Speaker A: Before we get into today's chat, I want to share a little resource that we've just released. As you might know, in our checkout episodes, I ask our e commerce guests, do you have a book or a podcast that you recommend our listeners get into? Well, I've taken all of those book recommendations and there's over a hundred of them, plus the stories that go behind them and put them into their own book called the Book Recommendations of E Commerce Experts. Yeah, I know, it's totally original. You will never, ever run out of reading ideas again. You can download that one now for free over on addtocart.com
[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 Eugene Cheng, an ex lawyer who's known as Australia's wealthiest shoe shiner. Founding sneaker laundry. In 2017, the business has sold over 110,000 sneaker care products worldwide, cleaned more than 37,000 sneakers in Australia alone, and now has stores in cities everywhere including Melbourne, Sydney, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and even Peru. Hey, guys. Welcome to the checkout. I've got Eugene Cheng here from Sneaker Laundry. Thank you so much for joining us today, Eugene.
Eugene Cheng: Dude, my pleasure.
Nathan Bush: It was so great to hear about how your business is going right now. But now we want to find out more about the man behind the brand. So I've got five quick questions for you today. Are you ready? Let's go.
Eugene Cheng: Oh, okay. Do it.
Nathan Bush: What is the weirdest thing you've ever bought online?
Eugene Cheng: Oh, shit. The weirdest thing I bought online. An only fan subscription to my mate's ex. No, sorry, not a subscription. Just a singular photo and only photo. To my mates. To my mates ex. I bought it for the boys. It was the boys group chat. They were wondering. I said, look man, just use my card. Like no one looks at my statement. Like, just, you know what I mean? Everyone's like, oh no, Mrs. Google, but just use my card. So I guess I bought it for the boys and me. Obviously I was curious, but you know,
Nathan Bush: I was not expecting that. Okay, let's move on to who is your favorite retailer.
Eugene Cheng: My favorite retailer is High Smile.
Nathan Bush: Oh, yes. Tell me about why.
Eugene Cheng: Because they took what was seemingly a very simple and accessible product being the first in market and they gained market share so aggressively and when you thought they had saturated everything they needed to saturate, they moved overseas and hit every market and when they were done hitting every market, being one of the most aggressive online spenders on advertising, they are now leaning super heavily into product development. And some of the new products that they're putting out is really inspiration to what we want to do and need to do for our category as well. So it's not just like where they were, which is take a product from China, take it, flip it and whatever. You know, it's inspiration to continuously reinvest into product development, merchandising. It's so much more than just how your ads doing today, you know what I mean? So really, really big inspiration there.
Nathan Bush: And just in case people don't know, so High Smile is an amazing Australian retailer that sell teeth whitening products. Right. So you know, they took what seemed to be quite a functional, boring product and made it sexy, really. And quite aspirational. Who would have guessed? So, next question. Which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Eugene Cheng: I love everything about E commerce really at this stage. Like it it's been. I come from a time and you come from that same time where marketing spend was not trackable. You like pray for the best and you just bank on people telling you how many people saw your billboards and all that kind of like, like everything's trackable now. Shopify. I came from a point where you used to have to get a website developer build your website and if that company went under, your website went under as well. You know, like and every time you need to update something your website, you need to call these guys because it's so hard to update that something's out of stock or something's in stock. You know, it was just so difficult to do e commerce back then. I do wish that, you know, I just ran into this problem the other day which, which did my head in that every app that you put on claims that they're generating this much in sales for you and you can't really tell. That's like my biggest pet peeve. I don't know how you can get rid of that. But basically, you know, Klaviyo might say they generated $10,000 in sales for you this month and Facebook will say they did another 10 and Google will say they did another 10. And then all these other apps that you install say they did 10 each as well. And then you go, well, why have I only done 20k in sales, for example? You know what I mean? So everyone's just claiming credit where they can with no real accountability of whether that credit claim is due to them. And I think that's a little area that if I could get rid of like, like or have more transparency. Everyone's reporting on what they're claiming sales for accurately would be nice. But apart from that, like you got to have the other extreme which is what was e Commerce like 10 years ago? It was absolute trash. You know, what is it now? Awesome. So accessible, so easy to use. So I would say nothing. I would say it's so good. I'm really, really excited for where it's meant to be in the next few years as well.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Next question. Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get onto?
Eugene Cheng: It's really weird. It's not a business book, but it is, I would say a self help book.
Nathan Bush: Oh, Jay Shetty.
Eugene Cheng: Yes, it's Eight Rules of Love by Jay Shetty. I'm currently on it now. There's a few reasons why I recommend self help books to business and entrepreneurs. Now the reason is we're under immense amount of stress at all times. A lot of times a lot of entrepreneurs feel alone and feel lonely because it's your vision that you're championing and people are either in that vision or in the way. So it's a very lonely trek to the top a lot of the times. And if you as a human being, you as individual is not healthy mentally or anything like that that business suffers right through affects your ability to make quick, necessary decisions. It affects everything. And so I think that whilst business books are so useful, self help books have helped me make decisions, better decisions quicker. And it's also just understanding that if you have sort of like love for yourself, you have love for the business as well. And that means being able to really put that business first so it can look after for everyone else that's under its umbrella. So I actually recommend that book. I'm about halfway through that book and I think it's a fantastic book so far.
Nathan Bush: I love it. And just the last question, finish this sentence. The future of retail is dynamic.
Eugene Cheng: I guess it's ever changing, it's funky. I would say it's definitely funky. Right. We've see soared through retail from E commerce to brick and mortar to E commerce. You know, each lockdown that happened swung back and forth and now it's in a state where I think it's normalizing to what Pre Covid was. But AI is coming in to disrupt a lot of things and you've got, you know, big players like Amazon and stuff coming in too. So it's just so dynamic. Pre Covid was so fixed in its ways. And people were struggling to enter. Amazon was struggling to enter Australia. Everything was struggling. You know, big players like Brosa gone under, milk runs struggling. I think funky is a really cool word. It's unpredictable. It's. It's just dynamic. You've just got to sort of like, keep your finger on that pulse all the time.
Nathan Bush: I would actually say there's no space for mediocrity anymore, don't you reckon?
Eugene Cheng: It's so competitive now. You're fighting to be at the top and people at the top make 10% profit margin. So, you know, like, like you're literally out for blood. And alphablood is making 10% on the bottom line. And when I first started business, I was like a discount code. Yeah, man, chuck them 25%, right? And now I just realized, mate, I don't even want to give up 10% right now. You know what I mean? So, yeah, like, it's cutthroat. You know what, I take that all back. The future of retail is cutthroat. That's what it is.
Nathan Bush: You heard it here first. Eugene, thank you so much.
Eugene Cheng: You're so welcome. Jo, I'll speak to you too.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Eugene, jump back into episode 305. It's a good one. Eugene shares how old school networking led to sneaker laundry stores in the Middle East. He reveals the details of Sneaker Laundry's rebrand and tells us about that time and advertising blunder. Costume dealing.
Speaker A: Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to car.
