[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 Rob Ward, CEO and co founder of Quad Lock. Now 10 years old, Quad Lock is a case mounting system for people with active lifestyles. Whether this be driving, riding, cruising, running, golfing, cycling.
Nathan Bush: Hey.
Nathan Bush: Or even singing. Quad Lock has all your phone mounting needs covered. Quad Lock started in Australia and is now sold in over 100 countries and has annual revenue exceeding $100 million. Better still, it's entered the vernacular with so many people no longer mounting their phones, but rather quad Locking their phones. Rob, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Nathan Bush: We've obviously learned a lot about Quad Lock and you've taken us behind the scenes there, which has been fantastic. We're here to learn a little bit more about you. All right, so five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Rob Ward: Yeah, I think this is a tricky one, but I think I'll go with something quite reasonably recent. And it was actually bought a boat online, and I think, you know, it was during lockdown, you couldn't go look at stuff, all these kind of things. There's no boats around. But it's maybe not the whiz, but I think it shows how far trust has come online that we can get on. Look at something, maybe a video chat, more photos, more this. You can get your confidence up to go. Yeah, I haven't seen this thing in real life, but I'll buy button. Like, usually you'd want to kick the tires. You wouldn't kick the tires on a boat, but you'd probably ask more questions if you rocked up and had tires. But yeah, buying that boat was kind of. I think it was. It was more. I think it's more telling of just, you know, how. Maybe it's just because I've lived on Zoom and online and just done business all over the world for so long, I'm just used to it now. I think I'm. Maybe I'm too normal, too normalized to that kind of behavior. But. Yeah, but you know what? Worked out fine. Worked out great.
Nathan Bush: In fact, I've got to assume a Quad Lock was one of the first things to go on that boat.
Rob Ward: Oh, I bought it for that. Yeah, yeah, of course. Product research, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Good. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Rob Ward: Ah, it's an unpopular answer. I'D say. But I think probably the retail I use the most, so they're probably, maybe they're definitely not my favorite brand. My favorite retail is.
Nathan Bush: We already know where this is going.
Rob Ward: Amazon. Yes. It's just so damn easy. And I've, you know, I've sold on Amazon for 10 years now in other countries, hasn't been here that long, but been quite aware of what that business is and does. Not all of it's good, to be honest. So a bit of a hypocrite. But if I need batteries to go on my kids toy the next day or my Phoenix 5 went flat, couldn't find it and I need to do, I need to charge by tomorrow Sunday morning, got on, ordered come Sunday night, charged thing up. It's like it's just too freakishly good. And they've done that for a long time elsewhere in like the other countries of the world. They're so Amazonified. It really does set the bar very high. Customer's always right. So it's reality of the world we're living in. So I think you can, you can shy away from it, but it's what is going to happen. And I, I feel just conversations I had. Aussies are still getting caught. Aussie Ecom still getting caught out of the beast that Amazon's going to be. I don't know if you see all their numbers. Like they've tripled their stock holdings, they've doubled their marketing spend. Yeah, they're setting up new logistics. They don't, they don't need to make any money here for years. And I'll turn around in one year and pay it all back. Exactly, yeah. So they're, they're, they're beasts, they're behemoth. But they do do it well. But like I said, not my favorite brand. I like, you know, not even the best shopping experience really in some regards. You know, if I want to buy something for my wife, I get like, you know, a door because I know it'll probably be good. I will still get it quick. Nice experience, all the rest if I want to, if I am. I know I like, like Patagonia, you know, I buy my puffer jacket and I'm riding home from Eurobike in Germany and I crashed and crashed the bike, ripped my jacket. I get back to Melbourne since the Patagonia, they send it back to me with a patch on it, don't even charge me. I'm like, that is amazing. That's the stuff I really love. But if I'm honest, I just Open up the app and buy stuff off Amazon all the time.
Nathan Bush: I'm guilty of it as well. We're in lockdown at the moment. I got, I got the old Covid diagnosis a couple of days ago and we downloaded some games on the switch for the kids and all of a sudden hit the limit on the switch memory and it was like, I need a memory card, micro SD cards. It was there the next morning at 8am I like no other retailer you can get that from at the moment. Are you selling through Amazon?
Rob Ward: We've done it all.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rob Ward: We've sold on Amazon. We've been an Amazon sold product.
Nathan Bush: Yep.
Rob Ward: And years ago we went to just the lowest level seller central.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rob Ward: And that works well for us. Cool. Yeah, that's how we do it.
Nathan Bush: Nice. Number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Rob Ward: Oh, I think there's a few of them, but I think probably the biggest one is just that, you know, eternal discounting, forever discounting, discount, discount, discount. I just think it's, it's lazy. There's so many other things retailers can do. Anyone can pull the discount lever.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rob Ward: And it's a race to the bottom. We always talk about, you know, let's do the hard things first, let's change the messaging, let's optimize the site, let's, let's do better content, let's do something interesting because you see retailers do it, they start pulling it, pull it a bit more. This is one way it goes.
Nathan Bush: You can fire the bullets and be left with nothing pretty quickly.
Rob Ward: Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, the period we're going into now with consumer spending, cost of living going up, I don't think wages will be moving anywhere. You know, don't know where some retailers will go with that.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, no, good point. And I think going back to our main episode where we talked about creating an ecosystem, going into specific passions, knowing your customer, all this sort of stuff, you've built up a really great product and brand where price isn't the central point for customers.
Rob Ward: It's not central point at all. Yeah. It's the like, what is the core problem? And the big thing for me around the discounting is it's just not sustainable from a business point or from an environmental point. You want people to buy something that they need, they get it, they feel good, they come back. Not just buy because it's cheap, it's not sustainable for the business, all that. And at the end of the day you see businesses, what ends up happening is every time you're Doing it, you're training the customer cheap. Only buy when we're cheap. Come back when we're cheap. Yeah. You know, wait till we're cheap. All these things. There are all these things that are going lowers the perceived value 100%. And then at a point in time, all you're doing is, you know, you differentiate its price. It's not going to work out because there's other someone can do it cheaper.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah. No great points. All right.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book
Nathan Bush: or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Rob Ward: You mean other than add to cart? Yeah, of course.
Nathan Bush: Thank you.
Rob Ward: Yeah. Okay. If I'm honest, it's bad. I don't read that much, but I do research a lot and I look and I read a lot of little bits of information from all over the place. But one thing I do like when I'm gathering the information is I like. The only real habit I probably have is like the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway. I really enjoy that. I think just little bits of news, current tech things. I like looking for trends and patterns, trying to understand. In this business, we're always trying to aiming where things are going, not for where they are right now. And so often when you're aiming for where it's going, you've got to be good at reading between the lines. And I like gathering that kind of information. I think that podcast is good for that.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's a great one. And I'm loving that trend of podcasts where it's firing a bunch of different information at you, which is kind of forward thinking and kind of just get you thinking every day. It won't have all the answers and I won't dive deep into a subject.
Rob Ward: Yeah. And I like that when it's not necessarily about having the answers, it's about, like looking for the lessons. Looking for the lessons. So similarly, you can go and listen to podcasts like this that talk about, you know, how people got here, what they've done over time. Nathan Shan from founder, he does that with like, lots of, lots of different people. If you sign up to those things and you try and look for like, I'm going to do what they do it. It's a different point in time, different product, different. I see that all the time. People want, like, success, the playbook. Yeah. And you're kind of like, no, no, no. There's still really good info, but it's about how did that work for them? What can you apply to it? Look for the lessons, not for the actual what to Do Perfect advice. I love it.
Nathan Bush: All right, finish this sentence. The future of retail is the customer.
Rob Ward: I think it's the future of retail is probably a lot like the past. It's the customer. I don't think it matters whether you're online or whether you're offline. It sort of starts with the customer and it finishes with the customer. And I think if we look the. The businesses like we think you think about winners and losers, businesses that take the best care of their customers over an extended period of time. That's, you know, convenience. It's not just. It's like good customer support, big one shipping, delivery, product expectation, meeting the product expectation, all these kind of things. Those companies that do that really well and look at Amazon, they've done that well for a long, long time. People trust them, they buy a lot from them and other great retailers do that. I think they have the potential to win. But I also think the reason why that looking at the customer is so important, because the other thing I could have said is becoming a destination. And I think in the world we're in at the moment where everyone pays a big Google tax, a big Facebook tax, a big whatever other taxes you pay, an Amazon tax. If you're selling on Amazon, these kind of things, you really need the customer to sort of start and finish their buying, you know, experience with you on your site. You don't want them to start on Google shopping, you don't want them to start here, you need them to start with you. So it comes back to, you know, looking after the customer, taking care of the relationship with that customer. And when you can do that, and as a brand, we don't mind if they walk into the store instead of typing into our. They can even type in qualocase.com that AU buy that or if they go to 99 bikes down the road and. And they go grab the quad lock, it's still all good, right? Yeah, they're getting a good service, they're being looked after. All this, you got to be that destination. I think for a retailer, it's getting them to start the search with you. And if you're a brand, it's that they're not looking for the widget, they're looking for your brand. So I think, you know, customer. And if you look out the customer, you become the destination. Become the destination. You're not going to be like a lot of. It's a bit of a race at the bottom, to be honest. There's a lot of retailers spending a lot of their money just trying to buy a little Google shopping ads and that's the difference between them or the other one. And sometimes they win it, sometimes someone else wins it. And if that's if you get a customer or not and it's in charge by someone else, that's not good for a retailer.
Nathan Bush: You don't want them to mount it, you want them to quad Lock it.
Rob Ward: That's right, yeah.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful, Rob, thank you so much for joining us on checkout.
Rob Ward: Thank you.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Rob, jump back into episode 177 where Rob shares the journey of how he started Quad Lock with his co founder Chris. It's a brilliant story given they were completely bootstrapped up until a certain scale and they have scaled responsibly. I really enjoyed hearing Rob's approach to growth. You wouldn't believe that it actually starts with a novelty bottle opener. We also discuss how they approach Quad Lock rip offs, the beauty of having limited SKUs and why they are focusing on the direct to consumer model model to serve their customers better. Thanks for listening and until next time,
Rob Ward: keep adding to car.
