Drew Mansur: When customers come to us, they're midway through their renovation, they're probably already over budget and they're probably already off schedule. So now let's start the conversation knowing that you're on the back foot. Okay, now how can we help the perspective of imagining that each one of the engagements that you get on social media, imagine that person's in a room with you. If we can see the dream and we can show you that we create those dreams for other people, we think that we're doing a pretty good job.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to ADD to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush catches up with Australian e commerce leaders to get all the insights, tips and lessons to keep you at the top of the e commerce game and of course, keep your customers adding to cart. Here's your host, Bushy.
Nathan Bush: Some of life's most stressful events, like moving house or having a baby or trading through peak season can actually be the most rewarding. And it's worth remembering that if and when you undertake a renovation that is
Nathan Bush: on the top of the list.
Nathan Bush: My guest today is a seasoned renovator himself and he knows only too well and aims to be especially speedy, safe and seamless piece in your renovation puzzle. Feels like we hear this from all the tradies, right? But our guest is actually doing it. Drew Mansour is the co founder of Tile Cloud, 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 such as Three Birds Renovations. TileCloud provides inspiration and the good to elevate your Renault with minimum fuss. Drew struck me as down to earth and very perceptive, the kind of guy you would want to have on your speed dial when dealing with a dodgy builder. He shares his thoughts on custom websites, he talks about the practical filters he uses when producing strategic content and shares the surprising response he has for the numerous Tile Cloud copycats out there. Now, Drew has kindly given Add to Carter's a discount. So if you're racing to finish your dream project in time for Christmas, stay tuned for the code to save now. Thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Paclio. Here's our conversation with Drew Mansour, co founder of TileCloud.
Nathan Bush: Drew, thanks for joining us on Add to Cart.
Drew Mansur: Thanks Nathan.
Nathan Bush: Are you in the block meltdown at the moment? The new season's just kicked off. I can imagine there's A lot of home renovators or aspiring home renovators who are just going, oh, I could do this. Is that a problem for you?
Drew Mansur: It's definitely not a problem for us. It's the busy time of the year. Like, the renovation season is crescendoing into everybody getting their projects finished for summer holidays, having people over, and so, you know, block or otherwise, this is peak season for us.
Nathan Bush: I didn't know there'd be a tiling peak season, but there you go.
Drew Mansur: Yeah, it's funny, when you order tiles, you need to make sure that you get them in time for the tiler to do their work. And then there's obviously a number of other activities that have to happen after the tiler in order to, you know, finish the bathroom or the patio or whatever it is is that you're doing. And so our peak season doesn't actually go all the way up until, like, Christmas Day. It almost crescendoes in more like an October sort of early November, because then, you know, there's a few other things that have to happen in order to get that special project finished for the big day.
Nathan Bush: All right, well, we're going to get
Nathan Bush: right into the business of tiles.
Nathan Bush: But before we do, I'd love to
Nathan Bush: kick off with how Tile Cloud kicked off, because from the outside, it feels like you guys are really shaking up how tiles are sold, not just online, but across the industry. Tell us. There's three founders, as I understand. How did you guys get together and come up with the idea?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, Mark, one of the other co founders, and I actually had a commercial tiling business. Our background's in construction, construction management, and we had a commercial tiling business for four or five years. And we were. We were doing hotels and restaurants and pubs and, you know, tiling, learning the industry and understanding how it all works, where the tiles come from and everything.
Nathan Bush: Are you laying the tiles yourself at any point?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've laid more tiles than you've had breakfast. I reckon it's. You gotta. Yeah, you gotta know what you're doing. And made as many mistakes as well. So you. You do learn a lot, kind of getting your hands dirty in that way. And from there we sort of recognize this opportunity to sell tiles online. It was around the time that sort of koala was sort of springing up, and, you know, there was Casper over in the States, and we sort of had this idea that those sort of industries were just really classic. You need to touch and feel this product in order to buy it. And then here they are dominating and it's like, well, tiles, there's some similarities there that you would perceive that this is an absolute touch and feel product. Let's see what happens. So we had been working B2B with builders and our soft skills, so to speak were non existent. And so I actually roped in my sister in law Floss, third co founder who has a background in interior. She actually studied sort of interior design at uni and then was working with Mud Australia ceramic tableware business and had like elevated retail experience and so brought that into the mix to help us balance out, you know, round out the skill set.
Nathan Bush: And what was it about the existing tile buying experience in the old world that you went. I can actually shake that part up.
Drew Mansur: For me, being in the construction industry when you have those skills, renovating is like your side hustle. And so we are absolutely renovated. I literally just finished a Renault about three months ago and it's a consistent theme and around our broader office as well, like everybody's, there's always a couple of projects going on and we, you know, we're, we're serial renovators for sure as a team. I think the core of the tile buying experience downfall was that it's very traditional in the sense that you need to go into that bricks and mortar store. They'll have some displays that they've done and it's pretty expensive to tile up, you know, a special display and so they don't change them over very often. And so that's, you know, last season stuff and that's out of stock, you can't actually buy that anymore. Got this in a catalog and it's like, it's kind of all just a bit clunky and I don't know, I think that I personally enjoy a little bit of like self guided shopping. I'm not much of a, you know, hold the hand type shopper. And so yeah, kind of just being able to put forward an offering where there was an appropriate amount of expertise woven around the information that we were sharing so that you could look at the products and figure out without being a tile expert, figure out what actually you need to do your job effectively and kind of get that dream outcome was kind of the, that was the challenge. That's kind of like the technical side of the challenge. And Mark and I in the construction side of things, absolutely deep in technical jargon and you know, industry terminology. And Floss had, you know, zero background in tiles from there. And so she was the perfect foil for our communication style and just being like well, we can't say that. We can't write that. We can't explain it in that way. That means nothing to no one except you nerds over there. Like, you've been doing this for years. And so it allowed us to sort of like to tone down our communication style and really help us understand that that's a big problem. You know, there's a lot of jargon and terminology that makes it confusing and overwhelming for people. And that if we could come in there and get people a good technical outcome with a simple process where they feel like they now understand what is and isn't important and then they can pick the right stuff that's going to perform in the right way, but as well look amazing because that's the first thing you notice is how does this, you know, space look then? That's obviously going to be an upgrade on how it's been done previously.
Nathan Bush: It's the calm before the storm. And unlike George Clooney in the Perfect Storm, spoiler alert. Shopify wants retailers to come out not just alive, but thriving because it's a big deal, especially here in Australia. Last year, Australian merchants ranked third globally in Black Friday Cyber Monday sales volume. What an opportunity. So if you want to maximize your shares of the peak sales this year, use this time before the storm to download and read Shopify's peak season playbook. They've got 10 experts, including me, to share their tips on how to maximize sales at this time. So put on your life jacket and get your hands on Shopify's free peak season playbook. Download it at shopify.com/guides or peaksalesseason2023 or
Nathan Bush: just follow the links in the episode show notes from the device you are on. Land ahoy. I love that you were inspired by Koala. Obviously taking something that's really difficult, that's traditionally difficult to sell online and going, actually there is a market for this online. To me, you know, it's the equivalent of trying to sell jeans or swimwear in the fashion industry online. It's kind of the stuff that you always thought you had to go on and try out, try on and see if it actually fit you when you were starting out and going, yeah, we can sell tiles online and I get that there will be limitations with the touch and the feel. What techniques did you use initially to help convey that in store experience and get customers confident with you online to be able to purchase for that first time?
Drew Mansur: It's funny, like somebody coming in and buying tiles online is not going to be a Gateway purchase to becoming an online shopper. That's not just, it's just not going to happen. So we knew that our customers were going to be coming to us with our online shopping experience, probably from retail fashion, you know, those, those kind of spaces. And we wanted to make sure that that customer felt familiar and comfortable in our sort of buying experience. And as a starting point, if you think about what options you've got, obviously the, it's fairly obvious that if we can get some of this product into their hands, then they can kind of connect the dots between putting some money into the Internet and actually getting something to come back out of the thing at a relatively de risked price point. And so, you know, we came up with this, the sampling service. It's $15 for five samples delivered to your door. And they're little coffee coaster sized pieces of the tile where you can, you can feel the texture and see the actual colors and look at the print quality, that sort of stuff. And the website imagery is where you can see bigger projects and like full rooms and at scale. And so it's like between seeing the physical thing and kind of like seeing what it would look like in a bigger, bigger space, we thought that that was kind of like the right way to balance out sharing what information needed me to share to build the confidence.
Nathan Bush: That's the way I came across you guys. To start with, we were doing a renovating project here and I found your sample tiles on our kitchen counter. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I talked to my wife Sarah about it and she was like, yeah, it's really cool service because you can actually get your hands on it. She explained it, I was like, oh yeah. And then I went on the website, beautiful website. What kind of percentage of customers do you see ordering samples first? And then are you able to share what kind of conversion you get off the back of the samples?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, sure. So probably like about 90% of our customers will order a sample and the sample to full order conversion rate is a very tricky number for us to track and shout out to Shopify. If you're listening, we could use more help in this department. As you can imagine, one of the things that Shopify uses to connect customers is their email address. And so we obviously have that. But in this scenario, our purchasing journey is, is a longer one. There's a consideration phase where people are thinking about it, talk about the tiles with their partner. You can kind of be on this sort of tile purchasing journey for weeks or even months. And there's plenty of opportunities to switch email addresses. You might be browsing at work on your work email and order at home off your Gmail, or your spouse might do the ordering and you've done the browsing, or even you've done the browsing and the builder does the ordering. And so there's all these places for that sort of like, you know, identifier to come across. And so we do know that it's an imperfect number for us. And we're only capturing. We probably think we're capturing about half of the connected identifier to identifier instances relative to what's actually out there, which is something that we're working on. And what that means for us actually, though, is it's still a useful number for us to track, but it's not an absolute number. Like, if we can see that 20% of customers are sampling and going through to a full order in that way, and we know that there's others that get untracked as we affect that number up or down as we change processes around it, we're more just monitoring relativity as we move it up and down, rather than knowing this is the exact number until we get a better picture of that. But still something to figure out there for sure.
Nathan Bush: You know it works, right?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, it works.
Nathan Bush: Have you found other tile online tile companies copying you?
Drew Mansur: Oh, mate. We try not to spend any energy thinking about it because we know that it takes a lot of effort and energy. And I think the first time it happened, it was like a word for word for our sample box and the card that's in there and all this stuff. And we were sort of just sitting there and we're like, oh, this just. It doesn't. Doesn't feel good. What do you do about it? Do you complain on social? Do you be like, guys, they're copying us, whatever. And it's just like, nah, just focus on what we're doing and guess what, we're probably onto the next thing by the time they've got, you know, the last thing sorted out and that, like, it must be exhausting to follow along. So I don't know. Good luck to them. I love it.
Nathan Bush: You have got an amazing social following. So I think five years ago you said there's going to be this tile retailer online that has over 300,000 Instagram followers who love their posts and get really involved in it. People go, tiles. It's not going to work on media. Social. On social. What's been your secret to getting such an engaged following?
Drew Mansur: I think it's. It's probably a Gary Vee type concept around the perspective of imagining that each one of the engagements that you get on social media, imagine that person's in a room with you. Like if you put a post up and 10 people, like give it a, like or a thumbs up or something. If you stood in a room and like held up a sign and were like, check this out guys. And then like 10 of them were like, love it. Like, you would be like, whoa, we got something here. You know, 10 people, wow, this is, this is something. And if you can have that perspective on each of the interactions that you have with people on social media, whether they take the time to write a comment or share it or whatever. And for us to be able to be attentive to, you know, answering questions or encouraging the community, like, that's how you build a community. Right. And I know that we at various times in the business have adjusted the amount of focus that we've had on community engagement specifically around being active in there. And it has had the number one direct correlation with follower growth, more so than quality of content, which I think would be a little bit counterintuitive to most people.
Nathan Bush: When you're thinking about that kind of engagement when you're creating content, are you coming at it through a product lens or are you purely thinking, we've got to give renovation content and then if they happen to buy tiles off the back of it, then that's a bonus.
Drew Mansur: I think our philosophy around content, it probably started out in the, oh, we need to show everybody our products kind of a lens and through time and through understanding more about how it works and talking to some other smart marketers have definitely shifted the perspective to, I think what, what I think is, is where it should have always been, which is, why do I go on social? Why do you go on social? What are we doing? We're there to be entertained. It's, you know, a lot of the time it can be escapism type entertainment or educational entertainment, but ultimately it's entertainment. And so if there isn't an entertaining undertone to the content and it looks and feels like just a straight up ad, it's probably not going to serve you very well in terms of entertaining your community, which is what they are therefore. So I think being able to keep that in mind and sort of have that as like a high level filter, sort of like audit your content through. It's so simple, right? Like, would I watch this? Scroll, scroll, scroll. Would I watch this? Yes. No, that literally that's the only test you need.
Nathan Bush: Is there any piece of content that you've released that you've like, whoa, that worked its butt off?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, yeah. We did a. Which bathroom would your partner choose? Which was like a, you know, share with your spouse kind of a one which went parabolic for no apparent reason. Like, the edit was ordinary. I thought the audio was nothing special. And it just. It just really. It really went hard. And I don't know whether it was like a function of timing or what, but, like, still struggle to place the finger on exactly what. What it was that went well. And I think that we are definitely getting better now at strategically creating content that we know will perform well. And back to my previous point, most of the time, it is literally just, would I watch this thing? 9 out of 10 of our best stuff will pass that test, and it's probably only 10% that's in the rogue. Why did that do well? Kind of a category.
Nathan Bush: It's an interesting mix, isn't it? Because you just described that piece of content as. I thought it was pretty ordinary. I didn't expect it to do huge things. And then saying, well, we've got to be strategic about it, but you can't be too strategic with it because you've got to allow for those moments of the pieces of content that aren't as polished or aren't. Aren't as proven because you never know what they might do.
Drew Mansur: Right. It's a good call out because it's like, when you talk about, like, strategic content, it almost makes it sound, like, clinical and, like, premeditated. But when I think about strategic content, I just think about, like, running it through that bigger filter of is this entertaining? And that can be. That can be scrappy, entertaining, it can be polished, entertaining, inspirational, entertaining, educational thing, all those. But, like, the strategy is. Is it something I would actually watch?
Nathan Bush: Then you bring partners into the mix. So you've got some amazing partnerships. Three Birds renovation is one that you really highlight. How do you identify which partners are right for tile cloud and then any secrets to engaging them to make sure the content aligns with the entertaining filter that you put over the top of it?
Drew Mansur: Three Birds one was pretty natural. We reached out to them when they were working with a different partner and said, we love what you guys are doing and we would love to chat to you next time you're thinking about the changing of the partnerships. You know, they do like a project by project kind of a deal. And I think that it was just a good people fit. Like, we got along really well with them. And, and so that was pretty natural. But I guess the behind the scenes of why they were a good partner to begin with other than obviously they are, you know, a dominant presence in the renovation inspiration space here in Australia and, you know, increasingly in the world. I think that the underlying factors of that are, you know, number one, it's the same target audiences, which is the obvious one to say. But, but I also think that it's interesting to identify influencers that, that are obviously already going to be talking to your customer, but when you put them on a scale of like, sort of like functional versus aspirational, that they would probably skew a little bit aspirational. And so it's like, it's the elevated version of what, you know, our customers life, they would like to see their life be. And I think that that's kind of the sweet spot. And you can, you can go too far into like unattainable, you know, luxury. And similarly you can go too down to earth. And it's like, that's, oh, that's a little too relatable. If you took an influencer whose content was maybe a bit more about like the day to day struggles of parenting or whatever, like, that's a relatable thing for our audience, but it's not an aspirational relatable. It's like it's just, you know, flick your partner a meme and then shuffle about how much sleep you haven't got and then, you know, carry on and
Nathan Bush: then cry into your pillow.
Drew Mansur: Yeah, and it's, yeah, 100% like they are absolutely same target audience, but not, not aspirationally compared to, you know, and if you swing all the way to the other end of the spectrum and it's like Arrow might also be following, you know, maybe some travel influencers and you know, that are, you know, it's, it's Dubai and then it's skiing in the Alps and it's, you know, this, that and the other, like that area up there is also not really attainable inspirational. And so if you come back into the, come back into the middle zone, upper middle, I think that's where the, I think that's where everybody wants to be and that's where they want to see themselves is where they're at.
Nathan Bush: Plus a bit, I like that word, attainable inspiration. I saw, just off topic for a little bit, but there was some research that came out this week around the top influencers in the world and how much it cost them to post. And Ronaldo was on top. It was something like $5.3 million per post of his.
Drew Mansur: Oh, that's not mucking around.
Nathan Bush: No, he's not mucking around.
Nathan Bush: What I liked about what you were
Nathan Bush: saying about Three Birds Renovations partnership was
Nathan Bush: that there was a real connection there
Nathan Bush: for you in the types of people that you are. Is that saying that you guys actually meet up and talk and discuss and in person, not just kind of through an influencer agency.
Drew Mansur: We don't work with agencies. We. We manage all that stuff directly. So even now, like, social is so important for us. And most people, most like inbound opportunities of that nature will come through social, you know, through DMs or something like that. It's. It's still Floss co founder who. Who is on the other end of that. So it's a critical part of our business and not something that we see as outsourceable for sure.
Nathan Bush: Makes a lot of sense. Now. I saw that you as well as DDC, DTC and changing the game around D2C tail buying, you've also got B2B offering is. How new is that?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, it is new. It is new for us. When we started, it was all about, you know, what does the retail customer want? And I think the look and feel of our website really speaks to that. And we've always known that there's been a big B2B opportunity in terms of being able to service that builder who is purchasing tiles on behalf of their client and kind of have that repeat purchase, which is not so common with the one off renovations from the retail customer. And I think that we sort of. It's literally been there from day one as an opportunity, but we almost didn't give ourselves permission to go after it because we felt like we hadn't mastered the retail yet. And so it's like you need to nail this before you earn the right to go and chase another opportunity. And so I think that's. That was kind of the thinking. Why? Why? We've been slow, if you can call it that, to service this customer better. But. But now we work with Shopify and there's a sort of like an expansion site which is a different version of our website behind closed doors that the builders can get in there and see the stuff that they want to see. It's a, you know, it's tailored to their experience and then also from the service or experience side of things, dedicated resources on this end as well. You know, a person you can call who specifically is, you know, your point of contact and can help out is, you know, really critical for builders that's how they like to work.
Nathan Bush: So what was the biggest change to your business, the biggest thing that you had to get your head around or put the most resources into, to be offering B2B alongside D2C?
Drew Mansur: I think it's probably just been how to attack that opportunity without taking any attention away from what is the core of our business in the retail offering. And we know that there's seven other opportunities as well that we also want to get around. But again, we need this program at a certain level of maturity before we can take it on. And I think people get a little bit carried away with wild business growth and you sort of see the headline stories of, you know, these businesses that go from this to this to this in a short period of time and it's like, how do they do it? And I think that those stories are held up as like, this is how it can happen. And I fear that my suspicion is that that is the exception rather than the rule and that building sustainable growth doesn't look and feel anything like that. And we're a self funded business, we haven't taken money. And so I think that that can sometimes be a limiting factor as well in the speed with which we grow. But we also feel like it's, it's a good limitation because we've also never had to respond in the opposite direction and lay people off, you know, if the market cools or, you know, it's like we're building a foundational platform for the business to go off of rather than kind of just be like, add a bunch of people, here's the thing. Add a bunch of people, here's a thing. Oh, it didn't work out. Can that division, you know, like you
Nathan Bush: can imagine, you strike me as someone who is very deliberate and considered with your decisions. You mentioned there you've still got seven other ideas sitting in boxes waiting to be open, but we've got to get this one right first. Have there been any processes or automations that you've implemented at Tile Cloud which have really helped you automate things so that you can move on to those next ideas?
Drew Mansur: I think for us, spending less energy on whether we've got our tech stack right or not has been a big one. And I think we originally started off with a custom website. We thought we were super special and we needed all these special things. And the more and more we realized what that actually means in that, you know, only certain people can work on it and they know how to do it and it doesn't really update the security and you know all these things, it's like man, this is actually a nightmare for incremental gain at best that we, we eventually moved over to Shopify from that, that custom thing and we've been running this for a little while now and have been quite settled in this. It's like Shopify. We do dear sin7core as our like ERP. We have HubSpot for our customer piece. Gorgeous for inbound comms and then Klaviyo for email. Like I think it's just like a really robust mainstream tech stack that just like they just talk to each other properly and it kind of just works. It's one of those ones where we've not always been in that way. And thinking back to the times when we, when we were using different providers for any one of those, to be honest, you just, I don't know, it just takes energy to kind of like get it to do what you want it to do compared to now. So that's been big for us. It's just like when you know that the underpinnings are right, you can just move on.
Nathan Bush: You've refreshed your website. The new range is about to drop. You've never had more customer service options.
Nathan Bush: Hey, but take a look over there
Nathan Bush: at that boring pile of packaging boxes.
Nathan Bush: Ugh, ugly.
Nathan Bush: Time to give that some love. Luckily Paclio is here to bring some joy to your customers delivery and unboxing experience. It's been ignored for way too long. With vibrant colors, cool designs and eco friendly credentials. There are no more excuses for boring boxes. Even better, Paclio is Australian owned and operated with same day Dispatch Every and 14 day returns. There's nothing boring about that. Check out the Paclio range of E commerce packaging options@paclio.com that's Paclio P A C K L E O paclio.com
Nathan Bush: is there a mindset shift initially when you move over from something that is custom to going into almost like a best of breed stack that has guardrails for good reason that you can't do all the special snowflake activities. Is there a bit of a team or individual process that you go actually I can't do that and there's a reason that I can't do that. Just stick to the guardrails.
Drew Mansur: I think that we, you know like wildly overestimated how special we were in terms of business process and what we actually needed there to make the thing work. And if you come back to that, that concept we were talking about earlier about our customer is going to be an E Comm customer that has shopped in retail before. We need our experience to be very familiar to them. Like, buying the tiles online is the weird part. So the actual interface in which you do that, the flow you go through, needs to be familiar. You don't want to be thinking about two weird things at once. So I think streamlining the tech stack to conventional, if you can call it that, you know, everybody knows what the inside of a Shopify cart looks like, where to put your address, and just like, oh, this is safe. This is trustworthy. Bang, bang, bang, away you go. Like, that's helpful.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Makes total sense. I loved what you were saying around the competition following you and how you can't put too much energy on that, otherwise you'll drive yourself bananas. At the same time, you've got all these ideas ahead of you. How do you know what to pursue and how to keep yourself unique year after year? How do you work out what your differentiator is and to keep moving forward?
Drew Mansur: It's funny, we were actually doing a project at the start of this year talking about what it is that makes us special and trying to really put our finger on that so that we could lean into it further and importantly, make sure that we weren't putting any energy into the distractions that weren't that. And the process that we went through was kind of a. It's a competitive landscape analysis and looking at the competitors. And so you've got Beaumont Tiles out there, and they're the big dogs, and National Tiles number two, and there's a few other key players, but we'll just talk about them for now, because everybody knows them as household names, like Beaumont's Value Proposition. You got to be known for something, right? And Beaumont's Value Proposition essentially boils down to range. Like, they've got the biggest range, and they're basically saying, if you need it, we've got the thing. Like, we got one of everything. It's like, okay, cool. So that's what they're known for. Range national is if you find a cheaper price, we'll beat it. Like, we're on sale and we'll beat it. So we're all about price. There's a few other. You know, there's a. There's a handful of things you can sort of, like core differentiate on. You know, another key one would be innovation. We invent new things. You know, maybe that's maybe more of like an apple sort of a value prop. And similarly, the other one that we like to call out because it's where we compete is on service. And I think that when we think a bit more about service and what that actually means in the context of a tile offering, there's this sort of like traditional sense of like, oh, okay, like if I need some help I can pick up the phone and we'll answer it. And you think of like post sales customer service, like, yeah, that's cool. And we absolutely do nail that and we are super helpful there. But that's only part of. And for us the definition of services is a fair bit more broad than that. And so we think about like all of the design advice that we're giving in the front end as part of our service and whether that is sort of like self serve on the website where you can come and you know, just like, you know, take yourself through a journey or if you want to engage with our, you know, in house design team and you know, do a free design appointment where they'll talk to you about your plans and you know, show you what, what to put where. Like that is the service. And we do know that, that customers, when they're doing a project and they need some tiles, it's very rare that the only thing that they need is tiles. Like it's an odd project to do to just tile something. Like usually it's part of a bigger renovation. You know, you're doing a whole bathroom or you know, another space in your house and so you've got a builder engaged and you've got, you know, literally thousands of decisions to make leading up to this point and then tiles is one of them and then there's probably thousands to make after that as well. And so I think for us it's important to have perspective on where we fit into that broader renovation because we are here to, for us, good service looks like supporting our renovator to have the information that they need to kind of like come in there, make an informed decision, pick something that's going to turn out amazing and then just get on with it because they've got so much other stuff to do. And so like you see in our messaging that we're talking about wanting to make a simplified process because we know that they've got all these other stuff that they're working on and we are a small part of that. And I think that if I, if I could sort of like define a, like an ultimate review of tile cloud, it would actually look something like. Loved working with them. Very easy. Wish all my other selections were this easy. Like that's actually the ultimate for us is it's like, we want to be in that place where it's like, the information was presented succinctly. We were able to get kind of, like, a clear view of what this thing was going to turn out. Like, we got what we needed, and then we were able to move on and know that they're going to get that dream outcome. And so as we were doing this process and kind of looking at what we were known for and understanding how services, the core of our business that everybody has. And when you did your renovation, I'm sure you would have felt this as well. Everybody has this, like, renovator inside them. Like, you can't not go somewhere and, like, judge stuff, right? You go into this and you're like, oh, that doesn't. That's not my taste. Or you come into a beautiful hotel, and you're like, this is nice, you know, and you're. You're doing a little mental, you know, record of what's good and what's not good. And, you know, you come home and you're like, I'd probably change that, and that's not so good. And when the time comes to do your own renovation or build, you get to be that guy. You get to be that renovator, and you get to kind of, like, unleash your renovation potential and kind of be creative and leave a mark on this, you know, this space that you're creating. And you know that your friends and family are going to come in and see this room and see this space, and kind of the ultimate validation is for them to come in and kind of be. Feel two things. Number one, to feel like, wow, this is amazing. Like, this is a just, like, an objectively fantastic space to be in. And number two is this other feeling of, like, if they feel like, oh, man, I don't know how he does it. Like, I don't know how he's. He's running the podcast, and he's got his, you know, recruitment and. And he's. He's done this renovation as well. Like, that is the. The underlying ultimate feeling for you and for us. We can support our renovators and help them accomplish that by just being this sort of, like, trusty sidekick that sort of, like, leads them through and helps them get those dream outcomes.
Nathan Bush: You make renovations sound so fun. It almost inspires me to go again. Kind of like having another kid. What I loved about what you were saying there, though, is that a lot of brands tend to think about themselves in the customer's journey as the center of the Universe. But you're saying actually there's a bigger mission going on here for people at this stage of the journey. We are one step in this journey, one little bump in the road that we've just got to try and get people over this bump as quickly as possible and as painless as possible and not expect too much from them, but be there for when they need it, because we are just a tiny part of the overall picture, for sure. Is that fair?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, no, definitely. When we sort of were able to kind of, like, frame up how we fit into the bigger picture in that way, it further reiterates that we're not there to try and, like, become this kind of, like, unnecessarily big, complex process. It is about simplifying. It is about kind of like, being able to. Like, when customers come to us, they're midway through their renovation, they're probably already over budget, and they're probably already off schedule. So now let's start the conversation knowing that you're on the back foot. Okay, now how can we help? Okay, so what we need to do is we need to very quickly and clearly understand what your dream vision looks like. And then together, we get really clear on that. And so, like, I'm looking at your inspiration. I'm looking at your Pinterest board. We're really kind of getting a very clear picture of what you see as the dream outcome. And then once we're both seeing eye to eye on that, my job is to just, like, share with you the products that make that up. And nine times out of 10, those are products that are. That are here. And it's like, here, here, and here. And then if it's not, I say you can get that one over there. And so we go, okay, that's what you need to do that. And then the other important piece is you need to have, like, supreme confidence that you're going to get that outcome. And so what I'm also able to do is I'm able to share with you this project. This project and this project which incorporated those products and got these amazing outcomes. These are other type of customers that sort of went down a similar path to you. A little bit different, but, like, you can see what's going on here. And they got this dream outcome and this dream outcome. You're like, oh, those look a lot like my dreams. And so if we can see the dream and we can show you that we create those dreams for other people, we think that we're doing a pretty good job of helping people understand that That's a good path to getting to their dreams.
Nathan Bush: I'd say you're a magician. If you can turn that customer segment with no budget, no time and big dreams into a happy customer, that's a pretty, pretty good going.
Drew Mansur: That's what we're trying to do.
Nathan Bush: Tell me just to finish off, I'm just personally interested. You must see your fair share of DIY horror stories out there. Anything that we can take away just to make me feel good about my own experiences?
Drew Mansur: Yeah, no, I think probably it doesn't happen often, but it's a killer when it does is if there's a breakdown in communication between the client and the Tyler on site and maybe they, they don't know what's meant to go where. And it's like when you tile a bathroom, let's say, for example, and this happens occasionally, the tiler will get all the tiles on site and he might pick the wrong tile to put in the wrong room and he might go, okay, I'm going to put these ones in the bathroom. Boom. Puts them all up there. And the homeowners at work or away for the weekend or, you know, even worse, they're on holidays and they get even further down the project. There's a considerable amount of cost that goes into unwinding that work. And so, you know, a lot of times bathrooms are waterproofed and so it's like, okay, peel the tiles off the wall, the waterproofing's ruined, you'll probably strip the, you know, the lining, the, whether that's billaboard or whatever as well and that gets all ruined. And so you really have to, you know, get back to square one. And so whilst, whilst we are not usually involved in those things, you know, we do, we do, you know, we're, we're active in the renovation community and you know, we hear about those, those horror stories from time to time and it's like moral of the story, communication. It's hard to over communicate. So, yeah, get clear.
Nathan Bush: We had that same problem with ours and it was a communication problem. Our builder thought the tiles were kind of a foot by foot big, but they're actually tiny little tiles. So quoted up his time and his efforts based on these big tiles and they're actually tiny little tiles that took him a lot longer. So it was an awkward situation for a while, but we got through it. Drew, really exciting journey so far and I love all the twists and turns along the way and what you've shared. What's next for yourself and the Tile Cloud team? Over the next 12 months.
Drew Mansur: I think probably the thing that we're most excited about, and I can even say over the next six months rather than 12, is when we were looking at our reviews and trying to understand what customers liked and didn't like and in particular didn't like about the Tokyo experience. A lot of that stuff was coming back to the delivery experience. We leverage third party delivery carriers all around Australia to help out with that. And we're like, geez, it'd be good if we could move the needle on that a little bit. And it's like, do we want to do delivery? Is that something that we want to get involved in? You know, that's almost like a separate business in itself, becoming a logistics company. And I think the short answer was like it's a big enough problem that we'd be doing a disservice to the customer experience if we didn't. And when we talk about service as our North Star for what we offer, this absolutely has to be included in there. So it's an important problem that we need to solve. And so starting from putting an exact date but like pretty soon here in the next couple of months we will be offering like owned last mile delivery here in Sydney. And I think that like the traditional bulky goods delivery experience for construction materials is a bit of a bit of a blind experience. It's kind of like, oh, it's coming sometime soon, we'll call you after we dropped it off or something like that. And it's just like that is not in line with the best in class retail delivery experience of, you know, message SMS updates and being able to track stuff and all that. And so it was like, well you know, if we're going to do it obviously we need to be able to offer that level of service. And so, you know, working with a routing software in our own trucks and this is, it's a big investment for us. You know, it's big trucks with truck mounted forklifts and you know, it's all that sort of stuff that makes it happen in, in the real world. But being able to offer customers, you know, updates and delivery windows and real time truck tracking so you can sort of see where the truck's coming. You know, people need to plan their day, they're going to plan stuff. So being able to see what's going on is going to be a big value add for us, for our customers. I guess I should say it begs
Nathan Bush: the question then, if you get that right and if you nail that for bulky tiles, does that lend itself then to that service for other bulky items that wouldn't be needed in renovation.
Drew Mansur: Oh, look, you can make a strong case, that's for sure. I think the way that I would think about that is probably to focus on building out that network first. And you know, it's you go Metro centers and then if you want to expand into adjacent verticals, that's a different proposition for, for another time, but probably.
Nathan Bush: Oh, opportunity is huge. I love it. I love that you are truly, when people say customer service, that taking on your own fulfillment is the ultimate level of commitment towards making sure.
Drew Mansur: Actually just on that point, like that was another thing when we started. We have our own warehouse just on the other side of the wall here and we hold all of our own stock and we pick and pack and wrap and strap everything for third party carriers that we use at the moment. We briefly entertain the idea of three PLs and it was just like it's not going to be a thing. Like we know the whole experience is completely soured by tiles that show up broken. Like you just can't do it. And so for us to have complete control over that and for us to closely track. So we have an awesome business metric which we track, which is the combination of our tiles that arrive broken, tiles that are picked wrong in the warehouse. The tiles that arrive broken is also like, like it's a damage in transit. But as well, if there's something that was maybe damaged before transit, you know, any of those, all that stuff combined for us is less than 1% of all orders. So it didn't always be like that. And I think that being able to keep that number down at almost negligible. Like we still do a lot of orders every day. So like there still is, there is still stuff to work on. And you know, part of our process is to ask customers for, you know, a photo or two of, of what went wrong. Because we're not just like saying it for lip service. We want to see what we could do better. Because, you know, wouldn't it be cool if we did 100% amazing. Love it. I love it.
Nathan Bush: I love the commitment to customer service and making sure that your part in that renovation process is as seamless as possible and that you're not the breakpoint, it makes total sense. So if people have heard this, maybe they made renovation, maybe they're thinking about renovating. What's the best way for them to get in touch or experience the tile cloud experience?
Drew Mansur: I think probably start on social like Instagram tilecloud and you can get a bit of a feel for our products and our, you know, our customers and see what other people are doing and get inspired there. And from there our marketing will probably chase you around a little bit potentially. Or, you know, visit our website and maybe even book a design appointment. We'll help you out.
Nathan Bush: Love your work. Drew, thank you so much for joining us on Add to Cart and sharing everything you did. Really exciting. Love your work.
Drew Mansur: No worries. Thanks mate.
Nathan Bush: Now, if you'd like 10% off tiles and tapware in the range at Tile Cloud, head on over to tilecloud.com and use the code add to cart all one word at checkout offers valid until December 31, 2023 all right, here are the three three lessons I took from my conversation with Drew. Number one understand the big picture and your place in it. When you are in a business or a brand, it is not uncommon to think that customers will sweat on every interaction, consider the purchase deeply or dwell on the experience afterwards. But the reality is for most customers, you're just the means to an end. Drew realized that they are part of the renovation process and aims aimed to make their transaction as seamless and simple as possible and get the hell out of the way. That in itself is not an easy customer experience to get right, but at least they know where they add value. Remove the jargon Drew came from within the building industry that he was trying to disrupt. Wanting to make tiles accessible directly to the end customer, he faced one big remove all all the industry jargon so that anyone can understand it. If you are in a technical or traditional B2B business, this is an activity you can do straight away. Pass your copy, pass your communications through a non industry person to make sure they understand it. You might not realize it, but you might be saying all the right things in a language your customer just doesn't understand. Number three sampling work Drew said that 90% of their customers sample a tile first. And keep in mind these aren't free samples. So you've got a few things going on here. You've got confidence in the product now that you can touch and feel in your own home. You've got increased trust in the retailer making sure they're legit and can deliver. You've established a relationship with the retailer where there's communication flow and they know exactly where you're at and and you've got a sunk cost in that you've already started spending with them. Sampling is a really smart strategy if you've got a product that lends itself
Nathan Bush: to it
Nathan Bush: to get the highlights of today's episode. Head on over to addtocart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary, links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free e Commerce Salary Guide and sign up to our weekly
Nathan Bush: e Commerce job emails.
Nathan Bush: Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to card.
