Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Making It in Asheville podcast. This is your friendly neighborhood podcast where each week we sit down with an Asheville local. We ask them what they are making and how they are making it. This is a very special season focused entirely on e commerce, businesses, retailers, sellers of things and stuff. And in this episode, we're joined by a very special guest with a very cool or hot product, depending on what you put in it and what you care about. Brandeger of Piranhi is here to talk about all things e commerce and business. Welcome to the podcast, brondejay.
Thank you so much. I'm pretty excited to be here. This is a pretty beautiful setup you guys got going on, and thanks for having us.
Thank you so much. And thank you to the sponsor, Ernest Co Warehousing, who kind of is hosting us here today. But the real cool thing and the real beautiful space are these tumblers that I keep seeing all over Asheville. If you could call it like a tweetable. Tell us a little bit about what Piranhi's up to today, and then we can go back and kind of flush out the whole story and talk about the we are.
I'm excited, by the way, that you said that you see our product all over Asheville because a year ago, we had a goal to kind of become an Asheville brand. And I put air quotes not because we're not an Asheville brand, but because it's something that we were trying to achieve. And I think we're getting close.
You're not already there. So. Originally founded in Florida.
In Fort Lauderdale.
Yes, Fort Lauderdale. You've been here over a year, or.
Did you yeah, so we moved here almost exactly three years ago and about 2021. January is kind of when we more or less went full time with Piranhi. I mean, we were full time with it, but that's really when we took off. And so then we spent a year without being in the community in Asheville, and then we got connected. And since we've been connected, it's been, I don't know, 16 months, and it's been really helpful, for sure.
Well, it's working. Talk quickly about primarily the flagship products. What are we thinking about when we think about Piranhi?
Yeah, so our first product, imagine a Yeti and a Red Solo Cup had a baby. That's kind of like the easiest way for me to spell it, know? So we don't have a Red product with us on camera, but our original was the Red Solo Cup. Look.
Great point. If you're not watching on YouTube, we welcome you to join us on YouTube. Podcast is great, but this in Red would look almost identical to a Red Solo Cup.
Exactly.
Much heavier. But even the line markings when you think Solo as the brand, which all these years later, after doing a little bit of homework on Piranhi, talk to us about what those lines mean.
Yeah. So those lines are standard measurement lines. So it's one, two, 5812, and then to the top of the cup is 16oz.
And who would have guessed all these years later that I thought those were just for grip. Yeah.
No. When we started the company, I did a bunch of research and ended up obviously learning at the same time, I think, when I launched a company or when me and my wife launched a company.
Amazing.
You asked what we're doing. I was just going to say so we got our hands on a lot of things right now. I actually just got back from a music festival that we vended at, and I say vended. We actually sold like 800 cups to the festival and then they gave them out to their VIP. We got that contract through a partnership with Live Nation. So we actually have deals with Live Nation right now, which is great. We've got another concert that we're doing in October. We did four other concerts earlier this year, and that's one portion of our business. I mean, that's a small I say small. That's like a small to medium part of our business. Right? Yeah.
I remember seeing on social media your Shania Twain holding one of the Piranhi tumblers on stage and thinking, wow.
Yep. We had Miranda Lambert also. She was making mixed drinks on stage in Virginia Beach, which was pretty exciting too, for sure.
Okay.
Then we also sell to retail stores. So we have I think we're at almost 600 retail stores that sell our product. Mostly southeast midwest. We don't have much on the West Coast yet. And then on our website, of course, that's about ten to 15% of our business as well.
Interesting. Yeah. Excuse me. I assumed that direct retail from your website wouldn't have been maybe more than half the business at this point, but wholesale, definitely the line share. And then these big events as a big part as well. Yes.
And then we do a ton of promotional products, so if attorney wants to order something for their employees, we do a lot of stuff like that as well.
And that's kind of where I've seen you in Asheville so far. I mean, retail, sure, but also I have sort of duct taped this glass, this tumbler to become a making it in Asheville plus sticker version. But you do offer leather, I'm saying leather laser engraving.
So we do it two different ways. We also sell to retail stores, so we sell to Mass General or not Mass General. We do sell there, but we sell to the Biltmore. And so Biltmore has custom branded Biltmore tumblers and then yeah, so we have a bunch of different channels. We're going to start going expanding into a few other channels probably in January, but that's kind of the majority of where our business comes from right now.
Very interesting, very exciting. There's a million directions that I want to take us. Where I'll start is maybe we go back to the idea. Right. Because there's a couple of things about your specific tumblr and product that I particularly like, and I imagine most people do, two of them, and they're kind of top when I think of what your marketing about the product looks like they're right. There one stackable, like a red solo cup. They fit inside of each other.
Yes, exactly.
Which is kind of a duh. Why hasn't this been a thing?
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, so that's one of our big selling points, for sure. Something that we only recently, probably within the past, like, two, three months, we kind of noticed is our cup, when you're using it, it doesn't feel like a vacuum insulated cup. It just feels like a cup. So it's not thick. We've always said that it's really thin walls, but explaining it that way, saying it just feels like a cup. You don't pick it up and say, oh, this is a vacuum insulated tumbler. You just say, this is just a cup. So they're a lot lighter weight, a lot thinner walls, but they still do keep your drinks cold for 12 hours, hot for 6 hours. So that's another big, and that one is a little harder. So we just started doing some social media advertising, which we haven't done in, like, two years. And one of the big selling things is the stackability, because that's easy. Like, you look at it and you say, it's stackable. No one needs to think about it. What does it mean?
It's that it's stackable and I get your ads. I've been tagged. Sorry, you've tagged me somehow. It is great. And visually, you can say it and it makes sense. But then visually, when you see someone's cupboard be converted cupboard that looks like mine does, if I'm being honest, with just tons and tons of individual glasses all near each other, a couple of yetis, a couple of these, a couple of those, and then the before and after and the resolution of like, there's eight glasses stacked. It's clean, it's simple. There's so much more space.
Exactly. Yeah. So that's a super easy one for people to understand. Some of the other things, like the lightweight, it's harder to sell that because you don't look at it. That needs to be tangible. You need it in your hand. So we get, I think, 30% of our customers on our website are repeat customers because they buy one, they love it, they buy another one.
I get that. The other thing is the fit on your lid is insane.
Yeah.
It has to be open to put it on.
Does.
Yeah.
So there's a couple of features around the lip of the cup that we have that are patented right now. So that's one of the things that we have protected as well.
Okay, so those two things I'm flagging as great concepts seemingly wonderfully executed, right? It's one thing to go, all right, I got an idea. We're going to do a red solo cup times a yeti and it's going to be this cool thing. And lid sort of sucks. Let's make the lid somehow better. What next? This is one thing to have it be at a bar, write it on a napkin, have this dream.
What happened are like I mentioned, we're from fort Lauderdale. And so me and my wife lived a block away from the beach. It's actually a town called Lauderdale by the sea. And every day we would go to the beach, I mean, every day we would go to the beach regardless because it was a block away. But it was very, very common for us to see litter. People come in, they party. A lot of the time they were from out of town and they don't really understand how beaches work, I guess. I don't know, a lot of spring breakers. It was really bad then. And so we would often do cleanups on our beach and we would always see red solo cups. And so at the same time, I was working for a company, I used to work for mr. Coffee and Crock pot, designing products. And then when I was living a block from the beach, I was working for a company that manufactured scientific equipment. And so I was learning I mean, I was learning all kinds of stuff, but one of the things I was learning a lot about was vacuum insulation. And so randomly at the time, the company that I was working for, they were using these big glass doers, which a doer is just a fancy version of an insulated tumbler and they would use it to hold liquid nitrogen. But they had like 30% of the products that they would ship to customers would break because it was glass. And so I was like, why don't we switch to stainless steel? And they're like, oh, well, how does it work? And so I started playing around and then my head said, hey, we see all this trash. I should make my own version. That would be a vacuum in it. So I got it. I ordered a sample from the factory. I ended up paying for the tooling. And at first my wife was like, I don't understand. I fought really, really hard. And so for those of you that can't see because you are listening only there's a rolled lip. So I wanted that rolled lip because that's what red solo cups have.
They do they have it?
You don't have a red solo cup with a rolled lip, then I don't know what the heck you have.
It's a knockoff store brand.
Yeah, it's not plastic cup. And so I fought really hard for the factory to manufacture that. And so my wife was like, what does it matter? Who cares? No one has it. So we were using HydroFlask at the time, no one had a roll lift. And so I fought, I fought, I fought. I finally got it. We got the sample in, and within two days, my wife's like, I get it. And so she's been on board literally since day two with the product, of course. And then we launched on Kickstarter. We spent about a month and a half kind of building the Kickstarter campaign, video, all that stuff. Neither of us have ever done anything like it. Like it like I said, my background is design. Her background was design. And she used to work for Royal Caribbean, so design and project management. And somehow we went from that to running a business, and Kickstarter was a good way to do it. It was definitely chaotic because we had no idea what the heck we were doing. We didn't know for the first, like, two years, really, but we got it now. We kind of have it under control.
I want to double click on a couple of the things immediately having a concept. So you're already set up to know how to build something like this in whatever program CAD, right? Something like it.
I had two 3D printers at the time, before we started Piranhi. I've built 3D printers of my own for, I don't know, I've been 3D printing stuff for like, 20 years, 15 years.
Wow. Okay, so sort of a perfect storm. You're not just some Joe Schmo off the street with a concept.
Exactly.
If you were to try and explain at a high, high level how to take a concept and try and find like, you already had a factory, I imagine, due to the relationships and past, like, where would one go to try and make something out of steel? This is stainless steel.
It's stainless steel.
Yeah.
So I actually didn't have connections with factories. And that was, believe it or not, a challenge. Because when you work at a company like Mr. Coffee, you're one small segment of a very large moving piece. And so when they said bronje j Pierce, you are an industrial designer at Mr. Coffee. That's what I am. And so we had a sourcing didn't we had a sourcing team. We had an auditing team for the factory. There was seven layers between me and the factory. Actually, I communicate with the factory every day when I was there, but there were seven layers between me designing a product and it getting manufactured. So I worked with them once the factory was established and all that. And that's fine, that's easy. So I had a lot of challenges. Our first two and a half, three years, we were working with one factory. And I mean, there were hundreds of times that it almost put us out of business, because during COVID and I get COVID made some challenges, but there was a time I put a purchase order in with our factory, and it should be 45 days from purchase order to ship. We didn't get the product. I put it in, I think maybe August, and I got the product in February.
Holy smokes. Yeah.
And so at that time, I actually was already working with another factory, but they weren't up and running. So it was challenging. But one of the things I always tell everyone that's interesting is know what you're good at. Right? So my background is industrial design, so I'm good at industrial design. We have done graphic design and branding for a long time. So we were really good at that and that's good to get the company where it was. Unfortunately, we did have to learn every single thing the hard way. So neither of us have ever worked in sales and sales are very important for a business. And so I always tell people, if you're not an industrial designer and you have an idea, you can spend 200 hours learning how to 3D model poorly. Poorly. I've been doing it for 15 years, 3D modeling. So you could learn how to 3D model to get your product point across, or you could just put it on a fingernail sketch and find someone and pay them, I don't know, $500 to bring it to realization and it's a way better use of money. And so I did all of our shopify development when we first started and albeit I still understand how it works, and I do a fair amount of coding myself now let me rephrase that. I am dangerous enough with coding to get things done and understand what's happening, but I'm not going to write code anymore and I wish I knew that back then as well. So, yeah, I always tell people, know what you're good at and leverage, that the best. And when you first start, you got to do you need to be multiverse in as much as you can. Don't just say, oh, I am a, I don't know, email graphic designer. You're not going to start a company, so do as much as you can. Of course. But if you are a CPA and you've never opened up a 3D program, maybe that's not the time to open a program. Just let someone else who's really good.
At it do it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me when thinking about building specifically a product. Right, so you find a factory, I imagine yours is overseas.
All vacuum insulated tumblers are made within a 50 miles radius in China, basically. Yeah, it's crazy.
Okay, I guess this could be at the end of the episode with fear based stuff and what the future holds. Are there other vacuum tumblers that have this aesthetic today that alarm you? Or is this not that crazy?
So yes and no. I'll go into a little bit of detail. So when we launched on Kickstarter kickstarter is a great platform.
Yeah. And notorious quick copies that make it to market often before the actual product.
And so there was this one company am I supposed to call people out or not?
Call people you're welcome to. I don't know if they'll listen. Are they local?
No, they're not local. They're in, I don't know, Oregon or something.
Yeah, Spokane. Go for yeah, for the throat.
So their company is called Wild Gear. And that's what they do. They're knockoffs. So if you go to their website, they launched their product four months after we launched our products. That means they saw our Kickstarter. Theirs doesn't have a good rolled lip. They basically did it the cheapest way possible, the easiest way possible. Their product just doesn't feel long story short, I wouldn't be happy with it as a designer. And so we saw that, but we didn't find out about them until probably almost a year after we launched. And someone tagged us on social media and said, I love Wild Gear so much better. And I was like, what the hell? And we found it. And me and my wife went crazy. We're like, what the heck's going on? Oh, my god. And then we found found out. And then at the time, this was still before we were I mean, we're not a big company. We're a small company. But we were a much smaller company. We were like, we're going to go out of business. So I don't know. And now there's another company that kind of copied us who probably will have a bigger impact on our business. It affects my wife a lot more than me. I am very much in the lane of move fast and break things.
Do our thing, do our thing.
I mean, be aware of our competition and try to mitigate as much as you can. So we have a new product launching in October. Patent application was already filed. It's going to be hard for someone to do too much. It's a pretty cool product. I have another product that I'm going to launch. I mean, this is probably like two years. I'm going to put the patent application in in the next six months because there's no reason not to. So there's two different business models. Some people don't care about patents, and they don't do anything. And some people do. And I'm a bigger advocate. Some of it's worthless because some of it's hard to defend. But it's still good to have as much protection as you mean.
We've hello. Are you watching on YouTube, listening on your favorite podcast player? If you're not on YouTube, perhaps consider it because behind us you would notice that we are in an absolutely beautiful space. And that, Space, is our seasoned sponsor. Ernest readymade? Warehousing and so if you're not familiar with Ernest, it is fantastic. I am joined here by my wife Sarah Ubertaccio, founder of QB Cucina, and one of Ernest newest clients.
Yeah. Excited to be back on the podcast.
Great to have you back. Episode 110 if you haven't listened before, but what we want to talk about today is why you chose Ernest and what makes Ernest stand out, let's say, compared to finding a new office space in town to fulfill from as a very high level. Ernest is a 30,000 square foot facility on Sweden Creek, just south of Asheville. Huge facility, beautiful facility. Why did you choose to go with Ernest instead of any other place in Asheville?
Yeah, well, I have a small growing business, ecommerce. We sell pasta tools and Italian kitchenware, and we currently outgrew the space that we were in and really needed a different kind of space. And so I love Ernest. I love the fact that as we grow, Ernest can scale with us. So they have different sized co warehousing spaces, so if we grow bigger, we can just quickly move over to a different space within the same building, which is a really huge time saver. I also really love that they have daily, sometimes multiple times a day pickups from Ups, FedEx and USPS, so we don't have to worry about packages getting lost or stolen and our team doesn't have to drop them off at the post office. And it just saves us all a bunch of time and headache. And also they have temperature controlled rooms, which for a business like us, one of our products is pasta flour. It's really sensitive to temperature. This is really, really important for us to make sure that our products are secure and not getting damaged while they're being stored in our warehouse. And I love all the other amenities. I love they have a photography studio so we can quickly photograph our products. They have a full break room. They have coworking space that we're able to use for our meetings with team members and other people that may come to see us. And then just the sense of community being around other small businesses is something that we currently don't have. And I'm really, really looking forward to connecting with others here.
I love that ernestready.com, if you've not visited that before or you can check out Makingitinasheville.com Ernest. And we have a bunch of information about the partnership we've built for this season, as well as some perhaps special discounts and incentives.
If you happen to be an ecommerce.
Business or the right fit for Ernest, you should definitely check out Makingintashville.com Ernest. Ernest. And back to the episode we in. Pre conversation noted that a shark tank type situation was on the horizon or was in consideration. And so there's at least one shark who always asks, do you have IP? Is it defensible? If not, what's the point? And so in a lot of ways, it is as important as you want it to be, and especially if you're moving fast and saying like, hey, we're just going to win and focus on what we can focus on. Yeah, well, something that helps us doing both makes sense.
Yeah, that's how I feel. Yeti and Ozark Trail are the same product and no, that's not true. Yeti and Ozark Trail are the same physical product, but one has a brand behind it. Exactly. And that brand is worth $6 billion.
That's exactly.
And so our goal is to build our brand so that people know Piranhi and people want Piranhi and they'll pay for Piranhi. And so we've spent a lot of time working really hard. These music festivals we work with, we do sponsorships with them. So one thing that we're really, really passionate about is we will never do white label. Do you know what white label? Okay, but talk about so for the audience, there's a difference between co branding and white labeling. Co branding is our logo is on the cup at all times and then potentially Nike. Well, actually, North Face ordered some, so I'll go north. Yeah, so North Face will order 500 cups. So it'll say Piranhi on one side. On the bottom it'll say Piranhi. The box will say Piranhi, but it is co branded with North Face. And so that's one way. The other way is they just reach out and they say, hey, I just want a cup that says North Face. I don't want it to say Piranhi. And the problem with that is you lose all branding. So we'll never do that. I mean, we've been approached by some really, we've had probably some couple hundred thousand dollars purchase orders be dangled in front of our face. And we're like, sure, it's great because we get a little money, but then what happens after that? So we've always said no and always been very passionate to make sure we only do co branding with yeah, I.
Love that as a strategy. I think that that makes a lot of, you know, Ben, Don't Brank kind of situations where it's like, hey, listen, we'll do some of this at a discount. We'll do this at better than normal margins. We understand that you guys are North Face and so that's not lost on us. Yeah, exactly, it's not lost on us, but that's not we have one customer.
Do you know RV Share?
Yeah.
So they own, I don't know, it's huge. They're huge, huge. So they want to order and we reached out to them and they don't really have a reason to put Piranhi in other than it makes their customer, but they're not a cup rental. So my goal was to outfit their product. And so they said, well, you could either white label them for this price or you can sell them to us branded for this price. And I was like, man, that's a big difference in price. But I was like, then there's no equity, there's no reason for us doing it. So we're opting to do so hopefully in the next, I don't know, eight months, if you rent an RV, it will have a Piranhi tumbler, stack of four Piranhi tumblers in the RV, will.
They get to walk away with them? No.
So it's just like a rental package. That's kind of our plan. So we do stuff like that where if you own 20 airbnbs, how do I outfit your airbnb? And our goal is not necessarily to make a ton of money.
Sure. But just be everywhere.
Just be everywhere.
Yeah. I love it, Dang. Okay, how did the Kickstarter go in doing homework? I've been on your Kickstarter page, I can't remember. I know it was funded. Yeah. How do you feel about the success of the Kickstarter?
Yeah, so we were 400% funded. Well, at the time I was like, we're going to do a million dollars because that's what you see. Everyone only sees the 0.1%. And so I don't think I had realistic goals, but I was like, how do we get a million dollars?
Sure.
Anyways, no, we were 35,000, $33,000 funded. Great. And the thing that's really exciting is last year we did a kind of soft Kickstarter. We did it like in house with our bigger tumblr. We didn't make a video, we didn't do any ads, but preordered type of preorder. Yes, we did it on our website. So we did a preorder on our website and we did more on our website with the preorder of the big cup with two emails, basically. Wow. And so the product that we're launching in October is going to be significantly different, significant enough. And we're doing it the right way. Like we're making a video, we're doing the ads, we're doing the whole kit and caboodle. So we're setting a goal. I think we're going to set the goal at like $25,000 or something like that. I'm hoping that we could do 250 or $300,000 and I think we can.
I think it's help me understand some of your audience dynamics. What does your email list look like today?
So we sell to a lot of people in the southeast, so a lot of retail stores. And one of the things that we do, we have a method to getting basically people for them to register that buy it in store. So we have a ton of people that bought our product in stores. Every music festival we go to, we capture, I think it's 70% of all the emails of the people that got our product.
No way. Yeah.
And this year alone we sold through.
Your register the product.
No, we do something different at the festivals. So we go there, we vend, and then we have a method to basically get people to come to our booth, we work with the bars, things like that.
Oh, I have a question.
Yeah.
Is it like field proprietary is something.
That you not field proprietary.
I mean that 70% hit rate is exceptional for person.
So we basically sell the cups to the festivals for cost or close to cost, and then they give us a free booth and then we give. Out free lids if they sign up on our email list.
So that is a loss leader. Free with order, free with purchase is a very common sales add on that I've seen a lot of people do like end cap type stuff at Whole Foods. You'll see sometimes promotions like free with purchase, but you have to do something really smart. Cool.
Yeah, that's worked out really well.
And the cap, goodness gracious. Best cap. Best cap in the game. That's not hyperbolic yet. These caps are so tight that with steamy hot coffee, sometimes a steamy hot can push them off.
Yeah. One of the things that we're doing is like these two cups. This is our 16 and our 26 ounce. They share the same lid. Our new product is going to share the same lid. And then one of the things that we're going to be doing in the next twelve months is we're actually going to come up with a series of different tops. So depending on what you're doing, all cups will fit the same top, all tops will fit the same cups. So you're not going to have twelve cups with 17 different lids. And so we're going to have it very easy for people to say, I grab a cup and I grab a lid and I don't have to worry about it. Fitting cannot wait.
Awesome. Okay, so list building is a thing that you've been proactive in and put a lot of consideration in, especially knowing that, let's just say loosely, 80% of the business is not from your website, which when people shop from the website you have at least their transaction based email address. Whether or not it's their AOL from 100 years ago. It is a way to get in contact.
And we just started SMS too, so same thing.
Smart.
Yeah.
Okay. And so you've been accruing audience size from the beginning. Kickstarter, Ecommerce, and now these live events. What do you use for wholesale retail? Is it just like register for warranty purposes? That's kind of a common play.
We do free sticker and we actually give out a wooden sticker. We should test whether or not we need to give out wooden sticker or not. Everything that we do. A perfect example, like these music festivals, we're doing another one in October. I don't know if we'll have it by then, but we're going to get a couple of other accessories that we want to sell at these music festivals. Because every single show we do, people.
Ask us as an example. One of the accessories on the website is like so we sell the handles, just giving people instead of tops. Here are some of the other accessories I've seen, is like kind of a Lanyard based nylon string handle carry called the Adventure handle. Yes, the adventure handle. Awesome.
But we got some custom made, I mean like ten custom made Piranhi branded sombrero hats. They're called lifeguard hats. And so I can order them very easily from a few factories, but the quality is garbage. Or maybe it's not garbage, but it's not up to our standards. And so even if it's something that's not a core part of our business, we make products that are meant to last forever. So everything about our brand is encouraging sustainability, reducing single use impact. We're members of 1% for the Planet, which means 1% of all of our sales are donated. Our goal is to make products that last. And so even things like the hat that we're making, I want it to last forever. And I know that's never going to happen because it's going to be made of straw. But if it can last five years versus four weeks five weeks?
Yeah.
So that's kind of our hopes and dreams with anything that we do.
I love that. Is there a future where you want to be like a B Corp?
We will. It's a hard process. We're a real small company still. We've done a couple of the things. So like, we're Prop 65 compliant, which is something that we need, I'd imagine.
Which to the listener, California Prop 65 stuff. Yeah.
So all it is is basically California kind of dictates what they have in them, what they don't have in them, if they basically pass or don't pass a safety. And it's probably more strict than things like even the FDA might have or whatever. And so we're working with Toyota. They order cups for it's. The Southeast Toyota Division. And so when you start working with these bigger clients, we've had conversations with Disney, we've had conversations with some big, big companies, and they are very, very strict about the social impact and regulations and certifications and things like that. So last year it was like ten grand to get Prop 65 compliant. And I was like, oh my God, we're going to spend all this money. What if we don't get a purchase order? We didn't get a specific purchase order from the customer, but I mean, it's paid for itself. And now that we're launching into California, we have to be Prop 65 anyway.
Yeah. Wow. Well, that's rad. Yeah. And B Corp is a very meaningful and arduous task of like it is being a benefit corp. But 1% for the Planet is also a stamp of intentionality.
That is, I think there's not enough people that probably understand yet the big benefits of one versus the other. And I can share briefly. Certified B Corporation means you went through the wringer, you proved it doesn't necessarily mean that you're giving back anything. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing, but it means that you are doing everything in your power. So, like, things that they probably would try to ping us so we don't use any plastic, any of our packaging. That's the kind of stuff that certified B corporation wants. We are very strict to air freight, as few as possible because the carbon impact of air freighting product versus shipping by boat is I mean, it's probably 100 times. And so if we are air freighting, 90% of our product, our carbon imprint is massive. And so those are the kinds of things and then there's supply chain that they go into, whereas 1% for the planet, if you wanted, anyone can sign up in probably a week or two and they basically just say, how much money are you going to give to nonprofits? And I mean, it's a great program. Something that most people don't understand, especially for smaller businesses, is 1% of sales. So last year I think 1% of our sales equated to probably 30% of profits.
Sure.
So the smaller the business, the bigger the number is. But even like a company that's doing a billion dollars, if they were 1% for the planet, they're probably giving up 8% of their profit.
Sure.
That's huge. That's a lot of money to give up.
Yeah. Margins, especially in physical product, especially in physical product that leans heavily into wholesale, you have very little of a pie to start handing out to begin with. So that's not lost on me. And also not lost on me is that half the process of becoming a certified B Corp is having the manpower to even go through the process of becoming a certified B Corp. And so a small team is not likely to be even capable of going through it. Whereas, to your point, it's like, how much money did you make? Can you prove it? How much money did you donate? Can you prove it? Check. Check. Cool. You get a stamp.
And something that's also good is I encourage anybody that's starting a business if they do want to do 1% for the planet, start it as soon as.
Possible, build it into the model.
Because what happens is if you start a company today and in three years you're making money and then all of a sudden you're like, hey, I want to be 1% for the planet. If you go from making common companies make anywhere between twelve and 18% profit. So if you're making twelve to 18% profit and then all of a sudden you're like, hey, I'm going to give away 5% of my profit. It's really hard to do that after you've launched. Whereas we were losing money the first two years and still getting away money. So we've been 1% for the planet for, I think the first year we didn't just because we didn't really know, but I think year two on we've been 1% for the planet. So even when we were losing money, part of our loss was donating money. So I think it's really important if you do it, whereas certified B Corporation, it's just the time and the effort and the energy where it doesn't really affect the bottom line a ton, or.
It can, but it's through a series of a ton of decisions that you've made. I can use a plastic top here, but we're going to use whatever material this is, which is probably recyclable, I have no idea because it's a choice for quality, and it's a choice for who the manufacturer is, and it's just choice. And so you're making tons of little choices and defending them in what feels like a doctoral thesis right. And have people inspecting each and every choice and decision, and how far is the manufacturer and why'd you choose this one versus that one. And I don't even know if that's actually the B Corp process, but that's what I understand it to be. It's close.
So I think by the end of next year, we'll be certified B Corporation. We have added a couple of staff members this year, and next year we'll probably add probably five or six more. And we were chatting earlier before we started streaming about how there's so many different things in the company that I don't even know about because there's other people in the company. And so the more that happens, the more I'll be able to work on things like becoming a certified B Corporation. And so I'm not going to worry about, hey, did that order ship? Or what's the customer want? Or did they get their return or did they get whatever. I'm going to try my best to deal with those types of things less and deal with the things like becoming a certified B Corporation.
B Corp and sick product. Yeah, exactly.
My background is design and loving. If we're at a trade show and we're slow for like, five minutes, I'm like, all right, what am I going to do? So I literally will start sketching ideas because at the trade show, I get inspired for sure, just because so many products around and so many companies and customer feedback and everything like that. And so I'll literally just sit and sketch. I sit and sketch all the time if I'm on a plane. And I'm like, all right, I've thought about this random product. We went camping, and I had a brilliant idea for a product that I'm going to launch in, like, two years. So I don't ever stop.
Can't wait to see these products. Had you made anything else before this? Yeah, clearly, Mr. Coffee and Stuff. But I was going to say individually, independently, had you ever 3D printed something and sold it at farmers markets or whatever? No.
I mean, every year I make Christmas ornaments.
Okay, cool.
And so I've been doing that for, I don't know, five or six years, and I just do it for friends and family. And every year in October, my friends and family start reaching out, and they're like, what's, this year's? Christmas? Ornament you got to wait.
Yeah, you'll see.
What about this? I'm like. Leave me the f alone. I'll make what I want.
Okay, so what made this particular idea? Because it's clear that if you've been playing with 3D printing for 20 years. You've been making stuff. What made this one feel so much more real, so much more necessary to go forward with?
So, me and my wife, so she was working for Royal Caribbean, I was working for Mr. Coffee before we started Piranhi. We met in February and then in November of the same year. So, 2013, we actually packed our bags and we went and traveled for a year and a half.
Wow.
And so we went all over the world and we had all these plans of different companies to start and ideas. And one of the things that was always part of our plan was doing something sustainable. And so when we got back, I started working at the science company. And I always tinker. Like, I always, always tinker. So I was learning electrical engineering. I actually built a full on product that we used in our bathroom for six months that eventually will launch. That's a much bigger project. Are you familiar with Lumi? Are you familiar with Pellecase?
Yeah.
So Lumi and Pella case are kind of the equivalent of what Piranhi and our other product will be. Not necessarily food related, but, like, very far reach. But I actually built this six years ago, 3D printed it, and it's just a huge undertaking. Anyways, we've always wanted to start something. My wife was actually thinking about starting an eco friendly swimsuit company. And so I started asking her questions about everything because I was trying to help her. I've always been the one that helped source products. And she was like, no, I don't really think I want to do this right now. And so I at the same time, when she was thinking about doing that, that's when I got the samples made. And I think I also never spent a ton of money.
How much do you think you invested in samples to just see it in your hand?
So, to get a physical sample, probably five grand, because there's tooling and then going through different factories and getting their physical samples. So anywhere between four and five grand and then yeah, so that was probably the most. Before Piranhi, I started a software company that never launched. It was a digital version of Ikea's instructions. Since Ikea's instructions are pathetic illustrations yeah, and they're not the best. It was called Construct it. I got a working prototype app. I spent about ten grand actually doing that, but the developers couldn't get it where it needed and they ended up refunding me all of my money. But I did, I paid ten grand. They got it 70% the way there, and that last 30%, they just couldn't do what we needed. And so I just ended up calling it. For now, we interrupt this episode with.
A horror story, an ecommerce horror story that my wife Sarah Upertachio experienced. But I'm going to preface, she's not alone. You might be an e commerce store owner. You might have a friend who's an e commerce store owner. And this story is universal, though.
Specific.
Sarah, please take it away.
Yeah, well, I own a small business called QB Kuchina, and we sell Italian pasta tools and kitchenware. And in our previous space, where we were fulfilling from one day, my employee was packaging up a bunch of packages to ship via Ups, and Ups did not pick up from this location, and so she was going to package them up and take them out to the car and drive them to Ups. Well, it was raining a lot that.
Day, as it tends to here in Asheville.
Yes, as it tends to here in Asheville. And on her way, taking the dolly out to her car, some packages flew off. The dolly were soaking wet. She was soaking wet. And then she had to repackage them, like, go back up to the office and repackage them because they were ruined and couldn't be shipped out.
And A, I'm so sorry to hear that story. That's a heartbreaker. Now you don't have to worry about that happening anymore because you work at Ernest Readymade Warehouse, and they have daily pickups and deliveries from FedEx, Ups, and USPS.
Yes. It's like suddenly we have a valet and concierge at our fingertips, which is amazing. They have daily pickups from all the major shipping carriers, and they have a huge loading dock, so we can receive our shipments very easily, 24 hours of the day, every day of the week, which is amazing.
To learn more about Ernest Readymade Warehouse, visit makingintashville.com Ernest E-R-N-E-S-T. We have all sorts of information about this season, about our sponsor, Ernest Ready Made, and offer a very special incentive for those of you who are small business owners in Asheville who could benefit from this facility. Back to the episode. You clearly have the stuff when it comes to making a product transition. You're like, there's a million things that we haven't done before. It seemed to me that there had to have been some sort of playground of skill acquisition, at the very least, adjacent to what's happening right now. Sure. And boy, was I right. So we've talked briefly but previously about running ads that couldn't have been your first swing at ad running.
Definitely not. Okay, I want to say something that's kind of entertaining, by the way. So we've been doing investor presentations, and that's one of the last slides is, like, your team. And so my slide and Danielle's slides say something clever to the extent of entrepreneurs since birth, because I sold grapefruits on the corner of the street when I was nine years old, and she sold these little bean pods that she painted when she was about the same age. So we've always had some sort of, like, entrepreneur spirit, for sure. So I know that's very random, but.
And it's A, on brand, and B, honestly, probably a really good indicator. When I think of the stories that stand out about the I want to say his name's Joe Gebbia. But one of the Airbnb founders, it's like, what things do they do to make a business work? How do they operate? How do they execute? And I can imagine that hey saw this opportunity as a way to capture what looked like a lot of available value that the market had, so that the thing that we really cared about could continue to grow at whatever pace it required. That's very compelling to me. And the Airbnb example is like, they sold presidential candidate cereal concepts. Yeah. So they ran out of money, and they were about to shut down, and then they put the rest of their 5000, 10,000, 4000, whatever it was, into these cardboard boxes. They bought cereal from stores, put the cereal into these cardboard boxes that were like Obama owes. But I know Obama owes was one of them, and then sold them via ads and made 100 grand and kept the business going. So I see it as an awesome indicator for you all.
Well, it's funny. There's so many companies that at some point have been on the balls of their feet. And so of November of 2020, we had just made a whole lot of money personally from the and by the way, our expenses were.
If that's ad based and you're buying the product and selling it, I know that the top line is nothing, no relation to it.
Basically gave us enough money to survive for two years, probably.
Sure.
And so we just came off of this high of like, oh, wow, we got a bunch of money. And so Piranhi at that point had been nothing but a thorn in our side. And what I mean by thorn in our side is we tried everything. We spent so much money on ads the first two years we hired these ad agencies. We spent money on SEO. We did everything that we thought we possibly could. And so November of 2020, COVID just finished that company because we knew it was like a burn coming in and get out. So just finished that company. Perani. I think that year made, like, $45,000 or something. And so November, I told Danielle, I was like, listen, if by March we don't have something by March of 2021, we don't have some sort of indicator that we should stay in business, I don't want to do this anymore. And so January, we were driving back from South Florida. So we had just moved up here. So I think my car was still in South Florida, went and visited family for the holidays. We were driving back, and I was like, hey, I wonder if we should try to do this really big trade show that we had talked about doing the year before. And so, boy, am I glad we didn't do it the year before, because that means January, we would have sold a ton of stuff. And in March, every single order would have been canceled because true, because of.
COVID And you'd have already made the purchase. Like, you'd have made assumptions on inventory.
January, I would have went into debt to buy inventory. So I'm glad we didn't do the trade show. Well, anyway, so January of 2021, COVID is already in effect. No one's going to cancel orders because they know what's going on. And so we were like, yeah, let's try. So we're driving back from Fort Lauderdale. We called the trade show. People normally a $5,000 booth. They were begging basically for people to come. So they think they give it to us for like 1300 or $1,700, whatever it was. And we're like, all right, let's just take a chance. We didn't have a booth. We got home, I don't know, Monday, Friday was the start of the show. So we literally built a booth out of our TV from our house shelves that we had that we went and got painted. We went and made, like, pallet walls, and we went there. And this was what kept us in business. Within the five day show, we did half of our sales from the year before in five days. Wow. So we had definitely been in positions where we're like, let's give up. This is too much.
Dang.
Yeah.
Dang. Okay, so ads, it wasn't your first time running ads when you ran ads for this ultraviolet fog concept. When thinking about growth strategies, you have cold email outreach and you point back to the website, say, here's what we do. I'm done. You've seen this. You can look, see us in the wild advertising. You had less success than for that in the past. Enough to make you consider hanging up your cleats, so to speak. With respect to the business.
One of.
The tells that an infomercial is working is that it stays on TV. Right? So is it making money? It's still on TV. So the product at least is making money. I have gotten piranhi ads for at least a handful of weeks at this point.
I would turn it off if I could, but I don't know.
How are ads more effective these days than they have been in the past? How are you feeling in terms of growing direct to consumer? Yeah.
So I'm sure you're aware of the iOS 14 update for audience that's not basically, over the course of three months, social media ads like Instagram and Facebook went from being, I don't know, efficiency of 70% or 80% to 5%. Like, I heard people's, companies that before the iOS update, they were doing $200,000 a month in sales, and it dropped to $20,000 with similar ad spend because of how efficient the ads were. And so we only ran ads really before the iOS update. One of my good friends runs ads for a living. All he does is Facebook and social and Instagram ads.
That's it.
He works for Huggies. He works for big, big companies. And so he was like, hey, I want to take on your ads and run them. I was like, I also want you to take them. And he's like, this is going to be easy. I'm going to knock it out of the park. Fish in a barrel. That's exactly it. And so two weeks in, he's like, yeah, I'm going to keep trying something's not working. A month in, I'm watching our bank account go down. I was like, I thought this was a fish in a barrel situation. And long story short, it just didn't work. And so we just tried and tried and tried. I actually spent like, I don't know, a hundred hours taking online courses to understand how Facebook ads work, how Google ads work. I ran the ads myself. We hired another agency. Nothing worked. And so we ended up just calling it quits for a long time. And about a month and a half ago, we started advertising again. And the only reason we started advertising is we kind of found something that we know works. So working with influencers works really well for us, and it's actually exciting. So influencers live this perspectively, glamorous life. You're looking from the outside, you don't know. There's all kinds of sob stories about the reality of influencers. But regardless, there's this one girl or woman that we work with. Her name is Brittany. She actually was on Shark Tank randomly. Her company is called Addison Wonderland. And so I reached out to her five months ago, and she was like, yeah, I guess I'd be interested in doing this. And so the way influencer marketing works is they get reached out to every day and they have to pick and choose the products that they use. But typically, sadly, there's a reality that a lot of influencers aren't truly in love with the products that they're speaking about, for sure, because they're just getting paid. It's a job. There's a reality that influencer marketing is a job. And so I am okay with that because it's working for us. So I'm going to let them get paid to influence. The thing that's the most exciting is when this same influencer that has 200,000 followers, she charges $5,000 a post, she reaches back to us and says, hey, I use your cup every single day. I'm doing this trip for all I think she's doing this cool trip with like, 16 or 20 or 25 people where she's bringing them to Greece. And she's like, I want to use your product to give away as a gift to all of the people coming. And she works with some big companies, sure. So to me, that's like, the most rewarding influencer marketing has really worked. We took the content from influencer marketing. We targeting the people that we know follow. And so there's a measurement called ROAS Return on Ad spend we're not profitable with our ads yet, but we used to average when we did really bad, like two years ago when I told you it failed. I mean, it would be not uncommon for us to be at, like, 0.1 row ads, meaning every $10 we spend, we get one dollars back in sales.
Brutal. Yeah. Unless your return customer buys 100 times more than they did on their first order, then it doesn't.
So we're trying to get to right now with where the iOS stuff is. If we could get to, like, 1.5, we'll be good. We're right at one right now, so it's only been a month, and that's by far the best we've ever done. And so I'm pretty happy with our ads right now. We need to keep doing stuff, and I'm doing myself, which is kind of exciting.
Dang yeah, that sounds right. One of the questions I had was like, but your product is it's one thing when it's a very inexpensive product. I can imagine that being particularly hard these days, trying to run ads to capture a customer and have that customer spend $15. Right. I don't know how people that almost can't be the growth engine when the product's that type but I mean, if the concept is like the four pack, all of a sudden you're like, all right, well, there is $100, there's $100, there's something here that we can play with. Interesting.
Well, one thing that's kind of interesting is since we've started running ads, we've had significantly more purchases of 200. Every once in a while, we'll get an order for $500. And so it is interesting that the ads are actually driving bigger purchases, bigger purchases. So our average purchase value or average order value is $59 right now.
About two. Yeah.
So about two and a quarter, something like that. And so the fact that we're selling, like, a lot more $250 orders, I think that's how the ads are actually working. And I think that's what we're going to try to figure out, how to optimize the ads. Because then the ads we run show how your cupboard can be converted. And so we want to get them.
People, the whole house, get rid of everything. Get rid of everything, donate it.
And so many people tell us, I bought one, I got rid of all my other cups. I only use prani. I've got ten.
Friend of mine owned a duffel bag business, and they had a concept in New York City specifically. But I'm sure all over there are these bags that aren't particularly handsome, called like banker bags, or what are effectively known as banker bags. Typically, it's like canvas bag and the handles or whatever, say like City, City, City or whatever, like Goldman, Goldman, Goldman. And the interns get them. The first year analysts get them. And so they made these beautiful bags. Hudson suttler beautiful bags, canvas bags. They did effectively like a buyback program.
It's.
Like, get rid of your banker bags and we'll donate them, we'll get rid of them for you. And somehow or another, a donation based campaign, get rid of this stuff, get rid of your chaos.
I like that.
And we'll redo your countertop, your cupboard space.
There's a mental perception.
There's something there.
So we're getting ready to buy a Sprinter van, and I have a Prius, and I'm like, well, I'm just going to get rid of the Prius and I'll just drive the Sprinter van because it's going to have our branding all over it. And so it'll be nice to be like, okay, well, we're offsetting the cost of this big fancy Sprinter van by selling my car. And so even if it's not a huge thing, even if we give a buyback of like, $10 for all of your old cups, there's this mental, like something yeah, something.
And whether or not, whether it's an influencer or some sort of affiliate, they execute it and it's their referral link and they validated that you've donated these things. Just interesting. And that's where my mind went, where it's like, oh, yeah, then obviously they'll buy eight, they'll buy redo the whole house.
So our ecommerce is up 130% this year, and that's before the ads, by the way, because I know we just started and we haven't spent that much on ads, just so you know. It's like, I don't know, we've spent less than five grand this year on ads, getting ready to double it, which I'm nervous about, but double the daily spend. Our ecommerce is up over 100% this year on its own, organically. And so I think the music festivals are working. And so I think this Q four is going to be very good for us because there are this year, I think we've shipped 120,000 cups.
Wow.
Something like that.
Sick.
Yeah. And so that's 120,000. Even if okay, if retail, maybe we're at like 75 to 80,000 new customers that we've got this year that have our product. And so it's great. We're up this year, 108% for the year as well, anyway.
And there's a lot of year left for those listening in the future. This is not September yet, right? There's a lot of time left. My two immediate questions website is on shopify. We know that you've done something pretty interesting, I think, with the ability to make bundles.
Yes.
Right. So is that a custom add on? Did you take a and kind of plug it in?
Yeah, right now we're actually just using it's just a bundle bundle builder or something. And we're on the fence of whether we want to spend some money to customize it so that it's well branded and beautiful and works. Because right now it's kind of janky. It's just out of the box, but it's proven itself. I don't know. We probably get at least one to two bundles a day. So yeah, we do okay with the bundle builders.
Yeah. It seems to me that there is an opportunity to ramp your website into best practices ecommerce. So that it's. Bundle baby, bundle baby, bundles all day. Like two more get a free cup lid holder thing.
Exactly.
A bunch of those different bells and whistles that you'll see. But I dig it.
One of the challenges we've had is, as I mentioned, we're a small team. And so every time we bring on a new project, it slows things down. And so we just went live on NetSuite, which is like.
We'Ve had solku on Pros and cons of NetSuite.
I'm excited for those pros. No, we've literally been live for two weeks on it. And so anyone you talk to will always tell you the first six months are miserable. I have spent many late nights, hours and hours just grinding away of getting it working. But we have a mentor that's all he does, is NetSuite development integration. And so he has been phenomenal. And he told me that my background is in design. I've done tons of mechanical engineering, I've done electrical engineering and programming. I've done a lot of things. And I think at heart I am just a problem solver. That's what industrial design and engineering do, or what they do. And so he said that he's launched like 200 companies on NetSuite. And he said that where we are in two weeks is better than any company he's ever worked with. So I'm pretty excited about that. Whether or not he's pulling my I don't think he has any reason why would he lie about it? We're pretty excited about that. But that has taken my attention from everything pretty much this whole month. If you talk to anyone from my staff, they'll say, Bronze, who? I haven't seen him in a month.
He's in the net, he's in the brutal. Yeah. So NetSuite is the enterprise version of a back end product inventory management, retail solution.
The easiest way I tell people is QuickBooks is great, but it's one part of a company. Before NetSuite, we had, I don't know, ten different tools that all had to talk to each other, but they all talk different languages and they all talk at different times of the day and they all are trying to say something over top of somebody. It's just brutal. And so NetSuite replaces all of them. And then the biggest thing is you think about what NetSuite does is it is the most customizable tool that will allow you to get to the point where you're doing like it's designed for companies that are doing a billion dollars.
A year or more.
And so our company is not doing a billion dollars, but the last thing we want to do is be doing $30 million in QuickBooks and then try and transition. Transition. My sister worked for a company and they do like $20 million a year, and they got bought and they said that to transition. There's some things that aren't being told because it's more detailed, but long story short, it's a five year transition. Oh, for sure.
It seems insane to your point. There are certain things that are effectively one way ratchets and it's like you don't all of a sudden cut 1% of your revenue year ten. It doesn't hurt as bad a month today versus five years ten years from now.
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned Solku. So one of the founders from Solku is our mentor. One of our mentors in a program that we're in. And about four months ago I was chatting with about our situation with NetSuite and I started telling her what we're doing and how we're doing it and she was like, that's not possible. And I'm like, I promise it's possible. I actually have learned so much more since then and even more. They still use like middleware sometimes and we just completely got rid of almost every middleware tool and now we just do it's called like Webhook and API calls. And so now all of our ShipStation integration is done through API. API. It's fantastic. And they do not do that. I know they use a program called Soligo and Selego is great, but it's like 20 grand a year. I don't know how much it is for them, but I know it can.
Be 20 grand a year. And that's just the middleman. Imagine dang okay, so the website. I had a feeling that Bundles was going to be a big part. Talk to me about the future. Q Four is going to be a great quarter. October. We're announcing product or going live on Kickstarter. That'll be when ideal ship. When would people see it? 2024. There is a small chance Christmas.
Small chance Christmas, but we will not promise Christmas. I'll lean heavy on my factory and they bend over backwards for us. So I'll lean on them to tell me what's doable before we launch and.
Then they'll so it's going to be an honest Kickstarter. It's not like purchase order is already in. We're doing it.
No, because we have to. I mean, the tooling for this is going to be 30 grand. And so we could spend the money on the tooling. We can afford to do the tooling, but then we wouldn't be able to afford the inventory or whatever. So we're definitely I mean, the middle of the Kickstarter will have a pretty good indication of what we should do. And I'll have the purchase order in probably within the first week of the Kickstarter because you can kind of see where things are going.
Kickstarters look like the shape of a U, right? It's like big first day if you did it right. Final push on the last day, everything goes flat. There's this lonely period in the middle where it's like, are the ads working? Have our emails been blocked? Are they going to spam? What is happening? And then all of a sudden bang. And anyone who has a trendline that's different than that, it's only because their first day was awesome. And then there's a little bump of PR or kickstarter their email on Friday, but it's not necessarily standard. You have a good first day if you did it right, and then a good last push because you've pestered people for several weeks and they go like, all right, I'll buy. Fine, you're right.
I think a lot of them look like lowercase cursive r's.
Yeah.
Or maybe not curse, maybe lowercase non cursive r. So just like a little it's just like a hump. I don't know what that curve is called. So things that we've got coming, as I mentioned, we aren't in the West Coast, so fingers crossed, and I don't know if they'll hear this or not, but it's kind of exciting. Asheville's a tiny town, but there's a rep group, a group of sales reps on the West Coast that we're trying to work with, and we've been trying to work with them for we've been kind of, like, secretly trying to work with them. We've been slipping them hints, but they didn't come from us type thing. And so randomly, that rep group, who's probably the best rep group in all of the West Coast, or one of the top three, at least. Solku's in it, poppy's in it, french broad chocolate's in it.
Yeah. Wow.
And so if they pick up perani, there will literally be four companies from the entire United States. Out of 40, 10% of their line will be from Asheville.
Small town. Small town nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yeah, that would really be something. We've talked a lot about rep groups earlier in the season. If you haven't if that concept is new to you, solku is a good example. But a bunch of episodes we've talked about rep groups. That's exciting. Yeah. And so we're close. It's not no ink.
I have met the owner once, two years ago, and he said, Get out of my office, basically. And I was like, okay, we're small. I get it. And then I haven't said anything to him since. But the two rep groups that we are currently, we're in three. Two of them are very well respected, and they know everybody. And so I said, I was like, I think I'm ready to shoot this guy an email. I haven't talked to him. I haven't done anything. So I sent the owner an email, and 15 minutes later, I get a call from one of our rep groups, the principal of the rep group, and she's like, hey, Matt reached out. I told him nothing but great things. I was like, well, thank you. I appreciate that. And then he called, or he emailed, and he's like, hey, I want to have a call. So we had a call for, I don't know, an hour and a half, and he said he's going to share it with his team. I've already been slipping hints to his team. I'm hoping that I know four or five of the team members already use Piranhis. So there's not much more that I can do. If he doesn't want to do it, then I can't do anything else for it.
Okay, awesome. So rep group, new product, kickstarter, and.
Then something that's big is so the festival we just came from, it was a pretty small festival. There was, I don't know, 12,000 people, relatively speaking, a small festival, but I made some really good connections. And so we're hoping that we can get into things like Lollapalooza or Bonnaroo or Summer Fest. Those are things that we're working. And I think there's a good chance because we're starting to get a really good reputation for how we work with the festivals.
Love it.
And once you get a good reputation and once you deliver, they don't want to change. It's not worth a headache. They want turnkey. They want to say, piranhi, I need 20,000 cups done. And that's it. That's the conversation. And that's kind of what we've been doing with them on our end. It's been a little more oh, yeah, chaotic.
I can only imagine.
Yeah. So that's a big part of it. And then we're going to be launching into the Golf Channel in January, so we're going to be doing PGA Show, which is a big oh, my God, it's expensive. It's the most expensive trade show that we will have done. It's triple the cost of any other trade show.
Wow.
So like a ten x ten normally is, like I said that one, it.
Was 1717 is what we paid.
But normally it's like four or five grand. Their ten x ten is like 16 grand. So yeah, very expensive.
Wow. Big difference. I think when you talk about customer types, it also makes some sense.
Right.
Like, who of us spends more discretionarily?
Yeah. And we've already sold to the PGA. I think they bought like 600 cups from us for the PGA Senior Tour.
Cool.
I don't know if that's what it's called, but something like that.
Awesome. Well, Dang, million questions. How would people find you on the internet to follow along and be a part of this next Kickstarter?
So you can go to our website. It's piranhi life. That's P-I-R-A-N-I life. No. I always tell people we've spent a lot of money on SEO. So if you just search vacuum, insulated, red solo cup will be the number one that is there. If you type in stackable, insulated, tumbler, we're probably like number three because Amazon's got a lot of SEO and there's it's just like plastic crap. But Piranhi Life is the easiest way to find us.
And we'll have links on all of the different pages and show notes page.
We are launching on Amazon after two years of back and forth, but we are launching probably October 1 we'll do like a soft launch. And then January 1 they'll do it's like an official launch. So we're part of a program that you can't apply for. Amazon has to contact you. And so they contacted us and they said, hey, why aren't you selling on our website? Naturally, because they want their pennies from everyone. And we're like, I don't know. So we said no for the first year. And they're like, hey, we want you to be on this program. We're like, no. They're like, we want you to be on this more exclusive program. We're like, no. And they're like, okay, well, this is an invite only thing. So anyways, I don't even know what it's called. They don't even have a name for it. What is this program called? They're like, well, I don't know.
The Facebook version of what I'm hearing you say of that has been apparently exceptionally good to the businesses that are in that small group cohort or whatever. Yeah, I would say based on this season's guest, amazon can be a brutal kind of partner. But this version of Amazon sounds pretty exciting. Yeah.
And we're not going to do it ourselves.
Sure.
We have a company that's going to manage it for us. All they do is that. And so, as I mentioned, I don't have time on a regular basis as is. And so we're just going to pay a company to it's.
A percentage of sales, 2024 is going to be very interesting.
Our goal is to double again next year. And that is we should be able to double without any fundraising. If we do get some fundraising, which we've been trying for a while. But it's an awkward time of the world.
Maybe not. What is the fundraising target?
So we are trying to raise a million bucks. We've got like four people lined up, but we're trying to get a couple more lined up so that when we do it overnight, we have quick. Well, overnight we go from not having fundraising to having at least half of our fund ask. Because if you raise $50,000 and you're trying to raise a million dollars, it's not going to be easy to raise the rest of the 950.
Understood.
But if we have $600,000 raised, that targets one. The targets one everybody's going be to like, oh, well, it should be a lot easier to raise the other.
Well, if you would like an intro to Bronteger, reach out to me. I'd love to help facilitate this. I think it's super exciting. I will offline click into that more, potentially think about a version of the Making of Nashville podcast where we get into numbers more aggressively than we ever had. If that's interesting to you, listener, reach out. Let me know because you guys are onto something. The product's wonderful. The track record speaks for itself at this point. Very excited. So links to all things Piranhi will be on the website on our Show Notes page for this episode. Cannot wait to see the product that drops via Kickstarter me and what happens in 2024. So thank you for being on the show.
And something I was going to say is we'll create a coupon code for your audience. It'll be ten or probably 15% off. That's probably what we'll do. And it'll be I don't know what the domain, but it'll be links will be links will be in the in the Show Notes.
We'll make sure that you know, because you've listened all the way to the cheap seats of this episode, to the nosebleed section, to the waning minute, you specifically will have a discount, and we'll make that as available and as public as possible. That's so awesome. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you for having us. Sure.