From Zero to $180 Million in 6 Years by Turning Customers Into Influencers with Joseph Thompson, Kits.com

It's a much more exciting world now. We literally were picking between 10 or 20 different options of sports or media celebrities at the time and spending, taking a huge risk and spending a lot of money. And now as you said, the choices is so broad. But I think what's different is that you know each of these influencers, especially at the mid sized influencers, they're earning and building their authenticity, their followers, their engagement every day. And so as a result they have to be genuine because if they push something that they don't believe in and their followers are disappointed by it, they won't have a platform. So it's really for the best of them. They've really created this layer of trust, this trust metric that you're actually partnering with them on as you share your product with them. And I think to really leverage it though, you have to be willing to do two things with influencers. You have to be willing to take your complete offering and just put it on display to either be loved or to be critiqued. And you have to be okay with that. And then number two, you have to give up total control of how that message is communicated. This is no longer a back in the studio editing clips for weeks and getting it just right and then putting it on air. This is offering your product to an influencer and saying post or don't post. Love it, don't love it. It's totally up to you.

Welcome to another episode of our Tracktion podcast. This is the Next Wave. The Next Wave is a different take on our podcast where we're bringing back some of our most favorite guests that have either graced our stage or joined our podcast 10 years ago, five years ago. And we're going to revisit their topics to see do they still hold up in today's world of AI. Traction is brought to you by LaunchAcademy CA, one of Western Canada's main tech hubs and an international accelerator program that provides you access to the Canadian startup visa as well as boast AI. Your go to partner for R and D tax credits.

Hey.

And this week's guest is Joseph Thompson. Joseph is CO founder and COO of Kits.com he was one of the very first speakers at traction in 2015 graced our stage in Vancouver. Joseph is a co founder of Kits Eyecare right now he launched that in Vancouver in 2018 and it's one of the fastest growing optical companies globally and the fastest to grow from launch to 150 million in revenue. It's traded on the TSX under the ticker Kits K I T S Prior to kits, Joseph had 20 plus years experience leading organizations at Amazon, at Procter and Gamble, with assignments in Cincinnati, Boston, Shanghai and Toronto. So he has some Canadian experience. He is in Canada now, but he is a global entrepreneur. Joseph, welcome to the Next Wave podcast.

Always great to see you ray.

Now in 2015 your topic was the future of branding. Branding is pretty universal but it has evolved and changed over the years and today we're going to really take a look back at some of the concepts and strategies that you shared with us in 2015 and see how has that evolved and changed today in 2024. Joseph we're going to start off by playing a clip. So let's rewind and see what did Joseph say in 2015?

A lot of time on that first question is I think two off to the opposite and if you see a lot of content that's out there now and a lot of discussion it's what's your strategy on on Pinterest or what's your unique strategy on Facebook or what's your unique strategy here and how do you build that from the ground up? And I think if you've got a couple hundred million dollars in in your marketing fund and in your product fund then that could be a reasonable thing to do. But there's probably only a handful of brands in North America that have that and if you're building small and if you're building scrappy, it's much more effective to spend the time on the hard stuff.

So that was your three step approach to branding. Obviously we don't have time for changes, but what has changed over the last almost nine, ten years now?

Yeah, it's fun to look back what's endured and what did I get wrong? I still think that that construct of start with a powerful insight with a customer as the hero and at the center and find a way to be really heart and mind opening in the communication. And just for about the channel, put that aside, leave the medium for last. I think that is has endured. I think that structure is even more important now than it was 10 years ago. I think it's just put the focus on making a great product and making a great product experience. But there's a bunch of things I think probably that have changed. Looking at that clip, what did I get wrong? I think I probably underestimated the speed of evolution of some of these media channels. They went just so quickly from an emerging channel to mainstream to and sometimes consolidation and then quickly to monetization. And I don't think maybe any of us expected how monetization would play such a big role and have such an impact for brands as all of these social channels, they just started charging and started charging top dollars. And at times some of them even took a bit of a darker turn. There's some mediums like even Facebook and Instagram, really the focus at times has been really to hook you into a behavior. And so where else did I get it wrong? I think I.

Let's take a step back here. So again, 2015 seems like a long time ago, but it wasn't really that long ago. And at that time, TV was still very heavy as a medium. Print was going on the wayside, but people are still putting ads in magazines and newspapers and whatnot. And social media, Facebook was a predominant player at that time. And again, nobody really saw a lot of this coming. Hey, this is from, especially from an advertiser perspective, people were, it was like pulling teeth trying to get PR agencies, ad agencies to put money into social. Everybody wanted to put money into TV and radio and other mediums. Yeah, no, we haven't heard of podcasts back then, so. But again, hindsight, we were able to see that there were some real mishaps around how Facebook handled ads and how people leverage it. But it doesn't change the fact that it blew up and it blew up fast. And it was caught a lot of people off guard of how fast social media and social content was going to be dominant in marketing and PR and branding.

I think that's, I think that's right on. And for me though, I look at what were some of the side effects that impact brands and marketing teams and organizations. And so maybe one of the things that I hadn't predicted that really emerged was this focus away from the hard work of establishing that powerful insight and the heart, mind opening communication, it almost shifted to this. These, as you said, these channels were so big and so important that companies then started to go sideways into maybe we should hire these growth hackers to go and solve this one component of this one channel and that will be our hack. And in my opinion, these tricks just, they don't endure. They might buy you a day or a month, but they don't last. And so the companies, in my experience, it really focused on this growth hacking or just leveraging one medium or one channel only. It was very hard for them to endure. And when the conditions changed and profitability became more important, these are the companies that really saw the hardest times and the companies that went the other way and maybe didn't see quite as many highs by not going chips in on one media as it was exploding and investing heavily into it. Those are the ones that just had a stronger foundation in my view.

Yeah, again, it was not that long ago, nine years. Over the nine years, Facebook was very dominant, but other mediums started coming in Twitter. But then you saw this big shift from a lot of text based ads and content to visual ads and that was Instagram, Snapchat, and Now we're seeing TikTok. So what do you feel was really the thing that tipped the scale of, okay, this is the new medium. That or social is the new channels that we need to leverage above tv. Is it the cost, is it the reach, is it the flexibility, the turnaround times? What really made it the killer solution for getting your message out and building a brand around?

Yeah, I think it was the speed of creation. You could really create content pretty quickly. And the tracking capabilities, it became almost addictive. This I could put money in and I could see immediately who saw, who didn't see. And that was totally different landscape than what we used to see, where you'd buy a big TV campaign and you'd wait weeks or in some case months to see the impact. In this case, you could get it in hours or even minutes in some, in some cases.

And we're here in North America and right now, today, it's Instagram, it's TikTok. Those are from the dominant platforms. X is having a little bit of a resurgence, but it's definitely changed since the old Twitter days. But geographically speaking, Facebook isn't that prominent here in North America, as was in 2016, 2017, 2018. But it is still very dominant in other parts of the world. You go to Brazil, you go to Southeast Asia. Facebook is very heavily used, more so than it is here in North America. But then you also spend a lot of time in China and they have a whole other ecosystem there of social channels and whatnot. They've got their walled garden and different reasons why they want those channels to be dominant. But then you look at Korea, South Korea is very open, but they have their own channel, Cacao and others. What did you experience? Because they were going down the social route faster than we were in North America. So did you see the stuff coming? Did you see any of these social channels really flourishing in those Asian markets prior to them hitting North America?

Yeah, in China, when I was in Shanghai, they were definitely ahead of North America on social adoption and just things like influencers or social shopping, these things would, would come to mainstream much faster, and they're in the process of getting to scale in North America. But these are Trends we saw five and 10 years ago in Asia.

And social shopping, this is something that you and I had some very funny conversations around. This is something that's new to North America. Even right now. You say social shopping, people like, what does that mean? You could go to Instagram, you can go to TikTok, there are embedded links they have the ability to put. Create your own little channel. But that's not really true. Social shopping, what is social shopping for audience?

Yeah, so. And I think it's just. I think it's just getting started, right? I think it's very prevalent in Asia.

And there's a ton of money being made from social shopping by individuals.

It is. It probably doesn't make any sense when you say it out loud, but it's really in the same way. Twitch is a platform where you could log on and watch, literally watch other people play video games. Social shopping is the same, but just watch other people go shopping. And it sounds ridiculous, but. But then when you see it, you're. You're watching someone say, hey, I need a new pair of glasses or a new coat and come shop with me. And before you know it, you're two, three minutes in going, I hope she chooses the red one. And you're hooked and you learn something. And it. You just. You feel this connection.

So, yeah, because that's kind of going down the whole reality TV type of stream, like, we. We've seen haul videos on YouTube and even on Instagram, where these are young individuals that are going out shopping, but you really see the aftermath. Like, they've come home and say, hey, let me show you what I bought at the mall today. And they're going through 20 different bags and putting stuff up. But a social shopping experience in Asia is quite different in the sense that their objective is to sell you on things. And they're getting affiliate links. They're getting commissions off of these things. Like we talked about, this one young lady pretty much blew up all over the Internet where she was doing items, just flashing them for like two seconds on screen, and it's off. And she's speaking off, saying Mandarin, but she's saying something about the product boom, it's gone. Next product boom, it's gone. Next product boom, it's gone. But then you see the view from her angle. She's got like a hundred cameras all around her, just filming her doing this. And these are all different channels, all different brands that are Trying to leverage her for her influence. Was that even a concept that could this possibly happen back in 2015 or because you were GM of retail at Amazon. Right. So you had a front row seat at a lot of online retail e commerce experiences. But this phenomenal.

Yeah, I think it's. And I think it's actually starting now in the US market. I think on Amazon.com and in the US you can go. And they're starting to, to test these live video shopping experiences. And so it was pretty slow to come to North America. I thought it would actually come a little bit faster. But, but it is a really fun channel. It's a fun way for the target audience to engage in the brand, engage in the experience and in a really authentic way. And so I think for me it's back to okay, what's, what's the insight? How are you making customers lives better and then how you com communicating it in a heart and mind opening way. And if it's a customer who's experiencing it and, and their reaction is live, then that's super engaging and it's inviting people in. It's very different than we when we used to make super bowl ads for Gillette and you would agonize over every frame on a 30 second commercial for months and spend millions of dollars. This is really the opposite. But I think it's more fun this way.

Yeah, that authenticity is what really ultimately transcends and gets people to convert. But on the topic of super bowl ads and celebrity endorsements, I've got another clip here.

I shot a bunch of commercials with Tiger woods and we're ready to go to air. And the theme was how Tiger was a champion both on and off the golf course as a human being. And that was the exact week we finished the editing. Was an unfortunate week for him and ended up being an unfortunate week for us too.

So celebrity endorsements, Tiger. I'm a big fan of Tiger, but he had has his ups and downs. Just like any major celebrity, you end up relying on them. But the challenge is these are not cheap contracts. You're spending millions and millions of dollars and one thing like that goes wrong and it's all out the window. Whereas now you're going after social influencers and there's hundreds of thousands of them to choose from. What is the difference between an individual social influencer on Instagram as opposed to a major celebrity? Obviously there's the following. You have somebody with 80 million fans as opposed to somebody with a million fans. But it's a big difference that you've seen over the past few years of going with a bankable celebrity as opposed to working with influencers.

It's a much more exciting world now. We literally, you were picking between 10 or 20 different options of sports or media celebrities at the time and spending, taking a huge risk and spending a lot of money. And now as you said, the choices is so broad. But I think what's different is that you know each of these influencers, especially at the mid sized influencers, micro influencers, they're earning and building their authenticity, their followers, their engagement every day. And so as a result, they have to be genuine because if they push something that they don't believe in and their followers are disappointed by it, they won't have a platform. So it's really for the best of them. They've really created this layer of trust, this trust metric that you're actually partnering with them on as you, as you share your product with them. And I think to really leverage it though, you have to be willing to do two things with influencers. You have to be willing to take your complete offering and just put it on display to either be loved or to be critiqued. And you have to be okay with that. And then number two, you have to give up total control of how that message is communicated. This is no longer a back in the studio editing clips for weeks and getting it just right and then putting it on air. This is offering your product to an influencer and saying post or don't post, love it, don't love it, it's totally up to you. And then they post when they want and you watch it at the same time everybody else does and you hit.

On something there as something very recent where you will leverage. And this is actually tv, this is not social media. But there was an incident on the Canadian versions of Dragon's Den, a Boba company out of Montreal I believe was on Dragon's Den. And Simi Liu, who many of you guys might know from Shang Chi, he's action superhero, TV star, he's one of the Dragons. And this Boba company was called out by him for, for all sense of purposes, cultural appropriation. It's a Taiwanese drink, he's Taiwanese. But they were having some different angles to Boba and they're claiming that it's for the general public. Now I don't want to defend either angle here, but to your point, when you take these type of social media risks, you really have to let go of your brand and deal with what happens and that's a tough thing to do. It was very tough for old school marketers to really wrap their heads around like, okay, well I have no control over the copy, I have no control over the actual. That's going to come out and the aftermath. It's hard.

Yeah, no, for sure. And when we put stuff up there, you actually don't even know if they, if it will come to light. And but it's every. Everything is a feedback signal. So if you're partnering with 5, 10, 100 influencers and only a small percentage of them are excited about the product or posting it in a way that you're excited about, that's a signal back to you as well. And so of course you could hire consultants to go and reach out to them and convince them that it's. But it's really a signal back to you to say, are we building a great product? Are we building a great product experience? And when you do, when you have that, you don't have to do the work as much. You send this out and then great things can happen. If people are genuinely, positively surprised by the product and the product experience, they almost want to tell others about it. And I think that's really the excitement of this influencer channel. And to the point where we've said we try to have a scarcity mentality with all of our marketing spend, even as we grow, we keep marketing very fixed at 12 to 14% of revenue. And as we've grown 30% over the last couple of years, each year we've actually declined marketing spend as a percentage of revenue revenue. And in our view, the best, most creative ideas, the best creativity comes from scarcity and it comes from constraints. And so that has really focused us and our team on what the best way for our brand, kids to travel in the US and Canada is if every customer is an influencer. And so that's the mentality that, you know, that our marketing team takes every day. We think we partner with influencers and some great influencers that have done great work on kids. But we really look to every customer as an influencer because they're the best marketing that we can invest in.

And you and your team are definitely a group that practice what their preach is. And we got another clip here of you giving up control.

The coolest branding I have ever seen. Kits. This is a box of glasses, the entire box of glasses. We're going to try them on.

Pair.

This is a Canadian brand. I had never heard of them before. They reached out. They just wanted to send me some frames. I'm only wearing glasses. Look how fucking sick their design is. This is kind of like a tissue paper. This was just pr. This is not sponsored. I sent them my prescription, so I'm assuming these are prescription. Are you kidding?

So that's obviously a gamble. You send something randomly to an individual. I'm assuming that was not a paid advertisement. That was. What's the actual terminology? When you give. Give something out to somebody to hopefully get them cover your product. And again, you're blindly putting faith in that it's going to be positive, but it could go negative. But that. She seemed excited.

Yeah, that was a really fun one. And you're right, that wasn't a paid partnership at all. Our team had seen some of the work that Christina had done and were big fans and so just said, hey, send us your prescription. We'll send you some. We'll send you a couple pairs of glasses. And so then they moved on to the next thing. And then one morning, I get a call from our operations team, and they said, joe, you're. We're getting thousands of orders. What you got to tell us when you're running. When you're running a promotion so we can. We could get organized. And I said, I don't know what you're talking about. Give me a minute. And of course, we found that Christina just posted this video, unbeknownst to us to TikTok, and we had a record day, a record week on the back of that. And there's many examples like that Christina video that we've seen. And for us, it was really just the power of have the conviction of your product that you've built a great product and a great unboxing and a great experience, and then have the courage to just send that out into the world and be judged. And. And I'm sure we'll have, you know, customers and influencer partners who don't have as great an experience and post about that as well, and we have to be okay with it. But contrast that Christina video with the work we would have done even nine or 10 years ago when we were last talking about branding, where we would literally be going frame by frame to perfect it, agonize over which words to use, which words not to use. And. And she just opened a box, turned the iPhone on, recorded it, posted it, and then it was done. And in the responses has been amazing. The only negative response I got was I was so excited about it, I posted it, the video after it came out to LinkedIn. And the first call I got was actually from my mom, who said, I watched that video and that young lady said the F word at least three times and you need to talk to her about that. And so it's not perfect for everybody for sure, but, but it was certainly great for our business.

But it's that authenticity that resonates with her followers and that's what led to that flood of orders that came through. Because hey, if, if Christina likes it, I like what she likes and that's probably a good thing for me to try as well. How are you and your team identifying influencers or groups to work with? Because there's literally millions and millions of people out there. What's what, what are some of the tips and advice that you can give to our audience?

We've got a great team that is just really thoughtful about working for the customer backwards. And, and so they start with identifying the target market for us in optical is the millennial consumer, 28 to 43 years old, prime optical age, very high standards. But it will be really well to a brand if you meet those high standards. And so, so they, they reach out to a number of different, a very small to mid sized influencers. We, we always want to start with a low cost model, prove it out, tinker a little bit and then earn the right to move up in the marketing stack. And so we haven't really the big influencers yet. We've just, we've been overwhelmed with the success of these smaller micro influencers because they've got, they've just got such fabulous engagement because each of these influencers, they, it's their own brand, they're not going to be excited about something that they're not excited about and because they need that following to come back. And so yeah, so I think it's just a lot of experiment and then just having the conviction of you built, if you built a great product, if you built a great product experience, put it out there and don't worry too much about exactly how it's communicated. Just trust that your product is a winner and doing great things for customers and then let go.

Yeah, I think a lot of people are starting to come around on micro influencers and understanding the value that they bring. Because you could have a celebrity that's got 40 million, 80 million followers, but the engagement level is low. Yes, the views are great but ultimately you want sales, you want people clicking through and checking out your website. Whereas the micro influencers that might only have fifty thousand, a hundred thousand followers, the actual engagement is a lot higher. You're going to get like a, compared like a 2% click through to a 50% click through. That's huge. And those ultimately translates into sales and brand recognition. I'll give a quick shout out to two of my portfolio companies. Creator co creator CA is a great platform to identify influencers that resonate with your brand. And later.com that was incubated right here in Launch Academy. Some great success stories that you should check out. Going back to the concept of giving up control, you guys ran another campaign, the city campaign. That was something where again, it's a big gamble. You were sharing how that came about and what ultimately has come from that.

Sure, yeah. And it's like anything, it's an evolution. You just have to keep tinkering, keep working on it and building. So we started when we started, we said, yeah, we're launching our glasses business. We think we've got. We've taken the cost out of the system without sacrificing any of the quality. So how are we going to get the word out there? And we said, we're so confident that the product is better and the experience is better. The first thing we did, our launch campaign, before we even got to the Citi campaign, was we offered free glasses. Free prescription glasses. We called it get your first pair free. If you'd never made a transaction on Kits.com in the US or Kits CA in Canada, we just give you a free pair of prescription glasses. And at the time, nobody believed it. There's all this chatter online about nothing's free anymore, what's the catch? But it created this conversation and it was a big risk for us. And we were very uneasy in the moment because it's a huge investment. And if these customers try it out and never come back, that's just money that we've lost. And we paid a lot to get that signal back. But fortunately what we saw was hundreds of thousands of customers tried this first pair free. And we had such confidence in. Because we have local manufacturing, which we do, we make the glasses ourselves right here in Vancouver so we can get them to a customer in a day or two. And so this customer takes a chance on us. They place their order and they forget about it. But. But then we would get to work and make their prescription glasses in about an hour and get them to them in a day. And there's, you know, the customer open the door the next day and there's this kids box on the doorstep. And they were like, no way. You know, the glasses cost $300. They take two weeks. You guys gave them to me for free and you ship them to me in a day. What's the catch? And so our customer service team was getting these calls like we don't get it. What, you know, what's the catch? And, and what they said was the catch is tell everyone because really if every one of your customers is an influencer, you don't have to do any marketing ever because they'll just spread the word on how great the experience could be. So that, that was our starting point and then we evolved that a little bit more into influencers. And what we learned with the Christina video and others like it is people live in communities and movements start in, in local areas and communities. So you know, Christina was living in LA and, and we saw these orders, hundreds and then thousands of them all in one area in la. And so that just sparked the thought with the, the, with our marketing team on if we want to start a movement, of course you can start a coast to coast but it costs you hundreds of millions of dollars to do and build that kind of awareness. If we could really localize our efforts and we called it own this town and just put some surge advertising in place in a community for a short period of time, maybe one month or six weeks, case eight weeks, really build up that awareness and to the point where you know, you almost had town or in that city, kids can't be missed. And so we tried this, this campaign on this town out this past summer in Vancouver and it was a huge success. And so now we're rolling that out to 20 different towns or cities across North America over the next couple of years and just really helped us focus with our marketing spend and then just create that movement. People want to be part of what, what they hear people talking about. And in some cities that could be bus advertising, in some cities that could be metro advertising. In some cities it's get the mayor involved and you have influencers and media that are customized. And in this world now, it's where everything is. The world is flat and everyone's using three platforms to communicate. There's still. People underestimate the importance of community and, and, and the power of local and, and when they see something and they really feel like, wow, this is something that everyone in my community is a part of and they're giving back and contributing to this community. I want to be a part of that too. So it's early days for us, but we're super optimistic about where this one's going to go.

Yeah, I dated myself about back when I was in school taking marketing classes. It was called Guerrilla marketing. And then 10 years ago it was growth hacking, and now it's just par for the course. Like, you have to think outside the box. You have to look at unconventional ways to get your message out and to that localized opportunity. Yes, you've got a social influencer that puts it out there, but her fan following is localized in a community. And so you're going to have dinner with friends. Hey, what's different? Oh, you got new glasses. Yeah, got them from kits. Got them. Oh, I saw that video. And so you're seeing this virality that actually happens IRL right there within friend groups that may be following the same person or may not, but it has that influence.

Yeah, bingo. That's exactly it. It's that. And before you know it, if you feed it, and again, it's all back to that foundation. Do you have a great product? Do you have a great experience? Are you solving a real problem for a customer? But if you do and you have confidence in that, it actually, it's. It. Once you get it going, it's actually harder to slow it down than it is to speed it up. And I just remember we knew we had it, or I knew we had the concept one day, and on this town where we could see it happening, we'd see the orders coming, we would hear people saying, I've been hearing about this company, Kits. Let me tell you about it. I ordered a pair, they got to my house the next day. But when it really hit home was one day my daughter was at school and her teacher came in and the kids were all like, oh, you get a new pair of glasses? And he said, yeah, I got a new pair of glasses. There's this local company that I've heard about, it's called Kits. They're right here in Vancouver. And. And they made me these glasses and they came the next day. And so my daughter could put up her hand and say, that's my dad's company. And. And so for. For me, that was just a signal that getting out there. And this is a really fun, responsible, and just exciting way to grow kits and to do it town by town.

Awesome. This is a great segue. I want to go to being responsible and play a clip that you said on stage back in 2015 at traction in Vancouver.

People think about marketing, they think about brand, and they think that it's just the message. And it's obviously the message and the product that you build around that, and it's also the organization because the way your company act, and I think now more than ever probably more than ever in history. It's more about what you do than what you say.

So it's more about what you do than what you say. And being authentic is something that we alluded to quite a bit in this podcast today. What have you seen over the last nine, ten years with regards to social pressure to do or act a certain way as a brand? Obviously, DEI ESG are things that are real and then Black Lives Matter. Me too. These are all things that have driven change, but it, it required brands to take a conscious look to what they're doing and how they want it to be perceived. What are your thoughts? How did you see this evolve from your viewpoint?

Sure. Yeah. And we're still currently new company. We're in just under six years since the essence we started the company. So we're still very much students of the market and trying to learn as much as we can. I think that it's still a sentiment that is true, though, for a company. What you do is more important than what you say. And I think as these conversations have spread, there's been a tendency to just be reactionary on we're going to do this one thing or let's send products to just this pocket of people, or let's do the X or let's just do Y. And so I think for us as a new company, we said, okay, how can we do good? And that's one of our. One of our core values at kits is doing good. And we always want to make sure that starting with. With the core product. We ran a survey in Canada recently, and we found that one out of every two Canadians delays the purchase of prescription glasses when they need them because they just cost too much money. And so certainly we could send people around the world and invest and build teams and plans to do that to help with eyesight issues around the world. That's definitely something likely that we will do in time. But to start as a new young company, that's something immediately right in front of us. One out of every two Canadians that needs corrective eyeglasses to, to just to get through the day, to see the chalkboard or to see the screen at work is delaying that purchase because they're too expensive. And our number one focus has got to be to take the waste out of the system and to solve that at scale in Canada and the U.S. and so that's, for us, that's driving the decision of how can we take the waste out of the system? How do we not spend too much money on marketing? Somebody has to pay for that. And as a result that's allowed us how do we do the manufacturing ourselves so that we're not paying third parties and do it onshore here so we don't have courier costs. And so if the price of prescription glasses on average last year was in the market $350, we're happy to charge 28 to $38 all in for prescription glasses anywhere and delivered anywhere in Canada or the U.S. and so for us that's the foundation. And then from there, what else can we build to do good? And in an area where we're experts, that's really admirable.

I want to. So we've looked back over the last 10 years. What's changed, what's evolved, we looked at what's happening today. I want to take a few minutes, talk about what the next 10 years looks like. AI is everywhere and in the terms of marketing and branding, people are using AI avatars to represent the brands or using AI to generate the new campaigns and videos. Where do you see AI really affecting or impacting marketing and branding over the next 10 years?

Yeah, we're seeing it, we're seeing it already. And I think as things come into the, they tend to be misunderstood a little bit. I think we, and so people focus on only one segment of where AI will contribute things like okay, automating call centers or chatbots and certainly that's low hanging fruit and we're doing those things and we're at the front of the curve on innovating on that side. But, but then there's also the stuff that AI is really helping contribute. A better customer experience. Our mission at Kids is to make eye care easy. Every part of eye care just needs to be easy. You know, as our team looks at every part of the purchase decision of making buying eye care, we're constantly asking ourselves could this be easier? Could this be easier? And so two areas where AI is helping is on the content creation where we can create content where previously you, you'd really need 10, 12, 15 content writers for email and you can now customize things with AI and reach a customer much more in a much more custom way. With some of these tools we can organize our inventory in a way where we have, we, we carry millions of SKUs. And so the power of these, these large, it's really helped us optimize our inventory position so that we almost know from traffic to order to history to, to trending forward across millions of different SKUs that we carry what we need when we need it so that you're more likely to to come on kids CA in Canada, find the product you need and get it the next day versus us having to backorder that. So those are a couple immediate, probably not obvious areas where it's helping make eye care easy for us. And then what's really exciting for us is when you think about your iPhone, you unlock your iPhone with your face probably 20, 30 times a day and the setup of that face ID has all the information that 30 seconds that you do when you set that up and you get a new phone has all the information in it to capture your face shape and allow us to deliver to you perfectly fitting custom that we think the technology is just going to advance rapidly now as the market really moves online. Millennials are driving every category, especially eye care online more and more. And we think as, as, as AI on Face ID comes more to the mainstream, we're going to be able to offer an even better experience online than someone could get in store. So we're super invested in bullish and where I AI is going to go in the next three to five years.

And then the other side of the coin is ar. So augmented reality and smart glasses are all the trend right now. Like we've seen Meta and Ray Ban and I know you guys have quite a few other brands that you guys carry. What are your thoughts on smart glasses and the trends that are.

It's very early days but it's moving fast and it's there's some of our bestsellers. We sell the meta glasses on kits and and so as a form factor it's just very helpful and if you've ever tried a pair of smart glasses on whether it's just the Bluetooth audio that you get so you can listen to a podcast, check ChatGPT or something. Hey, I'm seeing something. What is this that I'm looking at? Or what time's my next meeting? Or answer a phone call without having to reach for your phone. It's a very helpful form factor to do it because you're already wearing them for those of us that are wearing glasses and, and as we add cameras and videos to it and the functionality grows, there's many folks that feel that it'll be even more impactful than smartwatches and but we'll see how fast it evolves. Some form factors evolve more quickly with smartwatches. It was about from the moment that Apple announced the first Apple watch. It was five years before the total smartwatch market overtook non smart smartwatches. And, and it's Never going back. So it was a five year journey. Smart glasses may be two or three years, it may be five, but we think, we think it's a, it's a very interesting form factor. You're already wearing them. The technology for those that haven't tried it is, is worth trying. It's freeing. You could be out and get a phone call and just say, hey Siri, answer, answer the call and not have to reach for your phone.

Yeah. As you said, it's still very early days, but the possibilities are endless with not tethering yourself to the phone anymore. You have everything happening right there in your line of sight. It's exciting times, Joseph. This has been a really great conversation. We've taken a look back, a look forward and hopefully this is going to be a new wave of tech in the, not just eye care business, but marketing, branding, social influencers. Joseph, I want to close it out by giving you a chance to give our audience a call to action. What can our audience do for you?

I'm still wondering when, Ray, when are we going to do our social shopping to get you a pair of eyeglasses? I think the people want to see what you choose, actually.

So I wore glasses almost all my life. I got Lasik surgery. But I'm getting to the age where I'm probably going to need glasses again. But this is actually something I've been questioning myself. I'm a techie, I'm an early adopter of all tech. But I haven't jumped on the meta bandwagon yet because I'd stop wearing glasses. So what are your thoughts on people that don't wear glasses? Are they going to start, people that don't need glasses, are they going to start wearing glasses just to have that flexibility and opportunity at their fingertips? It's like sunglasses. Like you wear sunglasses, but there's a reason you're trying to block the sun. Are you going to see more and more people just wearing smart glasses for everyday work?

I think so, Yeah, I think so. And resistance is futile. We're coming for you one day. You're going to need vision correction at some point again and we'll be ready for you. But, but yeah, I think you're right. And there's, there's sun, there's blue light blocking. We're just learning more and more about the impact of all these screens and indoor lighting that's having. And a lot of folks just really like the, the opportunity to have a different accessory. And that accessory, it doesn't make sense if it's $350 for a pair of glasses with blue eye lenses. But, but at 28 or $38 at Kids all of a sudden that's very accessible accessory and, and if it's helping your eyes, preventing the denigration from screen time, then it's productive and, and fun at the same time. So I think you're right about that. For call to action. We've just been so fortunate. Home base matters as we say and as Rajana just look back on starting kits and the wild and exciting and crazy ride that it's been to to build it to approaching dollar revenue run rate and growing. We're just so fortunate to have Vancouver as the backdrop where you have, it's almost an unfair advantage starting a company in Vancouver. You got access to phenomenal talent folks that really excited about building and excited about the market that they're in and you got this backdrop of companies that's been started here that is so impressive. And for us it's really we to new companies and say we can help anyone and give back in any way to the community. Just reach out to us. I'm joeitz.com and we'd love to talk to you and tell you about our journey and we just think Vancouver is a fantastic place to start to start a business and and we're, you know, thrilled with the market and the team and the business that we have.

That's awesome. I love the Vancouver shoutouts. Obviously I'm based in Vancouver as well, but KITS is a wall all over North America and I believe even internationally.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more on that front. But yeah, we ship anywhere in the globe, kits.com in the US and Kits CA in Canada and we'd love if you have any questions about any product there some customers that they've just not bought eyewear online. We have a whole team of folks ready and, and willing to help with that first purchase. So just reach out to me joeits.com and we're happy to help and hopefully turn more customers into influencers and then on we go.

Yeah. You don't just have to take Joe's word for it. Christina.

That's right.

Happy kids customer as well. Joe, this has been awesome. Thank you for your time and check out kids.com thanks Ray.

This episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year the US and Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out www.boast AI foreign. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave.

Us a five star review and you.

Can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI that's B o a S T.

AI forward slash trying to be a hypocrite. No offense and silly. Focused on the tech stack thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to build a unicorn. You need distribution to get growth.