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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cut 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.
[Ad]: Today's checkout features Michael Janke, Gary Tramer and Andre Sofanow, co founders of natpat. They're a brand creating wearable stickers for kids that are infused with essential oils to offer a range of solutions to everyday problems. There's a patch to repel mozzies, one to aid sleep, and even a sensory patch to alleviate stress and anxiety. NATPAT started as a D2C brand and have sold millions of stickers worldwide. They are now stocked in retailers throughout Australia as well as the us, UK
Nathan Bush: and parts of Europe.
[Ad]: And even Kim Kardashian is on the natpat train.
Nathan Bush: Michael, Gary, Andre, thank you for joining us on the checkout. We had a great main chat in there around natpat and what you've built there. Everything from how Kim Kardashian found you as a brand organically through to your expansion internationally through Amazon and through retail channels. Incredible stories so far, but I've got five quick questions to get to know you guys a little bit better. So number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online? Michael, I'll start with you.
Michael Jankie: That's probably safe so Gary can think about, you know, some, some, you know, safe for work conversations to talk about. Listen, I love buying weird things like, you know, my wife, you know, often laughs about the packages that gets like, what strange thing, what strange thing is this today? The weirdest thing. I mean, like there's a lot of entertainment value that goes on in our house, but something I bought, it's actually a while ago now, but it was a online, it was a, like, I don't know, like this latex Thing and you, you load it up with some sort of liquid. This is down weird, but I don't
Nathan Bush: know where you're going with this.
Michael Jankie: It's like you push it in, it's like popping pimples. Anyway, I thought that would be a great gift for my wife. Just, you know, something to attack is super weird.
Nathan Bush: That is cool. That is weird. That fits the bill of the question. Well done. And weirdest thing.
Andrei Safonau: Have you heard of those stickers that repel mosquitoes? Honestly, you know, sometimes I have to buy from our own website and just to be on the other side and just buying and putting my own card and just being customer for yourself is just very weird feeling, I should say. Like, I've never experienced anything before.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Gary Tramer: Gary bought one of my best mates for his 40th, a sex toy for him to use. And I was on Amazon and he asked me to return it because it didn't fit. So there you go.
Nathan Bush: That is fantastic. Well, at least it didn't go to waste. Number two. Which retailer has inspired you most recently? Andre, I'll start with you.
Andrei Safonau: I was actually in the United States where we visited this retail called Shields in Minnesota. And, like, this store was like a really amusement park for kids. It was selling, like outdoor camping gear and so on, but it has, like, so many attractions. Lovely stuff. Kids are browsing around and like, wow. First of all, I understand why parents bring their kids to this store, but at the same time, it's the best place for us. A lot of inspiration just to see
Nathan Bush: how to bring a brand to life, like when you're playing in that area. That's fantastic, Gary.
Gary Tramer: I'm going to be boring inside Target. We're in Target in the US and just the way in which they're thinking about our product, serving the customer and the speed in which they can help serve the customer so well, particularly our target audience, which are mums with young kids, is quite amazing. And the speed in which they're moving, especially with us and our product line is. Is really, really impressive.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. Awesome, Michael.
Michael Jankie: So I'm going to give you two a physical one and then an online retailer physical one. I was actually, I was over in Hawaii not long ago and went into what was like a Toys R Us, but it was for candy, the kids candy. And it was really interesting to see store layout. You know, just sort of how they map a customer journey through a store and get them to buy different things and see different things, but also playing with eye levels. What Was really interesting was the older you were, the more age appropriate the height of the. The product was. So it was just, I don't know, that sort of stuff. Part of it's like my entrepreneurial brain. I walk into a restaurant and don't look at the menu. I, I count how many tables there are and how full it is to try and work out the, you know, unit economics of a bit of that business. Anyway, so this candy store was, it was gigantic. But it was really interesting in the way that they were not just putting different candies on the shelf and see what sells, but actually optimizing for age. Optimizing? Yeah, for height, those sort of things. And optimizing the journey through the. The store to buy things. So that was a really interesting study. Online retail. Listen, there's a, there's a lot that interests me and we, you know, we look at a lot and we. It's really hard with online so we look at a lot but you can say things look nice and things look pretty but you know, it's all about how does it convert? You know, a junk website might convert better than the most highly polished website but you know, a highly polished website might build the brand a little bit better than others. There's one I've done a bunch of shopping from myself, not for myself but as gifts and I get their emails and socials as well. Journey of something which started off as a puzzle company, I think, I don't know, they're just that package of the way that they promote where the website's built and they're probably up to thousands of SKUs now and probably started with five or six.
Nathan Bush: Are they really? I haven't bought there for a while or I bought back when they were a puzzle company but haven't been back since.
Michael Jankie: I think just really, really interesting product but also just a lovely layout and tie in of all channels which I think just is very big for brand building and you know, they're selling 60 or $70 puzzles which in reality as a packaged goods company I understand that, you know, the cost of manufacturer is much lower but they've got to build in all their costs to get a sale. You can buy cheap these products cheaper elsewhere or similar things elsewhere, but what they really nail is the desirability of the product and its unique differences that make you, you know, push, push up your, you know, your ability to spend.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, great examples. Thank you. All right, third question. Name a piece of tech that you or your E commerce business couldn't live without. Gary, I'm Going to start with you.
Gary Tramer: I'd say slack and I'd say the reason I'd say that is because we have a distributed team. We work asynchronously and without that I have no idea how we would be able to organize.
Nathan Bush: Yep, yep, perfect.
Michael Jankie: Michael, I'm going to give you two. One is Shopify mostly for the obvious reasons but they've really, they've been doing it for 20 odd years but democratizing, you know, online retail, it is amazing. So we run a multi eight figure business. We sell globally all different currencies, all different tax collections, all different product listing, all these sort of things that like what we do for you know, a few thousand dollars a month that we pay Shopify, it is wild.
Nathan Bush: And you're Shopify Plus.
Michael Jankie: Yeah, we are Shopify Plus. It is wild what we can do and it's still like whilst I will complain and please don't tell Shopify too much about this but like I will complain about costs. You know, we like to save money wherever we can. It still amazes me that you know, we pay Shopify less than we pay our email platform. And the Shopify team are great. We've got you know, merchant services managers that we've been dealing with with currently and over the years that like, it's sort of, they just, they find solutions.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Michael Jankie: The other one is actually Air Wallix. So I deal with a lot of the operational finance, legal, legal side of the business. And again we operate a global business, multi currency moving money all over the, you know, backwards and forwards and you know dealing with a, a Neo bank is phenomenal. Like it's from like multiple currency bank accounts to abilities to do direct deposits to charging to, to you know, foreign exchange. It's just, I don't know, you know, I have Anz or Commbank or Nab call me and pitch different things and it's just like they just can't do it and they can't move quickly and so just as a operational thing again we're a fully remote business but, but the banking infrastructure provided by Airwallex for us and you know, there are a few others, it's, it's just phenomenal. Like Airwallex has probably only been around for four or five years. You just couldn't do like we couldn't operate our business the way we operate our business without it.
Nathan Bush: That's awesome. I've spoken to the team there but I haven't gone deep in Airwallocks but it's always great to hear it firsthand from the people that use it. So thank you for that Andre. Any e commerce tech that you can't
Andrei Safonau: live without, I'll give it to you as well. One of those is Meta Media buying engine. Like you know I've been doing performance marketing for like 15 years roughly right. I've seen different vertical, different clients and to this date no one can match what Facebook is doing across like you know, acquisition of customers. It's impressive how they managed to progress. It's impressive how they managed to deploy the AI across the product suite. And it's just blood for all those, you know, DTC companies that just rely on them. And I think we are as well to a big degree if it will no matter, I don't know like who will be using. I maybe will go old school the way but not in DTC commercial worlds.
Nathan Bush: And are you mainly using Meta's Advantage Plus?
Andrei Safonau: Ah well it's a big thing.
Michael Jankie: Yeah.
Andrei Safonau: We'll do everything we try to. If Meta has a tool we try to use that it may be not work as good as their best tool but in the world of incrementality we try to use everything there is a reason for it. So that's putting aside second tool I would suggest ChatGPT has been like when it was released. We have our company has already been a couple years old and you know, I just see that these days how our all operations changed massively. Like how we have cut on costs, how you know, when we had to hire freelancers, hire different contractors to help do these things or they took us like days. Now it's just so easy. Like I'm in charge of a few hours every day just to embrace some ideas, to pump the copy, to analyze something like it's such a big different game changers made my life so much efficient.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. Great tips. Thank you guys. Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Michael Jankie: Michael, Most of my reading is actually online so I'm not a not a heavy book reader and I'm actually not a heavy podcast listener. So I don't know but I will spend too much time on Twitter and I use Twitter as like an education piece. I don't use LinkedIn as an educational piece. I would say I use Twitter just to deep dive into things and it's sort of funny. So internally Gary, Andre and I run a slack channel called Swipes Marketing Swipes and often it's you know, all of us really posting things that we've seen on Twitter, interesting tidbits, takeaways, those Sorts of things. So I'm going to say, aside from your podcast, Nathan, people should be, I don't know, just like I'm a consumer on Twitter, not a poster. But and we've actually got some team members that have totally come. Actually two of our key roles have totally come from, you know, what was people just posting, saying on Twitter and us going, you know what you're talking about. You're interesting. We'd love to work together.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, beautiful. Great tip, Andre.
Andrei Safonau: Can you Recommend podcast operators? 9 figure operators? There is a spin off of marketing operators. That's nine figure dollar businesses, like half a billion dollar businesses out there that we aspire to and a lot of things they share, you know, ahead of us, but at the same time we can, I personally can benefit a lot and I think businesses who are in eight figures or seven can do as well. Highly recommend to listen to those guys.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. And that's a theme that I got from our main episode with you guys is that you're always looking for the operators, all the people who are that two, three steps ahead of you and focusing your efforts to learn and upskill on those people who are at that next stage to level up. So that was a great tip. I think, out of that, that and what you're saying there. Andre, Gary, do things differently.
Andrei Safonau: I would say we're also looking for things differently. If someone else, oh, here's the playbook, here's the process. Like, no, definitely we're not following that. Let's find someone who've done things a different way, even though if they're not big, but different, that will be way more interesting for us.
Nathan Bush: Perfect. That's awesome. Gary. Books or podcasts, you know, I find
Gary Tramer: fascinating the acquired podcast. For those that have listened to that or that, I recommend it just because I really love the way they tear down over three to five hours of business. And the seven powers, the Hamilton seven powers and the just the different ways
Michael Jankie: different businesses tackle that.
Gary Tramer: And then to Andre's point, trying to find little angles that we could apply for ourselves just to expand the mind. Like listening to Nvidia's story or Microsoft story or, you know, Berkshire Hathaway's story, but with such granular detail around the strategies and the things that, you know, these pivotal moments that created success, I find fascinating.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's absolutely. That podcast is phenomenal, but gives me ptsd. Like trying to put that, that level of content and that level of detail together. I'm like, oh my God, it's just phenomenal. The effort that goes into it.
[Ad]: Now I'm going to throw the last
Nathan Bush: question out to all of you. Whoever wants to jump in can jump in. What is your biggest challenge today?
Andrei Safonau: Biggest challenge is rolling out the new packaging and branding because we are scrappy and I see online some people are selling our products that are like or branding that a couple years old and we are excited to allow a new one that's very different. How can we actually marry those together? And there is a transition plan and we don't really alienate like our co fans but also like introduce new fresh things. That's a challenge. And just from operations perspective as well from logistics and website transition and like all our partners, that's the thing.
Nathan Bush: Fantastic. Sounds like we talked a lot about that around the challenge of how do you bring all those channels together so they complement each other rather than work against it. It sounds like you're doing a great job there. So Michael, Gary, Andre, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Andrei Safonau: Thank you.
Michael Jankie: Thanks for having us.
Andrei Safonau: Pleasure. Thank you.
[Ad]: To hear more from Michael, Gary and Andre, jump back into episode 419 where we delve into NATPAD's channel marketing mix and how it works. The team also share how they position themselves as the original and the best in market and how they combat back the copycats that keep coming. We also hear how Kim Kardashian herself endorsed their product without them knowing and without any payment at all. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
