like, you know, how we grow. It's. It's the guiding light for the company.

Yeah. I have so many questions about growth. But before I get there, let's go back to your customers for a second. What do you think the most successful retailers on comments sold? What do they have in common?

It's a great question. We actually studied this a lot, like really dug into it quantitatively looking a lot of metrics that we track internally but also qualitatively asking a lot of the retailers and in some cases they gave us permission. Their customers know why you shop here, what, what makes it unique, what creates this repeat purchase habit loop that's just absolutely phenomenal. And it's really boiled down, I think to like a handful of pieces. The first is to, I mean live is very important. Like just to take a step back. Live is we really encourage all of our retailers to go live. There are some that do not. I just want to encourage everyone to give it a shot anyways because a lot of the retailers that you may know or maybe even look up to that are live, a lot of them don't enjoy going live. You know, like they're like, they're not. They don't get off the live and they're energized, they get off the live and they're drained. But they've, they've learned like, where else can they go in the business and have such a big impact in terms of revenue per minute in the same way? And so they try to get rid of it. You know, we encourage them to try to get rid of every other piece. You know, if you're doing as you grow and you get to different levels as you're getting, you know, getting rid of, out of the fulfillment side, getting out of the intake side, getting out of the customer support side and just focusing on live. So going live is important. Consistency is incredibly important. I like to think about it a little bit like a TV show. And that's why I always mentioned that, you know, what we're doing is very similar to media and not, not necessarily E commerce. People get addicted to tuning in the community that you're building, engaging with you. And so if they absolutely have an amazing experience Monday, if they can't have a similar experience for another month, it's going to be very hard to build that relationship with people. Just like imagine if you were, this is a way to scale the one to one relationship. You know, like in a store, if you were to only hang out with somebody once a month or once every three months, you really can't build a tight relationship with them. But on the flip side, we have retailers that go live, let's say a few times a week or maybe almost every day. And the, some of the shoppers on there, like die hard fans, you know, they, they are involved in the life of the retailer, they're following them around, they're consuming all the content, they're purchasing products. Like, it doesn't get any better than that. Large retailers would kill for that. In fact, we know a lot of them that work with now that are trying to figure that out. How do we get people to care about us like they do for these brands like Uncommon sold like. And the consistency is very, very important. Authenticity, I think, is the other thing that a lot of them have in common. Like, they don't worry too much about having a real high production value. You know, like a lot of larger brands come in or a lot of brands in general, like, okay, I have a certain image, I'm thinking, so I want to like have multiple cameras and then this host will, you know, switch over to this host and here's the script. And it's like, you know, in reality the authenticity is so easy to see through. If it's fake, you know and so that's a really, really important part for the retailer. So just to back up consistency, authenticity, the scarcity is the other real big component that even if it's somewhat manufactured, like the fearing the fear of missing out, the feeling that you may miss something, whether it's a giveaway, it's a shout out, then that's, it's like you want that driver to the live. That's the other thing that we see happen on every live from our top retailers that have that in common. And I would say the last thing is probably just like absolute, very, very high frequency relationship with the shopper. I'm trying to think of a better way to state that. When you watch their lives it's very easy to just look at it and say like and think about the products or what the pricing is that they're selling. But in reality the best retailers, the top retailers are very good at engaging with the shoppers. So they're constantly reading the chat, they're constantly giving shout outs to people. They're building that warm and fuzzy relationship that's very intangible but it's so, so valuable. And I always encourage people to do this. When you do watch somebody else and you're kind of taking notes like just forget about the product, forget about the set that they're in, you know, whatever camera that they're using or the filter or anything and just look at the amount of times they interact with the shopper. And we do this, you know, we, we have a particular patent on this in common soul to where we bring in all the comments from all the different places. You know, Facebook from the page, the group from your website, live on the web from your app, maybe a couple other places soon we can talk about that. We tell you information about the shopper as they're commenting. Hey, this is, you know, Ashley, she's brand new. This is her first live, you know, hey, this is Sarah, she's a VIP. She spent over a thousand dollars in the last 30 days. We do that. So these what we call a social trigger so you can engage with people and try to build that relationship. And that's truly I think what really defines the top brands that are doing well on the platform versus everyone else. But you know, if you're still growing in today's environment year over year from a big Covid spike and in stimulus like you're doing great. I see posts in the hub about this now. Like, you know, like don't be discouraged. Even our top customers get discouraged as well. Like if you're still up year over year or close to it. Like you're outperforming all of E commerce, you know, so you should feel good.

Yeah, that's so helpful. I love that. You know, just thinking about the big box stores that are taking note of what's happening with commerce sold. I and, and just in our conversations, you know, just kind of hearing where you're coming from with that, it's amazing. But it goes back to people want to do business with people. And so that's why I think like this boutique category that we're in, whether you sell clothes or home goods, whatever, gift shop, that's why the future is so bright. There's so much opportunity, but it's just you have to be willing and nimble to change and try new things and get comfortable being uncomfort. Because lives like you said, it's not always easy, it's not always fun. Some people dread going live, but it's worth it when you're there and you have like this heart to serve others. You are more invested in the relationship than you are in the product and the financial gain that you're going to get at the end of the day. So such a huge opportunity for sure.

That will always come along. Like the financial side will always come along with good relationships.

Yes.

And it's so much so to where people even unfortunately have like targeted specific customers because like, oh, this person spends so much. They don't realize it's like targeting somebody's, you know, wife or husband be like, they're so nice, you know, like, that should be my wife or husband. It's like, okay, you forgot about how they got to that point. Right. There's a relationship that's developed over time.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's, it's so cool to see when it works because those customers are insanely valuable from an economic perspective. But also like you're, you're really doing something in addition to just selling them products. You're building real relationship and they're getting real value out of that community and that's why they come back. It's so cool to see that it really works. And you're exactly right. These large retailers are coming to us and saying like they've, you know, a lot of big box brands, a lot of people would know that never. They haven't put someone in front of a camera. So they're so, they're so far behind. It's, it's embarrassing. And they're like, we think we're going to do a Live sale, like, once a quarter. I'm like, oh, good. I don't even want to do that, you know, because, like, the whole benefit is having these people that buy all the time.

Yeah.

Why would you want to just monetize them once a quarter? It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, so true. What about the analytics that you think some of your most successful stores have in common? Like, I feel like I always see the question in the Hub, how often should I go live? How long should I go live? What day of the week should I go live? Like, what are some of those common denominators? Or do you think it's different for everybody?

I think there's a lot of good common denominators. One of these guides we're going to be publishing soon, particularly around, like, the frequency of live and the best time. I mentioned this at my talk at Summit, where we go through what we see as the most common times that have the best chance of success. And the big thing is, like, having the consistency because a lot of people say, like, wow, you have someone like, you know, Mindy. Mindy's boutique is amazing, and she blows it out of the water, and she does stuff that's super unconventional. She's like, I'm gonna go live for four hours.

Yeah.

You know, I'm gonna have some lives at noon, which is not good for some people.

I'm going to wax my husband's nose hairs.

I'm a lion. Nose hairs. That's actually. That's such a good example that, like, she's so good at being entertaining and bringing new elements to it. And, like, her viewership is always off the charts. It's insane. She's absolute rock star. And so you can't always look that and say, like, well, I go live at noon, and I don't have the same kind of viewership.

Right.

I think it's really important to really nail the consistency, and then the audience will follow. That being said, nighttime lives are a lot, for a lot of people, the most difficult because they're like, oh, I want to be off work. I want to spend time with my family. Yeah. What we've seen, our largest retailers do, they have really embraced nighttime lives. Like, 7, 8pm the ones that we see do the best is that they essentially don't work in the office most of the day. So that's like, the start of their work day in many. In many cases, because they're just focused on live. And that's. That's great because very sustainable. It doesn't burn them out. If you work from, you know, 8 to 5, then come home, make dinner for the fam and go live at 7, you're only going to do that for so long or it's going to completely burn you out and you're going to end up resenting it.

Yeah.

When in reality, it's the. It's the best part of the business. The metrics that people really, that we see people really optimize for is they really do look at their revenue per minute, which is something you can do in comments sold in your life history, which tells you, like, essentially how efficient are you at live selling and on that live sale and when you try different models or you're going live at different times, or you're talking about different products or the speed in which you're showing products, we show all that to you there. Like, how many products did you sell? What was the average time per product? What was your viewership over time? So when did people lose interest? When did people gain interest? When did people pay? It really helps our best customers go back and look at that. I would say at least once a week to try to make changes kind of in their routine. What's interesting is you would never see that from the outside looking in. You just think, oh, someone's live right now. I got a push notification on the app. I see them on Facebook. You don't realize the input that goes into the best shops that really, I think study those and become much better over time.

Yeah, I just have to like, preach. I got to like drop the mic a little bit because I firmly believe that only attract number grows and retail, like, this business is so right brain, left brain. Like, there's the art side of the business which you see on Instagram and you see people at market and you see them live and that's great, but that doesn't make you successful. You have to have the science side. You have to study all the metrics you just mentioned. You have to have good buying plans. Like, there has to be strategy that goes behind it. You have to understand your cash flow. You have to understand, you know, how are you paying yourself at the end of the day, all of that. But nobody talks about that on Instagram. So I just want to, like, preach for a minute. Like that is the kind of support you also need. Don't just like get lost in this trap of comparison because there is so much more behind the business.

I would say all of our top retailers, let's say anyone doing like 10 million a year in sales or more, I would say zero of them are unfamiliar with the numbers. Every one of them studies the numbers in some way. They may not always allude to it, you know, because like, oh, yeah, I just kind of threw this together. But. But they are.

Yeah.

One Common domain is incredibly hardworking. All of them, like, as easy as they make it maybe seem on. On Instagram. Like everybody does, like, oh, just hanging out at the beach with the famous. They work incredibly hard, you know, so like, don't be discouraged because of that and that they also really studied the numbers. I think that the tough thing is when things are going really well, the rising tide lifts all boats. The other one I've heard recently is like, the rising tide hides a lot of old stumps.

Like that's good.

Yeah. It's like you gotta. You gotta deal with the stumps, you know, sometimes, or at least make sure you avoid them. So what we see is like last year when we had a little bit of stimulus, things are going well. March of last year was like all time higher for Common Sold throughout the rest of the year. But it was also for Shopify, also for Square, also for BigCommerce. Everybody. E commerce was at all time high. Now that we have what I would kind of consider reversion to the mean or basically going back to the growth rate that we were before the big spike. That's when people are like, oh, I kind of have these problems. I'm not growing as fast as I should. And they're starting to dig into the data. It's so easy not to dig into the data when things are going great because you're like, wow, sales are up. That's great. And you don't really question it. However, when sales are down, it's like, why? Right? Why are sales down? I want to understand this better.

Yeah.

And like, I just encourage people to have that motion constantly. Because when sales are up, you should also know why. And same for when sales are down. It just gives you really good control over it. One thing we're going to start publishing at Common Sold is sort of like an E commerce index that people can benchmark off of. Because something I've seen recently, which has been a little bit sad really, is that some of our best retailers, some retailers in the hub just around like, man, this has been a really hard month for me. I'm only up x percent year over year. I thought I'd be up 50% like I was last year, but I'm only up 10. It's like you're way outperforming. Everybody if you look at Shopify stock price from January 1st until February, they're down over 50%. And it's basically because they came out and said, hey, E Commerce is not growing nearly as fast as it was last year because we had all this boost because of COVID And so I wanted to, of course, the nerd inside of me, I want to give the index and publish it every month and say like, hey, if you were above this in terms of year over year, you're doing great. Because in reality, a lot of these big brands, a lot of these E Commerce brands, they're down 20% year over year. So when people say, like, I'm only up 5% or I'm just breaking even over last year, it's like, you're doing great. You're way outperforming them. Likewise, last year when some people were up 40%, you were just average. You know, because of where things were at, I think that's valuable for people. At the end of the day, it's like you still have to keep pushing forward and be consistent. But it's nice to know really definitively. I think anyways, that, like, hey, what I'm going through is, is more macro. And it's not that you can't control it, it's just that you're actually doing good when you think you may be doing bad.

That's so good. I can't wait to see that. I think that will really be helpful to really normalize those numbers. So you're talking about something new that's coming to Comet Sold with that statement. There's a lot of new things coming to Comet Sold, which you were able to talk about at the Boutique Summit. So, so let's. Let's spill some beans. Let's talk about what. What is new coming to commentsold in the next year.

So that's a great question to take a little bit of a step back. We obsess over the retailer success at Common Sold.

Mm.

This is how confident we are in the live business going forward. Like this year, Common Sold started at about 220employees. We're going to end this year at 500. We're taking our. And this is like totally family information, but we're taking our EBITDA down close to zero. You know, just break even. Because we are so bullish and so excited about the future of live in the U.S. and in surrounding areas, primarily the U.S. so we're very, very excited to have a lot of conviction over what's coming. Investing in product engineering, lots of resources, very Very exciting. So a couple of the key initiatives, again, also to take a step back. The reason why we think about these initiatives is we're trying to solve for two big pieces, one that we really recognize across all of our customers. One is inventory is a pain in the booty. It's just tough to do it really well. A lot of our customers have no process in place or the process they use, you know, has some problems scaling. And so inventory in general, especially with the supply chain issues, has become really under fire for our retailers. So the way that we're kind of planning on fixing it and helping rather, is a few things. The first is our PO management. So for the longest time in Common Sold, we didn't know about a product until it was already in your warehouse or in your house or in your apartment and in the system, which is like crazy because you've already made the buying decision probably months ago.

You tied up your cash and tied.

Up the cash, and we can't help you at all in terms of, like, how much should you buy? Are you short on dresses this upcoming month? You know, like, all these things that a really good inventory planner would do, we want to be able to do in the software. And the first piece of that is making sure we get all your purchase orders into a single system where you can see what's expected to come in. Issues with the order automatically integrate with Hubventory, of course, so you can pull in those orders and products directly so you don't have to enter in the products manually whenever they come in, which is going to save, I mean, hundreds of hours.

We're super excited about that, by the way.

Oh, it's going to be great. Like, it's. It's going to totally streamline that piece of the process. So not only will it give you great insights, but will really cut down on all the labor. So we're very excited about that. The place that Common soul has just been, we haven't been in that part of the stack before. We're excited to be able to help. The second piece that we're doing to help on inventory is drop shipping. And drop shipping, I'd almost consider it like ancillary drop shipping. I think we'll have great products. We'll have a lot of the products that you buy today, but we'll also have a lot of new category of products, which is really what I'm most excited about. So you can test and try different things without actually having to, you know, lean in and buy in big quantities. So you'll be Able to go into drop shipping on common sold and check a whole bunch of samples that you want to order. We'll shoot them out to you. You can sell and all they'll be shipped within an sla. We really feel like other people doing drop shipping now are doing it totally wrong. Of course, everybody says that before they start something. Right, but really like having the vendors drop ship something, you know, or having it drop ship from like AliExpress and it's just that's it doesn't work, you know, like your consumers are. They believe you. They have this authenticity with you. If you sell them something, we want them to ship to you and your poly mailer. We wanted to ship with your insert about what your return policy is and a little thank you letter. We want to put little nice gifts and kindness in there like a pair of earrings. Like these things that you do. Now we want to incorporate in drop shipping directly, but again, so it will really appear to be from your brand, but it will help you do stuff. Like I didn't have my shipment coming in this week and I still want to go live and sell or I really want to try home decor, but I don't feel good going to gift market and you know, doing a whole bunch of POs for home decor. Yeah, I'm really excited about those two pieces to really help solve sort of like the inventory equation in common Sold for our retailers.

Yeah, let's talk about those for just a quick second. And I want to hit on the. On the PO management piece. You and I were talking about this. We've been in the middle of retail Bootcamp and a big piece of what we do in retail Bootcamp is just talking about the importance of PO management and understanding. You know, you really can't plan anything if you don't really know where you've been. Right. You can't really plan anything if you don't know what's coming. And you can't go to market and just shove your orders in your purse and just hope that things arrive. So I love that you guys are taking that into your own hands and really making that available for all of your retailers. That is so important. And I mean shameless plug. But I am really excited about that in like that integration between Hubventory and comment Sold. So as you're buying on Hubventory, we can sync all those things right into comments sold so you can see what's coming before it gets there. And then as we have tracking numbers and shipping, like we can see those arrival dates start to automatically Change as well. So you know exactly when things are going to arrive.

That's right. And then when the product actually comes in or the PO actually comes in, the order comes in, you can say, all right, here's the 10 products that actually came in the order. Boom. The products just appear in comments sold. You don't have to go manually create them. It's going to save a crazy amount of time. I think a lot of mistakes happen in the intake process.

Yes.

So it's really, really exciting in terms of optimization and efficiency there.

Yeah, I'm really excited about that. And then also just, you know, to your point on drop shipping, I want to make this like kind of clear because I think that there's maybe going to be some confusion as this rolls out. Does this mean that I should open a drop shipping boutique tomorrow and compete with everybody who's an existing boutique owner that's carrying inventory investment or does this mean I'm an existing retailer? I'm already buying inventory, I'm running a legit business. This is just to help me fill where there's opportunities and to test new categories.

That's a great question. The first is you can't just become a drop shipping sort of retailer on Comet Sold. Which I think is kind of an oxymoron. You can't be a drop shipping retailer. In my mind, retailers like you own the product, right. So you're just a drop shipping. I don't know. But no, if you're a drop shipping only store, you don't get an app. I think that's very unlikely and there's a couple of reasons. One is we have a. Every product will have a minimum margin. There were a margin that we're trying to hit for the retailer and then we'll also have a minimum retail price that we enforce in the system. So there'll be no way for someone to just go on and try to like undercut pricing on everybody because they won't be able to. The second thing I think is really cool is that the product, your allocation, amount of inventory you have will be based on how much you sell on comments Sold. So I think we've really solved that problem very eloquently by giving you quantity based on how much we expect you to sell so that you don't have to worry about selling it really fast or somebody else got the same piece. There will be tens of thousands of items in the catalog that you can order samples and sell and not ever have to worry about. I won't have enough inventory as you go down in size. The like, your allocation, of course, gets smaller and smaller, but it's appropriate for the size of the business, which we're excited about. This is very much the only reason we would do this. And the only reason we are doing this is to help retailers get over this inventory hump that a lot of times when people go to market and large retailers, the same thing happens. So again, don't be discouraged. Not everybody has it. I would say very few people, maybe none have it all together, you know, including me, including Common. So we're just trying to figure it out, trying to help people out. And when you go to market, you buy all this product and then you all of a sudden decide like, I don't have anything coming in next week. This is a big problem. Now you can sell products on the live. Your customers will have no idea it's dropshipped. It will come, it will have the return address of your warehouse, it will have your poly mailer, like all these really, really cool things so that we maintain your brand, which I think is very important. It's just purely to try to help. Like where Drop shipping, if you could imagine, is like one of the worst businesses to get into. Because all of a sudden we're saying, hey, instead of being a SaaS company selling software, we're going to buy a whole bunch of clothes and put them in our warehouse. Yeah, that's a horrible idea, just like I told my wife. But we're only doing it because we're helping fill these gaps for our customers that are having this pain today. So you nailed it on the head. And not only that, but like you, you can't just be a retailer on Common Sold and only do drop shipping.

Yeah, I think that's so important. And it also solves the problem of you don't want everyone to look the same. You don't want everyone to be competing, you know, in the same niche as you. So I think the opportunity is you're still your own brand, right? You're going to market, you've got your own unique product mix various price points. But this is an opportunity to fill gaps. Not everybody selling the same stuff all the time. So really good to differentiate.

You won't be able to anyways, which I think would be good. We really try to think through a lot of these edge cases to make sure that our retailers are protected and that this does what we intend it to do, which is, you know, help our retailers grow faster than they would be able to. We also have inventory financing coming this year. I forgot to mention that it's kind of a smaller piece, but just like shopify capital, I look at dropshipping as kind of like one of the alternatives to inventory financing. It's like, hey, instead of, you know, taking debt to go buy inventory, like, you can just, you know, sell stuff that we already have.

I love that. Are there any other new products you want to mention coming out this year?

One side is inventory. Really want to fix that problem and help our retailers. The second is really with the decline of Facebook year over year, the organic reach of Facebook, and I mentioned this in my talk, is down, you know, almost 60% just for organic live videos in general. You know, we've proven this with our white paper. It's like not common sold lives. Lives in general just aren't being prioritized. If you just go scroll through your newsfeed now, you probably will not see one live. It's just one of those things where Facebook isn't prioritizing them in the newsfeed. So we're like, we got to fix this problem for our retailers. We got to fix getting new shoppers. Previously, that came almost entirely organically. What we've noticed is that from this time last year, roughly from March last year until March of this year, last year, about 60% of all new shoppers on common solen for all of our retailers came from Facebook. This year, almost 70% are coming from web. Their first purchases on web, which is fascinating. I think it's just. It really shows you the shift into paid acquisition and trying to, you know, ramp that and scale that up to a really good place. What's nice is our retailers have this incredible advantage over every other e commerce retailer and that their ltv, the lifetime value, how much they make from the shopper is so astronomically high that they can afford to pay almost anything for a new shopper as long as, you know, just like you mentioned, actually has to be tracked. As long as it's tracked and you stay on top of it and you work with, you know, a good agency that it's very reasonable to keep in place. But it's really exciting to me. So we're trying to solve new shopper acquisition. How do we solve that? The first is we have a new partnership that may or may not have been announced with Facebook at the time of this podcast, where it's a new Facebook product that we worked with them on around messenger where we can, with just one click or someone saying a keyword on a live or clicking through on their, you know, after checkout, they can choose to opt into live notifications for 30 days, one month, up to one notification every day. What's interesting about this is people forget but back in 2018, 2019, that drove about 80, 83 to 85% of all live viewership on Comet sold was driven from these messenger notifications. And then they went away because a lot of people were using them from spam. And now they're back with exactly what they should be, which is, hey, we're live. It's to use whenever someone's going live, which I think is going to be great. That's one of the ways we think we're really able to drive, you know, new viewerships and even running ads to drive people to opt in to live notifications is something that we're playing around with right now. So that's one the Facebook partnership, which is exciting. The second one is Marketplace. So we're actually building a consumer, consumer focused and consumer oriented marketplace that has all of our retailers in it. Of course you have to opt into it, but then when you go live in your replays will be in a centralized app, think kind of similar to Etsy. And we're going to go spend tens of millions of dollars to try to get new shoppers for you to buy from you in this app directly, which this is one of the things I'm most excited about. That's a big swing we're taking in Common Sold this year and really setting it up for next year is going and getting new shoppers for our retailers with no risk like that is something we're very, very excited about. The value proposition I think really goes up in terms of like, now we can go get shoppers for you as well. It's something that just historically a lot of our retailers have struggled with Just because they've been so good at organic acquisition, they haven't had to rely on paid acquisition like a lot of e Commerce brands that are of similar size but primarily, you know, sell through a Shopify or Big Commerce. So those two pieces are coming that I'm very, very excited about. Then the last one's kind of like our certified agency partnership program. We're overhauling it. We have a few new agencies in there that we've worked with to do really tight integrations with Common Sold and they really prove themselves in terms of their ability to scale out advertising budgets. So that's kind of like the third prong in the approach of solving this viewership piece and the fourth prong, I guess at this point in time we're already To a chair. The fourth leg in the chair is a partnership that I'm not sure if I can announce yet, but we'll be an officially commerce partner for a large social media network that is not owned by Facebook or Instagram. So you guys can take a guess that pretty popular working on right now. That's pretty popular. That's the most popular actually right now. Yeah, that we're working on right now. That we're very excited about that, you know, will be the largest live streaming partner for them, you know, by probably 10x. And a lot of our retailers will benefit from that primarily in new shopper acquisition. So we're very, very excited about that.

So many good things. I am so honored that you were able to share all these at the Boutique Summit first. Give everybody a sneak peek, of course. And here today, I again, I just love watching the growth and the journey unfold. And for you guys personally, but also just for every single retailer that has an opportunity to work with you. So congratulations. That's a big list.

Thank you. It's been a blast. I mean, it's, it's so much fun to get up and work on this every day. I know that everyone in common sold feels the same way. You really feel like you're helping, you know, David versus Goliath, but David's winning like every day. Like David's going out there and just smacking the crap out of Amazon and it feels great. And I think that it's kind of flown under the radar until this point and then now, you know, Common Soul did over a billion in GMV last year. I think we'll do close to 2 billion in GMV this year. And all these are like retailers that are growing like crazy. And it's just, it's amazing, amazing to see that. And most of that, over 80% of that will come from existing retailers, you know, not new ones. So it's these existing retailers that just continue to grow year over year. It's just I love being able to support their business and help them fulfill that's the real American dream is like, hey, I was a teacher before and now I have this business. I'm making more than I ever have. I'm making more in a month than I did as a teacher in a year. Now my partner works for me. It's just, it's so cool to see this play out over and over again. And we're excited to continue to be in their corner and back them.

Yeah, man. Our visions are so 100 aligned because that is what drives us Every single day. Because I believe when you change a business, you change a family, you change a life, you change a community. There's just so much we could have.

Done without the Hub. I mean, we couldn't have done Common Soul without the Hub in the beginning. We couldn't do Common Soul without the Hub now. So I'm so thankful for our continued partnership.

And me too.

Like, it's just. I think we're just in the beginning. I think with hubventory, a lot of the stuff we're working on training is just very much in the beginning. But it's just been so cool to look back and see that journey from 2017, when I could probably fit most of people in the Hub into, like, a few rows of chairs to where now where I have to get binoculars to see Ashley on stage. It's just amazing.

You know what's amazing? I think about that very first boutique summit. What do we have there? 300 people? I think was the very first one. We had 500 people. At the second one, you. By the end of this year, you will have more employees than we have people.

Wow, that's.

Isn't that wild, though? Yeah. And you were just like this guy in the corner, like, hey, who's that guy?

It was just me and Melissa, who. Everyone that knows Common sold loves Melissa. And I actually had a fake profile that was called Catherine because no one knows. This is a secret. Do you know about this, Ashley?

I don't know.

Tell me this is okay. I'm about to just drop a huge Common sold secret. Like. Like Illuminati kind of secret. And it's funny because Katherine was still in the support rotation up until, like, a month ago when someone realized that it wasn't real. So I went to, like, fake persongenerator.com or something and click the button, and it was like, I got a profile photo, a name, and I was like, okay, here I'm going to be Catherine. Because what happened is when people came in to talk about live selling and the strategy around going live and selling, you know, women's fast fashion. And Brandon would answer, literally a lot of ladies would tell me, what do you know about this space? You know what I mean? Like, you couldn't possibly understand, which was part of it was probably true and still true today. But I was like, I think I really can't help. And so then I just did an a B test. Of course, the nerd in me where I was like, I'm gonna have Brandon answer 50%, but I'm gonna have Catherine, answer it. I am actually Catherine. Brandon is actually Catherine. And Catherine performed almost twice as good in terms of people doing the first response and way better in terms of the rating, which I thought was hilarious, like the conversation rating. So Katherine lived for almost a year in common, sold, answering questions and interacting and building good relationships. Yeah. And then, spoiler alert, I'm actually Catherine. So if you. If you did chat with Catherine back in the day, then shout out, hit me up, you know, on commissoul.com or Facebook or LinkedIn and let me know. But absolutely crazy.

Is Catherine still in the boutique hub? Like, is this Catherine with a C or Catherine with a K? I feel like I need to search Catherine.

It's Catherine with a K. So we do have a new Catherine that's real. Oh, totally real. And she's great. Shows by Cat. She's awesome. Catherine with a K. I'll send you the profile photo so we can make fun of it. It was, yeah, totally not real. And the. The photo also looks like a model photo that someone just zoomed, took it, like, circled out the head so she's like, kind of in a pose and, like, with a tree behind her. It's a really weird headshot. But. But yeah, Catherine. Catherine answered support tickets. She was the highest rated support rep for a long time. Then once she felt like number five, I was like, I'm no longer better than the team that is at Comet Sold. So they kind of fired me, you.

Know, which is everyone's goal.

That's right. Yeah. Oh, they're way better than me.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna go search this out. Catherine is on so many things. This podcast is already longer than I normally do podcasts. But it has been so good, I could keep going. I just want to ask you one, like, a personal question. So you and I have had these talks, I don't know, since the beginning. I feel like you just randomly just chat on, hey, what do you think? So I'm curious, like, founder to founder, a couple things. Number one, what is the biggest mindset shift you've had to have as a founder to take on this growth and build this company? What's a big mindset shift you've had?

Oh, that's a great question. I think the first was going from I'm trying to optimize for saving money to I'm trying to spend it aggressively wherever we can get some return. And that was a big mindset shift, you know, around, like, I'm just trying to make sure that we. And a good Example of this is we did a. A contest like a year ago in Atlanta market where we gave away a tv. What a dumb idea. Because everyone's there that flew in. No one's gonna take a TV home. And that's what we realized. And this TV was like 400 bucks. It's like a 50 inch TV and everyone's like, okay, we called like five people like, hey, this person didn't want it. Do you want it? Congratulations, you won. They're like, okay, great. No, I don't want the tv because I can't check a TV into Delta on the way home. And so we just left it there. And my wife was like offended. Amanda was like, I can't. Oh my God. You brought a brand new TV and left it there. I'm driving to Atlanta right now to get it. And it really was a mindset shift around saving money. And it now it's definitely not being reckless, but it's like taking risk.

Yeah.

You know, quantified risk often is like a. Was definitely uncomfortable for me as a shift in the beginning. That was one big mindset shift. The second huge one was it was kind of closer to the Catherine days where I had to what I call like make space for people. So you put someone in charge somewhere, you invest time in them, you know, make sure that you, like, are good at getting them ramped up and onboarded. Once that happens though, you kind of have to get out of the way. And that's. That was really hard for me. And I think for a lot of our retailers can relate and people listening founders can relate to because you kind of take a step back and immediately there's going to be some things that are a little bit wrong, or maybe not even wrong, but you would do differently. That happens to me and I immediately kind of want to jump back in and meddle around. And that was the hardest thing for me to be. Like, if they really do have and you trust this person, you build a good rapport with them. You can have one on ones with them and help course correct. You got to get out of the way. And that was a really hard mind shift for me. I think I still struggle with that today.

I don't know that that ever goes away. I. What is the EOS term? Delegate and elevate.

That's exactly right. Yeah. I love you.

Yeah. And that's a really hard lesson. Oh, gosh. I have a similar question on just like that elevating piece, you have grown. You've taken on financial partners. Like you've got A board. You've got all these things going on. What do you do in moments where you feel like you have imposter syndrome? How have you invested in helping yourself develop as a leader? So you feel like you are still, like, running the ship and your dream, and you don't feel like you're surrounded by other, you know, all of these other people who maybe have been there, done that. Like, how do you challenge yourself to keep thinking bigger and step into a new level of leadership?

That's a great question. I think it's so much easier to point the finger and tell others and not look inside and do it yourself. For example, for me, I preach this at Common Sold all the time. Hey, we grew 40% last year. That means everybody in every role needs to grow 40% in order to stay just where they're at, you know, because the company's growing fast. And you'll have this in. In all businesses. And the. A lot of the boutiques that are listening, the person that probably was, like, the best person you had in fulfillment all of a sudden is the worst manager or the person that was an okay manager. You know, like, getting the team excited with three people is really bad at 10. And that's, like, a constant change. I think that's really, really tricky to navigate in those times. I have to take a step back. And there's, like, a couple things that I really try to do consistently. The first is this comes from, like, essentialism. But if. If you don't have time to think, then you don't have time. Like, you don't have enough time at all. So I really put these time blocks in my calendar of, like, my calendar is booked every day, but in the day, there's at least an hour and a half, like, a good, you know, contiguous time block there of where I can really, like, think about stuff, take a step back, be strategic. Otherwise, it's so easy to just get stuck working in the business. I mean, I see this all the time. Like, we call it, like, the hair on fire. You're just running around. You're doing so much. You're busier than you've ever been. But, like, are you really looking around the corner? I feel like. And also, like, just like, as a side note, I feel like that's Common Soul's biggest responsibility is to look around the corner for our retailers. What's coming, what's happening in the social networks, what's happening in paid, like, make sure we're on top of this stuff, you know, so that. That's been really, really tricky but I think super rewarding. And in terms of the myself in personal development. We have a book club in common sold that I love where it's. I kind of run it dictator style of like I think we should read this book. It's not like voted on or anything. It's just like this is the book we're going to read and most always it's like business self help type things.

Yeah.

The other thing that I've just done recently like 9 months ago is, is really getting executive coach and I had great peers in the industry. Like, like I love brainstorm with you actually. You've helped me through so many things and problems and strategies. It's been so valuable but it's so cool. It's, it's like when you pay someone to help, they're much more okay telling you that you're wrong, you know, or like that you're being an idiot, you know. And like in, in finding that was really helpful. So I have, you know, my executive coach is the ex CEO of Big Commerce. So the real, A lot of real relevance in the space can be really helpful in navigating. You know, how do you navigate the board? How do you navigate a leadership team of this size? Like how do you navigate even different industries we're going into? You know like drop shipping or marketplace is very, very helpful. So like having the peers like Ashley is my, one of my closest confidants, the executive coach. And then I think just kind of the continued education and making time for that which is, that's the hardest part is like nobody. When you go through your whole week and you're just super busy, you're never like I should take time off and like really think about stuff. It just can't.

Doesn't happen.

Yeah, but you have to, you know, it's the most important piece.

That's such good advice. I meant and that's relevant to every single person who's listening. I feel my module two of Retail bootcamp is like spilling out of me right now because I feel like the 4 part to do list and some of that stuff strategy, like you have to build time for it. So thank you. We have crushed a lot of topics today. This has been such a valuable conversation for me personally and I know for everybody who's listening. Thank you again for your time at the Boutique Summit and for today and just genuinely, again, I know I've said this already but just to watch your journey. I really appreciate the fact that you are so humble and genuine and you always have been throughout this process. You're approachable by everyone at every level, and that says a lot about you and your character. So I just want to thank you again for your friendship and for how you continue to build a path for all of us to follow. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. I think that it never is lost on me every day when I wake up, that it's the reason I'm here. I would not be here without the retailers. I would not be here without the Summit. I would not be here the first summit. I would not be here without the Boutique Hub. And I will never forget that because it's incredibly apparent every single day. It's the only reason we exist. And so it's the least we can do to, like, treat it very, very seriously and take that responsibility on our shoulders. And it's just, I don't know how people could possibly be cocky from, like, growing a company. It's like, you know, it's like you're just the product of all these people believing in you and you helping them. Like, how could you be cocky about that? Like, they're the ones that make it. I talk about this a lot in Common Soul, too. Like, the whole customer empathy piece. When we work on stuff like, what's the financial model for this thing? I'm kind of like, we got to keep customers in the forefront, because if we don't have them, we're all just. No one here has a job. Like, we're all gone. Like, just go work somewhere else. Right. Including me, you know, so it's. I have so much love for the retailer. I don't ever want to lose that. And it's just. It's incredibly important. I think a lot of our retailers have a love for their shoppers and, like, real relationships with them, and I know the Hub does. That's so incredibly apparent. So thank you, Ashley, for really trailblazing the space. Like, there was no education, no place for people to go. You know, people forget that back in 2017, and, like, now there's all this noise, and it's just amazing when, like, if you really are in the space and, you know, it's you, just the authenticity, you immediately can tell who's authentic, who's real, who, who knows the space, who builds the community, and who's just, you know, trying to make money. It's just a joke, you know? So I, I. It's so incredible to see what you built so far and the team, the community that you built in the Boutique Hub. I'm just very thankful to be a part of it.

I appreciate it. Guys, if you want more from Brandon and also from Amanda, I just want to remind you, go back. I believe it's episode maybe two. Like one, two or three. It's in the first three episodes of this podcast. You'll get all the origin story. Brandon, thanks again. Please tell Amanda hi. Give Canden a squeeze and we will see you again soon. Thank you. Hey guys, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope that you loved it. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a rating and review down below for a chance to be one of our featured listeners each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and how to access complete show notes and bonus downloads from our guests, head on over to theboutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.

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