Nathan Bush: Before we get into today's chat, I want to share a little resource that we've just released. As you might know, in our checkout episodes, I ask our e commerce guests, do you have a book or a podcast that you recommend our listeners get into? Well, I've taken all of those book recommendations and there's over a hundred of them, plus the stories that go behind them and put them into their own book called the Book Recommendations of E Commerce Experts. Yeah, I know, it's totally original. You will never ever run out of reading ideas again. You can download that one now for free over on addtocart.com
[Voiceover]: welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features Daniel Katay, founder of Fun Day Natural Sweets. They're a confectionary brand making lollies with no sugar or sugar alcohol added. Daniel's own weight loss journey left him missing out on the joy of one of his favorite treats and inspired him to create a replacement. Funday's unique formula maximizes taste and eliminates the frequent trips to the loo that many healthier lollies can bring. They have a five star rating, contain around 100 calories per pack and can be found in Chemist, Warehouse and Woolies. Daniel, thank you so much for joining
Nathan Bush: us on the checkout.
Nathan Bush: We had an awesome chat before around
Nathan Bush: how you've established Funday as the alternative healthy, sweet or lolly and some of the distribution that you've got into Chemist, Warehouse and other big retailers as well as Amazon and the subscription that you set up so much in there. But today we are here to learn a little bit about you. Five quick questions. Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Daniel Kitay: This is a tough one. I think the weirdest thing is something an ingredient that I found on Alibaba from China. It's called a sterol, like a plant sterol. And I was googling it because I had this idea that I could put sterols in. You know, there's like instant hot chocolate sachets and you could have that because the benefit of sterol is it lowers your cholesterol. And I did all this stuff I bought, had to buy 10 kilos of this random white powder from China. And then I tried it with hot
Nathan Bush: chocolate that was inspected in customs.
Daniel Kitay: Yeah, totally. And then they I tried this thing it was excellent. And I spoke to a regs consultant. She said, no, you can't do it. It's illegal, or something like that. So that was. That was. That was done in about a week. But I reckon 10 kilos of this sterile powder, which ended up having to chuck out, is the weirdest thing I've ever bought.
Nathan Bush: That is good. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Daniel Kitay: I got two. I absolutely love Kmart and I love jb. Hi, Fi. There's something about those retailers where you walk in and it feels weird not to buy something. Their merchandising is just fantastic and the quality of their products is now good. Say, for Kmart's perspective, it's changed a lot.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
Daniel Kitay: And there's something to reset for just being quite mass market, but just absolutely doing a cracker job at it. I probably say chemist warehouse falls into that category as well. You just walk in there, you have to buy something. That mentality, that psychology where they position things, I think is just genius. And I'll never understand it, but it's fantastic.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: When you. When you actually put it on paper or take a photograph of it, you go, it doesn't make sense. But it's. When you're in there, you know that you're going to spend.
Daniel Kitay: It's a great point.
Nathan Bush: Number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Daniel Kitay: I mean, the only, like, practical thing I could probably say was just spending advertising dollars on, like, Meta or some of those platforms. Like, it's just not what it stacks up to be. It's way more difficult. I wish there was a better way to interact with people through socials and educate them without spending all this money with what typically wasted ad spend. Like, that's. I wish that was done.
Nathan Bush: But what I loved about our chat in the main episode was that you gave so many examples of alternative marketing that you've used, whether that be partnership marketing, the influencer stuff, even things like the TikTok examples that we gave. There was so much that you're doing that falls outside of that traditional. Go spend 100 bucks on Meta and hope that it brings in $400.
Daniel Kitay: Yeah. I think our job as a. My job as a business owner is to ensure that we have sustained sales coming through the door. And if you put all your eggs into one basket through Meta and you have really poor ROAS CPAs for that month, then you're finished. Like, that's all the marketing dollars you've got. Whether it's the online, how we divide up the marketing dollars and Even how we divide retail, whether it's through grocery, pharmacy, petron, convenience, health, food, independence, online. It's all part of a deliberate strategy to diversify risk because if we lose one, then the business still continues. And it's the same thing for marketing dollars. If Meta stinks one month, then we're fine. We still got a bunch of other things rolling in the background.
Nathan Bush: Very, very smart.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book
Nathan Bush: or a podcast that our listeners should
Daniel Kitay: immediately get into from a, like, a CPG perspective? There's a book that I read many years ago, probably seven, eight years ago, called Delivering Happiness. It's the story of the Zappos, I guess, how it came to life. The reason I like that book is it frames their brand and their product offering in a very unique way. So typically, you get into business and you'd say, like, I'm going to create a business selling tables. And we sell tables, right? And that's what we do. We make the best tables. But the way that this book makes you think about it is like, well, no, you don't. You actually are offering family dinners and families to connect and comfort and memories to be shared. So they go like a level deeper than what you're physically selling. And for us at Fun Day, it's like, yes, I could say we're a lolly business and we're just so confectionary. But what do we actually do? We actually take to give that person or the customer a couple of minutes out of their really crazy day and give them a really great experience and a great fun moment to just relax and enjoy and do their thing. And. And part of the learnings from this book are like, well, it's not just the product, it's everything. It's what's the customer experience? What are the touch points along the journey to make sure that that customer is having an excellent experience? For the first year of the business, our E Comm customers just got a plain cardboard box to their door. And when we sort of looked at it and said, well, what are we trying to do? We're trying to create this fun moment. But the first thing they see is a boring brown cardboard box, it didn't take too long to say, all right, let's redesign our box. Let's redesign the experience. What communication we provide them during and after the eating process of the confectionery, and how do we communicate with them to make sure that we're delivering on this message, which is bigger than just lollies.
Nathan Bush: Love it. And I couldn't agree with your recommendation anymore. It's actually the book that first got me passionate about E commerce and I have it on my bookshelf above me. And it is the first book that we give our students when we are teaching the E commerce accelerator because it's all about sell. What the solution and the benefit is. Look after your customers. All the great principles that you described there. Last question I have for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is.
Daniel Kitay: It's a really tough question, but I would say Omnichannel. I think having experienced businesses in the past, purely online and also purely offline, I think both carry very significant pros and cons. I think most brands getting into retail need to consider what an omnichannel approach looks like. And it's purely to diversify risk. You can, you know, take for example, Covid, where no one was going into stores for a long, long time or, you know, doing online checkouts and things like that, deliveries. If you didn't have an online business, you're sort of screwed. Contrary, if your website goes down and there's an issue with your tech stack, well, at least you can go into a store and buy the product. So I think for sustainable business sustainability purposes, having your products available in as many channels that make sense for your brand as possible is the best thing you could possibly do for your brand.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, really well put. It gives you options as a business, but it also gives your customers options in terms of how they want to experience.
Daniel Kitay: Absolutely. And everyone's different. Some people love buying online. Some people like sitting in the store and doing their thing. And the job as a brand is to like, you've got customers that need things and their needs change and you need to keep adapting to that. It's easy to create a website these days. It's very hard to get your product into the offline environment. And ultimately you have to consider all those things we discussed about, you know, packaging, branding. The product actually has to be excellent. It's got to pass the hurdles and the thresholds. And I think having that approach of Omnichannel will make brands do a better job as well.
Nathan Bush: So well put. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Daniel Kitay: Thanks for having me, Nathan.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Daniel, jump back into episode 317 where Daniel shares how a unique influencer box helped Funday achieve liftoff, the journey to having a profitable Amazon presence, and how a brand crush set the tone for his mission to make lollies cool. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
