Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
And I was inspired by my dad and I thought, you know what, I'm
going to name it after his middle name.
I'm going to call it Burton Goods.
And I'm going to try this again, but this time I'm going to do it
on my kind of my timeline with all of the experience of 15
years. Who on earth starts a new
business say hey, we did it so badly last time It's like that
isn't the most authentic way to start a conversation.
The. Point of the e-mail program is
not just to drive opens and clicks right, it's to actually
support the business. Brian and the team at Saguno had
really partnered with me. They had really come around me.
They were teaching me things I had never been told.
So are you telling me you enjoy doing blog post and e-mail more
than sitting on developer calls at Magenta about security
updates? Is that?
Yes, yes, yes, believe it or not.
One of the things that is really important to us is that when
we're sending emails to customers that our customers are
successful reaching their customers.
So good, O'Brien mentioned just before we hit record.
You've got a book. Is your book about that journey?
Then what's the name of the book and or is it completely
different? That was a joke, Nick.
I'm sorry. I should have.
I should have caught on with the new dad.
I'm sorry. I didn't realize you guys had
sarcasm the other side of the Atlantic.
Oh yeah, I. Should have seen that coming.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Winning with
Shopify podcast. If you've not seen him before,
my name's Nick. And if you're wondering what
T-shirt I'm wearing, which I nearly forgot to shout out, but
I haven't even told him, but one of our previous guests, James,
who I think would have been two weeks before this episode from
SAA Clothing, I've ordered one of his T-shirts.
And we've also put on our Instagram a little, I think it's
called stop motion. I'm not really into video
editing, but there's lots of pictures all stuck together with
us unpackaging the product. It's absolutely amazing.
It's incredible 'cause it's all about autism.
And yeah, if you want to check out their clothing, it's a a
clothing. I think they're only shipping in
the UK at the moment, but have a look and there's an amazing
cause. And also, if you have anyone in
the family, people who work with the R autistic, James is the
most incredible person to to engage with, hence why I ordered
this T-shirt as soon as he was on the show.
I also have some other cool merch coming ahead of guests, so
we might do like a spot if Nick's wearing some merch in the
future as well for our guests. Anyway, enough about me.
If it's the first time tuning in, hit subscribe button.
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There's some incredible brands in there.
And one of my guests, the second I'm going to introduce has
actually appeared on one of our round tables.
We've done in there as well. Without further ado, we've got a
really interesting story. And as I say, my guests, I have
two guests with me today. And annoyingly, this is neither
of their fault. They're both called Brian, which
is slightly frustrating for me. So we're going to have Burton
Brian from Burton Goods, who I'm going to introduce in a second
and we're going to hear from that Brian 1st.
And we've also got Sagun O'Brien and I'm going to call them that
today. And I'm a very tired new parent,
so I might get the names, names muddled up.
This is the worst timing for this to be thrown at me, but I
accept the challenge. So Burton Brian, why don't you
kick us off? Welcome to the show.
Tell us how you are today. Give us a bit of a background to
your business that you run at the moment.
Good to meet you, Nick. Nice to be on the show.
I we are. Burton Goods is a small
Minneapolis business, Minneapolis, MN and the USA.
We design and sell online luxury leather accessory goods.
So think iPad cases, iPhone cases.
We're getting into leather bags eventually.
Yeah. We design everything here, work
with our vendors. We ship out of Minneapolis in
our warehouse and we use Shopify as a platform.
So, and it's been, it's been all amazing actually.
Absolutely. And obviously we've got Sagoon
O'Brien with us. I'm going to introduce in a
moment. So you guys are using Sagoon,
you're on Shopify, but that's not always been the case and
we're going to talk about that as we go through.
So if you're sitting there not on Shopify going, Oh my gosh,
this all sounds too good to be true.
The grass is always greener. There are downsides to Shopify,
but we're going to, we're going to talk about the move you've
made from some of those other platforms in a second.
But Sagoon O'Brien, if people have never heard of you, it
means plumes have never listened to the show because you are one
of our sponsors and actually one of our longest running sponsors.
Well, you've been on the show a few times yourself.
You've been to a round table, we've done the Growth Hub.
If someone lives under a rock or in a cave or both.
Under a rock in a cave. Tell us a bit about yourself,
Brian, and also a bit about Saguno.
Yeah. Hey, Nick, thanks for having me
back. I think this is my third or
fourth time on here so. Absolute pleasure.
Good. Time and A and a good
conversation to be together. So I'm from Saguno Software.
We are a marketing platform built exclusively for Shopify
and built inside Shopify. So we love working with brands
like Burton and helping to build out e-mail marketing strategy,
pop up strategy, product review strategy.
We also have a number of other products for unique discount
codes and a Canva connection that is quite popular at the
moment, new product that we launched this year.
So really excited to be back here.
You can find me anytime, suguner.com.
You can book a call with us and, you know, talk about e-mail
marketing strategy. And Brian and I actually get to
spend a ton of time together. I think we had a conversation a
couple weeks ago about how Burton was doing and then might
have had a little tangent into Asheville brewery scenes.
Yeah. So I love getting to work with
brands and helping to, to build programs and helping to, to
basically build businesses as best I can.
So really excited to be back here and talk about that today.
Amazing, amazing and so good to have both Brian Burton on for
the first time and also Saguno Brian on.
And again, I'm going to refer to them as that.
They're left and right on my screen.
So we'll see how we get on with this, but we're going to start
with you, Burt and Brian. And why did you decide to move
from Magento into Shopify? Yeah, yeah.
So like, why would you get out of a quicksand into like clean
Prairie that's warm and cool greases.
And yeah, no, Magento was was basically I was using Magento on
her on the business that I ran before.
And so when I hit when I started over, basically I started over.
We'll get into that possibly later.
I decided to work with Shopify because I thought, you know,
it's the easiest way to enter into.
I did the whole what is a dollar a month plan for three months.
I built the website out myself in three months and got ready to
relaunch a new brand and and I didn't want to have anything to
do with Magento because it I mean, for the obvious reasons.
Magento is extremely complicated.
You need a eating coders less now with AI as AI can help you
code, but I it's it's still a ton of work.
There's tons of plug in issues and security issues.
One of that was one of the biggest things we had was
security issues with our old site in Magento.
And we haven't had, I don't think we've had any at all with
Shopify. So yeah, it's been, it's been
like night and day different actually for a small business
owner like me. Yeah, 100%.
And I mean as as an SEO agency, we've done loads of migrations.
We've done one from Shopify Plus into Magenta Tea, but it's only
because we were, we were basically doing so much with the
Shopify engine, it started breaking and it was like,
actually we need to, we need to get an engine we can convert up
from like AV6 to AV12 using a car analogy.
And but having done so many of those migrations, I think one of
the frustrations we find, it sounds like you've had the same
thing as you're sitting there going, I should be spending my
time doing sales and marketing and getting more customers in,
getting more lifetime value out of our customers.
But actually I'm sitting here on a three hour call that's costing
me $1000 with the developers to basically just go from like
we've we've dropped below Ground Zero on our security again, I
want to get back. Whereas actually on Shopify,
it's like every Shopify store in the world can be on shop Pay,
for example, when you're already part of the whole ecosystem
where people can order products and review themselves.
And as you say, it's a dollar a month to start or whatever the
rate the rate is now. Do you ever find that in your
warehouse you have dead stock, You can't sell it, no one wants
to buy it and you can't get a refund on it.
Or alternatively, you're missing inventory in your warehouse that
you need, you've got sales coming in and you're low on
stock and you haven't ordered more stock in time.
All these things hit profit. And I've been there.
I've run my own Shopify store and had exactly that problem.
But we've partnered up with Inventory Planner who have the
most incredible app to help you manage that and forecast exactly
what products, what skews even down to what colour of product
you need to order in advance to make sure stock levels remain
consistent throughout. They're also running a seven day
boot camp. And if you want to go and sign
up to that, it's 7 emails every seven days and it takes the same
amount of time as your morning coffee.
And in seven days, like me, you can become an inventory
management pro. Both links are in the
description. Enjoy.
I'm going to jump around slightly.
I know we just agreed the plan for it, but you've mentioned the
previous business and I would love to, before we start talking
about kind of directly into e-mail, I want to jump ahead.
I think just to get a bit more context on this.
Tell us about the previous business and you mentioned
before we hit record bankruptcy as well.
There must be some amazing stories that you've had out of
this and some challenges, some real learnings.
Talk us through some of those like kind of leading into
Shopify and then we can talk about that kind of e-mail base
and what the e-mail journey looked like of telling those
customers what had happened. Yeah, yeah.
So to tell it really short and as succinct as I can, the pan
call started in 2010. We were making accessories again
for iPad in 2010 and it expanded into leather goods over the next
15 years. I started by painting my web
designer's deck. She built me a website.
We, we, we didn't do any, we didn't do any ad buys for the
first three years. We just talked to the press and
Wired featured us and CNET featured us and all these
different publications. So we were growing in those
early days of the, you know, the 20 tens.
There was a lot of growth, a lot of growth and it, and it
expanded quickly. But then over I think from 20, I
think it was around 2018-2019, we started running into some
financial issues. I had some personal issues that
went on and then the pandemic hit.
And after all of that, Pat and Quill couldn't make it.
We had, we had accumulated too much debt over time that we
could no longer maintain. So it it went under in 20, the
end of 2023. Yeah.
And so when I knew I was going to have to declare bankruptcy, I
decided that was when I decided, OK, I, you know, 1:00, AM I even
going to do this job again? I wasn't sure if I was going to
do what I was doing. I was a little burnt out.
My wife who was a big support to me in the second business, she
just said, well, you love it. So I think you should do it.
You should do, you should think about it and maybe be inspired
by something. So I started thinking about it
and I was inspired by my dad and he was an engineer and he was an
artist. And I thought, you know what
it's I'm going to name it after his middle name.
I'm going to call it Burton Goods.
And I'm going to try this again, but this time I'm going to do it
on my kind of my timeline with all of the experience of 15
years of running a business online.
And so first, first option was Shopify.
It's inexpensive. I can build a site as I
mentioned before and we started doing that.
I was with MailChimp at the time for e-mail.
I just brought it over. But MailChimp didn't like that.
I just switched companies. They they were like, you can't
do this. You can't just.
And they still resending stuff. You can't just e-mail your old
list. You, you, you know, you can't.
And so I started getting getting letters from or you know, emails
from. I'm saying you can't do this.
When we launched and this was in, you know, very early 2024.
And that's when I reached out to Saguno actually because I saw
them on the platform and then they were high rated.
And I thought, OK, I'm going to reach out to Saguno, see if they
can help me figure out how do I, like, properly reintroduce my
customer base to this new brand because they were loyal
customers and I wanted to be. And there was a lot of, as Brian
will tell you, there was a lot of emails in there that were
just not being responded to at all.
It was a list that needed serious cleaning.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
And this segues I think really nicely.
I appreciate you sharing that cuz some of those things are
quite personal, but I think I think it's really powerful.
It becomes part of our journey and our story.
And I also segude O'Brien mentioned just before we hit
record, you've got a book. Is your book about that journey
then is is it about that transition?
Like what's the name of the book and or is it completely
different? It was a that was a joke, Nick.
I'm sorry. I should have, I should have
caught on with the new dad. I'm sorry.
I didn't realize you guys had sarcasm the other side of the
Atlantic. Oh yeah, I.
Should have seen that coming. That's why I was saying Brock or
Chat GTP could have written the book for me because I definitely
not really. Yeah, maybe we need to, maybe we
need to get that book going right now.
We could have that book ready before the episode.
Comes we should we should, I mean, get a book out, Brian, and
it will be in the link right, We'll get that out.
Appreciate, appreciate you sharing that.
There's a lot of personal bits that affect staff.
I think I mean, as business owners, I mean it's one myself.
Sometimes you've just got to kind of, you know, get get get
your big pants on, as I say, and just get in the office and get
cracking. It's like, you know, kind of and
that that's what resilience is all about.
But obviously there's a technical challenge in there for
muse again, O'Brien of right, we've got this new e-mail list,
like no one knows the new brand and we know what Google and
Microsoft and all the servers are going to do if we suddenly
e-mail them all. Talk us through that process of
introducing that new brand to everybody from a both technical
and kind of marketing. No, you're, you're, you're
directly on, on the, the nail with that one.
I mean, the biggest thing is, you know, we, you can't, you're,
you're on. And I think it probably breaks
so many people's hearts that I can't just take an e-mail list
from one brand and say, I've got all these emails and I can, I
can send them whatever I want. You can you're welcome to most
of those emails are going to end up blocked or in the spam
folder. And one of the things that is
really important to us is that when we're sending emails to
customers that our customers are that our customers are
successful reaching their customers.
And so that really is a guiding principle for us to protect the
inbox from that junk, which then make sure that the good emails
do make it into the inbox. Something that was really unique
was I actually, I knew about Pat and Quill before I got into E
Com and before I got into e-mail marketing.
I was working at the Apple Store and a few of the, the guys at
the Genius Bar had their PQ cases and everyone was always
envious. And you know, something that was
really cool is it was never just like 1 product, right?
It was you had fans, real people that were, were truly fans.
So, you know, I always whenever somebody says I need to rebrand,
I approach it with a little skepticism.
In Brian's case, I had, I already had a personal
connection. I knew that he was being honest
that these are my customers and they love me.
And a lot of these, I have 10 year buying relationships, 15
year buying relationships with them.
They've been with me the whole way.
So what we needed to do was really make sure that the the
story of who is Burton Goods and how did they end up in my inbox
come across. Brian had already done a really
nice job writing up a landing page about what happened to PQ
and then where Burton came from that.
So that was a big part of what we wanted to do with
introduction. But it's not just that easy.
It's you can't just take, you know, thousands and thousands of
e-mail address and just say, hey, by the way, this is what
happened. Yeah.
Because if they don't recognize it right away, it's a it's a
problem. Yeah.
So and buy this product, look at these images, see all these
links? It's like it's just a nightmare,
isn't it? It's all the things you don't
want a spam filter get in its hands on.
Yeah, and we, I mean, Brian was really open to, to our input and
that helped a lot for me. You know, where we, I don't
think we, Brian, we didn't even feature products in the first
couple of emails. It was a personal note.
You know, we used a signature section in there to make it look
like he had signed the e-mail. And it was all of the whole CTA
was driving back to what happened to PQ in that customer
relationship, I think was something that Brian held onto.
But in order to get to the inbox for that first one, we had to
sift through all the MailChimp data and say, I need to find
those super fans 1st. And this is something that we've
talked about a lot, Nick before, but by taking a your, your list
and everyone thinks their list is just a monolith of just, I
have an e-mail list and just push this block forward.
But there's really, there are valuable sections within that
list. And so we've started to dig into
previous purchase data from Magento and previous engagement
data from MailChimp. And we found those little bits
and we started by stacking the deck with those little bits and
getting those folks to to send. So I think Brian, if I remember
correctly, the first e-mail that we sent with Saguno had an open
rate over 50%. And it was a lower volume, but
it was, it's, it proved that hey, there are people that want
to hear from this. And it had a very low
unsubscribe rate. And then we said, great, now
let's take the next level of fans and the next level of fans.
And we kept repeating that process until we've gotten
through everybody that had a previous buying relationship
with, with Brian or had been engaging with e-mail from
MailChimp with Pat and Quill before.
And so it's, it's not a, a fast process.
But you know, there's another fortunate part of being on
Brian's timeline was I want to do this right.
We're willing to work with you to get it right.
And so those are my favorite projects where I get to sink my
teeth into it and say, all right, we're, we've got a
problem to solve. We know we've got a a a really
strong possible outcome on the other end, so let's work towards
it. Yeah, yeah.
And to use a massive buzzword, I think it's the word of the year
in the USA year or two ago. It's authenticity.
So the story you were telling is so authentic.
And I, I think I, I was looking the other day like, and I think
I asked like a few AI bots this and read some, a couple of sort
of short books about it. But what makes someone believe
something is authentic? And one of the biggest criteria
is it's something you'd be stupid to make up.
And I think actually having that honest conversation with your
customers, who on earth starts a new business, say, hey, we did
it so badly last time. It's like that isn't the most
authentic way to start a conversation.
I've certainly noticed more and more over the last probably year
or two, the amount of guests we get on here who probably a big
chunk of what they say actually is not like, hey, we've done
this and done this and done this.
A lot of it is like, look, we make a ton of mistakes and
actually we just every eight mistakes, we need a success like
or whatever their ratio is, you know, we need something to go
right. And so I think doing it in that
staggered approach, there must have been and to ask a slightly
poignant question on this, there must have been some points for
both of you guys. And we'll go to Burton Bryan
first told you're going to use those names and we're going to
go to Burton Bryan first. There must have been points
where you were thinking like, oh, I'm done, just hit send all.
But like actually holding your nerve to say, no, we're in the
process at the end of the process.
We need to get this process right or it's going to fail.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, there was, that would be
when the numbers were decreasing in how many we were, we had a
very large list that went like this.
And I was like, oh, no. And the reason why was because a
lot of these emails were not, no one was ever responding.
And he said, and you know, Brian at Saguna was telling me he's
like, this isn't helping your, this is hurting you.
This is hurting your reputation because these are people who are
never opening and we need to stop sending.
So it was whittling down an e-mail list that was, I thought,
was this this big number? And it got, it's about probably
half of what. I think that's about right.
I think we ended up about half of the original.
And it's interesting because it it, it's fine because these are
the people that actually are engaged.
And that's wonderful. And that part I love.
And I guess by doing that, the ones you are the one that the
half that are reaching, that you're reaching now, you're
probably reaching more and more engaged because you've
understood them more and you're getting through more spam
filters. So more emails are being
delivered. Saguno Brian, I'd love to ask
you that the same question. Like were there any points as
well where you were? You know, did you kind of stick
to your professional guns at all points going no, no, we've got
to stick to this? Or were there moments you were
like, I just, you know, control a send, you know, to send
everybody like there? You know, I'm basically asking
the question, how scary is it for brands to go through the
process that Burton Brian's just, you know, just been
through over the last couple of years?
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there's I,
I apologise if my earlier statement made it think that it
was just a nice smooth ramp. Oh, it didn't sound that.
Don't worry. That was like the challenge, I
think. Yeah, yeah.
Brian and I had to step back and reset maybe two or three times
before your first large product launch.
And the honest piece is, Nick, I could have just tried to stick
to my guns, but I have. It's the point of the e-mail
program is not just to drive opens and clicks, right?
It's to actually support the business.
It's to bring customers in. So to not pay attention to what
Brian's business priorities were and when we needed to have a
sale or when big things were going through, then I wouldn't
have been a good partner in that way.
So there were, I think a few times early on where we said,
you know what, we're going to try to do a bigger send or for
this weekend only, we're going to forget our best practices and
hope that we have enough goodwill with the Googles and
the Microsofts of the world to just look the other way.
Just for three days, please. And sometimes they did, and
sometimes they did I. Sometimes they did, and I.
Believe they didn't more than they did.
But yeah, that is the problem. When they didn't, it took us two
weeks or three weeks to to clean it up afterwards.
When they did, you know, it was, it was much nicer.
And then Brian was very busy making sure that everything was
going well on the site and fulfilling orders and all of his
his side. And I got to sit back and be
proud. But now the, you know, the the
big pieces were when you start to build that reputation, you're
sending, you get to the inbox, the inbox providers know all of
these things they're seeing. How are people opening and
clicking? How long are they opening and
clicking? You know, your suspicion about
did your phone know what your e-mail said probably is true.
Yeah. You know, so all of those little
pieces where the the providers know, do people want to get your
emails? And then when you build up that
reputation that it gives you more, you know, more goodwill
to, to get through to some of those marginal inboxes.
And then they'll start to release more of those in there.
And, and what we're typically looking at is both the, the
classic Gmail inbox and the promotions folder and other,
other folks. And I know there's a love hate
relationship with promotions folder.
And I'm so glad that Gmail's doing things like annotations
and making those more shoppable. And we've actually just released
a new product carousel for if your emails are in promotions,
which is a really cool way. But all of those things to say
that they start to believe that Brian at Burton is sending
emails that his customers want to receive.
So when the volume starts to increase a little bit more,
they're going to keep letting those through.
When the volume spikes up without us really doing a any
kind of ramp during that time, then they say, whoa, that's way
too much. You used to send X, now you send
2X what's going on? But what a lot of folks can do
is they can say I need to send to my most engaged contacts the
most of the time, and then I need to send it to my full list
during the most important commercial seasons.
So that would be big sales or product launches, things like
that. So that was a big piece that
that we monitored on our side. And then Brian, I'm sure would
dread getting an e-mail from me of the update about ascending.
Reputation False False Not true. And I mean, just to they are
obviously a sponsor, some technically getting paid for
saying this, but if you're a brand going, oh, we must have
good record of that. It's a measurable statistic you
can look at and I, I'm going to, I'm going to go out on a limb
here and say most brands I've ever worked with, which is like
over 2 or 3000 now, I haven't counted recently, but in the
thousands of brands I've worked with for nearly two decades,
almost all of them have no idea what their postmaster scores are
or how like what grades they're getting in the inboxes right
now. It's one of them.
If you, if you use Saguno's e-mail platform built into
Shopify, Shopify only you use it.
You can reach out to them and they will give you some support
on how to find that out. You can obviously Google it,
ChatGPT will tell you where to do it and where to find it.
But if you don't have that information, you were already
losing. And when it comes to the e-mail
game, because it will probably be bad if you're not aware.
And the second point I would make as well is in fixing that,
it opens so many doors to your business that are very, very
cost effective, apart from paying for Saguno, which is, you
know, excuse me, Brian Saguno for a SEC, but it is
interchangeable compared to other e-mail platforms.
It's not mega expensive. It's not the cheapest one in the
world. You're going to pay for an
e-mail platforms, you've got to pay for an e-mail platform.
Whatever you do, you're not going to use the Shopify default
one. It's a bit rubbish.
And but what you're already paying all these things are free
to then get more from that. It's so important.
So we won't go into detail now, but if you want to find out, go
and reach out to Brian at Saguno and, and, and get get a steer on
that. And we've also spoken about it a
couple of times before as well. So if you Google Brian Saguno
winning with Shopify, you'll probably find some old episodes.
Our partners at Saguno released a brand new app for Shopify and
it's called Shopify Connect 4 Canva.
You can essentially look at all of your product images from
Shopify directly in Canva and export them straight back.
This can save you a lot of time if you want to find out a bit
more about this or go and you'll find the app yourself.
You can go to saguno.com/camber. Enjoy.
That became a building block, didn't it, Burton, Brian, still
using the names and see that became a building block for you
guys. And you guys hit some milestones
quite ahead of the schedule you'd set.
Talk us through the next bit of the story then.
So you told everyone you'd change, you'd done some product
launches. What are some of these
milestones that we're talking about?
Yeah, just to go back on one thing you just said.
I am an example of what you just said.
I had no idea there was even a postmaster score.
And I've been in this business since 2010 until Brian from
Seguno told me, did you know there's a postmaster score of
your e-mail? I was like, there is and I had
no, he, he walked me through IP. You know what the IP score is,
what your web, you know the all the different scores.
I had no idea. I was actually the.
Same. Very new to me.
Yeah. We we had the same with our
emails. So, oh Phillip, this is almost
becoming one of those anonymous sessions where we can all share
our our failures that Brian. Yeah.
And what I mean, what I'm trying to say is that that's why I felt
like Brian and the team at Saguno had really partnered with
me. They had really come around me
because there was a they were teaching me things I had never
been told. Now MailChimp was probably 1 of
that's where I'd come from and they were.
I was with MailChimp for 15 straight years.
I can't tell you how much money I spent on MailChimp.
Wow. Quite a bit.
And I don't think anyone ever reached out to me for MailChimp
ever. I don't think I've ever gotten a
call, which is incredible to me. That's incredible.
And so with Saguno, I was called.
I think Brian, you reached out within days after we signed on.
Yeah, Yeah, I think so. So it was, it was night and day.
As far as the next phase, I just wanted to go over that because
that's important. It was, it was a big deal when
that happened. Next phase was we, we got to, so
customer base got engaged. We were building very slowly.
I wasn't able to pay myself any salary or very, very little.
But then the Apple released new iPads last year, all new iPad
Pros which were totally redesigned.
And that's my sweet spot. That's that's how I started the
company in 2010. The old one, I knew what I was
doing when it came to iPad, how to design a really nice case
that really was functional and beautiful.
And so we went after it hard and it it just exploded.
Our revenue exploded starting in I think it was about a May of
this year. Yeah, actually May of a year
ago. So we had a really big year.
So I was able to start paying myself a salary by I think July.
Yeah, a minimal salary, which is great.
Which is pretty early for a new business.
Normally just keep reinvesting. Yeah, yeah.
And then and then the other
thing was I the big milestone was build an inventory with no
debt. That was what killed PAD and
Quill was was leveraging far too much debt to expand the business
too quickly. That's something we've been able
to do. And that was a big deal.
So I own a lot, all the inventory.
It's far exceeds any small debt we have.
And it's that's a huge part of it.
And a lot of that has to do with engagement with customers.
So, yeah, and that's one thing I wanted to bring up too.
You didn't ask this, but I was just gonna say really quick.
The thing with e-mail that I learned from the old company to
the new was that I had not been really engaging customers as
well as I could have. I think part of it was that I
was too kind of not aware because I was so busy and
overwhelmed. But in this business, we've been
using e-mail to really engage with I, I, I don't know if
you've seen this, Brian recently, but I have.
A lot of my posts are about our newest blog posts and we're
doing comedic blog posts and we're doing like how to blog
posts and I'm actually really enjoying all of this.
Customers seem to be reading it. I don't care if they buy
anything. I'm kind of hoping you just
click on it and read a little bit of the post.
So are you telling me you enjoy doing blog posts and e-mail more
than sitting on developer calls at Magenta about security
updates? Is that yes?
Yes, yes, believe it or not, it was way more interesting.
That's good, yeah. Yeah, but I think it's exactly,
I mean it sounds like you've you've almost got the tool stack
that works for you. And I'm going to use the phrase
works for you because it is all relative and it's different for
other people. Some people want way more
flexibility and you could get with Saguna or Shopify and that
kind of tech stack. But it's working.
I think you've got you've got the tech stack now that's
working for your business. But with this product launch, I
mean you jumped on it quickly. You must have jumped on it
certainly the premium iPads case market.
So you must have been so much earlier than anybody else when
the new iPad Pro and everything came out.
So goon O'Brien, what happened? I mean, I know they would have
gone up, like, talk us through the e-mail open rates, the click
rates, like how engaged were the audience in this new product
launch and everything was going on.
Yeah. Well, that was a big piece that
was leading to earlier was Brian let me know as early as I think
he could that we needed to be prepared for that launch.
He needed the list to be ramped up and ready to go when the case
came out. And so that gave us a deadline
that gave us a big goal of great, you know, we have
products that we can sell in the meantime.
We obviously want to start to to sell those products and support
Burton at that point. And then when the iPad case came
out, I remember looking at the open rates and the click rates
and just like, OK, it happened. And Brian, absolutely right.
You know, all of a sudden you're getting when you're getting
double digit click rates and, and you know, those are, you
know, pretty, pretty strong indicators.
And I think the conversion rates are way up as well.
And still a fairly new business, new domain.
So like it's all quite early for those things to start getting to
that level. Yeah, yeah, at that, at that
time, absolutely a couple months, that's a pretty quick
ramp. But that that goes back to the
relationship that Brian had that we were not building completely
from cold that we had a relationship.
He had a high quality product before that he was able to be
able to you know, carry that, that forward with us.
But that is that's something that I think is a challenge.
You know, I, I don't know. And Brian, maybe, you know,
we've never talked about this, but I don't know if you chose to
launch Burton knowing the iPad launch was coming up in six
months and that was going to be the goal.
But you know. I don't know ideas by.
Phone every year, you know, I think I'm on, I'm on, you know,
3 year old period at this point. But when Brian's talking about
sending out content that's engaging, you have to keep that
relationship going and keep Burton at the top of their mind
until they buy the next product, until the new Airpods come out
or until they're new. You know, the MacBook finally
bites the dust after I think I've got one that's still
running from 2012, but it's still going, you know, like
those are you have to stay in mind.
So the comedic posts, the, you know, those blog posts, I think
Brian started recording videos of showing the products at one
point and those were just crushing it and just finding new
ways to, to really kind of show off the, the products and keep,
again, keep that going. But to be really honest, Nick,
the, I had done all my work up to that point when Brian
launched the iPad cases, it was really just the, OK, that's why
we did it all open rates, click rates skyrocket.
And now we're on to how do we take all of the people that love
their iPad case and get them into a phone case and get them
into one of the incredible Apple Watch bands or get them into
some of the, you know, the new accessories that are coming out,
the more device agnostic ones that are coming out.
So that's really where you take the, the retention side of it.
And that's our next goal that we have to do so.
Absolutely. And you've mentioned quite a few
of the products. And if you're not watching on
YouTube or any of our video platforms, guys like you're
missing out. And this is where really this is
a line for me. It's about opportunities.
Bert and Bryant, talk us through.
That's obviously an iPad case. Yeah.
Talk us through some of the products.
So this is a new iPad case we're about trying to release and it's
a new leather. It's an aged amber leather.
It's magnetic. So the iPad actually is sitting
in here magnetically very thin, so you can take it out quickly
and put it into your magic keyboard.
It's protective and and slim. We've been listening to
customers. They were feeling our current
magnetic case was a little bulky.
So we wanted to come up with something very, very slim and
easy to use. And then like this is an iPhone,
here's an iPhone 16 case that we do with stitching and has some
reverse chevrons, and then we have Magsafe stands.
That's really cool. So you can put those in, you
know, cards in there. Yeah, Saguna, Brian, you
shouldn't be too surprised because you've been sending
emails with this stuff in, but. I hadn't seen the Magsafe.
Oh no. Well, this hasn't.
Well, and it hasn't. It's it.
By the time this broadcast, it may have launched.
We'll see. All right, so see Nick, I'm I'm
in the clearance a new we're not in the lab together exactly as
a. Good broadcaster.
I'll now say this is a winning with Shopify exclusive.
It's the only. Place it is.
But I think I mean, the products are amazing and you know, kind
of come back to your point, Saguna, Brian about that, you
know, the open rates and things. Sometimes we are presented with
our own goal. And actually, I think what
you've just described really well, if I use a metaphor for
this, is if you're not ready to right the football, the own goal
is irrelevant. And actually, Bert and Brian,
you guys were well situated. All the right knowledge and
everything. You've just shown the fact that
you guys create your own products and create them on
sites. It must make your life so easy
to make incredible products because you go, well, let's just
make one and we just make one here.
And then we go, that's not very nice.
Let's just modify it as it is or let's go, Do you know what?
I've not ordered 100,000 of these things from China or
Vietnam or something and gone. I don't like the corners, but
they've got to go. We're going to, you just go,
well, we'll just make one and it's rubbish, right?
We'll just chat that a bit and we'll make a next one.
And it's much better you say about making it lightweight.
We can do that quickly and find a solution rather than how much
longer would that take if you were having a conversation, even
if they were a mile up the roads, how long does that
conversation take to go? It's still not quite right.
That's not what we want. It's not what our customers have
said they want that whole processing journey of processing
out a product. Combining that into the last
point on my list about e-mail content, it feels like you've
got everything so succinct now about you do this, then we can
do that and we can do that. We can ask some questions,
respond quickly, can even do a live kind of look, these are
three prototypes. What do you guys think?
You must be so much closer engaged to your customers with
all the content or the e-mail engagement social than if you
had to order, you know, across the across the world or even 5
miles up the road. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,
to be I, I would say this, I've, I've been, we've been, we
started making products in the US in with Pat and quilt in 15
years ago. And we now make stuff from all
over the world as far as our manufacturing from Mexico,
China, Vietnam and and, and there's some US goods we're
looking, I'm actually looking at the factory.
It's, it's actually three blocks from here.
We're looking at doing some US made goods as well.
And yeah, I, I think the key for every product is I used to think
it was, if you like it, your customers will like it.
A little bit of an American view, a little bit of a Steve
Jobs view. If I'm happy with it, then
they'll be happy with it. And I've, I've come to this
conclusion of, yeah, but you, you, you can't always think like
all your customers. And so I, it's a combination is
what I've learned. It's if I like it and I've
listened to the customer feedback, then we'll have a
great product. Yeah, yeah.
It is really hard though, isn't it?
Because you must be sitting in meetings going.
Everyone's telling me in this meeting that the data and all
our customers were saying this is great, but I know it's
rubbish. So do you sometimes and it's a
really kind of like tangent question, but do you find it
difficult sometimes to do you just need to like, because I
find this, do you find you have to just take a minute and go?
Just give me 30 seconds guys. Just a process in my head and
get out what I'm trying to explain as to why I why I'm so
against it and whether it's my prejudice or it's actually I
know it's wrong. I just need to kind of navigate
why at this stage. For me it is.
Sometimes it stays, sometimes it stays.
I was working with a vendor and I couldn't tell what was wrong,
but I knew something was wrong. And after a couple of weeks of,
of doing tests with products and having them make products, I
realized they're not exact, they're not precise.
They're, they're constantly making excuses for a lack of
precision. And my customers want precision.
I promise that in the brand, it's called precision Craft.
That's what we do. So yeah, sometimes it's, it's a
drive home that those revelations happen.
But yes, I, I think snap decisions are not ideal in this
business. You have to step back and really
assess. So for me it's drives, that's
that. Absolutely.
And I, I mean, I love a train ride or a drive as much as the
next person. Podcasts on music?
Oh no, there's no Wi-Fi. Excellent.
I can speak, speak and think clearly to myself for 10
minutes. How does that affect then the
electoral newsletters and the content you create using
Saguno's tech? That precision you have in that
close relationship at least with the vendors and products in
internally. How does all of that actually
translate then into coming up with what is, let's be honest,
is everybody's kind of challenge with emails?
What story do I tell today? Like I feel like I've told them
all. How does that then transpire
into content that gets pushed out?
That's I mean, it's interesting because I think I feel like I'm
in a new, a new era of my professional life of really
learning to balance out. People want to know what your
products are. People also want to be
entertained. They want, they want, they want
content. They want both.
They want to know both. They don't want just your
products and they don't just want to be entertained.
So how do you balance between those two and keep revenue up
and you know, keep money coming in, but also create
entertainment. So that's been something we've
been doing. So I there's, we just built a
whole new video studio here, got new cameras, spent a lot of
money, 26 frames per second, the whole thing.
And we're going to be working on creating new video content for
customers that it's just a lot more personal for for me.
It's also going to be videos of me, videos of the products.
Yeah. So that that's the type of
things that we want to create more engagement of how how a
customer can experience our products, but also how they can
just kind of enjoy the brand and the passions behind the brand.
Because we have a three pillar passion that we're about here
and we're gonna we talk about it on the site.
We also talk about in videos. So yeah.
Absolutely. And one of the things Brian,
you're talking about there is the, the connection to the
brand. And I think we, we're in an age
where e-commerce means that we have no shortage of choices.
So when people choose to who they're going to, to purchase
with, I think one of the things you've done such an awesome job
with is giving them a brand to connect to and telling the story
that, that authenticity that that Nick was talking about
earlier on. But even going back to the
origin story and to the connection with, you know, being
inspired by your dad and the three pillars and you know,
those, I think those are the things that continue to make the
e-mail delivery side of things really easy for me because
that's people can connect to it. And you know, the goal is that
that will keep bringing them back more and more.
Absolutely. Well, look, I've I've just seen
the time. I always get carried away in
these conversations and we're going to draw things to a close.
But first of all, Sagun O'Brien, firstly, thank you so much for
coming on the show. If people like Brian, I need to
talk to you. I'm like Brian from, from
Burton, I need to have a conversation with you.
I've got so many problems. We need to look at your tech.
This Canva integration, I've heard so much about it now from
XXL, Scrunchy and a few other brands and now Burton as well.
How can people reach out Saguno? How can they play with the tech?
Yeah, absolutely. You can go to to siguno.com And
actually right on topic, we actually have a new
deliverability checker. So if you're saying, hey, I
wonder if if I have the issue that maybe Brian might have had
back with, with MailChimp for another, another reputable
provider. You know, you can go to
siguno.com/check dash, inbox dash placement or just go to
siguno.com. Scroll down to the bottom you'll
see the link right there. You can just go through the
quick quiz that gets reviewed by myself.
Deliverability team will shoot you a response and you can
schedule a demo call with myself or with our CSM to say, Hey,
what's the gonna got to offer was my program look like.
And I think Brian hopefully will will say that you know, it's low
pressure. It's not a, it's not a high
pressure sales. So we're here to to learn about
your business and how we can help and if we're the right fit
for you. So again, that's segundo.com,
not Segundo, seguno.com. And yeah, please check us out.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for
joining us again, Brian. And as a marketing guy who works
a lot in lead Gen. as much as e-commerce, having a call to
action, like go and check out your e-mail deliverability is
absolute gold dust. So yeah, Saguna, Brian, please
milk that every time we talk anywhere that's live because,
yeah, it's exactly what brands need.
I think you, I think it's a, it's a really, really good tool
on that. So I'm certainly going to go and
use it and see how much you've got us out in the woods since I
asked you to help with the winning shop for emails.
But anyway, yeah, Burton, Brian, thank you so much for joining
the show. I hope you've enjoyed it.
And again, a massive thank you for your time and appreciate you
just being so honest and sharing your story.
Yeah, thanks, Nick. I, I appreciate you guys having
me on. I, I love what I do.
There's a lot of passion here and it's it's been wonderful to
work with, with both Shopfi and Brian at Seguno because the it's
a it can be very lonely running a.
Business it can. And it it is lonely and so to
have partners who really come alongside you like Seguno has
for me has been really a huge blessing.
Thanks for having me. Again, you're very welcome and,
and again, thanks for your honesty and just sharing some of
the, the problems and challenges as much as like, hey, we've got
amazing business. And if people want to follow you
and see these newsletters, come sign up, even buy some of your
products because let's face it, everyone listening has some sort
of device they're listening to right now.
So they're all potential customers.
And, but how, how can people reach out?
What's the website address? Yeah.
How to join the newsletter? Yeah, the website
iswwww.burtongoods.com and if you scroll to the bottom,
there'll be a sign up for news for the newsletter.
But yeah, you can just check out the check out the products and
check out our story. You go to our blog, you'll see a
lot about our story and what what we're about what's what
we're passionate about so. Amazing.
Well, team Brian, thank you both so much and for everybody tuning
in at home. Yeah, if you want to tune in
more than you have as a one off, do you hit that subscribe
button? Please leave us a review.
We post almost every Friday. We've got so many shows lined up
over the next next few weeks to record.
It's amazing. So we're not going to miss
another one. The only time we missed one is I
literally just had not slept for three days solid.
So it's like because my baby had arrived.
So it's like I am not doing an episode right now because it
would be the worst episode ever. And like we've discussed today,
don't send an e-mail to people that don't want to receive it.
Don't record a podcast that's so bad no one wants to listen to
it. That's my rule of thumb today.
Thanks for tuning in. We're back again next Friday and
we hope you guys have an amazing week.