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Cale McPherson: We catch up with previous, add two
[Ad]: cut guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better
Cale McPherson: and leave you with a little extra
[Ad]: inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy. Today's checkout features Jason Thomas and Cale McPherson, the creative duo behind Sodi, the Aussie electrolyte brand that's redefining hydration with science backed innovation and premium ingredients. From converting chest freezes into ice baths to championing bold branding choices, we chat about everything from the inspiration behind shaping their brand to the lessons they've built from building Soda Sodi from the ground up. Jason and Kyle, welcome to the Checkout. Thank you for joining us today. We had a brilliant main chat back a couple of weeks ago where we talked about all things which I never thought we would on add to cart all things salt and where you source salt from and what salt does to the body as well as some amazing tips around building brands through performance marketing and your new strategy around retail and wholesale distribution. So thank you very much for that. But I have five quick questions for you to learn a little bit more about you guys. All right, question number one. What is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Jason Thomas: Oh mom would be a couple of years ago when I was buying some I wanted to make an infrared sauna home but I wanted a full spectrum one and I was buying full spectrum infrared globes. But to get a I've actually got one sitting here the soccer that had enough wattage to it. I had to actually buy a reptile heating lamps that wouldn't short circuit my house. So I had these reptile kit lamps kits rocking up and I remember someone was there going why is there reptile gear rocking up to your house? And I had to sort of explain it makes sense, it's for a sauna, it's Full spectrum. And then. Yeah, so that. That'd be it.
[Ad]: Just putting reptile gear into my sauna.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, yeah.
Cale McPherson: I mean mine's pretty similar. I mean, to be quite honest, my now wife made a reference to this in our wedding vows that, you know, she's constantly supporting the weird things that are rocking up for the house that in the better, betterment of myself. But yeah, literally bought a chest freezer which doesn't seem right. But when people come to our house, it's converted into an ice bath with a, with a water filter and thermometer and everything like that. So it's not your average chest freezer.
[Ad]: It's.
Cale McPherson: It's now an ice bath, you know, that sits in the shed.
[Ad]: Look at you guys hacking your way to better health.
Jason Thomas: Driving, driving dramas. Ice bars.
Cale McPherson: Good work.
[Ad]: All right, number two, which retailer has inspired you most recently?
Cale McPherson: Tricky one. Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, I mean in the same sort of vein as us. I really admire what chief are doing from a. Pretty much use a lot of their products. So they sort of sit in the same performance product space as us, but they're definitely catering to a market where they, they started their, their products with the animal meat focused bar which sort of very similar to us in the sense of reframing a category. Everyone those sort of protein bar spaces as, you know, junk filled, get all the sugar and get all the whey protein in and just fill it with a lot of stuff. They kind of flipped it on its head and created a really unprocessed bar that was obviously backed by meat. They came really successful on that. Now I've launched a whole bunch of products on the back of that. Whether it be collagen. Whether it be collagen bars that are actually super delicious. Yeah, all sorts of things. So yeah, we're big fans of their products and I personally am as well. So really just love watching them grow and watch doing what they're doing.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, mine would be. I'll go slightly different direction with it. Mine would be all these sort of niche or smaller shoe brands that are starting to pop up that are really starting to take some of the market from the big players. Nike Adidas. You sort of see the Saucon of the world almost become like a fashion icon that baristas and people walking to cafes are wearing to these smaller trail hoka brands that really started to take a chip at the big brand. So sort of how they've done that is full weight interesting for me to look at. So it'd be, yeah, any of Those smaller shoe brands that have gone up against the big guys.
Cale McPherson: Yeah, I can see that.
[Ad]: I can see you've got the, the challenger mindset that you, you love getting in early and the innovation and pushing the ideas and finding your strong advocates early. That seems to resonate with you.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, we used to say to each other early on when we're doing something there's always a better way to do something. There's got to be a better way to do it. And that's.
[Ad]: Yeah, I can imagine. The flip side of that is that you must get frustrated especially in the health space when you see new brands pop up, especially maybe influencer brands and people like that who are launching products, health products that are just shit.
Jason Thomas: We, yeah, to put it nicely, we, we laugh on a daily basis when we see products pop up that may not have done the hard yards of figuring out what's actually going to move the needle a in someone's health and wellbeing or not actually going to move the needle in sort of a market. The health and wellbeing space is exciting and also challenging space because there's always new ingredients, new trends popping up, new people promoting whatever it is and people can get lost in that I think and sort of create a whole brand around this one sort of small two week trend and then all of a sudden that trend actually doesn't do anything or that special ingredient is. Turns out to be xyz. So yeah, I think it's challenging to sort of actually figure out what works, what's a trend and what's actually important to someone's health and then sort of the rest, once you've changed someone's health and sort of daily energy or whatnot, the rest of speaks for itself.
[Ad]: Yep, makes sense. All right, number three, name a piece of tech that you or your E commerce business couldn't live without.
Jason Thomas: Let me start. Good name. Obviously we're a design branding background so we heavily in the sort of design software tech space. So we bounce between the Adobe suite to Figma is a big one. We use, we use even the figjam portion of that for all our brainstorming strategy sessions, even all of our sort of documents and anyone anything needs to find is in Figma. We kind of use that almost like a secondary Google Drive for anyone to find stuff. So probably couldn't live without figment to be honest with you.
Cale McPherson: Yeah. And then I guess following on from that like early on it's, it's big but sort of later in the, later in the stage it's, it's even bigger. What we've found recently is we use Klaviyo. But I mean sort of any sort of email software. The value that is built from those email like direct communication. We kind of have always said that if Facebook and Instagram get turned off tomorrow, what do you have and who are you speaking to that the email database is one of those things that is such a great way to communicate with customers and get that educational point across like we kind of spoke about. So yeah, Klaviyo for us is huge.
Jason Thomas: Good one.
[Ad]: Beautiful. Klaviyo is a friend of the show. Can I get from you one tip from out of Klaviyo? One feature, one tip that you're loving that you go. Anyone with it has to do this.
Cale McPherson: Stacking the email flows and building them out to near precision is kind of like what our team really spend their time doing. I think it's really cool to navigate someone through that flow. If you send out sort of that general email advertising, know 10 steps about hydrating this summer or something like that to to segment into, you know, who read it, who didn't, what to send them if they did read it, what to send if they didn't read it. And sort of working down, you can send sort of five or six emails off the back of one email just to gauge interest and sort of navigate them through. We're very, very lucky that most of our customers are sort of sorry if not already customers are very, very warm customers. So you don't have to get too far into it. But yeah, we're sort of always amazed at our warehouse gets very angry at us when we send our emails.
[Ad]: They have to do some work.
Cale McPherson: Yeah, it turns a. It turns a busy day into a maybe not going home today kind of thing.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, mom would be pushing the design as well. Just look up some basic design principles. Clubio is great and all those platforms are great, but if you're kind of using off the shelf templates, you can kind of run into some problems. So just research some basic design principles and actually think about the purpose of the EDM and structure your design and hierarchical information in a way that reflects the purpose and then combine that with an external design platform, whether it's Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, whatever. You've got to really elevate the designs because in a world of EDM rampage, especially through those sale periods, you need something that's going to feel refreshing, it's going to stand out. So just combine some basic design principles with excellent design program to make your EDM stand out.
[Ad]: Great tips, guys. Love it. Thank you. All right, number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Jason Thomas: Yeah, I'm a. I'm a big. And I probably quoted too much. I'm a big Seth Godin fan. So any of his books is a must must reads. I just think the way he talks about marketing and intertwines it with a brand and business sense is just super important for someone to read. Especially in the world of performance marketing where you may be told that Facebook ad performance is the only driver of business. Where Seth communicates that these are only channels, marketing is much more than digital marketing. It's creative marketing plan and then utilize these channels off back of that and then sort of embed your whole brand and values and all of that through. Through those channels. So any of his books is great. His latest one strategy is phenomenal. It's just individual points and paragraphs of lessons that he's learned over his years of educating people. And you can just pick up a read any page and learn a point and then figure out if you want to implement it or not. It's. Yeah, it's really good.
[Ad]: Great tip. I saw Seth speak last year, late last year, and it just reminded me again to go back to the books because I haven't read them for five or even longer, 10 years, and I'm like, I've got to go back because they. While the world moves on, his principles actually don't.
Jason Thomas: Timeless. Yeah. His principles sort of sit above the trend of marketing.
[Ad]: Yeah.
Jason Thomas: So you can just adapt what they push, push it down into those marketing trends or channels. So. Yeah, just amazing stuff.
Cale McPherson: Yeah, good. Very cliche. But like start with why I was very much a blueprint to starting our brands and even formed part of the ethos of like our design agency and speaking to clients. And you would be surprised at how many people obviously haven't really dived into that sort of level of thinking, especially around like early on in their business journey and like before it's even sort of practiced the ground again. There's not too many people who wouldn't have heard of sort of Simon. But definitely starting out that book, just grasping that concept and not just manufacturing it, but reading it three times and then really, really understanding why we, and we spoke about this kind of earlier. Don't just bring another shit product out into the market. Work out why you're doing it for who you know and what problems are you going to solve. And I think that, you know, is a blueprint to success. I love that.
[Ad]: I did have a chuckle when I was looking at the Divide agency website and one of your call outs or one of your principles is the world has enough shit stuff. And I thought that was very nicely put.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it goes back to it. There's no shortage of products or businesses out there. Very few of them actually are relevant to move the needle for someone. So it's just a principle that we think about. If you're going to do something, do it right, do it with purpose, do it with reason, because it's going to be better in the long run.
[Ad]: Last question I've got for you, gents. What is your biggest challenge today?
Jason Thomas: I'll go. Holding stock at the moment is our biggest. Our biggest problem. We're sort of increasing production every month and sales go up at a higher rate. So we're having trouble holding on a stock in the warehouse, which is a good problem to have. Rather have that problem than trying to sell stock going out of date. So it's putting a few things in place now to get that humming a little more just so we can have a bit of stock Runway in the warehouse. So that would be my one. Yeah, yeah.
[Ad]: Stock moving quickly, especially. We're going to keep rebranding the packages.
Jason Thomas: Exactly.
Cale McPherson: Yeah.
Jason Thomas: Yeah.
Cale McPherson: Hot warehouse too.
Jason Thomas: Yeah.
Cale McPherson: Mine's probably a bit more personal. I've got a nine week old newborn at home for us. My first child. So balancing that and startup life is. Is. Challenge is the wrong word. It's more of a great, great thing to be working out and working out
[Ad]: how to be a dad and that's a big challenge.
Cale McPherson: Run a business. I don't think we'll ever work it
Jason Thomas: out, but we'll give it a crack.
[Ad]: How nice. It does bring a new perspective to it all though, doesn't it?
Jason Thomas: Huge.
Cale McPherson: Yeah. And just how you go about interacting with your team and all that kind of stuff, it. It just makes you. Yeah. More appreciative of everyone and definitely of their time. And, yeah, you definitely want to get home a little bit sooner, that's for sure.
[Ad]: But beautiful. I love it. Jason, Kyle, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Cale McPherson: Yeah, thank you, man.
Jason Thomas: Cheers.
Cale McPherson: Cheers.
[Ad]: To hear more from Jason and Kale, jump back into our main episode where they share the amazing story behind sodi's initial growth. From grassroots Facebook groups to being stocked now by over 650 retailers. And we hear why they're obsessed with educating Aussies on the real science of salt. Trust me, I learned a hell of a lot about Sol.
