Nathan Bush: Before we get into today's checkout, I want to invite you into something brand new. Our free Slack Add to Cart community. After four years of bringing you experts and leaders in E commerce, I thought it was time to connect you our listeners. I have no doubt that you can share experiences, tips and questions that will help you in your e commerce businesses and careers. It makes sense to bring you all together. If that sounds like a community that you want to be a part of, head on over to add to cart.comau ecommerce community to join.
[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 Drew Manservice, co founder of TileCloud, an online DTC store, transforming the often confusing and overwhelming tile buying process. With over 300,000 Instagram followers. That's 300,000 Instagram followers for a tile shop. And partners on board such as Three Birds Renovations Tile Cloud provides inspiration and the goods to elevate your Renault with minimum fuss.
Nathan Bush: Drew, welcome to the Checkout. Thank you so much for joining us in our main episode. We talked a lot around your role in the customer experience across the whole renovation journey and how you can make that as simple as possible as well as your expansion into B2B and some of the technology automations that you've put in place to make sure that you can focus on the customer. But we're here to learn a little bit more about you. So I've got five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Drew Mansur: I got a little adventurous and I bought this. It's like a, it's like a printing gun. Like imagine it looks like a super stoker and you can print on like three dimensional objects kind of like outdoors and stuff like, and get a load of this. I thought it was a red hot price. Turned out to be a scam. They just took my money. I got nothing.
Nathan Bush: Oh, what were you planning on printing?
Drew Mansur: Those printing things are a real thing by the way.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I've seen them in real life. Like on T shirts.
Drew Mansur: Yeah, I wanted to label palettes that have like boxes of tiles all on it and it's like a super rough surface for like, you know, batching and stuff like that. Good intentions, but I think I learned my lesson. Don't buy exotic printers online.
Nathan Bush: You don't have a printing gun?
Drew Mansur: No, I Also didn't follow up and go buy one in real life. Anyway, I just. I parked the idea.
Nathan Bush: Leave that trauma behind. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Drew Mansur: Aussie or international?
Nathan Bush: Have you got one of those?
Drew Mansur: Yeah. Okay. International. It's a bit basic, but I really like. I really like to study Apple and I. I'm fascinated by how they make, like, really complex stuff, simple, and the way that they organize their menus and the way that they hide their information and the way that it kind of like, comes out. Like, I'm just fascinated by that. And, like, simplicity for us is a big part of our. One of our kind of, like, core tenants of what we're trying to make this process. And so I think learning from people that do it really well is fascinating. That'd be my international inspiration. My local retailer that I love is. I really love Jason the team up at lskd up in Logan in Queensland. There we're part of an E commerce community and it's been fun watching their journey and sort of seeing how they have better understood their purpose and their mission and really lent into that and how that sort of translated into business success for them. Yeah, they're just doing good stuff.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, they are. Have you done the HQ workout there?
Drew Mansur: I've not done the HQ workout there, but it's a. It's a cracking gym for a. For a warehouse. Like, yeah, that's an awesome facility for the staff.
Nathan Bush: Quick funny story for you. I call. I went and saw Jace a few months ago and met him. It was like middle of the day, so. So I was like. I was like, two o' clock on a Friday afternoon, rock up. And he comes out and we shake hands and his hand was freezing cold. I'm like, oh, mate, that's cold. And he's going, yeah, sorry. Just jumped out of the ice bath just before this meeting, so I've just been chilling. There you go. Exactly. I'm glad he didn't ask me to join him in the ice bath for the meeting. All right, number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Drew Mansur: Oh, I probably say I'm. I'm not a big fan of that. Kind of like that sort of wasteful. Grab six sizes and know that you're going to return a bunch of them. It's not a big thing in tile, so, like, it's not something that I feel like I'm proactively needing to, like, manage in. In our world, but more as a consumer. I just have an awareness for, like, wanting to, like, never do that. To retailers that I buy from, it's like, figure it out, get your size, just buy the thing and be done.
Nathan Bush: Need some sort of sampling program.
Drew Mansur: Universal sizing. I don't know, I think sizes are meant to be universal but like they just kind of aren't. Like, I don't know, everybody interprets the sizing differently. Maybe someone should sort that out.
Nathan Bush: This is two blokes talking about sizing problems, you know what I mean? Like, I think if we've got problems then I know how bad it is in female fashion, the differences in what's a size 10 in some places versus other places. It's. Yeah, it is a big problem. Number four. Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Drew Mansur: I'm going to recommend the first business book that I, I read where I was like, oh, this is like impactful on a day to day. And it's how to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie. And the thing that sort of like tripped me out was that it was written like ages ago but that all of the, the teachings are so relevant like and continue to just be like it's about managing relationships with people in business. And I personally guess to a certain extent but, but kind of just that when I'm bored I put it on. Like I'm just like, oh, go through that again. Like it's almost like at any time any chapter can relate to something you're doing in your life. It's like kind of like a. If you have like 10 minutes to listen to something and you're like not keen to like start a new thing, just rip a chapter of that. It's good.
Nathan Bush: I think it's like you said, it's a great starting point. If you haven't done a lot of business books like, because it's the foundation of everything, right? Is relationships.
Drew Mansur: I would also say that I feel like the title does it a bit of an injustice. Like that's a. I don't have to win friends and influence people. That's a bit. It feels a bit dirty to me, but the contents feel not so aligned to that.
Nathan Bush: Is there a tip in there that's kind of stuck in the back of your brain that you always go, I will always do that. So for me when I read that the thing that was, that immediately clicked was people like hearing their name said out loud. And as a 20 year old when I read that and I was like, ah, that's why people say names. And like especially when you're introducing because it creates that connection so to me, that was like a aha moment. Did you have similar.
Drew Mansur: Yeah, I think it's. Interestingly, it's also probably playing to the ego a little bit. And he talks about a merger of two industry titans. The. I think it was a Bethlehem Steel company and. And somebody else, and they were going to merge and kind of go into partnership together, and, you know, they're fierce competitors. And he was sort of setting up the deal and. And the punchline is essentially, it's like, what would the new entity be called? And he's like, well, obviously we call it your name. And, like, you can imagine how that would land in real life, right? Like, you'd be like, oh, yeah, we would. And it's like, you're on board, you know, so, like. Like that. I don't know, let's call it credit for the deal. If you can structure a proposal in that way, let me tell you, it lands better.
Nathan Bush: Love it. All right, last question I have for you, Drew. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is.
Drew Mansur: The future of retail is. Oof. I think it's probably just going to keep getting more and more convenient, and I don't want to pretend like I know exactly what that looks like, but I do think that we're going to start to see more and more as we move away from, like, the. The cookied browsing experience where, you know, brands kind of, like, know what you're doing in the Internet, like, more broadly, you're still sharing what you're doing with, like, individual brands in the way that you specifically interact with one specific one. And so I think our. Our experiences will become just more and more customized with our sort of, like, favorite brands. It's like, you know, my relationship with, you know, my supermarket, for example, is going to continue to get more and more refined as they know what I want and they point me to the good stuff and, you know, that kind of thing. I think that that'll be ultimately useful because it's kind of like. And I think that there'll be, you know, it's a bit boring, but, like, I think that the, like, the regulation around, you know, using people's personal information and, you know, consenting to doing all that stuff, there's privacy reforms, like, that will be impactful, and it's definitely going to shape how. How people are sort of, like, tracked, but also how they're fed a customized experience. Love it.
Nathan Bush: And it kind of ties nicely back to what we were talking about right at the start of our main conversation around the frustration around not being able to have that tracking of the customer journey all the way through. Because people use different email addresses, it might come from different household members. So that might just be something we're stuck with, that we have to learn to live with imperfect data. That's the world we're in. Drew, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Drew Mansur: No worries at all.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Drew, jump back into episode 334, where Drew shares his thoughts on custom websites. He tells us the practical filters he uses when producing strategic content, and he shares the surprising response he has for the numerous tile cloud copycats that are out there. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
