Rob Ward: Back then it was really validation tool. Here's my idea. Don't have the capital. Do you guys like it? Keeping a website offline, waiting till everything's perfect. It's never going to be perfect. Get out there, get something up. That's when you start learning, that's when you start iterating. Actually you got to really make everyone realize it's okay to fuck it up. It's fine, let's take that learning. Let's own the learning. And once you start owning it and taking it, people don't feel bad about it. They feel liberated by it.
[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 from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E Commerce Talent Agency. Now it's fair to say that there's not many people that I would trust
Nathan Bush: my phone with, especially in an unlocked state, but today's guest is at the top of the list.
Nathan Bush: That guest is Rob Ward, co founder
Nathan Bush: and CEO of Quad Lock. Now 10 years old, Quad Lock is a case mounting system for people with active lifestyles. Whether this be driving, riding, cruising, running, golfing, cycling or even singing. Yeah, singing is an active lifestyle.
Nathan Bush: Quad Lock has all your phone mounting needs covered.
Nathan Bush: Quad Lock is now sold, started in
Nathan Bush: Australia and is now sold in over 100 countries with an annual revenue exceeding $100 million.
Nathan Bush: Better still, it's entered the vernacular with many people no longer mounting their phones, but rather quad locking their phones. That's where we all want to get to, right?
Nathan Bush: Today, Rob takes us on the journey of how he started Quad Lock with his co founder Chris. It's a brilliant story given they've been complet completely bootstrapped up until a massive scale and have scaled responsibly along the way. I really enjoyed hearing Rob's approach for this. You wouldn't believe that it actually starts with a novelty bottle opener, but I'll let him tell that story. We also discuss how they approach Quad Lock rip offs, the beauty of having limited SKUs and why they're focusing on the direct to consumer model to serve their customers better. Now, before we launch in, if you're coming along to the Add to Cart meetup at Retail Global tomorrow night, make sure you say hi, I'd love to see you there. Tickets are getting really tight, but if you head to the Eventbrite page in the show notes or from the Retail Global Agenda, you may be able to snap up some of the last spots.
Nathan Bush: Really looking forward to that one.
Nathan Bush: All right, so thanks to our sponsors, Shopify plus and Signet. Here's our conversation with Rob Ward, co founder and CEO of Quadlock. Rob, thank you for joining us on
Nathan Bush: Add to Cart, especially racing your way back from, from your Facebook lunch to join us when you couldn't get an Uber.
Rob Ward: Yeah, I think. Well, thanks, Nathan. It's one of those things when you throw that much VC money at something and you educate everyone that their service should be amazing service and really, really cheap. It's actually a false economy. I think that's what we're seeing playing out pretty much right now with Uber.
Nathan Bush: Well, I hope Facebook at least bought you lunch.
Rob Ward: No comment. But yeah.
Nathan Bush: All right, let's get into it again for people who may not have heard of Quad Lock, and I doubt there's many people in Australia haven't. Can you tell us how Quad Lock started with your co founder, Chris?
Rob Ward: Yeah, definitely. So for those that may not have heard of it, it's a case based mounting system for people with active lifestyle. So if you use your iPhone and you're into running or riding your bike or your motorcycle or boating or anything like that, we're the thing that means you can use your smartphone and all the apps on your smartphone in that activity. Which is ever since we, you know, 10 years ago started, this has just become more and more and more important. So actually started. My co founder, Chris Peters was actually working for an industrial design mob in Sydney at the time and he just got the brand new iPhone, it was a three. And you couldn't actually get him in Australia at the time. He jailbroke it and he was trying to get around Sydney on his bicycle. City didn't know and he's riding around having to pull it out of his pocket all the time. He's like, I just need this thing on my bars. And that was sort of the genesis of the idea. And it's sort of, you know, from we did start in cycle, but we sort of had other ideas that this could become a bigger, a bigger thing than just cycle.
Nathan Bush: That's amazing. You just brought back memories of jailbreaking iPhones back when they were tied to carriers and really limited. That's hilarious. Okay, so in my research that I did, one of the early activities that you did was a Kickstarter campaign. But we've actually heard a few Kickstarter stories on add to cart. But yours stood out because of some celebrity traction that you got as well.
Rob Ward: Yeah, I think you might have your timeline slightly out here or I could
Nathan Bush: just be doing dodgy research.
Rob Ward: Yeah, I mean it was 10, 11 years ago. So what actually happened was we had a couple of business going at the time and the first sort of consumer business we did was after I went right through. I watched every video on Kickstarter and which you couldn't do anymore. And we came up with the idea of an iPhone bottle opener called the opener case. And we launched that on Kickstarter. It was our experiment into e commerce. Consumers shipping a product, Facebook, all these like, you know, web 2.0, all these things that were sort of new, transacting online, Shopify, all this fun, all this stuff we sort of take for granted now. It was just. It wasn't as easy as it was as it is now, but it was all just starting to become accessible and the barriers to like entry were coming down. Kickstarter was a part of that. So we sort of thought we got an idea, let's really use Kickstarter to validate it. And you're going to remember in the early days of Kickstarter, you see Kickstarter campaigns that come now very polished. Like the product is going to go whether Kickstarter goes or not. Back then it was really validation tool. Here's my idea. I don't have the capital. Do you guys like it? If so, pre, buy them and we'll go from there. And that's sort of how we started. So we did that with the opener. It took off, did really well. It was quite polarizing product which we like. People either loved it or they hated it. But they talked about it. So it was perfect.
Nathan Bush: How could you hate it?
Rob Ward: People hated it. I'm telling you, people hated it. And it was perfect because they told. They talked more about it, they clicked on it and they told their friends how much they hate it and their friends come and buy it. So it was perfect and it was just polarizing. Then there was people who loved it just go to a barbecue or a pub or a bar and just. They sold themselves, so to speak, which we needed because we had no money.
Nathan Bush: It's got that great social experiment and like bragging rights, doesn't it?
Rob Ward: And also it's got like iPhone was a very in thing at the time. Still isn't in thing, but it was more novel and having that like an Internet connected device opening a beer. It was sort of a bit absurd, but a bit of fun. And it did appeal to a certain. Certain demographic.
Nathan Bush: I still remember there were beer apps around that time. It was literally like Heineken or something. And you could just open up the app and it would just be a fizzy beer and that's all it was.
Rob Ward: And you pretend to drink it. Yes, that's one of the first. Yeah, yeah. And the beer would go down.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rob Ward: On that bubbly old iPhone3. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And it was like, how cool is this?
Rob Ward: I know they've got a gyro in the phone. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Yes. Okay. That's the euro we're talking.
Rob Ward: Yeah. So we're geeking out now. But yeah, so we did that product and then it was. We knew. We were sort of aware this is going to be a fad. And Chris already had that idea as we spoke about around, you know, the iPhone and Google Maps was just new. No Apple Maps at that time. And putting that like right up in front, it was a great idea. And then it was sort of. We took the money from that, built quad lock out further and then once again went back to Kickstarter and said, there's this other idea. It looks like this, do you want to get involved? And once again, people got around it. But the funny thing with quadlock is it's not as polarizing. It's not as much of a fad. It's kind of actually. That makes sense. I'm interested. I'll do that. Other people, like, no way. I'm putting my probably back then $600 iPhone on my handlebars and things like that. So it was a bit different. And it did well funded itself. We had a bit of a following. A lot of back then. A lot of it was about like building our following before we do something. And then based on that, effectively we sort of, you know, month and months slowly grew, not like the opener slowly grew and then had some big learnings that we had to work out on messaging, how to talk about it, what actually is the benefit that people are buying. We had a lot of really good solid learnings with that, which we worked out. We had to sell less to sell more, which was not that it's a quad lock and you can put on your bike and you can put a wall mount or you can put it on your wall and you could do this. This, like all those things are cool. But we went back to saying quad lock, the iPhone, bike mount. And this just hammered that message home. And this Sales just took off once we sort of learned that took a little while.
Nathan Bush: Now if you listen to this podcast, you probably have a little hunch that there's a big future in E commerce. And if you're anything like me, you want to know what the next big trends are. Luckily, Shopify have done the hard work for us and compiled the Future Future of Commerce report for 2022. They identify the main trends in e commerce, retail and shipping, and they go a step further with practical tips on how to implement them and insights from the best in the business. There's heaps of info available on the site on what I must say is a very well designed page as well as a comprehensive PDF available for download. Head on over to shopify.com research futureofcommerce to download it today. We'll also put the link in our show notes for easy access.
Nathan Bush: I could imagine there's a big trust barrier that you'd have to build there or get over because like you said, these iPhones at the time were precious things that are like, do not break my iPhone because there's not many of them and I'm really lucky to have it.
Rob Ward: And it's still precious. I mean, if you name another device or another thing other than maybe your kids and your wife or something like that, you could take away and you'd feel as lost without it. It's not really your Mac or your computer or your car or whatever. It's still the iPhone or Android, whatever. At that time we were only iPhone as well.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, okay, gotcha.
Rob Ward: Well, at the time, this is a long time ago, Internet was pretty different. I think you really, you have to think about it. You know, Facebook was still pretty new. Like if you had someone follow, you couldn't put videos on there. No, you could put videos on, you just couldn't do lives. You just put a YouTube link in and it would play natively within Facebook.
Nathan Bush: But your fans actually saw it organically, right?
Rob Ward: Yeah. Taking people on the journey was the key to it back then. It was when we're doing opener, it was, this is what we're doing. We don't know if the blade should be this thick or this thick. We're making all these different ones. We're opening all these beers with iPhones. We want. That's absurd. But I love it. I'm going to buy one. And then from there it's like, okay, so we're putting this on the bike, we're lifting the bike up with it. We're just doing all this basic stuff. People are watching it and they go, okay, this is like, this is a considered product. These guys are really trying to solve a problem and it's not just this piece of plastic in a cardboard box. It's like there's people connected to it and you think about a lot of the products. It's probably happening more so now, but back then a lot of what you would buy was cheap shiny stuff or something that has a big brand name on it that you've known for ever. You just know that name. It wasn't so much. So, oh, there's these guys down the road, unless it was a cafe or a bakery or something like that. So getting like a consumer product from people that you could look and say those two dudes made that thing and I'm buying it off then that was sort of novel back then. It's a bit more normal now.
Nathan Bush: It's really cool. So tell us. We've gone down. It's been good for me because bit of reminiscing about that time and therapy. Tell us about where Quadlock are now because in the research tools that I've used and some of the conversations we've had, I really do think you are one of the most under the radar success stories in E commerce in Australia. Can you give us an idea on the scale and the reach of Quadlock globally?
Rob Ward: Nathan, you sound like the emails that get high. We acquire brands and sell them on Amazon. We want to buy Quadlock. We've seen that you are.
Nathan Bush: That was going to be my next question actually.
Rob Ward: Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, we've like I said 10 years at this now. 10 years plus we're selling over 100 countries. We're north of $100 million in revenue, profitable from day one, still very profitable now. And that's probably sort of the key to our success is we've been always fairly measured in how we've gone about it. We sort of find the win and then ride the win and then engineer the next win while we're doing that. And we always, we do things in a scalable way but it's not like we do things like we don't go and double the team overnight, although we've come close to doing that at times. But everything is sort of pulled from the market led. We get something right then we follow it up. That's sort of how we've always done it. We find a win, we follow it up and a lot of it comes back to it Sounds good now, but a lot of it comes back to like there wasn't A choice. We didn't have any money where a bootstrap startup. We only had as much money as we had and that was just personal finances. Like we had to product businesses. As you probably know, not the easiest things to scale. You need to buy big moqs, you need to hold stock for sometimes long amounts of time. But that DTC nature that we started with, you get paid instantly and it's just like you can work out a way to sell one and buy a whole hit more and get them in the door, not pay yourself. You can make it work. And that's what we did for a long time. And then obviously pay yourself, get more staff, do all that. But even with the more staff, even with the budgets we have today, still a bit of that bootstrapping mindset of like, this is, yeah, we can do that, but is it going to pay? How are we going to measure it? How are we going to know whether we should be spending the money here or here? We got to work that out first before we go and spend the first cent. That sort of default mode of operating here, like everyone sort of thinks like that.
Nathan Bush: How do you get that?
Nathan Bush: Because that's a founder's mentality, right? That's an entrepreneur's mentality. How do you get that throughout the rest of your team?
Rob Ward: One thing is we're lucky. We have lots of team members here that have been here a long time. You know, some being seven, six, five years. Like we were pretty small still back then. So, you know, some of those guys have come in, learnt the trade, so to speak, and they know like what they learned was those ideas. So that becomes their sort of almost default way of, way of thinking. It's not like you're pulling people out of an agency and giving them a 20 million budget on day one. Like, that hasn't really happened here. It's more like we do it this way and we try and work it out that way. And if we get a win, we ride it hard and then we go from there. The other thing we do well, I think this is another great thing we have is. And I realized someone came into the business like they came in probably almost five years ago now. But I realized at the time, like, actually you got to really make everyone realize it's okay to fuck it up. It's fine. As long as we work it out, we know it, that's great. Let's make, take that learning, let's own the learning. And once you start owning it and taking it, people don't feel bad about it. They feel liberated by it. And then you're like, so that means we can actually try anything. And that's very liberating. We can try anything we want. We'll throw as much of the wall at the wall as we can. Whatever sticks, we'll do more of that. And that kind of mentality, it's logical, I think, but it's not the default thinking of everyone when they land. So over time I've realized you've got to spend a bit of time to make sure everyone sort of works. Gets cool with that quickly because you don't want to be the one in the room going, oh, I've done this thing and it didn't work out. Because what we want is like, bring it up, let's talk about it. Look at it, nobody cares. It's like great, worth trying. Let's either scrap it or let's iterate on that. Is there another version of that? Where do we go from here? Yeah. So that's some of those kind of default ways of thinking I think have contributed a lot to our success. But I do think if someone had given us a whole heap of money at the start and said, go and build this thing, it wouldn't be like that. It was built from necessity.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Do you remember either a really great win that changed the trajectory or the scale of your business or a massive fuck up that you learned from? Is there any that stand out for you over those 10 years?
Rob Ward: I tell you, this is really early. And I almost got to it before was when we're saying we became the iPhone bike mount and we started selling heaps of things. That was great because people would understand the message. They come and they buy the iPhone bike mount at the same time. We're like, it's meant to be so much more than this. We're meant to be making all these other products. What if we can't make it work? And then this was a huge win. We were like, right. We put our hats on. We thought so. People at the time. We didn't realize it then. Still early days. But we're not an iPhone case brand. We're a motorcycle product. We're a cycling product. We're a car product, we're a full drive product, we're a boating product. We're all these things. And this happens to be mounting a smartphone. So we're the activity first and we speak to people. Activity first. And we took us a little while to realize that it's obvious in hindsight, like everything, but we sort of took everything off the Side just went, iPhone, bike me. And then we're like, right, how do we get it back on there? And you'd come to our site and you'd shop by what iPhone you have and things like that. I cringe thinking about it now, to be honest. And. But where we ended up is like, no, no, no. This person's a cyclist. They're a runner. So then we've changed it to, you shop by activity. And it sounds obvious in hindsight. It's funny, I remember we were flying to CES and we sort of launched this website and we were like, if we can start selling these extra products that we already had, like the running arm bound, the drive solution, that kind of thing, and keep selling cycle. If we can put them all up and the next day we sell the same amount or slightly more, we're onto a good thing with one. And you know when you're working on something, you sort of start convincing yourself at the same time. I was aware of that. I'm just like, it's just. It's either gonna work or it's not gonna work. We put it up there and we actually sold more the next day, more the day after that. We went, right, we can start tailoring our message. But then we took those learnings and those learnings, then ran all through all of our ads, all around, messaging, everything. Like, you'll see an ad and you'll just think, oh, quad Lock, they're just the motorcycle mount company. They just do that. But then when you come, you'll end up in the motorcycle seconds. But then you realize, hang on, they do more than that. But if we try to sell that everything at once, I think it comes back to trust. Like, you want something that's really solid on your adventure tourer, keeping you charged so you can go and ride two weeks in the rain, mud, dirt, all this kind of thing. You've got to trust it. If you have this brand tell you, oh, yeah, we do the best cycling mounts and the best desk charger, and we do the best calm and we do the best warm out, and we do a really good motorcycle.
Nathan Bush: Maybe, Maybe, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Rob Ward: We've taken it and we still take. We still think about it like that today. So that was a little win. Like, it's not like we doubled sales overnight or something, but we started selling more with more complexity on the website and we didn't lose conversions. That was a huge win. Like, we wouldn't be here without that win.
Nathan Bush: And even today, you can see on the website that you've got a really great gif, I think it is on the homepage, which shows all the uses, like go through them really quick, car, bikes, marine, motorcycle, and then even get someone using it to play guitar. And then underneath, really clear categories around car, marine. So it's a great way.
Rob Ward: It hasn't changed much since. We're actually working on a new homepage at the moment which is just the same version. Just looks a bit prettier.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. And then in terms of your customers, do you in a CRM or. Or in your backend where you store your customer data, do you have them really clearly labeled and segmented around those activities?
Rob Ward: Yeah, that's a good question. So the way we think about it, even when we do customer surveys and things like that, we try and extract information from the customer. Not all our customers are the same. So we know that. And it's not like we're a retailer where they may be selling T shirts. And you like this T shirt and you like this T shirt. There's some people who just want to know about something for their motorcycle. There's other people who just want to know about something for their road bike and they don't care in between. So what we talk about is people get into quad lock through like a passion category. So effectively we solve a problem in their passion category. So they come in and we talk about them as like cycle first customers. Turns out a lot of people who cycle actually have motorcycles and cars and all the rest of it as well. But still, if you try to group them all together, you don't know what's important to a cyclist is not the same thing that's important to a motorcyclist. So we have different messages that can go out to these different target audiences when we're trying to solve that initial problem in the passion category that they're in. So we talk about ride first, drive first, moto first. That's the way we sort of think about our customer.
Nathan Bush: And have you found over time that there are some people that. That are more likely to be same category? So for example, motorcyclists are likely to be musos as well or.
Rob Ward: Yeah, well, a big one. We've found throughout. For example, when we started selling in the early days, selling lots of bike mount products. Right. And then we did a little bit of motor drive and some other things. Although motor took off really quick, you're thinking, okay, so they buy a cycling product. Next thing they probably have a car. You hit them up with a car, then you start thinking which does work very, very well. Then you see the next most bought thing is actually just another another. This is when you're just looking at sell through to customers versus asking the customer the wise. This is why it's, you can get misled. You say, oh, they're buying more mounts, what are they doing here? Second, what is it? And then you realize, you ask people and like multiple of our enthusiast customers have like three plus bikes. And so then you end up on all their bicycles. So it's not that they bought the bike mount. Don't tell them about bikes anymore. Talk about they bought the stem mount. Tell them about the out front mount aluminum, low profile version for their road bike or maybe the short reverse over the stem one for the mountain bike. That may be the next thing that they're interested in. So you really got to always think about like data can be awesome, it can be misleading sometimes. You've got to get that level deeper. And so, you know, talk to the customers, customer service, trying to understand like why that behavior, especially for us, this is a bit of an advantage. Not an advantage, but a nice thing. Being a brand like Quad Lock really have a quite a small set of SKUs. Like everything we sell we've designed and we make. Right? So we don't have the biggest. We wish we had more product but we've got all these guys making all those next versions of the product and going into new categories and all that. We can't just click our fingers and go and buy it. So as we scale up, we've got more to offer the customers. But one of the nice things is still a small SKU subset. So you can get really deep into what is the customer doing and thinking. Because it's not like we have kids from like, you know, 12 to 80, we have like motorcyclists on average is like, you know, the absolute core customers like 40 to 55 years old. That's like the core adventure tourer type cyclist. We can go right into that. Then we can go, what about the guys who are riding scooters? What about the people who are riding sports bike? Or what about the cafe racer scene? We're big there and you can really start tailoring it for the niches within the niches. That's something that we have as a brand that not all retailers can do that.
Nathan Bush: Oh, in some ways it's almost harder because you're, it's like you're running multiple retail stores here. You know, you're running a golf store, you're running a running store, a Marine store with limited product in each.
Rob Ward: Yes, yes. And luckily, when you get this sort of what we've found is like, you know, active lifestyle type people have mad crossover. They don't just do one thing often they do multiple things.
Nathan Bush: So I could imagine that you have pretty sticky customers because once they're in the quad lock ecosystem, they're in totally,
Rob Ward: and I mean literally lock them in. What happens is you buy a product from your first passion category, say it's for your motorcycle, but then you go, I love it on my motorcycle. Why don't I have it on my, in my car? And then when I have it beside my bed at night while it's charging, just sitting there. And then you have these multiple mounts, so it actually becomes like the barrier to exit is quite large because if you got rid of that case, you'd have to go buy all these other mounts. And the other thing is people have the product, they get sold on it more and more the more they use it, and it just becomes part of your daily life. So from a product sense, it's worked really well. And then prioritizing that relationship with the customer, which we've done for so long, trying to look up to the customer comms, these kind of things, it's just an easy option. They know that when the new iPhone comes out, the new Galaxy comes out, we have the case ready to go straight away. They can jump online, order that case, it's going to rock up a few days later no matter where in the world they are. And it's just an easy relationship. And we see customers coming back time and time again. And one of the great things is the more products we've had and the bigger we've gotten, we're actually getting stickier and stickier. So if you look at like, for example, I know the 2017 cohort of customers that onboarded in that year almost at like, I think it's 50% retention now of those customers. But if you go back a few years before, in the same year after, it's slightly less. And then if we look forward in the last couple of years, customers we've onboarded, they're not only spending more because we've got more options to that they can get involved with, they're also coming back at greater rates. So, yeah, it works on multiple levels for the business.
Nathan Bush: You've probably got some great intelligence there that the, the phone manufacturers could fall over themselves around when people are ready to upgrade.
Rob Ward: Well, I think it used to be upgrade time for us especially. This is something that's changed a lot in the recent history is like we would just run ads to our existing audience just based on and just target only the people with new phones. So as soon as you went on to like your Facebook, your Instagram for the first time with a brand new phone you would get hey you with the iPhone 13, how about you come back and buy quadlock? Best returning ads we ever got. Like we could do it with an email, we could do that. But it's a bit of fun and people like oh, this guy bank. Yeah. So that kind of thing has dropped off a bit but we still know that it's different in different countries. You know a lot of countries like in the US here people buy a lot of iPhones out right now that didn't used to be the case in the US There are lots of them are on two year plans. So it's different in different countries really A lot of it comes down to the plan. And you'll see as iPhones have gone up in price plan like being on a plan is a bigger, a bigger thing. They really do lock people in to those. The telco plans with the phone and
Nathan Bush: you mentioned there about being able to release product, new quad lock product quickly after manufacturers come out with new designs and new models. Obviously those new releases and new drops are heavily guarded secrets.
Nathan Bush: How do you get ahead of the
Nathan Bush: game to create your product to make sure it fits?
Rob Ward: We've been doing it a long time now and yeah, it works out for us. Definitely works out.
Nathan Bush: Sounds like we've got to remain pretty tight lipped around that process for obvious reasons. But something you do really well.
Rob Ward: Yeah, no chips.
Nathan Bush: If we flip the question then how do you stop someone else from coming along and doing a quad lock rip off?
Rob Ward: Yeah, it's a good question. And to be honest, they do it. It happens. But early days when we got no money with quadlock, one of the things we did spend money on was a patent. So we patent the original mechanism and that's a great start. But patents are quite a gray area. Cost a lot to enforce and to even prove. It's just the start of an argument really. So pattern is one thing really. When it comes down to it, I think the best thing you can do is use your patent to give you a head start to build your brand. And then once you build your brand big enough, that becomes the moat. The fact is people, perfect example, you go on Google trends and you type in like iPhone bike mount. You'll see iPhone bike mount has gone like that as quad lock's gone like this. So the search term quad lock's bigger than iPhone, bike mount. Now that's like probably the best barrier we could have. You could have all the patents, all the trademarks, everything in the world. So your trademark, your brand is probably one of the biggest barriers to entry from everyone else doing it. And when it comes down to you get people copying, we call them, you know, you get the copycats which are copying actually what you're doing, buying it, trying to reverse engineer. Right. Then you get what we call like tribute brands, which is brands we're trying to copy. The way you go to market, roughly what you're doing, your messaging, those kind of things. And they're probably the ones that are a bit better competitors tribe. But the fact of the matter is we've got like 10 years in the market, we have millions of customers, tens of thousands of reviews, maybe a hundred thousand reviews. All that just builds this big presence in the market. And the fact if you go for a ride with your mates or something, someone's probably got a quad lock. If you start driving, riding for Deliveroo, Deliveroo, send you an email, hey, we recommend quad lock. Get a discount like this, bang. And they will have quad lock. So there's just this barrier to entry. And now we're doing a lot more looking at oem, working with different manufacturers, things like that, things that we can do that are interesting, that just more so Build that moat, build that wall around us. Yeah. And at the end of the day, the pull from the market in the sort of the good part of the market, the market that wants to buy something of good quality, a lot of that pull is for cord lock. And I think part of that comes from like we sort of built a category, there wasn't really anything there. It's hard to do, takes a while, but once you've done it, it's kind of like you've been made all that investment over the years that doesn't go anywhere. It sort of only gets bigger. Yeah.
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Nathan Bush: Have you heard any vernacular changing around that like instead of hey, you should go get a black mount for your phone instead like you should go quad lock your phone.
Rob Ward: Yeah, quad lock it. Yeah, just get a quad lock. You see it in the comments, people typing, oh but this, that you're like dude, just get a cod lock. Dude just get a, just get a cod lock. I had a cod lock for six years, seven years. Yeah, I'm onto my fourth, fifth, that kind of thing.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. And now in terms of your sales channel, I understand you've got a mixture of B2B, DTC and wholesale. How has that changed over the years and where are you putting most of your focus now?
Rob Ward: Yeah, it's changed a lot. So early days was just complete startup D2C type scrappy operation. Although we were pretty global. And then as we've built that out and become a bigger brand, you sort of think that oh, we've got to do the normal thing. We should be in stores, we should be selling to these distributors, we should be in JB hi Fi and you sort of start to think that's maybe what success is. So you start going down that route. And we went down that route around the world and with mixed results. A lot of different markets, Some markets just got completely out of control. Some markets like Australia has done great. We've had good partners here for quite a while. And it's like the more we sell online, the more we market, the more they sell, the more they sell in store, the more we sell. And it's just like the rising tide rates. It's all ships which is the model you sort of want, I believe in this day and age. But we didn't get it right. And what we did is we turned in about 20, 17, 28, we turned a lot of it off. We just turned it off. We had to pay our way out of different contracts and things like that, but we just turned a lot of it off and we just thought right, we got to get back to doing what we do. Wes which is advertising, acquiring a customer, spending the money we make from that customer on more advertising and buying more product, developing more and just go, we did that and like we almost doubled in the next year of turning it off and going back to just dtc. But we never, we're never thinking we are specialty product and we Always have seen value in these specialty channels because we're selling to niches. Right. Independent bike dealers, like, for one, it's just such a busy, crazy market, but people go there to get help, buy bikes, talk to people, sit on the bike, trying to helmet all this stuff, like old school stuff that it just works. There's still good value in it, you know, and there's great retailers out there. Like we started selling to 99 bikes in the early days and I think they would have moved more than any, any single anyone, not us, but anyone else.
Nathan Bush: But by being in those specialist retailers, you're being part of the community as well.
Rob Ward: Right. And it's not 100% and it's not about selling into the community, it's about being part of the community. It's literally one of our goals. So it's about being there, getting the feedback, that kind of thing. So right now what we're doing is actually we've got a much more measured and a better approach to it. What else we have is the brand is much bigger. People agree to the terms and conditions. We get a lot more respect when we go into these negotiations because they're sick of people walking into their stores asking for quad lock and they go, well, we don't have it. We have this other thing. No, no, there. To buy a quad lock. Yeah. So that's what we're doing right now. We're rolling out a lot in our. We call it our B2B sales, which is distribution as well as we've done something pretty innovative which is like a director retail. So we have B2B portals where independent bike stores or it could be a kayaking store, boating store or whatever, a motorcycle garage. You can get an account with us and they can buy a discount and supply it to their customers. So some of these places like do bike builds and they're building a custom bike, they can just get online, order the quad lock form, build it into the, into the bike for them and that kind of thing. So we've got this direct to retail as well as direct to consumer as well as distribution going on. So we think that it's sort of, it's about being where the customers are. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And it's so great for people with those existing passions, but also people getting into their passion. Imagine buying your first bike and it's also coming with a quad lock because then you're in kind of two ecosystems. Then all of a sudden you're like, totally.
Rob Ward: And one of the coolest things is, you know when you go and you buy a bicycle from a store, there's actually not that. It's not. Even if you buy a few hundred dollar bike, it's not as much margin as you think. It's pretty tight, you know, getting that helmet and that quad lock and something that can be as much margin as the bike at times for that independent bike dealer. So it's a good deal all around. And then the best thing about what people like about quad lock is lots of things come and go. But if you bought a bike mount from us 10 years ago, you can still be using like you can go through 10 iPhones and be on your 10th iPhone and still be using that same mount. So we're here to stay. Yeah, that's awesome.
Nathan Bush: You've touched on it a few times about being bootstrapped and growing this iteratively over time. But what I love about it is that you've set, or seem to have set this business up to be international from the get go. It's not that that has limited you saying, well, we've got to crack Australia first and be 100% thorough in Australia. You've set this up to be a global business from the start. Can you give us a bit of insight on that?
Rob Ward: Yeah, I think there's different ways of thinking about this. Our sort of thought was the more customers you get, it turns out customers end up becoming more expensive to get. You get the cheaper ones, the early adopters first. And we sort of thought 3 PLs were sort of coming online at that time. So why don't we set. Well, actually in Australia there was nothing. We were shipping them out ourselves for ages. There was nothing good at the time back then. But we set up with Shipwire, which was Ingram Micro, who got bought by Ingram Micro. Now we bought by Siva Logistics but with those guys in la. So we could do the US we could do here. And we shipped from the US to the UK and we started that way and it was kind of like, well, why don't we just go broad and just go get all the early adopter customers? Because you got to remember 10 years ago, iPhones, it's kind of early adopter behavior. At that time it wasn't as mass as it is now. You got in people's cars back then, not many people had come out. It's getting people's cars now. Lots of people have comments for their phones and things like it's very normal. So putting on your bike was even just ridiculous. So we went and got all those early adopters and we just thought we can just roll out once again we don't have any SKUs. If you are fashion brand or something I appreciate harder to do. We have hardly any product obsoletency. We just, we just hold onto products and they eventually sell. At times mainly our problems are keeping up with the sales, to be honest. So we could work out a way that was pretty cost effective to open up multiple warehouses and then we went into UK and then we went to EU warehouse in Asia. We could just keep bolting on these warehouses and just getting all those early adopters from that market still nice and cheap. Because when we go into a brand new market, this will happen quite quickly really in a couple of years we start getting really cheap, really cheap customer acquisition costs straight away and we just keep doing it and it. But I do see I'm getting conversations and people do put a lot of barriers in front of themselves to doing these things. A perfect example is I remember talking to retell you a brand you've had on this show before. They're awesome. And they said, oh man, like, what if we go into the eu, do we have to do a French store? We have to do a German store, you have to do Italian store, Do we have to do this, do that, do that? I'm like, you know what, it'll probably be better if you do that, but trust me, we did tests and we just went with an English store and it's now like four or five years and we still just got an English store and we've got to change it. So we've got millions of customers there. So, you know, putting off like test, measure, learn, maybe get in there. If it works, you can always do it better down the track, keeping a website offline, waiting till everything's perfect. It's never going to be perfect. Get out there, get something up. That's when you start learning, that's when you start iterating and if anything it brings the success forward, it doesn't push it back. That's my like. And if it doesn't work, lesson learned, you'll still know more than when you go to do it. Right?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of, especially in the last six months, a lot of Aussie brands. Because we've had a great couple of years going, now's the time to attack the U.S. but it feels like everyone's doing it at once. Like there's all these Aussie brands going over the us. Do you feel like Aussie brands haven't been as aggressive in taking their products overseas as they should?
Rob Ward: Have been? Yeah. I think. I don't know if it's aggressive or if it's that it's like intimidating to do so. You know, you used to hear this, these things that Pacific scattered with brands who never got to the US and that kind of thing. But it was a different era. It was way different era. I think, like I just always come back to thinking the customer, the customer that you sell to in Australia, if you put them on a stool next to the customer they're going to sell to, they'll get along like a house on fire. And they're the same little differences. Yes. But big things. Do they have the same problems? Do they like the same stuff? It's similar, it's the same. And especially when you're talking about a market the size of America, you don't need everyone to be your customer. You just need to go get your part, your little portion and you'll find them. I also understand though, at a certain point we were niche early on, very niche type product. We weren't for everyone. So being broader made more sense. Maybe if you're in the kind of market and you're selling something more generic, maybe I always like the idea of going deeper rather than broader, but we would do that in a product sense. We would go deeper into a niche with a product but broader with the geography because we didn't. We our website could be exactly the same, our copy exactly the same, our videos exactly the same, our photos exactly the same. We didn't have to change it. There was no more real complexity. A little bit of tax, actually there's heaps of tax but even that's sorted now. Use that Avalara and good tools that are out there. Yeah, it's all doable and to be honest, it's never been easier. So you know, if you can do it and you can do it in a the thing. It's easy to do things when you don't bet the farm because if you just use a little bit out of the back paddock, doesn't matter, that's it.
Nathan Bush: And you touched on it. There's around. There are the tools that are set up to be international. Like if you're in Australia running an E commerce business, it's likely that you're already on a platform that works internationally. Whereas 10 years ago that might not be the case because you had separate instances. But now you can go actually spin me up another site here and it has.
Rob Ward: You can just do it. And, and to be honest, the thing, the other thing is like we do it pretty scrappy. Like we'll do things such as we want to see which countries in Asia were the best for us to target. What are our best performing ads? Sending them to the best most likely product page. Motorcycle. Run them internationally, push them through the US site and go, okay, it's USD. It's maybe not the best shipping. Maybe we'll even just discount the shipping, ship them for free or something. I don't know what we do. And just test, measure, learn and go. Okay. Oh, Philippines, that's an interesting market. Korea, this thing. Okay, well just based on that, let's go spin up that new 3PL that can service that market and then let's go. I remember it was like India as well. We spun it up. We start going throughout most of Southeast Asia and bit to India. India, grateful for market logistics, trying to get it there. Didn't work. Doesn't matter, we'll turn it off. We'll get to that and do it again later. Let's go back over here to the Philippines. Oh, now we found a distributor and you just start learning. And then it's like, we better go make a proper site for this and then we'll go do that. But we sort of, it's like we're trying to back like sure things and making them as sure as we can by just doing these little scrappy type tests.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, nice. And in terms of investment, we talked about bootstrapping. I saw an article from a couple of years ago, I think it was, where private equity might have been imminent or on the cards. Any investment coming or take.
Rob Ward: Yeah, no private equity quadrant. You would have heard the growth fund, they bought in 2020. So it's been, you know, a couple of years now working with those guys. So yeah, sort of good corporate governance side, you know, we never had a board meeting in our life, you know, those kind of things.
Nathan Bush: So yeah, was the appeal of private equity, was it that led to do more or put those structures in place?
Rob Ward: It was sort of part of it. It's not like we needed money or anything like that for growth. It wasn't really around that what it was. It's more around just being very aware that, you know, you don't know what you don't know. Everything we do, we do for the first time at the time the biggest business I'd ever worked in, let alone running at the time. So it just sort of made sense at the time. We're like, you know what, why don't we have a look? And to be honest, we'd been Most of we've been approached many times over the journey mainly by US brands, and nothing had ever, ever eventuated, which is probably awesome from how it's turned out. And once again, but what we learned along the way is that you never sort of want to be doing like, you know, like having one horse in the road. You never want to have like this one person trying to buy it. So we always, we had some advisors over there that we talked to every now and again. We said, if someone comes to buy us, we'll spin up a process real quick. And what happened? Someone was interested. It turned out in the end, they weren't that interested when they got into it. But what we did is we'd already spun up a little process, pushed it out to a few places in the US to mix results, and then also PE here in Australia and a lot of PE in Australia was interested. So we sort of want a process with a few PE firms in Australia and another big one out of the US and then, yeah, that's how we ended up with Quadrant at the time running around buying a whole heap of these type of businesses.
Nathan Bush: You're in a nice little spot there. So what's next on your radar? What's exciting you around the next, say, 12 months at Quadlock?
Rob Ward: I think next 12 months, yeah. Well, got a lot going on, to be honest. We're really looking at the distribution angle. But what it is, it's more so around what we call, like, you know, be where the customers are, you know, own the space we occupy, being active participant in our market segments. And that's sort of per category, per region. So not just do stuff here, try to do stuff everywhere. So we have a new gentleman starting with this will be a sponsorship manager. So sponsorships, events, we have a new creative budget for that. So I'm super pumped. I mean, that'll be awesome. We already do bits of that, but we're just really making it a whole pillar now and it's just the start of it. So I think that's really exciting. It's about, you know, getting just getting deeper into these niches and these, they're passion categories for people. Like, you know, we don't just want to be selling it, we want to be in there understanding more, being part of that community. And we do it anyway. We sponsor things and that, but just do that at a better level and have someone whose job is to take care of that. So that's, I think that's awesome.
Nathan Bush: That's always the fun part. Even when I was at super retail group and obviously dealing with sport camping and fishing and cars. They're all passion categories. People love it. So when you get the foundations right and you get to do the fun stuff like the content and the community and the sponsorships, that's. That's where the fun is.
Rob Ward: Yeah. And that's where all the good content comes from. You know, sponsor this. We already do it. We sponsor people. And you have people like, got Chris Froome. I know we have someone flying over there to. To shoot him. I think it's next week, which will be awesome. We just did a cool piece of content actually with Chris Froome and he was talking about how he thinks racing is probably more dangerous now than ever because of all the data everybody has. And he's like, it's the only time when you say there's a little bridge coming up and a quick right hand after it and we all speed up to try and get there first and get through it. And the cool thing was like within the next two or three weeks, every cycling blog around the world, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Featuring our articles. So that kind of stuff just puts your name in there right where we want to do B. We've worked with Charlie Brauman for a long time. He did the. Just recently he did. I loved his old videos that probably got me into motorcycling back in the day here in Nguyen. And he just did the long way up streaming on Apple tv. They had the Apple iPhones and they had quad locks on all their bikes and for the whole thing in Nguyen. So that was just perfect.
Nathan Bush: That was such a great series.
Rob Ward: Yeah, it wasn't a good. Yeah, those. The thing is, it's funny, you know, we just do any video with Charlie talking to camera. It just works like he just is so easy to listen to. People just stop, Charlie.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Rob Ward: Scrolling through and they stop. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Good. Rob, thank you so much for everything that you've shared. Like I said, I do feel like you are one of the most under the radar brands in Australia because you have that global viewpoint. So we really appreciate you taking us behind the scenes with Quad Lock today. Now, if people have heard this and they want to find out more about Quad Lock or potentially get in touch with you and the team, what's the best way for them to go about that?
Rob Ward: Yeah, just jump on our website, qualocase.comauor.net and you'll end up on the right store and yeah, hit us up on. You know, the guys are always telling the people on Instagram and Facebook and that kind of thing. Or shoot us an email and look me up if it's an E Commie thing. Yeah, we're happy. We're always having we may be under the radar. We do know a lot of people still in e commerce. We're always having little chats.
Nathan Bush: Absolutely. Rob, thank you so much for joining us on Add to Car.
Rob Ward: No thanks Nathan. And you know I've got a lot of value out of this podcast as well, so thank you.
Nathan Bush: I said it to Rob straight after we wrapped that conversation, but I am continually thankful for how much our e commerce guests share with us. I feel we genuinely got 10 years of e commerce lessons in 40 minutes then it's amazing stuff. Here are my three biggest takeaways. Number one developing a product Ecosystem Quad Lock is a product built around creating an ecosystem just like Apple, Lego or Amazon Prime. Once you are in, you go all in and essentially have blinkers to other options. And it's paid off big time. Rob said that 50% of customers they acquired back in 2017 are still customers today. Now if you can develop a sticky product or a service ecosystem, you are setting yourself up for an incredible customer retention and lifetime value Targeting Passion Categories if you look on the Quad Lock website, they don't market by product types like iPhone or Android cases. They market by passion categories such as cycling and running. They market direct to these people passions and solve a problem specific for them. By solving the precise problems for these passion categories, especially the niches within niches, they develop trust and draw them in to the wider Quad Lock world. It's a really smart strategy. Number three Find a Win. Ride the Win Rob said this a number of times and he talked about how to scale responsibly, especially as a bootstrapped business. And he and he said finding the win and riding the win. It was a theme he kept coming back to and it really stuck with me. It's about giving yourself enough room to experiment and make mistakes. But when you find something that works, drill into it and go really hard. Don't just move on. Make sure you milk those wins for all they're worth. The targeting of Facebook ads at new phone users was a great example of that. Find the Win, Ride the Win. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.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 eSweet, 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 e Commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to card.
