[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 Tom Hollings, co founder of Different Drop. With a focus on wines crafted by real people with a sense of adventure and authenticity, Different Drop unearths the best and most exciting drops from producers all over Australia and with some great tech
Nathan Bush: to make them accessible to all.
Nathan Bush: Tom, thank you for joining us on the checkout. We've heard a lot about Different Drop.
Nathan Bush: We are here to learn a little bit more about you. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Tom Hollings: Weirdest thing. I'm actually, admittedly not a huge online shopper myself, so. I know. So my wife takes care of a lot of that staff for the house. But what I did do a lot during lockdown was bought a lot of my own product and I was driving the team absolutely mad because I don't live that close to the warehouse either. But I was in lockdown for months and every other day they were driving up to my place with a different little bundle of weird and wonderful wines for me to try, which I think wore pretty thin on them after a
Nathan Bush: bit of, I think, you and the rest of Australia, right?
Tom Hollings: Yeah, that's right.
Nathan Bush: All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Tom Hollings: Look, it's a bit of a boring answer to say, Amazon. I mean, we've learned so much from Amazon about obviously, customer recession and concentrating on scale and operations really to solve customer problems. So that's the boring answer, but probably more close to heart. I really love Booktopia. I've been really inspired by what they've done. Obviously, being local, unfunded for the most part, I believe, aren't they? And really just that year on year, solid growth over many years and in a category that people probably thought they couldn't compete and just focusing on great product, great range, great service.
Nathan Bush: No, they've done incredible to go public in. What was it, 2020 or 2021. After building for so many years when every year felt like there was an article saying that books will never be a category after Amazon kills it, but they've kind of differentiated and done really well.
Tom Hollings: Absolutely.
Nathan Bush: Number three, which e commerce practice do
Tom Hollings: you wish was history? I'll tell you what I said. I'm not much of an online shopper. I put in a big order for a bunch of clothes from a certain Australian fashion e commerce site and it came in about nine different shipments and that gave me the shits. I'd rather take an extra couple days and all come together. To be honest, the tracking was so confusing. Some things didn't turn up. I couldn't figure out how to track them. Constant knocks on the door, with sleeping kids in the other room, bombarded by text messages. I know people don't want to hold stock and they're drop shipping, but I would prefer slightly slower but more convenient experience.
Nathan Bush: And the environmental impact as well is phenomenal.
Tom Hollings: Huge.
Nathan Bush: There's actually services starting up and you've probably seen them in the US where we've got kind of third party companies collecting shipments for households in warehouses. So it doesn't matter if it's from the same retailer, but multiple retailers coming into this shipment address, they hold them to a package and they might deliver them once a month or once a week to reduce the impact and that noise to the household.
Tom Hollings: Fascinating.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, makes sense.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book
Nathan Bush: or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Tom Hollings: You know who I've always loved and I love everything he does is Seth Godin. For me, when we were starting the business and even now, when you're looking for more practical advice, sometimes a bit of Seth, whether it's his daily blog or any of his books, I think you can't go wrong. Whether it's that high level stuff or even a bit more kind of tactical, pragmatic.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Any Seth books that stand out for you normally, like Purple Cow is the
Nathan Bush: Go to Purple Cow.
Tom Hollings: Purple Cow for me was life changing as a entrepreneur, really. Just obsessing over quality of product and not just being a little bit better, but a lot better or a lot different. And we still hold that very close to our heart. In fact, we did a bit of a presentation with the team the other day with our plans for the year and I put up a big picture of a purple cow and they all just looked at me like, what the hell are you doing? Explain the logic behind it.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. All right, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is easy for the customer.
Tom Hollings: For the customer or a supplier, I think product is obviously important, but there's always other products. Price is important, but I think not as important as people think it is. Speed of delivery is an interesting one, but our experience says that it's about quality and ease is what's most important. People don't mind paying a little bit extra, they don't mind waiting an extra day, they don't mind trying that extra product. As long as it's simple, solves their problem, they don't have to worry about it. It's reliable and I think that sort of pain point around people's time and attention is probably the most prevalent one.
Nathan Bush: Well put, mate. Well put. Tom, thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Tom Hollings: No worries, Nathan, thanks very much.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Tom, jump back into episode 162 where Tom shares how he and his co founder Brett started the business from Brett's mum's garage back in 2013. He also shares how different drop pivoted by starting to do their own delivery during COVID and what he learned from meeting the great Ricky Ponting. And we ask a very controversial question. Ice cubes in red wine. Passable or hell no. Tackling the big issues here on Add to Cart. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to Cart.
