What Comes First, Brand or Product?

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard, get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

We have a topic of brand or product, which comes first, what comes first? And for a couple of product people. Well, what do you think the answer should be? I think maybe it's supposed to be product, but.

Well, I think most people would think product and most inventors whose focus is a product of some kind.

That's right.

Are going to put emphasis on the product. But the reality is if you start with the product and go down the road, you've learned too many times, you can have issues with what the specifics of the market for that product are, and it can cost you a lot more in marketing dollars to kind of force fit that product.

Exactly, exactly. And you know, I think this is a really big deal for a lot of those of you who are listening, who are private labelers and other things, because you all start with this keyword and your product, and then you think of the brand later. And the big problem with that is that if your goal to have an acquisitionable brand or to have an acquisitionable line, if that's your exit strategy, then you must start with the brand first. And while those keywords are important, use it as a screener to decide whether or not that product fits that brand. Because at the end of the day, if you have all these disparate products all over the place, you haven't built up something that's acquirable.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

So the big subject of product or brand first, I mean, the reality is there has to be a complete alignment of your product and products with your brand, your brand promise, your brand strategy, and that goes into your marketing effort and dollars. Who is going to buy the product.

That's right. I mean, I can't tell you how many branding people that I talked to, including George this week. He and I spoke for an hour and a half about it, that we believe brand comes first, shocks people, but it really needs to. And the reason for it is so much deeper than just a choice that you're making. There's so many things that happen in the product development and design process that are expensive, and if you don't get your brand right, those things may be not a choice for you in the future. It may require all new tooling, it may require all new packaging. Every choice you make is a very expensive redo. So you need to make those choices first. But the other part of that, the flip side of that is, is that when you get your brand right, when you figure out what it's going to be and who it resonates with, that who is telling you exactly who we're designing for, it makes our job so.

Much easier and it makes your job easier as an inventor. Whether your product is something that needs to be designed at a high level, or your product is more of a commercial product that's mostly engineered, it really does not matter. Understanding that who it's for and laying that out before the product is fully developed is critical because then you know exactly who you are designing, developing that product for and you develop it to that market. So that makes the marketing dollars you will spend, the marketing efforts you will undergo fit that much better. And it's more efficient from a cost perspective and a timeline perspective of your project.

Right, exactly. And you're designing for impact. I mean, that's the goal is you want to make sure that it resonates with the target market, that your goal is that it has impact with them, that it sells itself. Because I mean, whether or not you're on a page on Amazon or a shelf in Walmart, it doesn't matter. Those items must sell themselves. The features that resonate with your target market must be obvious. They have to show in a photo, in a little tiny thumbnail sometimes. And you know, they must also just. There's no assisted sales process in mass retail. And while you can have description and keywords and they're searching, helping you online, which is of benefit, and it does help less obvious products and maybe even less quality products rise to the top. Because that process, the reality is, is that it won't last long. And that's always going to be a fight because the ones that do better, the ones that resonate better, the ones that have met the needs of the target market will always out review in the long run and they'll always do better in sales, they'll always get the referrals, all of that. When it sells itself, it's like going viral. It sells itself.

Well, let's go into maybe a little bit of what that is. I mean, the reality is if you develop product first for what your intuition, or you're shooting from the hip, whatever.

Or your friends and family, which we.

Talked about notion is of who this product is intended for, right? You develop that product and then you Go and produce it. You bring it to market. If you haven't researched that market first, one of the key things is you may not know where the sweet spot of the price point is.

Right?

Right. And so you go to market and you've done it on a manufactured cost basis to, you know, because you've gone product first, you're going to develop this product for what you think it should be. You're going to determine what it costs to manufacture it based on the assumptions you've made of what it needs to be.

Right.

And then let's say this product is going to retail for 39, 99, okay, $40.

Right?

Right. And when you get to market, you put it out there at $40, but you're finding that you're not getting a lot of traction and you realize, gee, it really needs to be $10 cheaper in order to achieve some velocity of selling. So you lower it. But if your cost basis is such that you only get your full margin at $40. Now you can see here's a situation where had you understood up front that the sweet spot in the market was $30, and you developed the product, made some different decisions for features, finish, how it's manufactured material, process, manufacturing process. Had you made different decisions to make a product that essentially cost you maybe $10 to manufacture instead of 13 or 14 to manufacture, then to get to that price point. Right. You end up with a mismatch between, you know, you've developed. What you've done essentially is developed a product based on manufactured cost basis instead of market cost basis. Right?

Right. And that has a whole host of other problems that happen to you and that it will never be able to be discounted. And so you have a whole bunch of problems. And it really, if you start online first and you think, well, I've got a lot of margin to move. You really haven't understood what's going to happen when you get on a shelf eventually. And so you have to build in those margins from the begin. So you have to understand your market access, which is a part of brand development. So if you know what your market brand is and who it's resonating with, then you know, are they willing to pay these kinds of prices or are they not? And so when you see that you get to this definite place at which you understand what the criteria for doing something or not doing something is. And so that's what we call it, the design criteria. And the design criteria might have sourcing criteria, manufacturing criteria. It's a big host of different levels of criteria, quality criteria. Like there's a whole bunch of decisions that happen, but it's something that we established at the very, very beginning of a project. And it is so much easier when a company knows who they are and that's what brand is. It shows that you know who you are. So now I want to talk a little bit about that because there's two different ways you might know who you are. Your brand might be a, what I would call a. A parent brand, a global brand. So you may have a brand that is your company. And so maybe your company is about all products that make life easier, that save you time. It can be that broad. Okay. It could also go the other way and be something like. Dyson is a good example. Dyson knows who they are in that they are making very technical, detailed improvements, but they're improving everything to the minute detail. And they have a style and look that resonates through their brand. So they have both things going for them. So they want everything to look synergistic and they want everything to follow their brand message of function and form and style. All those things together.

Yeah. Superior function, I think, being the big thing and also sort of breaking paradigms. I mean, when they entered the market with their vacuum, they went and pitched that vacuum to all the existing vacuum manufacturers in the world. None of them wanted to do it because they didn't have bags that were used in the vacuum. And those companies thought that a huge part of their sales every year are replacement bags. So if they put a product that didn't have bags, that was going to be a bad move for them.

Right. And, you know, just announced really, is their new hair dryer. $300 for a hair dryer.

That's a lot for a hairdryer, actually.

$399, $400 for a hairdryer, which is high, but I'd pay for it.

Well, what's their unique function proposition? I haven't seen that.

So their unique function proposition that I saw online today was that the handle is thinner, so it fits. It's what, a fingertip grip. So in other words, for a lot of us, the handles are huge. And that means that the hair dryer is really heavy too. And the weight of the motor is up ab so it's above your hand, which means that it's always kind of doing this in your hand and it's flipping away from you. And so it makes it difficult to move it around. It's bulky, it's big. So this one, of course, re engineers the Way the air moves so that you get more power, which is everything that they do. It's just like their fans and their other things.

They're getting more power with probably less energy.

Exactly. More efficient power. And when this is part of their mission, right across all products. So it's why they did a fan, it's how their vacuum works. It's all of that. So that works. But by moving the motor into the handle, they change the balance point on it.

Which means that they had to make a very small motor. So you're talking about a lot of reinvention and redesign here. But at the end of the day, it's worth it because now women especially who buy these hair dryers, I mean, look, we use it pretty much every single day of the year.

Oh yeah.

Does $400 sound like all that much money for something that is going to save me time every morning in how fast I blow dry my hair, a better effect and do a better job of keeping it from being frizzy like it is today because it's a little damp out and you know, all of those things mean something. And is it worth that amount of money? I think I'm banking on the fact that this is going to be a category killer for them.

Well, and really that's their M.O. certainly this company, to our point today knows what their market is.

They know their brand and they know their customer.

They know what the brand promises. And it is not the low end of the market. It is the high end, which, I mean, it's still attainable. While $400 hair dryer is expensive, most people can afford that at some point in their lives if they make that a priority. Right.

Well, and they've already proven that. I mean, because people would pay twice as much money as your average vacuum. Yeah, and that's not something you use every single day, at least not in our house.

Once a week thing. But I mean, the point is, you know, you're buying a vacuum for most of your life with a company that's also standing behind it and tough their superior technology and all this. So. And you're saving money, not buying bags. Right.

So exactly.

Anyway, then the point is they know their market and they're an established company. So it's maybe different for inventors who may be a startup, you know, or a new, a new entity. But the point is knowing your market, knowing who you're marketing to will save you, you know, time and product development. It'll make sure that your everything's done more efficiently and you achieve success faster. Ultimately saving you money. And, you know, so the next aspect of this is really, you know, the marketing dollars spent.

Right.

You know your market, and you've developed the product specifically to go after a certain market. Your marketing dollars spent are less.

It's more effective marketing.

More effective. Well, here. Because here's what will happen. You know, you do it the other way. Develop a product that you then discover later what the market is for it. How do you discover that? You discover that after a lot of.

Trial and error and a big spend. And that's what happens, is that the reason why companies have such huge advertising budgets and marketing budgets is because they don't understand who they are. Now, those are the ones who throw more and more money at. That's the only option you have is to throw more money at it. Because at that point, redesigning your product is not really an option.

No, that's the thing. So you end up doing the shotgun approach of marketing, general marketing, marketing all over, and not focus targeted marketing to who, you know, wants to buy it. So you're spending all these dollars trying to figure it out. All right, where is the market? What is the sweet spot? And reality is you waste a lot of money doing that.

Exactly. So anyway, so for a couple of product people, we think brand needs to come first. But it's not about having to do all the graphics involved in your brand. Like people confuse with website, graphic work, a package. Look, that's not brand. Brand is the understanding of who you are, what your promise that you're going to deliver is. What that feels like and does look like is a subset of it. It's an execution of that. So don't be confused by that. And this is something that I feel very strongly about. And we talk about this all the time. There's like five key resources that we always say that you should spend money on, unless you are an expert in one of those areas. And one of those five key areas is branding. It is really hard to brand yourself. It's so hard. I can do it for other companies and clients and help along with their product promise and all of those things. But doing it for yourself is extremely difficult. And so you must really take the time to bring somebody in. And this is not a. Doesn't have to be a 10,000 doll, huge expense for someone to come up with a tagline for you. That's not what I'm talking about. But it's a good idea to spend a couple of thousand dollars at minimum and just get a couple of hours of somebody educated in Branding's time to talk through your ideas with you and see if they resonate because you're going to spend so much more money later on website, Redos packaging, Redos design changes, all of those things and as Tom put it before, a ton of marketing and advertising dollars. So all of those things are way worth the investment now to get that foundational piece in place. It informs so many decisions.

It's a hard lesson, you know, for inventors to learn. And, you know, I include myself in this, you know, earlier in our career.

When, you know, product focused people, it doesn't have to be inventors, but yeah, you're right.

Yeah. Anybody who's developing a product, whether you're inventing it or you're, you just have a product idea, you're going to, you know, source something and bring it to market that you think will resonate and have value is, you know, and we did it early in our career too. When we started T Tools, we had clearly a product idea first. We developed it, we patented it, and we brought it to market thinking, assuming what the right market was for it.

Right.

It was our T tool stylus pen and you know, for the Palm Pilots handheld computers at the time, which was a huge, huge economy, you know, 1998, 99, 2000, sort of the time period. We did that and we found out, you know, well, let me tell you what we did. So we brought it to market and we thought the big market was selling directly to end consumers who were, you know, buying compilots.

Right, right.

Using them, these early adopters at the time. And then it became a bigger economy and we were like, how are we going to market to them? Well, there's a catalog that ships in the box of the Rupont pilot. Let's get in that.

And we did.

We paid advertising dollars to get on the COVID of that and in that and on the back cover of that. And these were not, you know, inexpensive expenses. Right. This is like.

No, it was quite costly at the time.

It costs many thousands of dollars to get that position. And then there was the beginning of email marketing campaigns that we paid to be a part of. And we thought we were doing well because these things got out there and we got a lot of sales for us.

Yeah, I mean, we would have, we would have like a 2% conversion rate, which at the time was still really good because how many people really, you know, I mean, it wasn't visual at all. It was all text at that time.

Every single day it would go out and we had, you know, Thousands of orders or individual orders to a single person of one single item. Right. But then what we. And we thought, hey, we're doing great. So here, where you can realize that it's not just through a failure that you realize that you've got the product that they're on market, but you think you have success, but there may be bigger success to have that you didn't realize. And what we ended up discovering by consumers trying to pull us and drag us into a different market was that really there was a commercial market for businesses that wanted to buy those products and have their logos printed on them to give away trade shows for promotional purposes. Ended up being the lion's share of our business for years.

Well, and the reality is, if we had intent, if we had designed our Penn for that purpose at the time, we would have made a bigger area to imprint and we would have made it easier to do that. Instead we had to come up with all sorts of jerry rigged fixtures to hold it to print on it properly. We had to go find a special pad printer to do it. So there was a whole bunch. And we had this high texture on our pen which made it difficult to print on and have it adhere to. So like, all of those design choices we were stuck with at that point.

And we spent more. Even though it was a very lucrative market. We went from selling, you know, hundreds of these pens a day, and when we did a big promotion, maybe thousands of them in a day, to selling. At first it was 10,000, then it was 50,000 pens, then it was over 100,000. I think our biggest order was something around 250,000. It was, yeah, for, you know, I think we sold them to FedEx ground, you know, for them to use because they had a full fleet of people. So we were selling those on a regular basis. So you can imagine, I mean, we went from selling thousands of dollars to a company that was selling, you know, well over a million dollars. It was like a couple million dollars a year at the time, I believe at our highest for that commercial market. And while we succeeded in that, we would have actually made more profit had we developed product properly. Instead, we developed the processes and systems around the product we already had. And like you say, it was less efficient.

Well, and to be honest with you, we probably didn't close as many orders as we could have at that time because the product couldn't be priced cheap enough. If we could have gotten the price, you know, probably another 20% down. And maybe by making it more efficient in the way that we printed on it and having less labor to set it in a fixture, doing all these things, we could have easily cut 20% out of it if we had design changed it, if we had designed it for that purpose.

Right. And even like you said, the printing, we had to choose a printing process that was slower. Had we designed the pen so it could be silkscreen printed. And there are automated machines that did that. But because of the way we designed the pen, it could not be. We had to use a slower pad printing process, which just the throughput is less, the labor is more, and the profit margin was less. Yeah, so that's a good example about that.

So, yeah, old story, but it's very.

Applicable to today's discussion. And my point is just saying, hey, we learned the hard way doing that. And we're here today trying to help you learn from our past experience.

Right. And then here's the other thing that I want you to seriously think about is that, is that a brand does not have to be all things to all people. So that's where we, when we water down our brand to the point that we think, well, we want it to appeal to everybody. We don't want to offend anyone. We want everyone to buy it. Because my market is everyone. I can't tell you how many inventors tell me that. And I'm going to tell you right now, your market is not everyone. And you can't reach everyone. And you will never get to the kind of impact and volume you want unless you focus it. So you have a starting spot. You have a starting spot who are going to become your raving fans about your brand. And you must make them love you. You must be everything to those people. So your brand should resonate there. And, you know, I had this question come up that we addressed. Maybe we addressed it on WTFF in the last couple weeks or something, but it happened that I was at an event and someone asked the question saying that they had a. For their company or their product, I think it was. And they were worried that the name was too cheeky for. It was targeted at college students who were supposed to join this group to do something. I don't remember what the product was. And educators wanted them, the educational administration system wanted them to have this group because it was beneficial to the school for it to be happening. But their brand sounded a little too cheeky, and they were worried that the education administration was going to balk at it. And so my answer to them was that sometimes we think too much about it. So if our brand is resonating with millennials. And they like that cheeky name you gave it. Like, we have the name WTFF on our podcast. And for, I don't know, six months, my mother thought I was swearing. So, you know, and maybe she was a little offended. Maybe it's why she never actually listened to a whole episode. But my mom wasn't my target market.

Not at all.

Right. It was somebody who knew enough about 3D printing to know that that was an inside joke. And so you knew enough to know that, but not so much that. Yeah, but not enough to know, you know, not enough to be so, you know, technical. I mean, that's really what it was about. So it works for our market. And so. And, you know, whether or not schools are offended by it, we know for sure because we have a lot of educators and a lot of students who listen to it and they all think it's funny. You know, it's not offensive unless somebody really is complaining it. So I had an interview recently with a company that changed their name. So they originally something like VLHC Fans or something like that. And it's like low currency. I don't know, maybe I've got the acronym very low currency something or other. So the fan operates really quietly, but it's big. It has a lot of power. That's the thing that sounds like a.

Really boring name, right?

That was the name of their company. And this is back in.

Did their market even care that it was low currency?

Well, they. They thought it did because it was going into, you know, more commercial installations and with facility managers stuff. So they thought that it did, but they kept getting phone calls that would say, are you the company that makes those big ass fans? That was the phone call saying, are you the company that makes those big ass fans? And about a year and a half later, the president of the company, to his credit, changed the name to Big Ass Fans.

That's a gutsy.

It's a huge gutsy move. And they've done extremely well in the marketplace. And every time they bring in a branding expert, the branding expert says, oh, you need to change that name. And every time they do, they fire that expert and they move on. And the reality is that it's not a problem if your core customer base is happy with it, and it's what they're gonna call it anyway. So you might as well, you know, not create trouble. I mean, you borrow trouble. That's the term you always use, Tom. Yeah, don't borrow trouble. Like, yeah, you know, it's Perfectly fine the way that it is. So we're not seeing any questions from you guys. So we're just gonna continue on because we, you know, we cut 20 minutes out of your time.

There may be also because unfortunately, we started late. Yeah. Bail on us.

Yeah. And I'm so sorry about that.

If you're watching this recorded, well, it's no worse off for you. Yeah, we'll have the technical glitches worked out by next time.

Yeah, so sorry about that.

But you know what? I also want to take a moment to talk about, actually a new invention of ours that has just been invented in the last 24 hours.

Oh, are you going to talk about your camera hack?

Yeah. Just how we're talking to you today. Tracy and I are actually sitting opposite each other on different sides of the table. Allows us to use our microphone sound system here and produce good quality audio, but it allows us to be using one computer to be showing both of us to you. Last time we did this, we had us on different computers. I mean, there was a lot of things to coordinate, and this is a little simpler. So I came up with a camera hack.

It's quite hacked, it's quite held together with a little foam tape, but it's working.

So I think I'm going to turn this into a product, and we can use this as a case study or an example going forward. Why not? I think there are lots of people, although it's probably a small percentage of the market, But I know there are lots of people who broadcast and live stream things online where they have multiple people. And it's a tricky thing. How do you show multiple people on the same camera without just sitting next to each other in front of the camera on your actual little computer?

Right.

So it needs some fine tuning, some refinement, I will admit, but, I mean, it's working. That's why there's this little sort of funny thing down the center.

There's this line down the center, but the reality. Well, should we move, like, and see what happens? Like if I. Oh, I guess I've got to go the other way. See, I disappear. Yeah, slightly. Oh, now you made it blurry. You scared the camera.

It's lost focus now.

No, it's okay now.

If I go this way, I go into the middle, Right, Right.

You go into the middle. Yeah.

So it's. Yeah, I went the wrong way at first. Oh, I did make it blurry. I see it now. Little delay. But the reality is necessity. Mother of invention.

That's right.

A good example.

Right. And this is the thing. This is where we hope we're attracting the kind of people like us who really just see an opportunity or see a problem and say this is not acceptable, that there's not a solution for this. And that's what we hope our group is about, is really taking that. Because not every one of these like this idea. There may be such a small market, it's not worth making a product over, but it may be totally worth us posting up the hack on life hackers or YouTube or something and showing everybody how we did it. So you can do it too, right?

Or make a Downloadable model to 3D print, you know, your own.

Yeah.

You know, with some instructions, you know, instructable type of thing. I don't. I don't know if it's going to be a commercial, you know, sellable product or, you know, I'm certainly want to improve it for us because only probably a little better. But, you know, the reality is. Yeah, I agree with you. It's a great example.

It's a great example of where there's an idea, you saw a problem. We said, we're not going to accept they're not being a solution. We can't find a solution out there, so we'll create one ourselves. And then you go through our process and you test it and you check and see if there's a market. You check and see if it's worth doing. And even if there, you know, if it's a really low market, but this is still such a cool, fun thing and we still want to offer it up. We just find a different way. We find a method to design and development rather than go for it. And that's what so many of you guys do. That we hear when we go to the inventors groups and the forums and other things like that, is that you just go full force into making this thing and producing it and then saying, oh my gosh, the thing's a hundred bucks. And, you know, because I'm only going to sell 20 of them, so I got to make back my money, you know, or whatever.

The webcam that we use was like 79 bucks.

Right.

You know, it doesn't make sense for an accessory to cost more than camera, you know. And the reality is I tried and researched for a long period of time to find a tech way this problem through. Okay, let's hook up two webcams to one computer. Does that work? Well, really wasn't the way to have that work for a live streaming broadcast.

Right. And it's.

We used two computers last time, which was bandwidth drain and a delay. Because you and I are not sitting at this table having a conversation that's very timely and fluid like this. It was a little delay over the network and then the camera would switch to me and you and me and you.

And that it was annoying to everybody. But here's the other thing about it, is that this ties back into our original topic here of brand versus product. This product does not fit our brand. Like we're not out there. We don't have a brand that sells this. This is a whole very technical market. Isn't our normal audience of people who we talk to to every day. So for us to start marketing a product that doesn't fit our daily brand is an issue because that requires a whole new. I got to get a new list of people. I've got to get a whole new setup for marketing. I got to start a new webpage because it doesn't fit in the webpages I have. I have to start a whole new brand on private label Amazon. You do all of those things and they end up costing you so much more money. It's a lot easier to say this product fits or doesn't fit my brand. And if it doesn't fit your brand, find a way to use it. Use it via social media, share the idea freely, just put it out there and do whatever you want with it at that point, but don't spend money. That's where you stop it. When your brand, your market and the product don't all fit together, your chances of success are slim.

And some cases, in some cases the choice might be, well, I think this is a great product idea, but not for my company. Maybe I'll go and see if I can license that to another company that it's a good fit for their brand and their assortment of product and just make a small licensing percentage instead of trying to sort of be the hog and keep all the theoretical gross margin or net margin to yourself.

Exactly. And that's a whole conversation, that's a whole nother webinar all in of itself. Because yeah, that's definitely a big issue that you would have to go into because do you have enough time to license. Because licensing is not speedy.

Well, but licensing versus vertical, it doesn't have to be vertical manufacturing, but licensing versus bringing it to market on your own I think is a great topic. And we're going to cover that.

We're going to definitely cover that. So yeah, let's talk quickly about our next topic. So we posted out a Couple of topics into the big group. And I'm trying to find the list here so I can read it to you. And there's a little bit of confusion about how the site works and how things work. There's on the page at which you're looking at this live mentorship hangout, or you'll be watching the video archive place that has that at the top of your page. So if you're at the Facebook page with our picture up at the top and it says mentors to Inventors Network, you're in the timeline. Technically, if you're not in your own feed reading that. Okay, so you're in our timeline. You want to click on the thing that says join us live. And that's where the video archives are contained and everything. And unfortunately, that's where this comment stream is too. So if you want to comment, that's where you need to be commenting. And so I had posted it in there not realizing that you guys didn't see it unless you were in the video. So we have to put it into the regular feed. Yeah, the regular timeline. So some of the top contenders for the next topic are competitive research, non disclosures, design and quality specifications, market versus cost basis pricing, which Tom touched on. Yeah. So we'll put that one off for a little bit, but we will definitely go into more detail. Yeah. Build a strong manufacturer relationship, which is something. Yeah. Which is a great topic. And we also want to talk about something we're looking at doing in the fall, and that is a special trip to Asia. And you can go along with us and be mentored and understand all the ins and outs of sourcing in Asia. It's a special trip we're looking at doing in the fall. Yeah. We got to get some time schedules on it. And we're working. I'm working with an agent to try and figure out all the arrangements to what we do. So if you are sourcing yourself and you want to make factory visits and you want to contact us in the meantime, we can maybe look at coordinating the right cities in for you. We're going to take a very select few people, probably only up to six.

Oh, sounds great.

So I think that will be really interesting and fun and no one does that. And you can learn all about exactly how we do the quality control and how we set our systems in place and how we audit a factory and plus have some fun time and eat some great food with. With our team there, which we love. There's such wonderful people there.

Hopefully we get enough interest.

But anyway, Those topics are still there. Love you to vote on them. Suggest other topics that you're interested in. So go ahead and do that at any time just on the Facebook page. But I'm going to circumvent next topic and our next topic is actually going to be a big issue that's coming up with Amazon doing a lot of direct sourcing and actually taking away the private labelers product line. And this is something that happens at mass retail as well.

I didn't realize.

So you get this direct sourcing competition. So where your channel, where your retailer is your competitor and so that's what we're going to circumvent. And I'm inviting Steve Creamy from AMZ alliance to come in. Yeah, we'll invite him to come in and talk as well about it and what that means for a lot of people. It means, you know, some of you could be out of product. Please feel free to Facebook us messages, direct message us if you want and let us know your questions and we'll try to answer them offline because we were unable to do it for you online today. So anyway, thanks again for joining us. This is Tracy.

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