thinking about as you exit your company or start a new venture, just like how do you get out of your comfort zone so you can keep learning. Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer, and I believe running a direct consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results. I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your ecommerce business. Let's get on with the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming the show a gentleman with multiple titles. Kevin Ty. He is the co-founder over at Beechley Brands, which was then acquired by retention brands, which he is now an advisor at. And now he is currently serving as the head of growth over at Bubs Natural. Kevin, welcome to the show. Yeah, Chase. Thanks for having me. It's been a long time coming. We try to do our first show at sub-summit and that got ruined by I think United Airlines and then, you know, with the plain delays, but now glad we could circle up and get this done. Absolutely. And I always like to shout out when I meet people at conferences on the show. I like to tell people, get out there and meet people in your environment. And you just never know who you're going to bump into and how they're going to help you. So, sub-summit, I think I even told Chris George this the other day. I was like, that's the most slept on show and that's out there. It's such a good one. Oh, yeah, it's fantastic. One of my favorites of the year. Awesome. Awesome. So, let's just start at the beginning. Take me back in time to the inspiration and the ideation of Beechley Brands. You know, what was going on in your life? Where'd this come from? Yeah, great question. So, to go way back, I guess I consider myself a serial entrepreneur along my first venture while I was in college. And since then, I've had a number of ventures, mostly failures, but a few successes along the way, Beechley being one of them. Beechley, I launched that back in, started working on the idea in 2014, launched into a very small beta in 2015 and officially rolled it out in 2016. So, I've been doing that a long time. The idea for that was actually interesting. I had to start up before that and that one ended up going under. And during that time, when the startup was, you know, we're trying my hardest to save it and turn the corner and I just had really burned myself out, you know, working, sun up to sundown, just trying to do everything from raising additional funds to, you know, continuing to push product market fit. And, you know, just didn't work out. And finally, threw in the towel and came up for air. And I was like, man, I need a break. I lived into time in Manhattan Beach. So I lived by the ocean. I wasn't going to the ocean, wasn't going to the beach. I'm big into health, fitness, surfing, water sports, wasn't doing any of that. So it just was, I wasn't really in a good place, you know, mentally or physically. And I decided to go and take a trip to Hawaii and unplug. And while I was there for about a week, I just reconnected with the things that really make me happy, which is, you know, the ocean, the beach culture, just being active, healthy, eating well, all that good stuff. And I came back on that trip, actually reinvigorated. I decided, you know what? I got, I got another start up in me and I'm going to start looking for concepts that really align with my lifestyle and helping other people in their lifestyles as well. So I really, you know, for that, I wanted to start with building something around the beach culture and, you know, other active lifestyles. So started testing and looking at, I guess, coming up with a bunch of different concepts and doing feasibility analysis and would find, come up with an idea, "Oh, this is the one." And then I just really run through the numbers and be like, "No, this doesn't make sense." Had to be really disciplined to think about margin, thinking about market size, all that stuff. And hold on, I got to, I got to stop you there. Yeah, yeah. How did you, how did you run this feasibility test high level? If someone out there's listening and they're looking or want to test an idea they have in their head, what were some of the things you were doing to make sure it was a good idea? Yeah, and this is actually so important when, when coming up for your idea. So I, the whole idea of the feasibility analysis, I mean, it's kind of an obvious thing, but back in college, I went to USC for undergrad and I did the entrepreneurship program and it was four classes all about entrepreneurship. And the second class was feasibility analysis. So the first one, you come up with an idea and the second one, they made you do a number of things and your final was creating like a 30, 40 page feasibility analysis and you got an A, if you could find a customer. So it likes to have someone to sign some sort of a lot. But yeah, so for me, it was under really going through market size was really important. Just that's something that as I was younger, you think, you know, you think a hundred million is a big market or 50 million, like that's tiny, like you need billions, tens of billions, you know, or more, you know, for market size. So understanding the market size and being realistic, like what is your, of that market, what is your, what is your TAM, your total adjustable market? Like realistically, what does that look like? Then going through the unit economics was the biggest one. So like essentially just seeing if there were competitors in the market, what does that look like? Understanding your costs and understanding your margins. And for me, you know, really trying to find a business that had, you know, solid, realistic margins, really understanding the overhead and having the market to support it. Because if you come up with a great idea and, you know, to make it work, you need people to pay whatever $1,000 a month, you had that really limits your size versus something that's $50 a month or whatever it is. So that was a really fun exercise and something that is extremely important and coming up with whatever venture you're going to work on. Absolutely. Now, now back to the main, main kind of conversation here, the inception of Beechly. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was assessing all these ideas, something came to mind. I was, it was about a year or so earlier when I was trying to raise capital for that start of that went under, I was in a meeting in LA with this investor and we're sitting in the meeting and I hear from, there's a back room. I just hear music blaring. I kept looking over my shoulder and he was like, Oh, come check this out. This is a startup I just invested in and he opens the door and there's just a giant room and they had hired a bunch of task rabbits for the day and they were there packing boxes and they were subscription boxes. The brand at the time was called Loot Crate, which was a subscription brand very early on in the subscription box game and they were focused on the comic con crowd. So they launched that brand became very large. Number one on the Inc 500 as peak and it did eventually actually end up going under eventually, but had, you know, but that was my first exposure to the subscription box model. So I remember walking into the back room seeing all that energy, all these people packing the boxes. I was like, what, what is this model? So there's something that stuck with me. And then I, when I was assessing ideas, I was like, Oh, what about subscription boxes? Hell, you know, I looked up that company, Loot Crate. And this is a couple of years later at that time. I think it's skyrocketed. I think they were over 600,000 subscribers. And I was like, holy crap, like this really works when you have a passionate, you know, focused audience. So that was at the time my, kind of my light bulb moment. And I started assessing that business model. No one had done that in the surf beach lifestyle or action sports space. So, you know, surf industry is a good market size, but I knew I'd, you know, to really get there would need to branch off and be able to see that there's a whole open gap in action sports. I gave me the confidence that, okay, you know, I think this can make sense for current revenue is something that is really sexy for business. So that part was really exciting. And that was my, you know, I started taking the plunge into the subscription box world and, you know, obviously I've been in subscription commerce since then. And that's essentially my bread and butter and launched that and officially launched and begin testing in 2015. And as I said, I'm officially launched that in 2016. Amazing. Now in 2016, Facebook was a different monster back then. But how did you go about getting, you know, customers to this new subscription box? How did you get in front of this market that you thought was so great? Yeah. So, and we, we had a lot of, a lot of pivots along the way in the journey. But initially I brought on an influential co-founder, a guy named Mark Healy, who's a well-known, highly respected professional action water sports athlete, professional waterman, I call him. But he's a big wave professional, big wave surfer, spearfisherman. He's on like Shark Week discovery channel stuff all the time. He's, this is all the biggest contest. He's featured in the magazine's great reputation. Awesome guy, good following. So I brought him on as a partner to really help me initially reach an audience and get some credibility, as well as help me with connections to the brands. And then we, yeah, we started ads on Facebook, as he said, was the, the initial watch. So using Facebook to just build up that email list, and then, you know, just testing and ramping up from there, we started really focusing on water surf and other water sports gear, which, you know, Mark would help curate those subscription boxes, really liked the concept. But the margins were pretty poor and those items were polarizing. So then we noticed that everyone really loves the clothing and clothing is obviously much, much larger, you know, much larger audience. I found the, I was doing market research. I found the stat that, you know, at the time, it said there were roughly two million surfers, but over 50 million people that bought clothing from surf inspired brands. So you can see the, you know, the big difference there. So we pivoted to focus purely on a, a men's subscription focus on beach apparel. So poor shorts, t-shirts, flip flops, sunglasses, hats, all that stuff. And when we launched, yeah, we were using Facebook, getting good numbers, ramping up. We started getting demand from women right away, commenting on the ads, being like, Hey, we love, we love beach apparel. We love subscription boxes. Like, where's the one for us? And so immediately I was like, okay, we got to get something going for women, but we weren't quite ready for it. So we, I continue to focus on men's, but can, but just really thought about, all right, what does a women's product look like? I know what we were doing for men wasn't quite going to work for that audience. And we went through an accelerator called Blue Stardust in Hawaii. I got to go live on a Wahoo for three months. And that was fantastic. And then right after that, we launched our women's subscription box. So something I was really interesting with the women's side of things. We again, use, use Facebook, Facebook ads and, you know, the organic audience we've built to launch that one. But we, the women's market, we throw up a landing page. I was like, all right, let's throw a 510 K and do an ad spend. And, you know, we got a hundred members, a couple hundred members in the first month. There's probably something here, you know, if the, if the, our customer acquisition costs looks, you know, looks comparable to the men's like, all right, we'll, we'll put more time into it. And the first week we had a thousand new subs and we were seeing on that, we launched the ads. And on day two, we started seeing a, we had a $20 in platform CPA with a $105 AOV. And we were, I was messaging with my team members and the guys at the agency I was working with. And we were just texting, we're like, oh my God, like, we're just, printing money right now. We're like, just go spend, spend, spend. So we just ramped up the spend and really started off to the races from there. We pivoted where we still have our men's subscription, but all the money has gone to the women's since then and really focus on building and growing that out. And the women's box in the first one month to eclipse our men's box, which he had had for like two years. That's so, so funny, but I kind of saw where it was going as you started to talk about it. But what we see on the women's, you'd run an ad and men's barely any comments. You know, you get likes and shares, the women's, we'd have a comment. You know, they had comment and they'd take three friends and they'd be like, Oh, I'm G, we need this. You know, and I would never like tag like, I chase, hey, buddy, we got to get this. Like we don't interact like that. So you pay for one impression. And now you just got, yeah, you know, three others in basically a referral, you know, on top of it. So that was where you got a lot more virality from that market, which was really interesting just to see, see that in, you know, in Facebook. Hey, Shopify store owners. Have you ever wondered if your store is leaving money on the table? Imagine increasing sales without spending more money on ads. Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not. I'd like to introduce you to store tester. Store tester is a done for you conversion rate optimization service for Shopify merchants. Could your store benefit from increased conversion rates? Higher average order values and improved revenue per visitor. Store tester could be the perfect partner for you from ideation to implementation. This full service AB testing service takes all of the guesswork out of improving Shopify stores. Store tester does all the work for you while offering month to month transparent fixed pricing. It gets even better. They believe in their service so much they're offering the first test for free for qualified merchants. 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It's a game changer for your business. Are you ready to transform your Shopify store's profitability? Book a demo today at intelligence.io, empower your brand to reach new heights. Again, that's intelligence giving superpowers to your customer acquisition, retention and overall profitability. Absolutely. And we're going to skip a couple steps here because there's just so much ground I want to cover with your career. So you guys have you have a hit on your hand. Let's be real. It's working. You know, things are going good. When does the idea of an acquisition come into play? No, I think as an entrepreneur, it's in your mind from day one. But yeah, there's 2021, you know, right after, you know, 2020, everyone out of boom. We had a really good 2020, but we were actually fairly conservative. Like I consider like we had real growth versus fake growth and that I was concerned about inventory and everything going on with what was coming up, you know, happening overseas. So we had a really good year, but we didn't go crazy. So I felt we had sustainable growth at that time. So 2021, I was, you know, we were profitable. We were things were looking really good. This was obviously pre iOS 14 and we. So I hired a ex investment banker to do a market check for me, not actually like to go out and run a process, but just to go and test and see what the marks look like. And I got some good feedback. The feedback was we weren't big enough. So I was like, all right, we need to lean in a little bit more. And we, you know, I spent, you know, focus on growth for another year or two and then was considering do we raise capital to push more growth, expand into, you know, new markets or, and while I was doing that, we encountered a group called retention brands and had some great conversations with them. And they were looking to do acquisitions. So we did end up closing a deal where we sold to them in 2023. Absolutely. And that's we met earlier this year, but you were still, you were still over retention brands. So obviously building a company and selling it and kind of living that lifestyle is a lot of entrepreneurs dreams. But you actually went over and continued working for retention for a while, but you tell me what you did. I don't want to tell your story. Oh, sure. Yeah. So, so retention acquired us and really liked the founders and the team. And so I came on board as a COO of the portfolio. So we had beach. We had Birchbox and another subscription brand called all true. And then they're working on a deal for another one right now, but spent about a year and a half over there as COO and working on the operations. And then just about three weeks ago, I actually decided to make a change. And I'm still a advisor over retention brands and work on beachly quite a bit. But I joined a new team called Bubs Naturals as head of growth, a great company here in North San Diego based in Ensignita. That's a we're a health food company that creates supplements built around helping people live better, longer is essentially the tagline. So the main product is a collagen peptides and we got a coffee creamer that's MCT oil and grass fed, which is awesome. And really just aligns with the lifestyle of helping people feel better, helping people live longer, helping them get out and be active and be able to supply them with the fuel to do so. Absolutely. I definitely want to ask you a lot more questions about what you're doing now at Bubs Naturals, but I do need to ask about your time at retention. One going from focusing all your energy on one product for one market, especially in subscription space, to now you've got a portfolio of products for different markets, what we're like the shared learnings and what was unique about that. Yeah, this has learned a ton and really unique experience because we had two of the brands were distressed acquisitions, and then one of them beach was not. So we had like a full team in tech coming in from Beechley, Birchbox had no team all true, had part of their team coming back. So that was a really interesting experience trying to mesh these teams and build an operating system that would work across the brands. For this roll up model to work, we were really trying to figure out how do you create efficiencies across the portfolio and some of them were a lot easier to execute, like getting everyone into the same warehouse and under the same roof there was extremely efficient and beneficial. Marketing was really interesting, trying to build almost like an agency within the portfolio. We had a pretty small team, but I oversaw that and build in a team to where some people would execute across the brands like for CRM exam and for media buy. And then we would have people who are really brand focused, such as the social and the content creators. So that was interesting, yeah, it's like an agency within a company. That was fun, challenging as well, and then trying to build an operating system behind the scenes to support the portfolio. So the finances and HR administrative, all that stuff, that's not that fun, but super important as well. So one thing I learned is just we have to be really disciplined operators in that model, which is something I'm all about. So I love that piece of trying to build out repeatable processes and then you have to do a lot of give and take, especially depending on how you build off the team. So, there's everything you want to do for all the different brands, but you actually have to really try to build a repeatable process or a model that you're just replicating across the brands. So that was something that's interesting, but we made a lot of progress. First box, you know, coming, like I said, a distress acquisition, being able to kind of rebuild that thing, rebuild all the processes, and made a, you know, that's made a ton of progress along the way. And that was, you know, fun, but also again, challenging, because instead of coming in and, like, beachly where we were, you know, home in and running full speed, you're kind of going back to like, okay, let's try to understand all these systems. Find developers, you know, you know, who understand the tech stack that was built and try to unwind all of it. And so it was definitely challenging, but it was really good learning experience. And then now you're on to your next challenge. What would you say is like you're one, two, three, like punch lists coming in hot of what you're trying to accomplish at the new gig. Yeah, so for me, it's, you know, I guess focus is number one. So taking all the pieces and just seeing, yeah, really focus on what's going to move the needle for us and making sure we're doing the most important things right. So I'm, you know, focused on ops here, but generally more focused on the gross side. So the same, you know, looking at all of our channels that we have and just really narrow it down and say, Hey, if these three channels aren't working, I don't want to touch anything else until these two and making sure that they don't. So that's number one, just for those channels, it's content. So I think, you know, the same in the game right now, if you're going to, you know, in digital marketing is really developing the ability to create content in house and have the right partners to spin off content for you. So I think that's a big opportunity for improvement here. So we've been working on that heavily the first, the last couple of weeks since I joined. And number three is vision. So being able to work closely with the founder, Sean Lake, who has an awesome vision for the product and bring my, you know, I guess, know how on how to scale brands and, and combine our minds. And how do we get to, you know, how do we double triple quadruple revenue in the next three to five years and being very strategic about how we're going to get there and then put it in the operating framework to be able to support that. We talked about a lot about your kind of amazing career you had so far and we skipped around a little bit now. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today? I guess one thing going back to probably guess why I decided to, you know, I guess transition from a company like a retention brand over to a new opportunity with Bubs Naturals. And, you know, for me and for founders that potentially sell their companies or have been there for been after companies for a long time. You do get that seven year it's a little bit, but, you know, I loved everything. We were doing a beastly and that retention brands and I saw a huge opportunity. But, you know, for me, it's, you know, again, going back to that feasibility analysis and you always have the itch to build and like rebuild. So I was looking at what's that, you know, what are the next opportunities and where can I learn about a new market I've been subscription boxes for so long that I can check that box. I wanted to take what I learned from subscription because, again, recurring revenue is extremely powerful and can be applied across a lot of industries nowadays. So how can I bring that over but really excited to learn about, you know, a new market being the supplements market is interesting really high margins. It's a consumable consumables are great for subscription. And then, you know, something that just helps people feel good and live better. So studying to, you know, just enter new markets and keep pushing and like, how do you keep putting yourself out of your comfort zone because I'm very comfortable subscription box. So how do I get out of that, push myself, learn new markets, learn this Amazon's new to me. So getting, you know, rolling my sleeves and getting the Amazon is something that's exciting because subscription boxes don't work great for Amazon. So, you know, just again, I think thinking about as you exit your company or start a new venture just like, how do you get out of your comfort zone to keep learning. Well, I think it's just insanely self aware and it goes to the power of you as an operator is just knowing where necessarily not necessarily week not I wouldn't call it a weakness, but just like where it doesn't excite you. And it's you're excited about the building aspect and you recognize there are probably people that are better. Operators that are going to maintain something that's already at a certain level. They're going to get back down to the trenches and that, that is such self awareness and such a great know how to have of like this is where I could shine the best instead of wasting my talents elsewhere. Yeah, and it's I think all these, you know, entrepreneurs have a lot of a lot of itch to constantly build and not that we're building a lot of great things. It's just in a different way, so being able to build it in a new market, I think with a great opportunity just to learn and continue to grow my grow my skill set. Absolutely Kevin. Awesome. Now, quickly, the new place, Bubs Natural, if I'm curious to check out the products over there, you mentioned a lot about them a little bit ago. Where should I go? What should I do? Yeah, go to BubsNaturals.com and check out the college in the coffee creamer is fantastic and starting November 1st. We're going to have a really good slate of holiday deals coming your way, so also keep an eye out for that for some good gift of purchases and other little discounts and offers coming out. Awesome, Kevin. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Yeah, thanks for having me Chase and I'll see you at SubSummit again next year. We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own businesses. You can find all the links to the show notes. You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestycomers.co to get each episode delivered right into your inbox. If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes that really helps us out. Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help you get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to electriceye@electriceye.io/connect. Until next time.
On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Kevin Tighe. Kevin is the founder of Beachly and the COO of Retention Brands who acquires and operates subscription commerce businesses. Their portfolio includes Beachly, Birchbox, and Alltrue.
We talk about testing market feedback before acquisition, learning and growing in new market opportunities, building repeatable processes across brands, and so much more!
