[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 you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features Kat Henselak and Nicola Omundsten from Get Down. They're selling sustainable, super stylish condoms and promoting women's sexual wellness. And not an oily chested Trojan man in sight. Kat Nichola, welcome to the checkout. We've learned a lot about you and a lot about your business get down. Who are reinventing sexual health. We've got a few questions for you guys. All right, number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online? This is going to be a doozy.
[Voiceover]: So this is excluding the 220,000 condoms that we had to order as our first order. You mean? Yeah, that was the minimum water quantity. So Cat currently has them stored in her house. So if anyone needs any protection, pop around.
Nathan Bush: Cats also great for birthday parties, Christmases,
[Voiceover]: and yes, other than the excessive amount of condoms and probably just like weird, weird things off ebay. Like my husband is into weird kind of art. I tried to buy a bronze statue that's a statue of a gorilla wrestling a lion. That was a weird one. But I was ghosted by the company, which makes it even worse. I like emailed them and said, I like to buy this and bid on it. It just got completely ghosted. So what a fail.
Nathan Bush: Because how do you find a statue of a gorilla wrestling a lion?
[Voiceover]: It's a good question. Honestly, I just kind of saw it and I was like, that has my husband written all over it. It was like, boom. It was one of those late nights searches where you're like, I don't know how I ended up in this place, but here I am and I'm engaging with it.
Nathan Bush: That is amazing. And I love that the person that you tried to buy it off was like, no, sorry, I'll sell it to someone else.
[Voiceover]: Exactly. Like how many people do they have trying to buy it? Is my question.
Nathan Bush: What about you, Kat?
Kat Hanzalek: Well, being in the sexual wellness category, you can imagine some of the samples that get a pretty wild. But it's quite funny when we have visitors come and stay with us because I'm like, little do you know, under the guest bed you're actually sleeping on 100 vibrators. Or like, you know, like if a mother in law comes to stay, she's got no idea. Fortunately, she doesn't listen to podcasts, so
[Voiceover]: I think I'M safe.
Kat Hanzalek: But yeah, there's so much she doesn't
Nathan Bush: know about get down at all.
Kat Hanzalek: No, she does. But I guess like, there's a spare bedroom we have and it's literally just got like all kinds of weird sex shit. Just like in sample boxes that we get from all of our supplies. It's like in brown boxes hidden under the bed covered in sheets. So Tom and I are trying to pretend like we're normal people, which Tom really is. But like. And then I'm like, just ignore this. Like, try and clean up my office. But apart from that, I just say peloton. I was so sucked into the culty advertising and their community led kind of exercise, like gimmick. I just am really bad with taking care of myself because I spend too much time on the Internet drinking Prosecco or just doing dumb shit that, like, I was like, okay, I need one of these.
Nathan Bush: Nice. And you love it still.
Kat Hanzalek: I literally just got it because they do not deliver Tisk. Tisk Peloton. They don't deliver to. I live in the Alpine region of Victoria and so I had to get it delivered to metropolitan area and then carted up here. So I've just worked out how to set it up and giving it a crack. I like it.
Nathan Bush: There you go. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Kat Hanzalek: So living in a small country town. I am living in Toowonga south, which is under Falls Creek, and there is this beautiful product, the argent silversmith. There's Liz is a local silversmith I met in a cafe and I was just absolutely enchanted with her brand story. And she really just pushes the p. Like, product, product, product. Her brand is so authentically her. It's recycled metals and really beautiful. I just love how her. She just shows like we walk. She walks around the village and literally has like all these like burns on her hand and like scratches. You're like, how did you do that? She's like, I just cut myself with a saw. And she's just like this sexy French chip that's like, I just cut myself with a saw. And then she's got this beautiful brand. So love, love, love what she's got going on also. Just like the school of life. I'm a deep thinker and I just love their balance of content and commerce. It's really beautiful. Just good for the mind. Cool branding. Cool.
Nathan Bush: We'll put links to both in the show notes. Where are you, Nick?
[Voiceover]: And it's a brand called Lucy and Yak. I think it's a UK company, but they Definitely sell to Australia as well. So they're an overalls company. Like dungarees. I don't know if you guys say dungarees. They're super cool prints. Really, really, really positive message throughout. They're very environmentally friendly. They're really inclusive, and they're incredibly transparent about their supply chains. They're one of the brands that I looked at when we were looking at, like, how transparent we want to be. They were just all over. And everything they're doing there is amazing, as well as being super environmentally friendly. And they just look fucking cool. Like, every print, I'm like, I want those ones, I want those ones. I want those ones, I want those ones. And I end up just gifting everyone their gift cards or like a cheeky pair of shorts. But they also have an amazing refer a friend loyalty program, again, which leans into the kind of authenticity of the brand, is that it's one of the best I've ever seen. And their stats apparently are incredible as well. So because of that, and I think it's just something to really try and emulate, use the kind of power of word of mouth and the fact that your customers are your biggest advocates.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, Beautiful. We'll check them out. Number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Kat Hanzalek: Profit munching layered discounts. Like, can people please stop giving away bloody cars? 10% off this.
[Voiceover]: This.
Kat Hanzalek: This like another sale. Like, literally the biggest problem after looking across our scope of book of business, like, when working at Shopify or honestly, in all the places that I've worked, is just profit. So many people look at sales and you're like, profit, profit. Read the book Profit first, please. Like, so I just say big discounts and not looking at other ways to stop being lazy. There's other ways to acquire customers. Stop conditioning your customers. Like, another thing is definitely the constant quest for 100% attribution. This definitely comes from your C suite and the demand for everyone to know exactly how every dollar was spent. And I just wish that C suite, particularly, like, you know, whether it's a country director or those in charge of budgets. Okay, go and watch Mad Men. What did Donald Draper do to Donald Draper? Sit there in his chair with his cigar, measuring every one of his advertising campaigns. Like, made that brand what that brand is.
Nathan Bush: No.
Kat Hanzalek: So stop fixating it. Think of other things and use your energy to do cool shit. It's important, but I just feel like there's too much emphasis on it, especially from senior leadership.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, there's always an X factor in, like, why something Works that you can't label. And that's what good marketing is, I guess.
Nathan Bush: And I think you've given me my new motto for life. Just do whatever Don Draper would do. Yeah, I'm getting a drink right now.
[Voiceover]: Whatever I want.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into? Might start with you, Nicola.
[Voiceover]: Mine is one of the reasons why we started the brand, actually, and when we were kind of looking for a reason to actually do it. And it's called Invisible Women by Caroline Perez. It's really famous, but I just think it's an incredible database. I love kind of data based stories that are kind of opinionated. They're just giving you the facts and you can draw from that. And there are so many examples through the book of this gender data bias that women face every day. I think it just inspires a lot of passion in women. And I think by reading that book, A, it makes you notice it all the time. B, if you're looking for a reason to start your business, that book will give it to you. So just read it and then tell everyone else about it.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. That's a new recommendation for us. So thank you for that, Kat.
Kat Hanzalek: I've got a couple and I'll try and keep it short, but Option B by Sheryl Sandberg is honestly the best book I've ever read in my bloody life. It's just about building resilience and moving forward after life's inevitable setbacks. For me, I feel really passionately that if you are leading any person, you should read this book. Sheryl Sandberg was one of the most important pioneers when creating bereavement leave in the US Shit happens in life, yet you're expected to kind of just keep going through and working. And if you can lead people through these inevitable setbacks, you will be an incredible leader. So I also think it'll give you license to be kinder to yourself and work out how to navigate life while running a business. So that's definitely one. House by Think I Thought by David Omand is really interesting way into analytical thinking and just getting into the head of, like, peculiar people that, you know you may not be able to work out. And last one is Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Given the Ukraine war pandemic and unprecedented times like history continues to repeat itself. Like humans, like, I don't know, we think that we're clever, but we're really not because we just keep doing the same dumb shit over and over and over again. So if you look Back at the history of the commodity of money and what we've done before, there's definitely some great learnings, especially when it comes to making room for error and long term planning.
Nathan Bush: Wow, what a list. I was surprised actually that the encyclopedias weren't on there because if you're going to win who wants to Wants to be a Millionaire, you're going to have to have some good general knowledge as well. All right, last question for you both. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is small and nimble.
[Voiceover]: I feel like we're moving away from these big brands that are very set in their ways to ones that are much more able to navigate the quick changing kind of e commerce market that we see now.
Kat Hanzalek: Mine would be sensory. I just feel like that we've only really recently you've seen retailers. It's experimenting with how they can combine, you know, Omnichannel. I feel like especially those in C Suite aren't really executing properly on no one's really worked out. But it's beyond just how to connect customers with their retail store. So how to connect your B2B suppliers and your retail suppliers, your wholesale suppliers and all your different customers that you have. It's like what does your brand smell like? You know, what does it feel like? What is that experience when they walk into your store or they open your package? Beyond just unboxing just seems like, I don't know, I hate that term sometimes because you're like, it just needs to be so much more like people are doing things in terms of execution of like podcasts for their brand. For us, we try and be sensory by having silly playlists so that when people are like getting down then they can listen to our absolutely ridiculous playlist and know what our brand is about. Like they can see us when the future products they'll be able to smell us. And so it's just exploring all those senses.
Nathan Bush: There are so many questions there and I'm not going to go near anything around unboxing, smelling, sensing, feeling.
Kat Hanzalek: It'll smell like an oily man.
[Voiceover]: I'm joking.
Nathan Bush: Wouldn't it be the opposite of an oily man? What's the smell of an opposite of an oily man? Now if you haven't listened to the main episode, this is going to make absolutely no sense to you and you're going to think we're the biggest weirdos. But if you want to hear more around get down and what Kat and Nicola are creating, make sure you head back to the main episode and hear the stories. Some absolutely fabulous stories in there. Kat and Nicola, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Kat Hanzalek: Thanks, Bushy.
[Voiceover]: Amazing. Thank you.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Kat and Nicola, jump back into episode 218 where Kat and Nicola share their formula for writing spot on brand copy. They also share how they navigate running a business and being best friends. And if anything, you've got to tune in for the unbelievable story of how Eddie McGuire ended up funding their condom startup. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to car.
