Episode 95: Supplier CMO Series, Molly Dietz with Strideline

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. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew. Hello everyone and welcome to the SkewCast. This is Mark Graham and we are back with another edition of our Supplier CMO series. In this series, we interview prominent marketing professionals on the supplier side to uncover what it takes to market effectively within our industry. Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Molly Dietz, marketing manager for StrideLine's promotional division. We had a wide-ranging conversation about effective marketing channels, how being hyperfocused creates the best marketing opportunities, and how their retail, direct-to-consumer, and promotional strategies intersect to create an unstoppable sales and marketing presence. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And Molly, it's such a great pleasure to have you on the SkewCast here today. Thanks for taking the time to be with us.

Thanks so much, Marc. I'm excited to be here. I've learned a lot from the podcasts I've listened to so far, so I'm just honored to be a part of this one here.

Yeah, well, you're very kind to have listened to them. I think it was amazing to me that you said upon being invited to the SkewCast that you listened to, I think, all 6 of the CMO series within like a day or so. So I think you deserve a prize for that.

Oh, well, thanks. You know, I'm a big podcast fan, so it was great to just plug in and listen and learn, and I'm hoping that the listeners will take something from me too.

Can you give me your quick background and what led you to Strideline and the promotional products industry?

I first became familiar with Strideline in college. I went to University of Washington, as did our founders and about half of our office. Our founders started the company in high school, so they kind of brought it to college with them, and they were known as the sock guys on campus. Snagged myself a pair back then. And I think it speaks to the quality of our product that I actually still have— well, I have one of the socks. I lost one of them a bit ago, but still, I kept it around for a while. Maybe it felt like an omen that I was going to work there some— here someday. But in the meantime, I worked for a boutique PR and marketing firm that specialized in lifestyle brands, which is really applicable to the work that I'm doing now. And our sweet spot was that launching point of the company. They usually were running for a few years, they had the structure, and now they were really ready to learn how to tell that brand story. And we did everything there. We did messaging, logo design, website. So I learned a ton during my time there, and I just finished getting a certificate in digital marketing, and I was ready for a change. And actually, my old intern approached me and she said, hey, we have a position at StrideLine if you're interested. It is in sales, but, you know, I'd seen the energy that happens at a company when it's taking off and really going and all of the excitement that surrounds that. So I wanted to be a part of that at StrideLine. So I took a sales job kind of with the understanding that marketing would be the next step, but we just didn't have any marketing positions within promo at the time. So, I learned about promo within sales, which was really, really great. You really get the full scope of things when you're in a sales position.

It's such a great point that I think that if you really want to learn a business from the inside out and also from the ground, there's no better way than in sales because you're the closest to the customer at that point. You're also closest to the rejection as well, which I find, you know, allows you to really understand what resonates and what does not resonate. Ultimately, I know that you're taking this story from sales into marketing, but I think that when you join a marketing position and you've had that experience in sales, it's hard to really do any, any worse with training for a marketing role.

Right. Yeah. And I was only in that sales role for about 6 months till I moved over to the marketing position because it started with me doing marketing on the side. And you know how that goes when you're in a sales role. We always felt like we were behind the 8-ball on, oh, we should probably send out an email marketing blast or whatever it may be. But yeah, I really learned everything from operations to what customers want, and it's been really, really helpful.

And so I have a sense of the dates. You joined Starline in this sales position when?

Goodness, 2 years ago now. Yeah.

You've been in the marketing role for, if my math is right, about a year and a half?

Yeah, that is correct.

Okay. So can you tell me about the role that you currently play on the marketing team right now at StrideLine?

I am the sole promo marketing person at StrideLine. I have a right-hand man designer who works in the Philippines, which is where our production, our CSRs, and our design team is, and he's my rock star. We churn out a lot of marketing material for being a 2-person team, but I also get to work with our branding team at StrideLine holistic level, and they are just rock stars at visual content and the storyline and the branding. So I'm definitely not reinventing the wheel here. I just have to take what they've created and tailor it for promo, which just means, you know, more sales specifics essentially. So we're giving everyone a little more knowledge than what they do on the direct-to-consumer retail side.

Right. How do the two divisions of the company intersect?

It's really an organic thing. We're still a small team here at StrideLine. So, they really create our brand story and I get to play with it, essentially.

That's a great way of putting it.

Yeah, I get to sit in on their meetings and learn from them and learn what they are looking for. And Jake, who's one of the founders, is really invested in brand story. That's kind of his baby. So, I get to learn what he wants and then tailor it from there.

I always ask that question because I think it's interesting in our industry that there are many companies that are promotional companies through and through. They don't have a retail side, they don't have a retail history, and so they're able to focus on being a promotional product supplier from the get-go. Then you have the companies like your own that really started off as retailers and understood that retail space and then got into promo, and I think what you see from a marketing perspective is something that's a lot more retail-influenced, where brand is really at the forefront, and it's less of like a supplier line and more like a supplier brand. I'm not saying that one's necessarily better than the other, but what I am saying is that they're certainly very different. It's very clear when you encounter a promotional supplier versus a promotional supplier that came from a retail background.

Yeah, I agree. I think that for us, it's really experiential in our branding. We understand that we're selling a premium level of something that may not have been considered premium level in the past. We're selling socks, but we're selling some really, really nice socks. So it's how do we make that experience premium from start to finish on our retail side and our direct-to-consumer side? That's a web experience. That's the quality of product. When you get the product in the mail, it comes in a nice packaging, but we take that and move it over to promo from the second you send us that first inquiry. We want our response times to be short. We want the interactions to be great and friendly and fun. We want the design quality to be great, and then ultimately, again, the finished product is going to be great. Even if you're getting our most economic sock, we want you to be excited and proud to be offering that sock to your clients.

I think in what you're doing at Strideline is analogous to what Starbucks did with coffee a few decades ago. And if you sort of think about these parallels, before Starbucks came into the market, coffee was a dime a dozen. It was something that you got at the local corner store or the donut shop. The quality was kind of all over the place, but it was something that it wasn't considered premium. Starbucks came in and then made it a premium experience, and the stores became this third place. Then of course the price went up and people would say, well, what was a 25-cent cup of coffee is now $2, and that was interesting. StrideLine came into the promotional market where the socks were inexpensive and of a certain quality. You came in and came in with something at a premium quality as well as a premium price point. Is that fair to say that price was not something you were really worried about because you were creating a different category? Yeah.

I think when we started off, it was a big question that we would get asked. What's the value of this sock versus the less expensive alternatives? Or frankly, we're competing with different products at that point as well. Why would we choose a sock? And we told that this story over and over of people will wear these socks for years to come. This is not a throwaway product. This is an investment in your clients for the next few years. And people actually accepted that faster than we would've thought. We obviously now offer other items that are, are, are on the more economy side, but it's really incredible to see how our premium line is still a really top seller for us just because of the value that it puts to itself. And when that person wears the branded sock 3 years from now and they look down and they see whatever company it may be, they're excited that they got that product.

Absolutely. And I think that that's a way of being able to differentiate the sock relative to other people. And I think it's— I mean, it's exciting to come into this space where you're dealing with a landscape that is commoditized to some extent. Price is definitely a key weapon in the fight for market share on the supplier side. Like, you you offer the least expensive such and such. I mean, that is one of the weapons. It's not the only ones, but you see it's quite prevalent. And I think how the promotional products industry got its start was really a focus on things like stock, good price, service. Whereas in your case, it doesn't seem like you've come into the market advertising that you're the cheapest at all. I don't necessarily say you're the most expensive. It's probably not what you wanna have in your branding, but it's all about this premium experience and how you're able to, really separate this from the regular sock market that you see out there. And I think of anyone, you've probably done the best in terms of repositioning your product into not just being a sock. That's my perspective from an outsider.

Well, thanks. Yeah, I think that that's great for me to hear, and I think that it is a goal of ours. But we're also— we've kind of worked backwards on that too. We also offer— we just lowered our knit minimums because that was a gap in our offering. To be 120 pairs, and we're offering the lowest-priced knit sock on the market. So we started at that premium level, and we are able to, because we know our production so well, create this economy-level sock that's still a great sock. So we do, we do understand that price is important, and we always want to make sure that we have some— a sock for each and every step along that price spectrum.

Well, I think from a marketing perspective, you're, uh, using a play, or a strategy I should say, that I think is very smart. And so it's coming into the market, having a very specific product that you're winning over the hearts and minds of your customers with, like this premium sock. It comes in, you're able to identify it, you bring on distributors that fall in love with this. And then the next stage is how do you increase share of wallet? So you know that these distributors probably have a number of clients that want those more budget-friendly promotional socks, and you'd be kind of crazy not to try to tap into that in the StrideLine way. So that way you're not just pigeonholed into being this like expensive sock supplier supplier that can't adapt to the other opportunities in the industry.

Yeah, you know, we were very well aware of the importance of variety in that regard. We want to be the one-stop sock shop is kind of the line that we keep saying, which is very hard to say.

Say that 5 times quickly.

Yeah, we just want people to be able to come to us, they need socks, it's StrideLine. That's the, that's the no-brainer., and we're going to have something for each person that needs it. I think we're at some— something like we have 16 different socks qualities with then if you add lengths and colors and everything else, it's in the hundreds. We're really working to expand that constantly.

Another brand that you remind me of is Orogadio on a number of levels. Orogadio started off in retail, then they got into promo. That's one parallel. Another parallel is that they started off with a high-end premium speaker with an investment in great packaging, just a supplier that just came into the marketplace with a very strong personality that understood who their customer was and they attracted a tribe of people who really loved them. What's interesting about Auric Audio is since they've been in the promotional market a little bit longer than Strideline has is that they've since diversified from speakers into things like bags and hats and DOP kits. And it's just really interesting as to how they've expanded the line. Is that something that StrideLine may ever get into, is expanding beyond socks into other things that are maybe complementary ancillary products that adhere to the sort of the philosophy of what StrideLine stands for?

It's always there. It's always a question that we're asking ourselves because, yes, I mean, I think one of our biggest struggles is a strong word to use, but we do just do socks. We're a niche product. We're a niche company. And that would be kind of the easy thing to do. To get more of the market share would be to expand our product line. But we're really comfortable right now and confident in what we're producing. And there's just so much more opportunity as socks become more and more popular and the value of socks is getting more and more understood that we're gonna stick with this, I think, for the foreseeable future, for sure.

And maybe we check in in a year or two and things look different, but.

Yeah, there you go. You never know.

I mean, I think that's what's so interesting about the promotional industry is that it's such a dynamic, a vibrant space where there's such an interesting demand for so many things. I think that suppliers that come to market with a great value proposition, whether it's customer service or whether it's great product quality or it's a great just personality as a brand, they're the ones that are best positioned to diversify into other product categories if, of course, done responsibly because they've already won the hearts and minds of the customer and that customer has lots and lots more money to spend. So it's, it's very exciting to be a supplier that is on the cutting edge of things. So congratulations to that.

Well, thank you.

All right, I want to shift gears and talk about marketing channels. What is the most effective marketing channel for you today on the promotional side, Molly?

Yeah, we are a big online advertiser, and when I say big, it's our essentially all of what we do. As I said, we're a niche product, and so the hyper-targeting capabilities of digital advertising is just kind of a perfect pairing for us. Our kind of go-to line is, if you've looked for custom socks, if you've been to our website, if you've searched custom socks on one of the platforms, we're gonna follow you around the internet for a while. We want you to continue to see us for a bit.

Right, so retargeting is big for you guys.

Retargeting is huge, yeah. We also worked really hard on developing our CRM, so when we're working on the digital advertising, a person that has ordered with us is going to see different ads online than someone that hasn't. And with email marketing, it's the same thing. We've worked on segmentation really hard this year to make sure that we're keeping people engaged and sending the right messages to people in any kind of platform that they're seeing us.

And, and do you find with search when it comes to distributors that— are you finding that there is the majority of the searches happen in the industry search platforms like a Distributor Central, Sage, and ESP, or are you finding that there's also a healthy amount of search that's happening outside of those platforms on, say, Google, where a distributor is looking for custom socks and you may get them there as well?

When we're doing search, it's mostly in the platforms just because we don't want to even get confused with selling direct, right? So we don't really mess around too much with that. But yeah, within platforms, if they're searching socks, any kind of opportunity, we jump at. So that's for sure. We've, we're looking into ways to partner with distributors to do search on the general web. You know, we will co-brand advertising or, you know, the landing page will be their site. But if you search custom socks, we're going to be incorporated that somehow. Right. We've kind of found the loophole in the direct world.

Yeah. Well, there you go. I mean, the, yeah, the aforementioned digital certificate has served you well, hasn't it, Molly?

Yeah, it has. Yes. Yes. It was a crash course. It was great. But then, you know, general web advertising also works really well, especially when we're targeting distributors with that. Our CRM is plugged in and we're following people around the internet that work with us.

How about the least effective marketing channel?

As I've said, we're a younger company. The digital world is where we're most comfortable. So when I say least effective, maybe least or the greatest opportunity is where I say is more traditional advertising. We've never made a printed catalog. We've done little brochures and things here and there, but we've really just stuck to online. I think that as we grow, that's where we're going to need to expand, especially when our product is so quality. When we're at trade shows or things like that, people get it the most when they feel the sock. I think that that's something that we're going to really start to explore more and more.

You started off by talking about your deep experience in digital and how you've made such such a strong investment in the digital online side of your business. I also know that Auric Audio has a great trade show presence, which is the exact opposite of digital. It couldn't be more analog and traditional than flying people out to a trade show. How do you balance those two investments, like one that is hyper-digital with one that is hyper-analog for a young company like yourself that is so indexed on the digital side?

Yeah, trade shows is the one, you know, that is the offline thing that we really do care about. And I think that our exec team does an exceptional job of traveling around and getting and pounding the pavements and getting in front of our distributor partners, including these trade shows. We do do a lot of advertising leading up to them on online and email and things like that, and also after. So we try to really get, maximize that opportunity. Our goal is always when we've met someone at a trade show that day, they're getting an email that night if possible. If we are able to get those lists so that they are already thinking of us. Because we know that when you go to a trade show you're bombarded with a ton of information and we want to stand out when you get home. We do a lot of kind of online or post-show offers, which aren't necessarily, you know, some people do show offers in person, but we usually take those online. And send those out afterwards. Those can actually communicate exceptionally well with the follow-up that we do. Yeah.

Well, and again, from my, my outside perspective, I think what's really interesting about what you've done is that there's this wonderful alignment between marketing and sales where you've got these, these different channels, the online channels, you've got the offline channels, you've got this brand story, you've got marketing that's out pounding the pavement at these shows, but then there's great alignment with the sales process so that sales knows to follow up on these opportunities, whether it's an existing distributor that came and saw a new sock or it's a brand new distributor that's never heard of you before. The fact that you're on those opportunities is, I mean, most people listening to this would say, well, that's a no-brainer, but I think that it is a struggle for some suppliers, like particular suppliers that are, that have been in the game a lot longer, that have got a lot of focus on different product categories and it's a little bit harder for them to say be as nimble or maybe as focused because there may be a more standard supplier where people just kind of come to them because they've been around for so long. You're at such a different stage in your journey that if you don't have that alignment between sales and marketing, you're quite frankly going to probably die because you're going to break through because there's so much competition.

We've found our most effective campaigns have come, and I'm going to give my sales team credit for this, come from them. I mean, I take what they've told me and flipped it, and we've gotten huge responses. Yeah. You know, they said, hey, we've been getting a lot of inquiries about sports teams giveaways at big sporting events or whatever else. What can we do to target that? And we'll create some material, and it's been extremely effective. It's also the benefit of having a smaller team. You know, we aren't in a big office that's you know, I have to walk to another floor or whatever it is. I literally have one of our account managers sitting next to me, so I just kind of hit her on the shoulder and say, hey, what do you think of this? It's exciting and it is nimble, and we switch up our plans all the time. Something's not working, we will quickly nix that and move somewhere else. We're huge at tracking our investments in marketing. It's partially why we're so comfortable with the online world and why the offline world kind of scares us is because we can't track that ROI as easily. I'm able to essentially know where each one of our opportunities is coming from through our UTM tracking. While there is that gap in the promo industry, sometimes it can be hard to see, oh, they clicked on an ad 3 months ago, they took a quote for their client, the client sat around for a while, and then somehow it's coming back around. That gap can be hard to track things, but I know that first touch point, and I think that that's really, really helpful when making these decisions.

Well, and I think that, I think that's really the beauty of, of the digital environment where you're able to see you're able to track ROI a lot, a lot easier, even in a wonky industry like promo where you're one step removed from the buyer. Who knows, right? Whether it was an ad that ABC Distributor saw 7 months ago that then inspired them to go and speak to Google, and then Google decided to go and order 1,000 socks, you know, 3 weeks ago. Well, no matter how great your tracking is, it's going to be hard to track that one specific case because of the fact there's a bit of a trickle-down effect there.

Yeah, certainly. So there's always that gap and that break, but I still know and I can still tell that that ad might get me 16, 17 more leads 4 months from now. But it is also up to our sales team and everything else. There's so many different ROI, return on your investment, tracking gaps, but still really interesting to watch.

Yeah, absolutely. I want you to tell me about your biggest failure on the job and what you've learned from it. It's been 2 years, so my guess is you've probably screwed up maybe once. Can you tell me about that and what you learned from it?

Oh, goodness. I, you know, there's always the little ones that kind of irk you, you know, the typos and things like that. I haven't had any huge, huge mess-ups, which is a true knock on wood moment. I think it's just a mentality. When I first started, there are so many opportunities within promo. The various platforms, the emails, the online, the everything, especially when you are a one-woman show here. But I tried to do everything and it just wasn't working. And I think now I have an idea of what works for us. So I really focus on that. It's kind of that hyper, hyper-targeting in what's effective as well. I wish I had a really good story to tell you here, but I just, I've gotten lucky again.

Knocking on wood. Well, we can circle back in a few months if you've come across a good— I mean, this is also the excitement of being a really young company. I mean, I asked you the question about your most, your least effective marketing channel. If you've been in market only for a couple of years, your answer is going to be very different than a supplier who's been in market for 20 years, where they may have said, well, hey, we loved advertising in trade publications 20 years ago. That was a that was gangbusters for us, but now we've seen that that is no longer as effective. So your answer is you're really pulling from a much smaller sample size.

It is true.

So I can appreciate that.

What is a cool part though about our company is we're young to promo. I think we're just about to hit 4 years in promo, but our leadership team, they started this company at 18. So our leadership team is this young group of people right around the age of 30 who've run a company for 10 years. So they've got a great wealth of experience of problem solving and all of the things that it's taken to get us to this point while still being quite young. So that's a great resource as well to work with. I'm just so thankful for all the advice that they could give me at their young age, still able to provide me with this great wisdom on a lot of things.

All right. So we talked about your biggest failure. Why don't we shift gears to talk about the company's biggest marketing challenge that you're facing right now?

Yeah. There's a lot of sock companies out there right now. While when we started there were, as you said, not very quality socks, there were some good knit-in options obviously, but now it feels like there's a sock On every trade show corner, there's a sock vendor. And in some ways, it's been a blessing and a curse for us. When we entered the market, there wasn't much else, and it kind of feels like we got to ride the sock wave, I'm gonna say, to the top. When we first started, it was, "Why socks?" over and over again. "I don't get it." And now it's, "Why you?" is the question that we're getting more and more often. Why do we work with you as opposed to the next sock vendor? We have kind of 4 goals, right? It's we wanna have the widest offering, We want to have the highest quality. We want to be on the less expensive while, you know, we want to have it be price point accurate. And we want to be fun to work with because we want you to come back and work with us and enjoy that experience. So I think that's what we deal with. That's our biggest challenge right now is telling that why us story as opposed to our competitors. And our sales team does an incredible job of doing that. On the marketing side, I've got a lot of resources to work with because our offerings are vast, that it makes it easier to tell that story.

Listen, like anyone who gets into a new category and breathes some life into it and spends a lot of time in educating the market, you obviously benefit from that because, well, provided you resonate with the market, you're going to benefit from that. As that category grows and as you grow, other people take notice and there are people either look at a way of cutting into your, your market leadership. There may be some people that are trying to knock off the socks in the market. I'm just guessing, but those are all challenges. I mean, there are obviously opportunities as well because now the category is even bigger and you've got people that are coming after you. But I think like a lot of very progressive companies, like whether they're in the industry or not, Your best weapon against any of that competition is to continue looking 5 steps ahead as opposed to worrying about a cheap knockoff because I think that really any great company is one that really always focuses on the future, what's coming down the pipe as opposed to worrying about people nipping at your heels.

Completely. And it's also where our 3 silos are really important. You know, we have retail, we have direct-to-consumer, and we have promo. Where people are learning about StrideLine, it's kind of hitting them at all angles. They'll go to Costco, they'll see StrideLine. They'll be online and they'll see our standard issues, which are our black and white socks, on the internet, and that quality is really important. Then there's also promo. It's been really fun to see the interplay of how the 3 different directions of our company come together and where people find out about StrideLine. We have people that get a custom pair of Salesforce socks at the big convention the previous week, go online and say, "This is the most comfortable sock I've ever worn. I want to get these and wear them every single day." So that's really helpful too when it comes to being— standing out from other competitors. We're not, again, we're not just a promo company. We're everywhere.

Right. And the fact that those different markets reinforce each other in a way that's really healthy, right? As you say, you get a— Yeah. Or you might even find that you have maybe a director of marketing at a big tech company that finds you online because they want to order one pair of socks because they may have seen the socks at Costco. And then they receive them and they go, well, I mean, I'm the VP of marketing at this big tech company. These socks could be fantastic for a giveaway. They then contact you. You then direct them to someone in the distributor world. And then now you benefit from that as well, which is of course like a— I mean, what do they say? It's always like searching for your unfair advantage. Like, that's an unfair advantage that StrideLine has because you're able to get them outside and it's able to fuel demand back in the promo business. And I, I think it's like a perfect playbook, uh, for the way a modern supplier should operate these days. So good on you.

Well, thanks. And that's even how we got into the promo industry. It was a story very similar to that. We essentially got a call from Google that said, "Hey, I got a pair of your socks with the San Francisco skyline on it," or something like that. And next thing you know, we've learned about the promo industry and we haven't turned back from there.

Yeah, I mean, that's often how it goes and you probably didn't know the promo industry existed.

No. Yeah, we were doing very small custom orders just kind of on a, even on a sports team basis. And then Google comes to us and says, "Hey, can you make," I think it was 5,000 socks or something like that., and we're lucky enough to have the retail background to have been able to produce that order. It definitely was a turning point for us.

Yeah, there you go. And that was 4 years ago. Now, now look at you. I know. All right, just, uh, want to round it up with just maybe, uh, uh, 2 or 3 more questions, but this has been really, really fun, uh, Molly. It's always great to speak with sort of this next generation of marketers that represent this next generation of suppliers, and I think it's, it's really exciting to, to get your perspective, um, relative to other types of vendors. So thank you so much for all this time. All right, so what is on your desk right now?

Oh boy, I'm kind of a desk minimalist, but I've got a few things. I've got a calendar. I still— well, this might be the opposite of the young thing that I've been talking about. I handwrite my calendar. I back it up with an online calendar, but I really like the experience of seeing what my month is going to look like. I've got that. I've got a water bottle. I've got like 3 tumblers because I think you can't go to an event without coming home with at least one of them in the promo industry. I'm a big coffee person here in Seattle, so I find that very useful.

Now, the water bottle and tumblers that you're referencing, do they have a logo on them or are they a blank product?

One has my name on it. Oh.

Yeah.

I got a laser printer to get my name on one of them at a show. The others are blank. I think they were a sample somewhere along the line—

way, right? That you'd just fallen in love with. Well, that's awesome. Um, I don't think there's anything wrong with being a desk— having a minimalist desk. I think that that can keep things kind of organized, right? Everything, I suppose, on your desk is probably in your computer, is my guess.

Yeah, for the most part, besides the calendar.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So what 3 brands do you admire the most and why? They could be from the industry, Or they could be from, from outside the industry.

One is definitely Aurigaudio that you already mentioned. I mean, you bringing them up in comparison to us is something that we're very aware of as well. I follow everything that they do pretty closely. They're just a shining example of what I think we can all be doing as suppliers on a marketing level and on a product level. They're just great. I know Patagonia is kind of a cop-out, but I just so respect what they do. Especially being in the wearables industry as well. There are some similarities in what we see with our products. It's, they say you can have this jacket for 10, 15, 20 years is their goal. We would like people to fill their sock drawer with 15, 16 really quality socks as opposed to 20, 30, however many you have that you throw away within the next year or so. So the lifetime of products, I think that that's something that really speaks to me with Patagonia. And then one of my new favorite brands is Imperfect Produce. Are you familiar with them at all?

No, I'm going to look them up.

I guess it's also to do with waste, but they take produce from the grocery store or that's too ugly or deemed too ugly to sell at a grocery store, and it's a subscription service where they deliver it to your house. Oh, okay. So it's like, you know, a crooked carrot or a slightly dented apple or something like that that's still great to eat., but it's just not grocery store perfect. Their branding is adorable. They caught me with their Facebook ads and I've been a huge fan ever since.

Yeah, I know. I'm looking at it right now. The infamous double mushroom. Right. I've certainly seen many of these weird strawberries in my day.

Yeah, or the really weird tomato. I think that's one of my faves that they have on there.

Right. The value there for you as a consumer is that you're getting product for less and it's great for the environment because now these farmers don't need to toss this merchandise and it's better for them economically. You're right, it's actually very fun is looking at— it's almost like this weird outsider brand and how they've been able to come in and win the hearts and minds. I know I've been saying that a lot in this podcast, but winning the hearts and minds of people with an unconventional conventional product and then creating a new category around it is, is really cool. So I hadn't heard of them before, but I'm just— I'm looking at their site and I agree with you, it's pretty cool.

They're taking something that people don't want and making, and making it resellable and marketing it as something that people do want, which I think is totally true. I even think it's fun, you know, when I get my box and it's, it's always an exciting adventure into the world of produce that you get each week.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But isn't that like a marketer's dream of like taking something that's unconventional that you think that might be a tough sell, but you create a brand and create magic and emotional connection. Any marketer who can do that, in my opinion, is at the top of their game. Totally. Last question. What marketer, dead or alive, would you love to have lunch with and why are they an inspiration for you?

Hmm. So as I said at the beginning of the podcast, I'm a big podcast fan. I love how I built this. I think that I know any person that's interested in developing companies needs to be aware of this podcast and listening avidly. I recently listened to the Airbnb founder, Joe Gebbia, and I wanted to continue listening to him talk about Airbnb for hours. So I think that that's something, someone I would definitely want to sit down with. And I think it's actually similar to what we were just talking about with Imperfect Produce. He made the space of your home, which is supposed to be stranger danger and don't let anyone in, he made that a space for people to make money and build this company off of and totally switch people's perception of their own private spaces, which must have been hugely difficult at the time. But it's just so prevalent now in the shared economy that we continue to develop. I love his perspective on all of it. And I think my— I have one other too, and I think it's because she almost did no marketing. The founder of Spanx was also on How I Built This podcast. They've done— she's done little to no advertising and yet has developed this incredible brand. So it's how do you build such a connection or make your product so great that it almost leaves a spot for not needing marketing, which I think is a great educational experience for a marketer.

Right. Then it gets into your definition of what marketing is, right? You could say on one hand, like a company like Spanx does quote unquote no marketing or no advertising, and you could make an argument for that, but then you could make the reverse argument and say that they are among some of the best marketers in the, at least the modern economy, because they've been able to figure out how to empower its customers and its fans to tell its story on its behalf. And if you can do that, then you, you really have magic powers, I think, because you're, you're right. Yeah, it's, it's, it's really amazing. And I don't think a lot of people have the talents to do that. And I'm not surprised by those answers because a lot of those people, I think, have things in common with what you and your team have built at StrideLine, you know, maybe on a smaller level, but certainly you're on the same track. And I think that that's really exciting and great people there for sure. Yeah, they're definitely inspirations. Well, Molly, this has been a real whirlwind. I feel like I could probably speak to you for another couple of hours about marketing, but I really, really appreciate it. It's just a real inspiration to sit down with you to understand a little bit more about your world, and I know that the listeners of the podcast will be, I think, equally excited to glean these tidbits from you. So thank you so much.

This has been great. Thank you so much. This was really fun. Totally excited to have been a part of this. And let's check back in next couple of years, see what happens.

Yeah, there you go.

We'll get an update on those failures.

Yeah, boy, fingers crossed. Thanks so much for tuning in to 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.