Episode 246: How Transparency Wins with Landon Wade, Goodson Clothing Supply

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Landon Wade is the owner of Goodson Clothing and Supply, located in Louisville, Kentucky. Landon and his team are reinventing the way we think about branded merch, business partnerships, and transparency. They believe that the product you choose to carry your brand speaks volumes, and the old way of choosing merch is broken. Focused on an authentic and honest approach, we talk with Landon today about their partnership series, a video series and event they created to highlight their strategic supplier relationships, their podcast called The Brand Herald, where they once invited a client on to talk about a project that didn't go right— talk about boldness— and a lot more. But before our episode with Landon, I want to mention that SKUCon, our in-person event held on Sunday, January 8th in Las Vegas, is sold out. But this year we are presenting SKUCon Virtual on Thursday, January 19th, that you can enjoy in the comfort of your own home. Or office, to hear Michael Bungay Stanier talk about the 5 Question Leader, Nick Sassaris talk about Web3, and interviews and stories from the industry's most maverick thinkers. SKUCon Virtual is a great way to kick off your year with your team in a highly collaborative fashion. So hop on over to skucon.com to register today. Today's episode is brought to you by CometSKU, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling both distributors and suppliers to process more orders easily and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonscue.com. Now here's my chat with Landon.

So good to have you here today, Landon.

Yeah, I'm glad to be here, man. Excited to do it.

Relationship is one of your key values. I mean, it's a huge— a lot of folks say relationship is important, but it's a really key value. You even demonstrate this through your podcast. Um, how do you utilize the podcast to enhance this, and how does it really help market your brand?

Yeah, that's a great question. I— and, and I'd love to say that, you know, originally there was this— a lot that I had planned, everything that has gone on with it. And, and I think the reality is that the truth of how we got here was I started and really just wanted to do some customer testimonials. And I don't particularly care for customer testimonials because, you know, you kind of just get, um, the, the what you know, people have good things to say about you. You don't really put out things when people are going to say something poor about you. So it's sort of like if I'm going to do customer testimonials, really what I really want to do is just have customer conversations with customers.

Yeah.

For the purpose of learning and improving. And then if I'm going to do that, I should record it. And if I'm going to record it, let's just do a podcast and do something that's fun that ultimately puts the spotlight on our customers because it was about them and then creates a way for them to tell their story.

Yeah.

And that's how it came about. And I think ultimately, you know, I joke internally that what I am— I've always called myself kind of a business nerd, and I've loved everything about business as long as I can remember. I love asking tons and tons of questions. It's probably one of the things I love most about our business is that you get exposed to so many different types of companies and industries.

Yeah.

And you learn a lot. And this just created a platform for me to do that. And yeah, so it's been, it's been really something I enjoy.

You interview clients, right?

I do. Yeah. Clients. And we've, we've veered away from that a little bit. One of the things that, you know, we've talked about internally is that we care, you know, the podcast, the purpose of it, what we say and sort of like, I guess, the some marketing copy for it is that we— it's, it's having conversations with leaders, people in marketing and in business for the purpose of understanding how to build great brands. I mean, we're trying to build a great brand. We're trying to explore how other people do that. And so because of that and because we really see ourselves as curators and believe that we want to genuinely find what's best, the best ways for our customers to build their brand, every now and then we'll run into something that, you know, the fact is we can't really buy and resell. And but we still feel like it's something super unique and super cool that they could use. So an example of that is we did— I did an episode with a guy who founded a company called Brixellated. They render buildings and things in Legos, and it's very complicated. You know, an example is like there was a city organization that did one of the city skyline and they used it to try to attract businesses that were trying to relocate to the area. Really super unique. We really wanted our customers to know about it. We've got a great relationship with Adam Mullins over there, but I send people to him if they want to do it and it doesn't channel through my company, but it's like I believed really strongly that I didn't want to, you know, it's not like I'm only going to bring the things to them that we can make money on. You know, we have a higher objective.

I love that. And I love the fact that you become the voice of authority then when you're bringing new ideas like that. What an incredible branded merch program. You also, what I really love, this I've never heard of, you take risks with your podcast a little bit too. And for example, you invited a client on after you had a project that fell through.

You tell me about that.

Yeah, I, as I mentioned, you know, you find out— I think we said this maybe a little bit of the conversation beforehand— when things go well, everybody tends to perform well. You don't learn a lot really about who you're working with until things go right. But you learn a lot about who you're dealing with when things go poorly. How do they handle it? And, and so I think in addition to relationship being something I care a lot about, authenticity is Transparency is something I care a lot about. You know, frankly, my wife and my mom would probably say I'm just a bad liar. I can't lie. And so maybe it's just something, it's just self-preservation. But, you know, really what happened in this case was I really wanted to do the episode with, his name is Klaus, and that episode is posted on our website with a company called Progressive Materials. And we had a situation with a hat order that went pretty sideways. And I immediately asked him, I said, hey, I was like, let's, you know, let's go on here and talk about things we do well, but let's, let's talk about that. And, and I think it'll be important because it, you know, I believe very strongly what Simon Sinek talks about sort of in, you know, that Start With Why book. And it's, it's, you know, people do business with people of like mind. And so for me, our marketing plan at a really high level, I always say, is communicating the personality of our company. And going and having a conversation with a customer openly and honestly about where we didn't perform well, to me, is a really effective way to give people an insight into who our personality as a company, and hopefully it communicates that. And it was, it was kind of funny. I mean, you know, it's funny when you, you break down the walls when you start having that kind of conversation. We had, we had a good time with it, but he's still a customer today, so it's a It's a great testimonial. It's a great win.

Yeah. And you also just talk about, talk about being open to perspective, right? You definitely got more perspective. There's something too about the podcast medium that, that is almost therapeutic in the sense that it allows people to open up.

Yeah, no, I think we— I have found that just doing the podcast with people, there's some, there's some serendipitous things that have happened that I really couldn't have planned for. One is I think it makes people feel valued and special. It's which— that surprised me a little bit. You know, it also— I think every time I do one, I learn something, I think, about the individual or the company or their needs that I didn't know before. I don't know why that's the case. I'll have had many, many, many conversations leading up to an episode, but that medium creates an opportunity to have either a different kind of conversation or a deeper conversation. Again, hard for me to explain, but it continues to drive into our value of relationship, getting to know the person and the company better.

Yeah, I love that. Let's talk a little bit about your partner series. Tell us about that. Why did you begin that?

Yeah, you know, as we all know, COVID happened in '20, and I think at the time it was just two of us and we really sat down and had to have an honest conversation is there a reason for this company to exist? I mean, are we, are we different? Are we doing anything different than, than anyone else? Or should we just go work for someone else? And that conversation led, I think, to us feeling, you know, really confident that we should exist, that, that there, that we're wanting to do things differently enough that we should be around. And so the next question was, okay, you know, what are, what are some of the ways that we can do that? And we would constantly experience the reps coming in to give us presentations. We would get excited about a product or a bunch of products. Yeah, but we didn't have a great mechanism to get that information in front of the customers. And so then we would leave that meeting and we would sit back down and, and I mean, you were a distributor in your previous life, you know, you have the list of emails and the next thing you know, the, you know, the immediate takes over and yeah, it's out of sight, out of mind. And those things we got excited about, we never really showed to the client. So the reason we decided to do the partner series, part of it was COVID, part of it was because that dictated virtual interactions. All of a sudden everybody was comfortable with it. So, so it immediately created a foundation that if we do a virtual meeting of some kind, people are going to be okay with it. It's not weird, it's not something out of left field. And then we want to bring these presentations that are being given to us directly to the client so they can get the opportunity to see all the things and get excited like we are And, you know, one of the things in our industry over the years that's kind of— people sometimes, not everyone, but sometimes they will try to kind of conceal, you know, where the items are coming from. And we felt very strongly that if our value is embedded in where the stuff comes from, then we're probably not doing much. We're not, we're not adding a lot of value. So we felt like our value is beyond that. We want to go take them straight to the horse's mouth, so to speak, show them exactly what we're seeing. And frankly, I feel like we learn in some cases as much as they're learning as we go through these presentations. And we're upfront about that. Yeah.

Now explain the— clarify the partner series. It's video and then you've now moved to an actual in-person.

Yeah, right. So in, I guess in industry speak, it's a virtual end-user show would probably be the best way to describe it. It's very similar. I mean, I got to give some credit to CommonSKU. I mean, your community events are It's a similar idea, but to our customers, to our end users. Currently, we just host it on Zoom. We bring a rep or, you know, from some of our— and we call them preferred partners. So I mean, I will say there's an element of, you know, we do try to curate, if you will, or handpick the partners. We curate the folks that are going to come on and do the event, try to make sure that all of that is lined up with our brand. And then we bring that person on. We— and the other thing is we surround it, we try to surround it for the month leading up with communication to get people registered. We also try to promote different things from that vendor. So, and then we, we pick a— it's usually on Thursdays, we bring them on, we have our customers live, and, and it usually takes about 45 to 50 minutes, and we record it so that we can send it out later to the, um, to the customers who are not able to join live.

Is that every week, every month? How often are you doing it?

Once a month. Yeah. And then, so you mentioned the live. The live is a new component that, you know, obviously with hopefully COVID in the rearview mirror a bit and people more comfortable with live events again, we added that. We actually had our first live event that we controlled start to finish about 2 weeks ago. And so it's the same concept, but instead of being virtual, it's live. And we had it here in Louisville. Next year, our plan is to do 2. So we'll do a spring and a fall live, and then we'll do 9 virtual. And then I think we're talking about doing basically just a holiday reception in December where we try to get our customers together and just kind of celebrate with them. And that's our plan.

So you've seen enough success then with this to obviously map this out for next year already. That's fantastic.

Yeah. Well, and part of it is what we've learned too by doing it where we need to get on some of these people's radars early and get on their calendar. Right. But, but yeah, we continually are trying to work to get farther and farther ahead. Heck, you in your position there, you know, it's— I have a great deal of respect for people who, you know, marketing and content and the planning that goes into it. It's not easy.

It's tremendous.

Yeah.

One marketing tactic you use are kits, but you do this also in a very special way. And this is how you integrate your partners as well, right?

Yeah, so what we originally did was we would talk to each partner we were having onto the Virtual Partner Series. We would ask them to give us an item, something that we could send out for those that register to join us live as a gift. And so each month we would send out a single item, and we modified that to doing that on a quarterly basis and said, you know, instead of just doing an item and item and item, why don't we try to demonstrate the idea of putting together a kit of items that are complementary. So we now we're kind of looking at it on a quarterly basis and we're trying to pick— it would be 3 gifts in this case from each different partner that's complementary to each other and creates kind of a theme. So like the one we did in the third quarter was kind of a beach theme. We did a tote bag, we did a sun bump kit from Hersh, we did— oh, it's escaping me at the moment, but there was a third item that's kind of on that beach theme. And then put that all together. And then what that allows us to do is we can send really one— it's other— there's some efficiency mindedness on the back end too, where we can just send one kit out to the people who are going to join for the whole quarter. Right.

So that one quarter, then that kit ties into the event that you're doing, the virtual experience that you're doing, so that everything sort of comes together with a theme.

Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of like it accomplishes a handful of things. One is it demonstrates the idea of a kit. Yeah, it shows an item from each partner that they're going to either have heard from or going to hear from during that quarter, uh, and, and then also, um, helps to promote what's coming essentially.

Yeah, this also has to help you and your team just in terms of marketing calendar and schedule. I mean, you've sort of got a track you've laid down, and that's one of the beautiful parts. One of the hardest parts about our business is you can do so many different things, and you— and people often get stuck in indecision phase, um, whereas you've got this plan and the strategy and the tactics that you're already working on deploying?

Yeah, I think creativity in our industry is, is really tough. And it's funny because, you know, we're not short on products. We have plenty of products, probably too many. I think that's why there's a lot of consolidation right on the supplier side right now. I think what we're trying to do is, is build a ecosystem, if you will, that surrounds our sales team and assists them in doing high-quality curation. So we say a lot internally, we curate people, products, and partners. And so first and foremost, we curate people for Goodson that are— that want to be here, that care a lot about our brand and fit into our culture. And of course, we're going to curate products every now and then when a client comes to us and says, you know, gives us the criteria we need to pick a certain item. But more than that, we probably— matter of fact, I asked at our live event last week, I had our largest customer in, and I asked him, what, you know, what do you think is the highest value thing we do for you? And he said, honestly, he's like, there's a lot of things you guys do, but one of the most valuable things is that you curate these partners so that I know if I go to Snugs, for example, you're, you're sort of vouching for them. And I know that everything I see at Snugs, I can I can have confidence in. And, and so that's, that's been interesting to see the value. It's, you know, it's— I don't think it's dissimilar from like if I need a plumber or an electrician, I ask people that I know, hey, who should I call? Right. And, you know, certain friends of mine, if they say call Larry, then I know Larry's going to be great, you know. And I think that's, that's a little bit of what these clients are telling us.

It's funny how far we've come as an industry where, you know, you can imagine 20 years ago when people were trying to hide supplier partners and now it is a very supplier, you know, very true partnership in the sense that you're approaching the client together.

Well, yeah. And I mean, you see, I mean, I think you've looked on our website. I mean, we put the logos out there and the names. I mean, there's no, it is, you know, in the day and age we can live in, they can easily pull up the website. So if there was an opportunity for suppliers to go around us, that's the door's wide open. Yeah.

How would you gauge the success so far of what you've done? You know, I know it's always a work in progress, but How would you gauge it?

I would say it has been, you know, again, I'm my worst critic, as you say, and I can, I can see a million ways it needs to be improved, as you said. But I, but, but if I push that aside, I would say it's been very successful. And the main reason that I would say that is because the clients have told me that we try really hard to ask clients consistently when we do things, hey, how did this go? How can we improve? Did this have value for you? Was this worth your time? Yeah. And they keep saying that it is. And that means more to me than what I might think about it, you know? Yeah. And, you know, you always— we always care about things and are more critical about things internally, but the external folks usually don't see half the things that bother us about it that we would want to improve.

So true. So, so yeah, I repeat this often, but, you know, the number one reason a client fires someone in this business is not enough new ideas, which means they don't care enough. And so what I really appreciate that you done is you've created this, this structural system where you can infuse new ideas to your clients in a pretty, it's hard work to pull something like that off, but in a pretty streamlined fashion when you consider how much there is to do in this business.

Yeah. I, I would say really quick, I think one of the things that I learned, I've learned is, and I function this way too, you know, context for people is so important. To understand things. And, you know, early on, you know, you'd have a— if you go all the way back, even before we started doing the Partner Series, you'd have the vendors come in, show us something, we get excited about it, and maybe you have an item. But even at that point, if all I do is start sending that item out to customers because I'm excited about it, but I don't provide any context, they may get it and they may like it, but a lot of times they're going to get it and just not know what to do with it. And a big, I think, underlying objective of the Partner Series and a lot of things that we try to do is to make sure A, what's our high-level objective? Communicate our personality as a company. B, provide context. Make sure that when we do things, we're providing context so that the customer understands why we're doing it and what we hope that the value in it is. And that is to me, aside from customers telling me that the Partner Series is valuable, that to me is why it's valuable because, and then what's been cool about it is it's been something we can leverage laterally because the partner series has almost become a bit of a brand or a franchise within Goodson that can be leveraged out into the live event, into all kinds of other things that we're discussing. Ways to—

I really love that you're not only giving them the what to buy, you're giving them the why to buy it, which is what the context has given.

Right, exactly. Yeah.

Fantastic. This can be a tough business to be in. And you mentioned a story earlier. Thank you for your transparency around just— you had to stop and ask the question. Should we continue this on? That's a hard question to ask. What made you stay the course?

You know, I think there's probably several ways you could answer that. There's like a— there's the pretty sounding way to answer it, and then, you know, some of it is just pretty practical, meaning it's what I knew, you know. And yeah, when you got to provide for your family, you find the thing that you know the best and that you think can generate the most income, right? So, so there's a practical aspect to it. There have definitely been times when I have considered like, man, did I pick the wrong— am I in the wrong stream? I think a lot of us that own companies, especially if we're honest with what goes on in our head, we probably wouldn't want to say it all out loud sometimes. You know, mornings and afternoons can be completely different in a given day. It, um, yeah, but I think, you know, outside of those sort of very practical things, I genuinely love the business. I think the fact that the business get— because it scratches the itch for me of loving business in general and being able to be exposed to a lot of different kinds of companies. Yeah, I've always had a great deal of respect for other business people, so I get to build relationships with people who are building really successful companies, which I really enjoy. I learn a ton by doing that. And ultimately, I think this business, when done the right way, is insanely important to companies to build engaged employees and loyal customers. And at the end of the day, those companies— you forget our industry for a second and look at what the largest companies in the world spend money on— they will spend whatever it takes to get engaged employees and loyal customers. And we are a component of that when we do it right. Now, I'll be the first to tell you, we don't always do it right. You know, we will transact products sometimes. We're not infusing massive amounts of creativity in every order that we write. Yeah, but we try to build relationships with clients in where we get more and more opportunities to do that and help them actually think, how does the thing that we're doing really support our objective with those two audiences? Because at the end of the day, those are the two audiences most companies are most, most interested in day in and day out.

Yeah, I love your conviction around that. So true, my friend. Very well said. What excites you about the future of the business? You probably answered a lot of it there, but what excites you about the future?

I think the opportunity to continue to elevate— not that I'm gonna be careful how I say this because there are a lot of people out there that I think will say things like, oh, we, we don't like dealing with smaller, like, smaller companies. We want to keep— we certainly need to move to dealing with companies that are larger, not necessarily because of something rooted in arrogance or anything like that. It's more the type of company I think that we want to build. We need to be deeper, you know, a mile deep and an inch wide as opposed to a mile wide and an inch deep. If we really are— for us to add value, maximum value to the customers we're working with, I do think that we need to see a bit of a movement over time to less customers that have more of a spend. And, and that not for us, it's so that we are adding maximum value to them. Because when we're spread really wide with a lot of customers, that attention and the bandwidth that each, each rep has to expend, it does erode their ability to do the high-value stuff for those larger clients. So I get excited about the fact that we're growing and that by growing we have more people, more resources in order to continue to elevate our ability to work with larger customers, which allows us to add more value.

Who are your influences? Where do you find inspiration, mentors?

Where—

how do you get your fuel every day?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have to say, my dad is one of the first ones. I mean, he's been in this industry since 1980. I mean, he's seen— he's seen the good, bad, and the ugly for—

Yeah, that's awesome.

Frankly, I never— I said I would never get in this business, you know, seeing it growing up with that. And, you know, yet here I stand. But And then I think beyond that, I've been very fortunate, I think, throughout my life to have some really incredible men and women come alongside me and mentor me a little bit. And, you know, there was a— this name probably doesn't mean much to folks, but like a guy named John Beckett, he's the president, he's the former president of a company called the R.W. Beckett Corporation. They're in Elyria, Ohio, near Cleveland. Had kind of a chance opportunity to meet him, and he's, he's been with me. And they're about a $100 million multinational company. And other guys like him, I've just had— and I'm in a Vistage group. I don't know if people are familiar with Vistage around here, which has given me the opportunity to create some relationships with some very successful business people in other industries. And really, you know, what gets me going each day, I mean, I've got a beautiful wife and 3 girls and And then I have a strong faith component too. So in a given day, those are probably the things that are getting me going.

Landon, thank you for sharing so much of this today and sharing kind of your strategy and tactics behind it and your why, all that. Thank you for being so transparent as a big principle of yours with your clients. And kudos to you and the team and what you're doing. We really admire what your creating there and watching, you know, with, with hope and expectation. Thank you.

Yeah, no, Bobby, I enjoyed it. I appreciate you having me and appreciate all you do for the industry and for, for Common Skew.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SKUcast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKUcast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.