[Ad]: Just like late night kebabs, we have all been burned at one time or another by traditional affiliate marketing, but it has changed a lot. Technology businesses like Impact are paving a new wave of business growth through performance based partnerships which connect retailers to influencers, content creators, affiliates and other brands and mobile apps in a meaningful way. And the best part? You stay in control. Impact allows you to set individual contracts to preserve margins, provides in depth analytics and even offers fraud protection. Visit impact.comgrowth to learn more or jump back into episode 81 with Booktopia to hear how they are driving growth through the power of partnerships with Impact. Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous guests of Add to Cart where we ask them five quick questions to understand more about them and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Today's checkout features Steve Blick from Stone and Wood Brewing. Based out of Byron Bay, they're one of Australia's largest independent brewers and for many are people's first taste of craft beer. They've been in the scene for a while. They've recently taken a focus on expanding their direct to drinker operation and over the last couple of years have moved pretty fast, including a re platforming and a new warehouse and a subscription product. All right, Steve, I've got you for the checkout.
Nathan Bush: We're going to learn a little bit more about you. All right, number one, what is. I'm a bit scared about this question, actually. What is the weirdest thing you've ever bought online?
Steve Blick: Okay, the weirdest thing I've bought online. Are we Talking like late 90s, early 2000s eBay, late night weird? Because yeah, if we're going to go there, there's.
Nathan Bush: You go as weird as you want.
Steve Blick: Yeah. Do you remember the brand called Bathing Ape or Bape? They had some weird clothes out there. There's a few of those that rocked up there was.
Nathan Bush: What kind of weird clothes? Can you describe them to us?
Steve Blick: Oh, probably like you think about like gangster baggy clothes, big fat hoodies with lots of colorful patterns all over them that I would never wear. That type of weird fits in perfectly in Byron 100%. So there's that stuff. There's, you know, the Internet is probably the best place to go to when you're looking for fancy dress costumes. So there are plenty of those. I think that that's kind of it, mate. Like, I'm fairly simple, otherwise not weird. But I'm surprised at how easy it is to buy anything online. We bought strands and lights, switches and light bulbs Online and got them delivered a day later in regional New South Wales. So that weirded me out how good that experience was.
Nathan Bush: You can tell the arc of your life here. Like you've gone from buying weird gangster colorful clothes late at night to buying fans and light switches. You can tell you've gone straight into dad life.
Steve Blick: Right, that's it. Drinking lager, replacing fans, that's it.
Nathan Bush: Living the life. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Steve Blick: The Accent Group are super cool to follow, so seeing what they do and have been doing is amazing. They've got this incredibly distributed model of small footprint stores that they're leveraging the hell out of the super relevant online. They're engaging with their customers, they seem to give you any option under the sun that you want in order to get access to, trying stuff on, buying stuff, returning stuff, and to do that and still have a simple front end that isn't a minefield to try to navigate through is pretty clever.
Nathan Bush: Really impressive Omni Channel, isn't it?
Steve Blick: It's amazing.
[Ad]: Number three, which retail fad to you wish was history?
Steve Blick: It's not a fad, but shit. Customer service, definitely, you know, like retail industry, like the pub industry, you're customer facing, you've got a huge. You're trying to meet people on their terms and serve their needs. Ultimately, if you're not into it and if you don't like being customer facing, then find something that's more suited. But ultimately there's so many easy wins in just giving great customer service. So the quicker we can all get there, the better, you know, the better for the industry, the better for punters who get to experience that great customer service.
Nathan Bush: Do you do anything special with your E commerce customer service team to make sure that they're always delivering fantastic service?
Steve Blick: There's a cultural piece to that and the values that we have in the business and recruiting people that share those values and, and as a team coming together and reinforcing those values, that's an easy win because all the cool stuff flows out of that. We randomly will pick out customers that you'd call them high value customers or high communication customers that are constantly engaging with us and we find fun ways to reward them. It's not all written down that they're going to get this, this and that, but we do it on the fly just to try to give those fun experiences. You know, we had a beer club member visit us in the brewery in Byron the other day and so Jess, our Cicerone drained tasting room manager, she pulled them in behind the bar and they got to pour their own beers. So that's not written down in a rule book. That's just that culture coming through, being able to do cool things for our customers.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant.
[Ad]: Number four, can you recommend a book
Nathan Bush: or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Steve Blick: If you haven't read Shoe Knight, if you haven't read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the guy that set up Nike, that's a really cool book. And it's really. It's about the first 10 years of Nike, and we all know where they're at now. They're an amazing brand. They are doing some amazing things. B2C direct with their consumers, but just to kind of get an understanding of some of the challenges they went through in those first 10 years that have helped set them up to be what they are today. It's a really good story, and Phil is a humble dude that just tells it how it is. And you don't feel like you've been given a rule book or been told a game plan. It's just the experiences that they've had in that business.
Nathan Bush: Was there anything in that book? And obviously Nike and Stone and Wood are slightly different businesses.
Steve Blick: Some people drink beer out of a shoe, believe it or not. That's the best connection I can come up with. It's pretty good.
Nathan Bush: Is there anything that you took out of that book that you applied into Stone and Wood or that stayed in the back of your mind for what you're doing today?
Steve Blick: I think the thing I took out of it is that you can grow something big out of something little. Because that first 10 years of their business, they didn't exist to anyone. They were a small little player against the big players like Adidas and others out there. And they just sort of kept at it, and they just kept trying and kept trying different things and new things and pretty relentless and pretty persistent and that they're really important things for any business in the first 10 years.
Nathan Bush: It's a good point, because it's like Nike seems this big behemoth now. That's just untouchable. And it's hard to forget that at some point there were challenges, and at some point they were a small business. They weren't always this big behemoth.
Steve Blick: Yeah, mate. The guy that Phil got to help him develop the shoes was the high school track and field coach who would tinker in his shed with different rubbers in pots on the stove to try to come up with new rubber soles and new patterns that were most effective for the type of shoe they wanted to make. So if all it takes is a pot on a stove to come up with the beginnings of a business like Nike, then it's kind of anyone's got the chance to do it right.
Nathan Bush: You know, all I'm hearing from that is that the brewers should allow you to start brewing your own beer and Stone and Wood can go to the next level.
Steve Blick: Hey, you heard it here first. I'm going to share that with him.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. All right, last question. I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is experiential.
Steve Blick: Hey, it's customer experience. It's giving people an awesome experience. You can have any product on a shelf next to another product, but for me, I think the experience is what sets it apart. The experience you get with that brand, the experience you get in a store, in a brewery, in a tasting room. Anyone can clone. Not anyone, but you can clone a product, but it's much, much harder to clone an awesome experience.
Nathan Bush: Well put. Thank you for joining us, mate. Really appreciate your time and really excited to see what else you're going to do with Stone and Wood online in the next two or three years.
Steve Blick: Awesome, mate. Thanks for the chat. It's been good to share what we've been up to.
[Ad]: To hear more from Steve, jump back into episode 64, where Steve shares how their subscription beerclub has totally changed their relationship with their customers, why they've moved from a national 3 PL to a centralised warehouse, and how he got his dream job at Stoner Wood with a simple tweet. The jury's still out on whether he was drunk tweeting at the time. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
