Episode 332: Monty Mims: How SanMar’s Connected+ Partnership with commonsku Boosts Real-Time ePOs

Monty Mims is one of the many folks leading SanMar's Decorator and Tech Solutions division. He's brilliant at both helping distributors work better with their decorators, but also helping decorators navigate the landscape of trends, equipment, and supply chain. As a self-professed tech geek for the apparel industry, he's really good at navigating the difficult world of tech solutions for one of the most complex parts of the industry, decorated apparel. Today we talk with Monty about SanMar's new Connected Plus partnership with us at CommonsCue, and how EPOs with SanMar's PSST program dramatically amplifies your speed and radically reduces errors. We also ask Monte his advice on how distributors can partner better with decorators, plus a few tips on how to source the right decorator anywhere across the country. Welcome to the SkewCast, a podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby LeHew. I'm glad you're here. Hey, before our chat with Monte, We wrapped up 2024 with some incredible stats. Over a million projects were created on the CommonsQ platform, and there was a 140% increase in shops and a 30% increase in EPOs. Over 850 distributors trust CommonsQ to make their work lives simpler, easier, and more productive. If you're listening to this and you've wanted to check out CommonsQ but you just haven't made the time yet, but you know you need to kickstart your new year, don't delay anymore. Visit commonscue.com. We are the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. And one last thing, if you're listening to this and you're on your way to the PPAI Expo, you're in luck. We have all the CommonsCue team events, happy hours, booth info, session details, and a handy list of all the CommonsCue suppliers in one convenient spot at commonscue.com Expo. Now on to our chat with SanMar's Monte Mims.

So great to have you. We've only been talking about having you on the podcast for, you know, years now. It's fun to finally do this.

It's been a journey. I'm excited to be here and we're making it happen. So thanks for having us.

Jumping right into it, what's your focus at SanMar?

Good question. And that's, you know, that's, that's changed over the years, to be honest. These days, I'm part of a unique resource team called Decorator Solutions. And we've got a few different elements to what we do. At our history and core, we manage our network of contract decorators, inclusive of a large group spanning over 850, a portion of which are part of our PSST program. We also help manage and troubleshoot decoration challenges as they arise. We have an affiliate program where we cross the aisle in the network and in the industry to be buddies with all the major equipment companies, consumable providers, service providers in support of our contract decorator network. But you could say in support of decorators, you know, globally.

Yeah, that's cool. 850 decorators. What percentage of those are the PSST program?

Yeah. So that for most of my time on the team, it's, it's been about 50/50. There has been some certainly changes as a result of the pandemic, and we've seen an uptick. So if I were to guess today, it's, it's maybe like 55, not, not greatly top heavy, but you know, a lot more decorators are, you know, digging into these resources. They're growing. It takes a particular person and mindset and model to really own successfully contract decoration, and we're seeing that growth.

I want to get into that a little deeper, but first let's back up a second just for those— most people are going to know what, what PSS is, but can you explain that real quick?

Yeah. So the acronym is pack separate, ship together. And, you know, when it was born, it's been 13 or so years. It did look a little different than it does today. When we would set up a PSSD decorator back in the day, they would have a pallet in their primary warehouse. As orders would flow in, we would put those boxes and bags on the pallet. If that daily load was in that 500-600 pound range, that would be enough to shrink wrap, put on a truck, and get it to their facility. We wanted to do that because that's where some of the freight, you know, cost savings would come into place.

Right.

Ultimately, we're going to service the decorator regardless. So if it wasn't to that degree, we'd break it down, we'd ship it UPS. So it's changed now with some structural changes at UPS, and we don't have those pallets quite like we used to. If a decorator is getting $3-4 million, you know, worth of goods and those kind of 500-600-pound thresholds are met regularly, we'll put them on trucks. But We don't want to— we're never going to have an emphasis on the cost savings versus delay in transit. So it's, it's really important we deliver it on time.

So the benefits, the freight, free freight benefits are obvious. What are some of the benefits that we may not be aware of as a distributor?

Yeah, and that's, you know, that's been a big part of my career since I've been on this team is clearing up, you know, the everything else and educating both brokers on their side so they understand and can appreciate those benefits. But, but even some decorators that a lot of people like to, to just kind of distill this as a free shipping thing. So they have spoilage funds in case goods are decorated. We have a really strong dedicated resource team that's specially trained for PSST decorators, and that resource team can help with order error recovery. So things that may be arriving in short or picked incorrectly, we want to expedite that recovery process. Also with returns, you know, that became a challenge during kind of the supply chain crisis. People were just ordering willy-nilly because they saw they could get it. End user changes their mind. Decorator's got 12 boxes in their staging area. They're tripping over, kicking up, and you know, the broker or sellers maybe moved on. They're not happy. Things went south or they flaked on them. And the decorator sometimes left holding the bag or box in this case. So, you know, those decorators are now empowered to work with their team. Not just wait for the distributor to get back to them, get that stuff picked up and out of there. And then we have specialized marketing resources. So I've done some affiliate collaborations there in support of the contract decorators marketing themselves as a contract decorator for more contract business. They have those resources as well. And I suppose tying in with returns, there's no restock fees. So the restock fees are waived, which goes back. Yeah, it goes back to that situation. You have to be doing this for like 5 minutes before an order goes south. A distributor changes their mind, right? They're past the budget. Yeah. And when that moment happens, we all feel it. It's terrible, you know? And frankly, they got to get the goods back. But like, we, you know, even with our free shipping, it's not truly free. Like, it's us owning that. So the coming back process, there is that incurred return freight, but there's generally a restock fee and that's you know, that's real money and time on our team at the DCs that have to inspect and put back all the stuff. And, and usually we work with our customers there, but using PSST, that 20% restock fee, it's just, it's a, it's a non-issue. So it can be a nice safeguard. All that really bakes into essentially that insurance policy, if you will, that, you know, allows distributors to stress less about the chaos that can occur.

Yeah, there are so many decorators. How do you go about vetting for like best-in-class decorators? For the PSST program?

Well, and I, I would never use the phrase best in class. I mean, that's, that's, that could be very subjective. And that could be, you know, is it their, you know, decoration quality? Is it their service quality? So many things could be used to define that, that concept. And frankly, we've been in reactive mode for most of my time. So I've been on this team almost 8 and a half, 9 years now. And really even at, and when I joined in 2016, our, our network was pretty strong. I'd say back then we probably had about half of what we have now. But, you know, we felt strong, we felt healthy, and we didn't want to go out and like actively call these folks. We wanted to make it a business decision. We wanted to have decorators who felt the value. Frankly, the biggest driver of all this are, you know, they're our shared accounts and those brokers and distributors that are saying, hey, We've heard about this thing or we're using a PSST guy on the West Coast. You're our guy on the East Coast. They have the program. We love it. You don't. Can you get it? So, you know, the, the market is really organically, you know, driven the initial conversation. But then absolutely we do have qualifications and we have qualifications even just to get in our network, much less PSST. And so we do ask that, you know, contract decoration is the majority of your business. As it sits today, but even more so than that, we want to make sure it's something you're focused on growing because it's, it doesn't want to be just, hey, I'm hooking up me and my buddies and I want to be off, you know, off the scene after that. We want to make sure these folks are dedicated and growing towards contract decoration.

And your role in your team, you serve as consultants for decorators, you're consultants for distributors, you're sort of this like connector to folks too. And we're going to get into trends at the latter part of our discussion here, but, but you serve as a sourcing house or an advisor both to decorators and distributors, right?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we take ourselves serious enough to think in that capacity. It's what we do. It has never really been part of our role defining or we've thought carefully about when we kind of rebuilt our team landing page a few years ago, we really thought about kind of what are those words, what are those language points that we want to kind of help put out there to define ourselves. You know, the idea of considering us a consulting agency didn't really stand out and we didn't want to, you know, put on airs about that. But, but it is, it is a lot of what we do. I mean, from helping people, you know, navigate decoration challenges, which the number of substrates that are out there today with rayons and spandex. I grew up in the decoration business. I got, you know, I started with Sammar in 2007. I feel like You know, I was in the early days of polysynthetic blends taking off, probably got out just in time, to be honest, before things got complicated. So we help on that regard. We help people with connections with affiliates. So like a hot topic right now is certainly direct-to-film. And in that space, we can help someone, you know, find the different companies that are manufacturing and selling transfers, or we can help them navigate the growing complicated which printer or printers should I be looking at conversation. So we do that. And my, one of my lines I like to use is in all of this kind of connected work we do is I don't have a promo code to give you. You know, it's not about that. It's not to say, you know, hey, make sure to tell Jimmy Manny sent you so I get some backend referral credit or something. It's let me connect you to Jimmy because I know Jimmy's my guy and he's nice and he's cool and he'll take care of you. It's, it's that, that happy to help kind of mentality that drives it.

SanMar has always been, you know, when I was a distributor, SanMar was always in our top 3 suppliers. Like many, like probably like a lot of distributors, we were doing on average around a quarter million a year with SanMar. Sometimes it'd be more, very rarely less.

It would be—

it was a nice number.

We—

but something that you have always done well from fulfillment and technology is that you are big advocates for just making distributors' lives easier and your decorators too. And you've been working with our team I know you just got off a call with our wonderful Abby on the CommonsQ team. You're a big advocate and changemaker at SanMar regarding tech integrations. How important have these been over the past few years, and do you see these tech integrations and the focus of SanMar accelerating?

I do. And first of all, thank you for saying all those things. I mean, I, I did. I started as a customer like you, and so I was on that side of it and actually entered into SanMar's world when some big acquisitions and things were changing in our industry. And so it was a little bit of a perfect timing of having this family-owned, you know, a little more quaint, a little more humble, a little more service and inventory-focused business enter our lives. It solved for a lot of challenges that were hurting our small business. And listen, that DNA, I think, starts with Marty Lott. It's carried through Jeremy Lott and our leadership team of always really focusing on, on helping our customers with, with not just what t-shirt do you recommend, but, but any and all challenges they might face. If we can dedicate our mind, our resources, and our connections to helping them, we hope to be along for the ride. I mean, it's, it's, it's really down to just that. So fast forward with technology, that is something I've slowly and organically been doing more of. It was never my job title, was never my like hired focus of area. Right.

It's kind of like, how did you get into this?

Yeah, you just sometimes you stumble and fall and sometimes you know where the door is and you turn the handle on the right day. So this is maybe more of a stumble and falling in the right direction, but it I think the reason I enjoy it is I'm a process and efficiency geek. I'm not really truly that much of a techie. Some people like to call me that, but I really am. I desire smooth workflow and process and efficiency, and that goes hand in hand with good tech. So I used to talk about our industry being a little slow and a little pokey and maybe frankly a little behind the times as recent as 2018, 2019, the pandemic, while it certainly had its downsides, one of the upsides for business was it did sort of force this, necessitate a hyper leap forward with technology. I mean, people were scrambling to find ways to sell online in 2020. They were looking for smarter, better management systems in '21, '22, I believe, as an association with, with a changing labor force and some of the labor challenges. And it's really just taken off ever since. Things like promo standards are a really good example of that. And then we see that growing and we see tech by our customers growing.

Yeah. Speaking of SanMar's now a Connected Plus supplier on Commonsku, you know, we have 800 distributors. I know I've been amazing. Thank you for like helping shepherd that journey on your side.

We're happy to be here. We're glad to be there with you for sure.

Let's talk to the distributors and let them know, how does Commonsku and SanMar's Connected Plus partnership, how will that impact their business?

Yeah, I mean, what a lot of folks realized over the last 3 or 4 years was, you know, to, to talk about supplier relationships as integrated, quick and easy to do. People will use that term very casually to have a true integration with, with things that are more real-time and things that are more direct and specific and actionable is what ConnectedPlus is now, you know, adding to our relationship. So when I talk to users that come to me for tech talks and want to learn about different systems and sort of the the whos and the whys out there. I do talk about integration into kind of the big three, and I talk about it with these aspects: account-specific pricing. Now, thankfully, at SanMar, we don't have 17 layers of pricing out there. Mm-hmm. Other folks do. I don't know how they sleep well at night. It's complicated. So, so most people are getting around the same price, but they might have a, a program price on a specific style because it's a high-volume mover. They might have an incentive program that changes those variables. But you want to log into a system, you want to credential in, and you want to know that the price you're getting in is your actual price. And so having that accuracy of data is important. The big thing that became really critical in '21 and '22 was inventory. I mean, those were dark years of people selling stuff online and then they couldn't go get it. And so having systems with as close to real-time inventory snapshots is also important. But listen, there's the back end part of that statement and then there's the front end part. So also translating that, whether it's on a web store and you have thresholds or displayed inventory or other ways to prevent, to use the data for good. That's the important part. And then the last one, which is, you know, kind of our final threshold that we've worked on diligently, is being able to submit orders electronically. You know, it's a, it's a single keyed process. Your users have built that quote, built that order. Built that data and they don't want to have to then go do it again to order, right? So it's already living and breathing in common SKU. Now they can review it, maybe organize it a little differently and then fire it off to Samra. It's, you know, not everybody knows this, but it doesn't get to us and then we're keying it through the EPO process. It's happening. It's happening like as if they ordered on samra.com and so you don't have that human keyer potential on our side. And, and the rest takes care of itself.

Expedites everything. Far less phone calls. I mean, you talk about— this is, this is such a huge win, and we've, we've talked about this so much that it's kind of hard sometimes to talk about it again without sounding redundant. But I mean, I know those days, what it's like to call and check on inventory half a dozen times, what it's like for us to have to call and double-check things on a purchase order, or to, or to have 12 back-and-forth calls with, you know, with your supplier partner over what's wrong in the PO because I screwed up on the PO getting it over there.

And then there—

and then we think done at billing, and then our accounting department's coming into me and going, what's the deal with this order? And it's like, just this— these days, I don't think we can speak highly enough. And I know I'm on the team and I'm wearing the hat and the jersey and all that, but it is truly a magical process when you think about what we've been able to do.

Yeah. And I would say when I was a customer as well, the supplier we were working with was going through a lot of challenges, and inventory was also an issue then. So when we were feeling it in '21 and '22, and our customers were— I could speak from that personal experience. I learned a harsh lesson selling back then in the, in the 2004-05 era of, you know, I convinced Johnny to go with this amazing shirt and this amazing forest green color. And then, you know, we'd handshake and have a great afternoon or I'd hang up the phone and then I'd log in and I'd be like, forest green's gone. And then, you know, I'd have to call Johnny back and say, hey, remember Evergreen? You remember the Evergreen we looked at? It was sort of close, right? It was close enough. Well, I'm telling you, I thought about it a little bit more and And that's the better green. We need to switch. And it started, you know, sort of as a— had to make quick decisions, but it became a lasting challenge where I wouldn't— had those supplier websites loaded up. I wouldn't do it, do a sales pitch or call without seeing that I could work with some stuff. And a little known fact too. I mean, just because you put it in the cart and you hit the button doesn't mean it just magically— there's not robots that grab the product and hold it for you. The real reality is once we get it, there could be that those hours until Carla pulls it out of a bin and then you got it. So there's nothing that can 100% solve for that. But let's make it as close to as perfect as possible.

So which is why now EPOs are such a magical thing. I yeah, I could go on and on. I will say this, you know, if apparel is a third of our spending category in the industry, you know, at least a third.

Yeah.

Then and it's and it can represent 40 to maybe 60% of a distributor's revenue, not just in percentage of sales, but in terms of percentage of products sold, but in terms of revenue. And it's this massive. Okay, let's hop over to trends real quick. So I want to ask you this because a little known fact is that your team at Sandmarc has 150 years experience with decoration, which makes you experts at trends. What trends are you seeing in the deco space this past—

None. No trends actually happening, right? So we're in a trend-free landscape right now. So next question, please.

Okay.

Next question. You know, and listen, I mentioned earlier about the industry being a little slow and pokey with technology. You could, you could argue a little bit with decoration trends as well. I mean, embroidery has been, you know, fundamental for thousands of years. I think it goes back in quite, quite extensively. You can find things on Egyptian walls and Asian cultures that used the early forms of embroidery. Screen printing has been around a long time. Those, those fundamentals are here. They're, they're staying the course. They're still the backbone of decoration. Undoubtedly, the trends that pop up are like little flickers of things that will occur. There was not that long ago where everybody wanted these Spirit jerseys with big puff screen printing on the back shoulders. It was a tourism collegiate thing and it bled into corporate even a little bit. So there's not a— there's usually not a big tidal wave. I will say the closest thing that does look like that to me is direct-to-film. Again, when I started at SanMar in '07, direct-to-garment was really getting its its legs and footing. It took a little while and it's run a good course and it's also not going away. But the advancements in digital quality and detail with heat applied, you know, items you can put on garments and it will, you know, stick and deal with a fight against dye migration and it'll work on all sorts of different fabrics and material. It stretches, doesn't peel off. You don't have to weed out excess material. I mean, it is solving for a bunch of challenges that other techniques have had, and I've never seen a concept rise so quickly. I mean, it happened to really take off almost during the pandemic. We saw early iterations of this pre-pandemic, but it really gained traction and we saw waves of the transfers in first and then waves of the equipment where decorators can do that now in-house. But from coolers to softshell jackets to t-shirts, It's, it's, it's got very unlimited potential. It complements with embroidery. It solves for the minimums that screen printing challenges has. It solves for direct-to-garment not necessarily working on all fabrics and substrates. So that's, that's not really a trend. You could say it's been around for a few years, but it is— it's unlike anything I've witnessed and gaining more momentum every day.

I want to respect your time. We have a few more minutes, but I have lots more questions. But I have a few that I want to definitely get in here. One is how— since you work with decorators, I mean, you sit at this interesting apex of working as Sandmarl, this incredible company that provides so much apparel to the industry. You work with decorators and you work with distributors. Have you noticed best practices that you can encourage distributors in working with their decorator partners or apparel partners? Are there things that you know you can advise them on?

Yeah, and I would say that could be summarized with communication. You know, my, my degree that I got in college was, I guess, Bachelor of Science in Organizational Communication, and Somebody in that career path would go on to be like a— ironically, like, and work for a consulting company now that I'm thinking about it. But I focus a lot around the organization of communication, just as a coincidence, not specifically degree related. And that's where there tends to be the biggest breakdown and challenge. You have folks that are really good at the sales and marketing side, but maybe a little less unpolished on organizing kind of the recipe points or data points that a decorator needs to successfully process. And a lot of the best contract decorators are very much in that sort of mechanical engineering, kind of hyper-focused, organized mindset. So they want clarity and focus. They don't want to— they don't want to be in the business of interpretation and hopefully getting it right. So, yeah, you know, what's cool about those relationships is you can do that successfully every day in an email. You could maybe do it in a phone call. I mean, that always makes me nervous because there's so many little things that could be misspoken. But, you know, there's certainly been an increase of technology in the latter few years, and I see it growing where, you know, closing that gap of communication, having it organized on the front end, having it interpreted and production ready on the back end. I mean, that's been like the missing link for so many people, but also, you know, globally across the industry. So, so fixing that gap and organizing that is, is the secret to success. Let the marketing and salespeople go, go sell and get it to the producers and the decorators in a way that they can just pull and go and it solves the back and forth and the mistakes levels go down significantly. So I see that as something that's very important and I see it getting better every day.

Here's something I'm curious about. As technology has democratized a lot of things, one of the things that might have democratized, you know, back in the day, a distributor would typically— and this is probably still the case largely— have a decorator that they would lean on that's in their local neighborhood, literally, or someone that they could, you know, there was a trust, there was a 'I need to go vet what's going on' type feel. Do you feel like now we're reaching a point, especially where technology enabling you with better controls over the end product and the quality of the product, do you see distributors now democratizing the selection of their decorator pool? Because that'd be a tremendous advantage. And we know, you know, we get these requests all the time in the community feed where folks are like, hey, I'm in Seattle, my director, but I've got a project going on in Florida. Does anyone have a decorator partner that I can rely on? Have you seen this change in terms of how distributors are selecting the decorator partners?

You know, a little bit. And we had to coach a lot on that during '21 and '22. You know, not only were we facing the supply chain challenges, but we were facing a labor crisis. Yeah. And, you know, there's nothing more representative of bodies and labor than, than it is at the contract decorator side of things. So we saw enormous spikes in people searching for contract decorators having to do with the fact that contract decorators were being overrun during this sort of post-pandemic comeback. It born a lot of new folks. It challenged some. Some had to kind of cull their list a little bit. And people would come to us and say, hey, my guy Jerry's, you know, he's not returning my phone calls. And that's my guy. And what we would say is you need, you need a couple Jerrys, right? I grew up in an embroiderer's business with my dad's embroidery shop. It wasn't very big, but, you know, he had multiple screen printers that he worked with from contract. He had a couple of contract embroidery people. If you had a 600-piece hat job, he could tie up his machines for 3 weeks or he could send it to a guy that could do it in 2 days. So we really coached. I wrote a blog about this topic of building a network of decorators to to use for specialization, to overflow. Jerry gets sick, you want to have that. And then to your point, looking at that on a national scale. So now you've, you've latched on to a gorilla of an end user account, a John Deere or somebody of Titanic size, and Jerry can't do that and he's in Fort Lauderdale and he's got to ship across the country. So we, we coach about that on a national scale and we'll do curated talks with people that have gotten themselves in that situation to help them navigate our network and who might be a good fit for them. But it's important to get, you know, get a network, be good communicators, pay your bills on time, all those great facets that strengthen the relationship. I would be remiss if I didn't bring up this point, which is, you know, our leadership team, and I think this really came from Jeremy directly, coined a phrase during the pandemic, which is business is personal. And I actually use that line a lot talking in, with, and about technology. But I would use that in this example too, which is to say, you know, look at your contract decorators as that extended arm of your business, as your, your own production facility, and have that personal relationship, you know, have it as a good thing on the front end, but then have it when things aren't so good to really strengthen those bonds and those connections. If you're just looking at them as can you beat this price and can you do this order quickly and can you guarantee it's perfect? You know, that, that isn't a good valued relationship. So yeah, business is personal. Have those personal relationships and you'll go a long way.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. I was telling Shelley once that I, that I often still show that this is not a t-shirt.

Oh yeah.

One of my favorites. And business is personal. I love it. We tie that to all those things. A couple of last questions. And you work with a lot of brands. Do you have a few favorite brands that you like in our industry or just like general period, general industry? This kind of gets you in trouble because you work with different brands.

So, well, no. And one of them is easy because I've been a long time team Nike guys, so I'm certainly a big fan of theirs. Right. You know, when I joined the team, we didn't have smartphones. I think my first was an Android, HTC or Samsung. You know, that world lasted a few years before I fell in love with Apple's technology. Again, I like businesses that are doing smart, progressive things, but that also have that heart and soul to them. And so some of those really stand out in our industry, you know, specific to SanMar. One of my new favorite, well, two favorite brands I have, one's retail and one isn't. I was— I didn't know what TravisMathew was all about. And when we brought them on, I was like, is this just another golf brand? What's going on here? And I've really fallen in love with their, their product and their quality and, and having a little bit of flair and some design style to them. And then from our world, a brand that we kicked off a few years ago, which is doing fantastic, is one of our new house brands, Mercer and Metal.

They go right here.

And that's been a fun line. I mean, that's speaking, I think, to a different style aesthetic. A lot of times if you wanted nice brands that there was this, you know, it's a golf thing, you know, it's like, you know, premium name, it's Cutter and Buck or it's, you know, Nike or Ping we used to carry. And what I like about Mercer Metal is it really brought in a different style aesthetic than we had maybe with Port Authority or previously with Red House and maybe for a different generational shift in kind of what that looks like. But, you know, the core stuff, the new things we're coming out with, I find that in my wardrobe more often than not.

So love it. Funny you said that. This is a terrible confession, but Mark and the team knows very few items make it to my closet. And I have a black Mercer and Metal jacket that we did.

Oh, nice.

Is that the bomber style? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fantastic. I love it. You know, truth be told, I was like, I got to look good on the camera here. I almost grabbed the bomber jacket. It's one of my go-to favorites.

I love it. Yeah, you know, it's very svelte, very, very cool.

And listen, here's what I think both of those brands have in common, that we keep going back to trends. I grew up with cotton and then it was, you know, wrinkly and getting, you know, beat up in the laundry. So then the infusion of blends with poly came around. And then like I said, right as I was leaving, the performance moisture-wicking stuff started to show up. Well, not long after, I mean, it was just all shiny, synthetic everything, right? Yeah. And so now we're definitely seeing that shift back to getting into the tactile appreciation of natural yarns with cotton, with rayon. So I think TravisMathews, they definitely embrace that. A lot of their things are blends. Mercer Metal has that in their line where you can— that jacket, I think that jacket might actually be mostly, if not all, poly, but it has that natural hand feel to it. So it's not all just slick and shiny everything.

So yeah, it's a really good point that, yeah, about trends, that texture's coming back. And just the feel and just us getting in touch with that.

There's something deeply psychological going on there, but people don't think about it like that. But as you want to feel comforted and you want to feel close, certain materials against your body and people, that makes a difference. Most people don't think about it. I'm one of the ones that would, but it does matter. And I love our trends team that talks about those things. They do a great job of explaining sort of the psychology of product selection is a fascinating thing.

That's very cool. Okay, last question. We get this—

we—

the community loves this question, so I always ask it. Do you have a book or podcast or video or anything that has really made an impact on you? And it can be business or non-business related.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. You know, I think I'm fairly educated, but I haven't been a book guy for a long time. And when I was more of a road warrior, back in my outside sales days, I was definitely dabbling in podcasts. My real heart and soul is with music. And so, you know, that and film as well. But, but so, so the podcast kind of went as I was, I was driving less and that was my main time to listen to stuff. So in the space of music, you know, a little factoid about me is I kind of have two halves of myself in that space. So for years I've developed these music compilations, one called Fusion Organic and one called Fusion Synthetic. And the organic would be relating to all music made by bands and musical instruments with drummers and guitars. And the synthetic side would be for hip-hop and electronic music. And if you go to any of those compilations, it's even within their subsegments, it's a lot of different stuff. It's old stuff, it's new stuff. And I've carried that trend on with Apple Music specifically since 2015 when it came out. Every year I'll make a compilation. It really is reflective of all the music that has found my ear throughout the year. And some years there'll be a little bit more and some years there'll be a little less. But it's kind of cool now to look back on almost, I guess, upcoming, it'll be 10 years of doing that. And I love going back and during 2020, the selection was a little different than maybe it was in '19 or '23. That's very cool. Yeah. And so that's my heart soul.

I mean, I love it.

Are there books I should be reading? Absolutely. Are there podcasts people talk about? And I'm like, man, I wish I had that time.

Or no, music feeds you, man. It's music feeds you. You know what's great? David Schultz, Danny Rose, and Mark Graham, they're all going to love knowing that. They're probably going to ask you for a link to those conferences.

Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's my— it's funny, there used to be a hip-hop artist whose, whose name was Mims, and it was Music Is My Savior was kind of the acronym there. And that's, that's more of my brand for sure.

Super cool. I love that. Love knowing that about you, Manny. I'm a music guy. Thank you for that. It kind of makes sense, right? You have this sort of engineering communication background. There's a lot that makes sense there that's going on.

So that's super cool. There's organized structure in that for sure. But I think I do try to think of myself as kind of equal halves organized structure, but also the fluidity of jazz and flow states and all that good stuff that's more on the art side of the world as well as the math side of the world. There's a common connection there for sure.

At some point I'd love to have a conversation about flow states and work and how it impacts our creativity, because I think that's a huge, huge thing. And Moni, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for everything. And thanks for— from on behalf of the team and on behalf of our customers, thanks for all the work you've been doing to shepherd the Connected Plus partnership with SanMar and the things that you and your whole team are doing.

It's absolutely phenomenal. Well, and I want to reciprocate that. I mean, I can't remember the exact year I met Mark, and then eventually you had a chat with Catherine. But have gotten to know you guys and met you at the shows and talked over the years. So this is just as much an exciting journey for me and for Sammar to, you know, have the Connected Plus, you know, come together, us to be working closer, both our inside teams and outside teams. So we're just as happy to be here as I hope you guys are and look forward to the future.

All right, my friend.

See you in Vegas. Yes, will do. For sure.