Jason Thomas: As you can see, we nerd out a little bit on Salt.
Cale McPherson: Sold's fun if you dig into it. Our first sale came from Reddit where I created a Reddit account, posted in a feed pretending to try the product and sort of was saying, oh, it's really great. And within two seconds someone was like, he owns it. Get rid of it, you're out. And I got. I got booted out. So that was a steep learning curve there.
[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. Here's your host, Bushy.
Nathan Bush: Hello there, e commerce adventurers. Now you know that the world of ecom can take us into some weird and some wacky places. Well, today's episode might just take the cake. Imagine owning a digital agency, getting curious about the science of salt and electrolytes, and then getting to a spot where you are sourcing your main ingredients from an ancient lake in in the middle of Australia. Yep, that's exactly where we're headed today on Add to Cart. Welcome back to Add to Cart. My name is Bushy. Joining you from the land of the Turrbal people here in Brisbane, Australia, I'm thrilled to welcome Jason Thomas and Cale McPherson, the brilliant minds behind SODI. That's S O D I I Sodi is an Aussie electrolyte brand winning over fitness buffs and everyday Aussies alike, including myself. They believe that salt is the secret to better hydration, peak performance and daily wellness. Jason and Kale started with a simple mission. Change the way that people think about hydration. Since then, they've transformed conversations around salt into science based products. Now, with distribution into more than 650 retailers, including boutique gyms, health food stores, chemists and independent supermarkets, they're on a bit of a growth tear, but they're just getting started. Today you will hear how Jason and Cal turned Australia's purest inland Salt, sourced from WA's Lake Deborah, into a product that they stand by hand on heart. They talk about why electrolytes are about much more than conquering thirst and how they've used their branding expertise from Divide Agency, which they own, to give Soti its standout identity. And of course, we talk all e commerce topics, from navigating product lifecycle strategies to tackling stock issues and international expansion. This episode is brimming with insights for brand builders, product developers and marketing strategists. A big thanks to our partners Shopify and Klaviyo for making this episode and all episodes of Add to Cart possible. A quick reminder, if you haven't already, to sign up for my weekly e commerce newsletter. Every Tuesday I share key industry insights along with my choice of five e commerce stories, research or case studies from the past week that will help you
[Voiceover]: in your e commerce role.
Nathan Bush: Sign up for free at add to cart.comau forward slash subscribe. All right, enough for me. We've got salt to talk about. Let's dive into it. Here's my chat with Jason and Kayl from Soti Kale. Jason, welcome to Add to Cart.
Cale McPherson: Thanks for having us.
Nathan Bush: Good to have you here.
[Voiceover]: You guys were my savior over Christmas. We were talking a little bit before Christmas and you sent me out very kindly a sample pack of Sodi, which I have here for those watching on video. And I took my holidays in tweed heads and Bundaberg of all places. And Bundaberg is fucking hot. So I was popping sodas on the regular and my in laws actually stopped me at one point. They're like, what is that powder that you're putting in your drink?
Nathan Bush: But I feel like it worked.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Holidaying is sweaty work sometimes. That's it.
[Voiceover]: So guys, tell us, tell us about sodi. What is sodi? How does it work?
Jason Thomas: Sodi is going back a few years. We were sort of toying around with sort of different diets and sort of all these different, like sort of health, I guess, optimization stuff. I think it was all in our own workplace. We sort of just started chatting about sort of best diets and all that kind of stuff. And then it kind of led us into like these low carb diets, keto diet, carnivore diet. And then the one thing that really stood out to us is that you needed a lot more sort of salt on those diets. And when you start, I mean, this going back sort of four years ago, the market's kind of expanded since then, but there's not, there wasn't a lot of products right, really from a convenient level that are available to you. And in that hydration space, it really hadn't sort of kicked as hard as it has now in terms of that. It was only sort of the big players, Gatorade and Powerade, you know, classified as electrolytes and then sort of those hydrolytes or even like really, really specific products that didn't even cut the come close to the salt requirements that we sort of needed to get into like a drink and that let us just really just quick salt in water and then you sort of adapt it from there. You put sort of lemon in it and try and jazz it up a little bit as much as you can. But when it came really down to it, you were just having a lot of salt in water and it tasted really bad. So that led us to kind of there must be other alternatives out there and there just really wasn't. So that led us to getting into making our own product. The closest sort of sodium content that we could find at the time was around 200 milligrams. The problem with that was came with a whole bunch of artificial sweeteners. They didn't really call out where the salt was from. There was no real magnesium or potassium content in there. There was no real rhyme or reason as to why the ingredients were that way. So it kind of just really opened our eyes to there must be a gap there for, you know, there's definitely other people like us looking for products like this. Especially in Australia, hot summers, athletes. Why hasn't this been done so earlier and it just really hadn't been looked at so. So kind of led us down the path of starting the sampling process and working through different flavors and really just nailing down that electrolyte content as to why it is the way it is. 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 210 milligrams of potassium and 70 milligrams of magnesium. And then the rest is sort of the history from there. Turns out people were looking for a product like that.
[Voiceover]: So there's a few things going on here. You've got product development obviously, but it's also sounding a bit sciency and a bit techy. Did you guys have a background in product development in this area beforehand?
Jason Thomas: No. We definitely lent on. There's definitely services you can lean on in that department when it comes to manufacturing a product like this for product formulation. But I'd definitely say that the nutrition background is around, I guess really just diving into the research on your own. There's ample research out there from peer reviewed papers on backing this sort of science up around specific electrolyte content in terms of different sports to different medical conditions, to just even everyday lifestyle sort of studies. And, and the research is there on how much salt a human can have. Sort of heavily influenced by some, I guess, medical researchers coming out of America and typically America is sort of like any in Australia to a point. The research is years ahead of what is sort of common knowledge and sort of research that's coming out today that's getting sort of implemented in the public is sort of, they say 10 to 14 years behind. You know, they would start talking about it 10 to 14 years ago. So it's just obviously speeding up now. But we're sort of just jumped in at the right time there to understand kind of like saturated fat, you know, not as bad as what people sort of say it was. Sugar turns out to be worse than people were saying it is.
[Voiceover]: Don't get into the sugar business.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, yeah, bad, but. And then so as it turns out, really not as bad as what people are sort of thinking. The research is there to back it up and, and then I guess the manufacturers and laboratories and then in terms of what product development really helped us pull it together into a safe manner. And then obviously all the sort of guidelines are there around working with TGA products and therapeutic goods and all that kind of stuff as well from an Australian New Zealand point of view too.
[Voiceover]: So how do you onboard a product development? What do you even call them? Like what do you Google to kind of start that journey?
Cale McPherson: There's a range of things you can Google. They all kind of go with different things. Contract manufacturing is probably a good starting point. Contract supplement manufacturing, contract bulk powder manufacturing is probably where I found a lot. But what we found tricky is a lot of the businesses or contract manufacturers, they may be doing the best product, but they're really good at manufacturing products. So they're hard to find because their marketing and website and SEO side of it is just tough. So it's really a lot of
[Voiceover]: digging
Cale McPherson: through LinkedIn trying to find people even talking to found got a list of content manufacturers from actually ingredient suppliers and said who do you supply ingredients to? And they gave us a list of their customers basically in different states. All of which you can't really find on Google either because the SEO is so bad on their sites or they're just on page seven of Google. So it is a bit tricky to find a good one. But you learn quickly what questions to ask and who looks like a good one and yeah, just the steep learning curve of how it works.
[Voiceover]: What was the best question you asked?
Cale McPherson: The best question most valuable question is are you okay to use our ingredients? We want to own the ingredients, know where they come from. Just for security reasons, if we have to pick it up and take it elsewhere, that's a great security spot for that scalability. What you how much product can you do monthly? Just all sort of the standard questions. Where are they located? The big one too, because obviously when you're shipping product across the country to wherever your logistics or warehouse is, that adds into it. Yeah, A lot of standard stuff you really do.
Jason Thomas: You have to come at it with a certain level of base knowledge. Otherwise like to really fight for the ingredients you want to use, packaging you'd like to use, I guess, the values that you of uphold as a brand. Because like before Sodi, we went through a couple of different product development cycles with other sort of products that we're playing around with. Whether it be in like the low carb space and you ask for a product and it sort of comes back with, you know, 10 ingredients that are absolute sort of no no's in that space. And it really teaches you that they understand manufacturing, they understand their sort of, their world. You really have to come at it from a point of like, what product do you want to make? And then can you reverse engineer that and make them work out how to make it?
Cale McPherson: Can you change everything you've done in the past? Because we want to do it a different way, which is. Yeah, that's the tricky bit, finding someone willing to work with you, especially when you're starting out too. Because your minimum order quantities when you're starting out are obviously quite low. So there's obviously a sliding scale of manufacturers, some on the smaller and some of the larger scale. Some are willing to work with you, some aren't. So yeah, so you're finding one that you can, you can work with.
[Voiceover]: And last question on this side is, does your manufacturer take it all the way through to packaging it up? Because you've obviously got the containers, but he's also got the satchels. It's a bit unique in terms of the packaging. Do they take it all that way or you do that separately?
Cale McPherson: So they blend the powder, make the powder, put it into the tubs to us, also pack into the individual sachets. We then do final product in our warehouse just to save on some logistics stuff. It's much more efficient to ship bulk sachets than 30 sachets in a box. So we have a warehouse in Adelaide where we do all sort of filler orders from and manage sort of the final product stuff. But they basically get it 95 of the way. We just put it into individual boxes and get it out the door.
Jason Thomas: Very cool. I love the boxes, they're so good.
[Voiceover]: They're like perfect size in your pantry. Especially the little dispenser tab at the bottom there makes it very handy.
Cale McPherson: I'm glad you, glad you noticed that there's a tear mark on them. We see some photos, people just rip the top off and we're like, there's a tear thing down the bottom. You can open it up. It's a dispenser.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, love it.
[Voiceover]: So tell me more about salt. I never thought I'd ask that question on Add to Cart to your point, Jason, is like we were brought up to say salt is bad and eat too much salt and you'll have a heart attack. That's obviously, you know, there's different research coming out on that now.
Nathan Bush: Is salt and electrolytes the same thing?
[Voiceover]: Firstly?
Jason Thomas: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. So I mean electrolytes as a. As you sort of maybe have known them or been spoken about them as growing up and things like that. Electrolytes are very much seen as an athlete focused tool or in worst case scenario, something you have in Bali when you're probably not feeling super well, when your stomach's upset, you give it to a kid, all that kind of stuff. Electrolytes were seen as a medical use and sports use. Electrolytes as a whole obviously comes into, I guess what it boils down to is minerals. So salt, potassium, magnesium or sodium. Potassium, magnesium and obviously other ones come into that, but the main ones we look at is, yeah, sodium, potassium, magnesium in our product, sodium as a whole. Yeah, you're right. It has had a really bad rap in the past, I suppose with a lot of things you've got to take without sounding too conspiratorial. There's research that's done on these sort of things. It's sort of up in arms as to how those research sort of studies come about, who funds them, the motives behind them and what they're trying to find out. We could speak for hours and hours and hours about salt as a category, but I guess a lot of the research that was done in the past is, is outdated. It's. It was sort of based around one really key study that sort of set salt down the path of not coming back from it. Not easy to come back from was a study that sort of found out of a huge population of people that 20% of the population experience sort of cardiovascular events or a rise in blood pressure, which is a marker for heart disease from consuming too much Salt. And that 20% happened to be insulin resistant as well in that population. And if you look at obviously Australians now, that percentage has grown quite a bit. But instead of sort of just making a, a really use case scenario for salt to say, hey, if you're insulin resistant, you should probably stick, stay away from too much salt. They just made a blanket, populate blanket. It's much easier to make a blanket statement and say, hey, avoid salt because it leads to eggs. As opposed to the 80% of the market, 80% of Australians that are actually completely fine with salt. And you couple that with a sort of campaign around hydration and drinking and water and the whole eight glasses of water a day, which has been drilled into us from a long time as well.
[Voiceover]: Is that still true?
Jason Thomas: Depends. Definitely. Consuming water is very, very good for you. As much water as you want. The key component with hydration is, is two parts. It's water and salt. You can drink as much water as you want. You've also got to consume salt as well, because salt's really what, what pulls the water into the cell. It's what allows the, the cells to hydrate and I guess hold the water in. And water retention is a huge part of that. And it's obviously magnesium, potassium come into that as well. But sodium is really that key mineral that makes, keeps you alive, essentially.
[Voiceover]: Okay, you get a science lesson on add to cart today.
Cale McPherson: Yeah.
Jason Thomas: Again, we could talk for hours, but at the same time, salt's very, very important. Very, very fine for you in, in the quantities your body's evolved over millions of years to, to thrive with salt and very, very deal with whatever it's thrown at it.
[Voiceover]: And fascinating that we're marketed salt anyway as electrolytes.
Jason Thomas: Yeah. And I guess the last finishing statement to that is you could walk down the supermarket aisle of the packaged food and you know, processed foods, chips, chocolate, sort of everything. You'll find sodium in absolutely everything. I think they sort of get to this point where, you know, salt is in everything. It's easy to point the finger at salt as being maybe what the, the burger did or the chips did or the packaged food or the processed food did. It's a really easy sort of scapegoat. You pull the salt out of that packaged food and you're just sprinkling a little bit of salt in your water. And it's not as bad as maybe the, everything else.
Cale McPherson: Yeah, on that. There's also a sliding scale with all things quality of ingredients matter. Right down the bottom end you've got highly processed table salt, which is a salt that's had every single other trace mineral and electrolyte taken out of it. Purely sodium chloride. Then they artificially put iodine back into it. The body's not great at dealing with things in isolation. So that though when you do have those lower quality salts, which is purely sodium chloride and iodine put back in, the body can't deal with it as well, which is where things like fluid, fluid retention and increased blood pressure can come into it. Where on the other end of it you have a really high quality unprocessed salt, which is Normally anywhere from 90 to 95. Sodium chloride with other trace minerals in there, such as magnesium, calcium, potassium, then trace minerals, boron, manganese, iodine. All of these trace minerals that when it's in a toll, the body goes. I know exactly what to do with this. I've been exposed to this for years and years and years. Everything has a spot for here. And I can. It can deal with it much better. So that's why, as you can see,
Jason Thomas: we nerd out a little bit on stuff.
[Voiceover]: Oh, I love it.
Jason Thomas: I love it.
Cale McPherson: And some people get confused which could. We tend to use them interchangeably, which we probably shoot them between salt and sodium chloride, where salt is a whole salt rock within that had all the other minerals that I just spoke about with sodium chloride is only one portion of that. So salt isn't an electrolyte, sodium chloride are. But salt is where sodium chloride traditionally comes from.
[Voiceover]: Gee whiz. It gets complicated.
Cale McPherson: Salt's fun. If you dig into the. If you dig into it. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: So tell me, I did go down
[Voiceover]: the rabbit hole a little bit on your website, having a look at all the exotic places that you get your salt from. Tell me about the salt expeditions because exactly like you said, you're not pulling salty water out of the ocean or you're not adding table salt to sachets. Where are you getting your salt from?
Cale McPherson: When we sort of down the path of trying to make the highest quality electrolyte as possible, as in our product, salt is a very large portion of it, sort of the main driver. It's what we believe makes a big difference in someone's hydration. We wanted to make that the highest quality salt that we could find. In Australia, where we're lucky, we have great natural resources. So we source our salt from Midland Wa from an ancient inland salt lake called Lake Deborah. And because it's an ancient inland sea, it's not attached to any ocean. So it doesn't contain any of the microplastics or modern pollution as that a sea salt or another salt might have. Even the holy grail of salt from a few years ago, the pink Himalayan salt is now sort of studies coming at say that can contain heavy metals and even radiation depending on what side of the border it's mined on, etc. So we source ours from Lake Deborah. It's actually Australia's Only organic salt. It's all hand harvested. It's arguably the most pure and most high quality salt in the world. And we're very proud to say that we use a wa. Salt. Salt that. That's such high quality. That's amazing.
Nathan Bush: And is that just set up like
[Voiceover]: a mine that you just buy quantities of salt from?
Jason Thomas: Yeah. So it's a bit unique. So there's obviously salt mining which is. Involves sort of like explosives digging up the earth. Digging deep Lake Deborah is really, really unique in the sense that it follows the natural cycles of, of I guess mother nature in the sense that in the, in the warmer months, sorry, in the cooler months it's, you know, the, the brine forms on the, on the top of the lake and the water comes into the lake and forms this really, really salty brine. And in the warmer months this brine dries out and leaving a really, really hard scale of salt on top. That's a fully regenerative process that doesn't really involve digging explosives at all or anything like that. And what they do is you can find videos online. What they do is literally just scrape the top off the lake, pull it all into one sort of area and then, and then literally bag it up. And there's no bleaching, there's no chemicals, no cleaning, there's no sort of making it white, there's no really nothing. It's just salt in its most natural form. And it goes back to what Kayl was talking about before in terms of all the goodness is in that it's. Yeah. Not processed at all. And then literally over 12 months that cycle repeats and, and you've got salt again on top of the lake and no harm done. That's very cool.
[Voiceover]: And then you guys take that and then you've got different flavors. So you've got berry, you've got lemon. Passion fruit are the ones that come to mind.
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[Voiceover]: What else do you add to the salt to kind of bring it into a consumer product?
Cale McPherson: So it's very minimal. We wanted to make it as clean and flexible as possible. So Jace touched on it before. Previous electrode products, Paul, sort of we came into the market were either very minimal electrolytes, more sugar or artificial sweeteners, or a bunch of binding ingredients etc in there. And then you look at it break down, you go, there's more non electrolytes in here than actual electrolytes. Where we want to kind of completely flip that. Have a high quality electrolyte product and not much else. So the sodium chloride or salt that we use in our product is like 90, 85 of it. I think we will then add some potassium chloride, some high quality magnesium. We use natural flavors where the flavoring component itself is actually from the oil of the fruit or whatever the flavoring is. We then just put a tiny bit of organic stevia in there to make it to kind of counter out the saltiness. And that's really it. A little bit of malic acid or tartaric acid sort of give it that. Give it that zing. And that's really it. So we want to keep it as clean and tasty as possible. I'm not trying to hide the fact that there's a good whack of salt in there. It's part of the product. It's why the way it is. It's why we call the flavor salty citrus or salty passion fruit. Or we're not trying to hide that. We're just trying to make it refreshing. Kind of zingy, but still salty. And we think most of the time, will the review sort of speak for himself that it is a refreshing drink.
[Voiceover]: There is something in it, isn't it? Because I, when I first tried it, I'll be honest with you, I was like, oh, like it really hit you. Because it's not like a sports drink. It's not like a Gatorade or a Powerade where it's got a real sweetener to it. It does taste salty and it's got that zing. The zing's a great one. But even as you're talking about it then, because I've been using for like the last month, my mouth started watering just thinking about it. I'm like, oh, yeah, like I really
Jason Thomas: need to get another one.
Nathan Bush: There's something to it.
[Voiceover]: It's like you get past that initial kind of shock factor and then you become conditioned to it. You kind of crave it.
Cale McPherson: Once your taste buds get used to that first whack where they're like, what the hell was that? After that, it actually gets quite addictive and you start going, where's my. Where's my sodium?
Jason Thomas: A real interesting part around that is your, like sugar can sometimes hijack the same taste receptors that salt sort of follow. So when you have cravings, salt, they sort of sit on the same. Like sugar can compete for the your salt cravings in terms of what they are going for. So when you consume more salt, you actually, interestingly, don't need as much sugar. You don't crave sugar as much. You're balancing it out with the right amount of salt. And that's where those like, I guess that salty sweet flavor is with that we've created is a kind of. It's not sugar, but it's nice and sweet. It's nice and salty. It's so refreshing. And you're sort of getting all the benefits from that as well.
Cale McPherson: What's interesting too, which is probably worth bringing up, some people despise the taste of stevia. They think it's got a really bitter taste to it, but it actually is a good sweetener if you're not looking to spiky glucose, glucose levels, et cetera. But people think it tastes bitter. But one way to counteract that bitterness is obviously salt, which is great for us because we have a good whack of salt in there. So people that normally don't like the aftertaste of stevia try sodium. They go, oh, it's completely gone just because there is that salt in there. Sort of counteract that bitterness.
[Voiceover]: Yep, makes sense. All right, so we should talk some E commerce.
Nathan Bush: Tell us about where you're.
[Voiceover]: So what started in 2021, so almost four years running now. So that would have been peak Covid starting out. Tell us about the numbers in those first four years. What can you share around how you've grown this business?
Cale McPherson: Yeah, we have a. Jason, I have a design and sort of branding background. So we kind of. We understand what it takes to design, create and launch a brand that someone's going to be attracted to and sort of fall in love with to a degree. So we were in no rush to get to any form of scale of numbers. For us, launching, it was really about launching to A very small group of people who we knew were going to see benefit from the product. We were lucky enough to be introduced to the product lifecycle quite early on in our business journey and we really understood, really understood what that meant and knew that we had to launch it slowly or carefully to make sure it did get to scale. A product like ours is very, especially back then, quite disruptive, quite counterintuitive to what you're told from a health and nutrition space and especially in the hydration space.
[Voiceover]: I could imagine those early days launching softly or considerably would have been hard, especially Peak Covid, where the numbers were going off the charts.
Cale McPherson: We're lucky enough to be in South Australia, so we didn't get hit as hard as other states. We were pretty much free to rooms we want. So Jason, I were in the office every day. It actually gave us some time to breathe and plan things out properly. We knew we were in the whole country and was sort of in lockdown, so we're in no rush to, to launch it. So we just sort of mapped out who we wanted, the small groups of people who we wanted to give the product to and make sure that they loved it, give us feedback from it early on, as we knew they were going to be the innovators, early adopters, whatever you want to call them, that we're going to push it through the later cycles of that sort of product lifecycle. So we're just doing really small numbers at the start, communicating to small groups of 30, 50 sort of 100 people and as you sort of compound interest that out, those people push it through and tell someone and tapping into small community, et cetera. That was really sort of our early launch days.
[Voiceover]: And is that you literally getting on Instagram DMs, just reaching out to people and introducing the product and offering samples?
Cale McPherson: Basically. Exactly that.
Jason Thomas: Yeah. Sometimes even small. Literally just to people that we knew.
Cale McPherson: Yeah, even like small Facebook groups who had small dietary communities or whatever, they were getting in touch with the admin, chatting to them. That's a great strategy. They're obviously trusted within their own small community. Just, yeah, real small grassroots stuff, getting feedback, getting the product out in the hand of the right people was really
[Voiceover]: the good tip to go to the admins first rather than just posting in the groups. Because admins, they like to feel a
Jason Thomas: bit special, don't they, that we've made that mistake.
Cale McPherson: That's a great lesson, that is. Yeah. Our first sale, actually, our first sale came from Reddit, where I created a Reddit account, posted in a feed Pretending to try the product and sort of was saying, oh, it's really great. And within two seconds someone was like, he owns it, get rid of it, you're out. And I got, I got booted out. So that was a steep learning curve there. Yeah.
Jason Thomas: Was that you, Jason? Did you report him? Yeah, yeah. Awesome.
Cale McPherson: All right.
[Voiceover]: And before we expand on the story, just you mentioned product life cycle and your understanding of it. You talked about launching considerably at the start. What's your understanding of the product lifecycle and your approach to it? Just from a high level, just so we understand where you're coming from and where you're going.
Cale McPherson: Yeah. So the product lifecycle is really, if you consider a graph of time across the bottom sales or sales through the top. And it really just breaks down through science or marketing science or business. Business science. Really. The types of consumers that need to say this product, validate the product before another group of consumers will adopt it, basically. And it starts out innovators, early adopters, early majority, and then it goes into majority and then all of that later on. Where I think a lot of brands and businesses go wrong. They try and launch a product for everyone from day one because they go, that's the largest group of customers. That's going to be our best bang for buck. Not realizing that there's a large group of those people there because by nature they're less risk averse, not out there looking for new products. They're only going to try a product if they're told by someone they trust within that certain, with certain category of products. So in any market or any category, there's going to be people that are innovators. They're the ones that are out there trying new things all the time, maybe making their own versions of it. They don't really care about marketing or branding. They market that much. They just get. They just love new things, trying new things. They're the ones that you really put the product in the hands first off because they're going to tell sort of that next, that next group, which is sort of early, early adopters. From there, once you sort of get them on board, they go, this is great. They're going to tell more people, more people. And sort of eventually most brands will never really get to the end of that. That's sort of like your large major household name brands. But a lot of brands just go for the massive group of consumers because they go, that's the best. But in reality, you got to get validity through the innovators, early adopters. We kind of Were lucky enough to understand that and not waste all of our marketing dollars on ad spend appealing to everyone. We were just doing grassroots. Here's the product. This is why you benefit from it. And letting them really push through the early stages of that product lifecycle.
[Voiceover]: And were they mainly athletes at that point?
Cale McPherson: I guess with our goal of trying to change the perception of electrolytes. Historically, people are aware of electrolytes in the athlete space, so we knew there were people that were going to use the product purely for its performance benefits. So there were some athletes in there for sure. But we're really trying to open up another sort of product category within that daily wellness space. So a lot of our early stuff was with people who are interested in dietary strategies optimization, people looking for ways to feel better, have more energy throughout the day. So there's definitely some athlete stuff in there. But we did sort of open up to a more general, health aware consumer.
[Voiceover]: And then fast forward to where you are today, selling in Australia, obviously. Are you expanding beyond that?
Jason Thomas: We typically started, as Kal says, before we typically started with dtc, probably for the first three and a half to pretty much the last sort of. Until last six months. We really took that as a chance to kind of hone in on product, build up really much excitement, or as much as excitement as we could around the product and also controlling our own sort of stock and packaging and all those sorts of things.
[Voiceover]: Sorry, what was the best piece of feedback you got during those early stages? Because most people have a story around someone coming back on feedback on the packaging or the taste or the.
Jason Thomas: Was there anything that.
[Voiceover]: Did you have any oh, shit moments?
Jason Thomas: Yeah, I mean, we still get them to this day, to be honest. They come in every single day. The. The piece around packaging is. Is one thing. So like we decided to go with a square sachet purely for, I guess, the way that we wanted to go with. A lot of people have caught that, you know, really, really want those sort of stick packaging options for to bottles. When it comes to tubs, you've got plastic considerations with that. Same with packaging, you've got sort of tear direction, which we've got wrong a couple of times on stage.
Nathan Bush: What, as in people, you go. What do you go left to right?
Jason Thomas: Yeah. Or sometimes ours for a while was down the side and people, you know, weren't really happy with that. That's all fine. And they're sort of easy ones to fix. I guess from a salt point of view. The biggest challenge with us has always been around the biggest challenge with us has always been around. It's a soluble product. It's one of those things. If you leave sitting in a humid environment for too long, it can crystallize purely because it's. It's salt and it's that sort of sitting. And maybe you put the scoop in your glass, got a little bit of water on your scoop and you put that in your container and then you come back in. Some people come back in seven days time and, you know, the whole tub sort of solidified because they've got water into it and literally 10 out of 10 times we'll. We'll obviously honor a replacement for that because it's just not the product that they thought they were getting. That kind of thing. And. And that kind of comes back to good customer service, I think. Just. Yeah, someone has. It's not really on the. On the label to avoid putting water in it because it's a water drink, all that kind of stuff. So. So yeah, we to and fro with packaging all the time as you know, just with design background and know we're about to go through a whole packaging refresh again for the fifth time. So it'll never stop in that regard.
[Voiceover]: Is it hard? Because you guys do have the design background and I'm going to give the agency a shout out here. Divide agency in Adelaide. Is it hard to stop tinkering with the design and the branding?
Jason Thomas: Impossible.
Cale McPherson: Yeah. It's. It's our bane of our existence, really. Yeah. Because we see it every day as well and we sit in it and we just look at it too closely and have the ability to just change stuff on a fly.
Jason Thomas: Yeah.
Cale McPherson: We have to actually stop ourselves sometimes because we go, that might be something to us, but the grand scheme, people don't even. Don't care or don't know about. It's a waste of time, so.
[Voiceover]: That's right. Like you've got a beautiful brand and most people are discovering it for the first time anyway, but with fresh eyes. But you don't have those fresh eyes anymore now.
Cale McPherson: They're tainted.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, yeah. No, and it's going back to that product lifecycle. Like packaging is a huge part of that, you know, like who you want that product to appeal to, what it feels like, looks like. Sounds like it's a massive deal. And for us it was. We wanted the product to seem like it could sit on your kitchen bench and you'd be happy with it. It could sit on your office desk and to ask questions around it. It could sit on a product shelf and, you know, people are going to definitely catch their eye at it. It needs to look, you know, medical enough to, to kind of look like it's going to give me benefit, but not, you know, candy enough or, you know, fresh enough that it's going to look like junk food. So when you start putting it through its paces and putting it through those lenses, it becomes really, really hard to. What you can sort of narrow it on as product designers or you can kind of hope is that you assemble the best and go forward with what you're confident with. And luckily we sort of, we think we've sort of hit the nail on the head with what we wanted. As you go through that product life cycle, you've got challenges in that, you know, maybe the product doesn't fit, you know, a mindset, for instance, because, you know, that's just, you know, they're used to really, you know, tradesmen sort of heavy high vis brands that, you know, maybe need a little bit more work, safety appeal to them or same with, you know, every sort of electrolyte. A lot of electrolyte products, or even just sports food products you still see come out are very tailored towards performance, fast, very edgy, whereas ours is a little bit obviously more softer and colorful and vibrant. So you've just got to be, I think we're just sort of got to be, remain confident with the product itself. And I think the ingredients, we have to remind ourselves, do a lot of the talking for us. You know, we've got professional golfers using the, the product, we've got Ironman using the product. We've also got, you know, just everyday people using the product and it's really awesome to see.
[Voiceover]: So, yeah, I could imagine as you do get through that product life cycle and your customer base expands, you'll be faced with all these different types of people using the product that you never imagined at the start. Like I remember one of my mates is a fly in, fly out worker out in the mines in Queensland and we were away on a trip one time and he just brings out this bag of electrolytes. He goes, boys, I've got some electrolytes for you. We'll fix you straight up. We use them out on the side. I'm like, I didn't even know this was a thing. But yeah, like I can imagine as you're doing that and how do you make it fit for everyone? But Jason, I interrupted you, sorry. You were talking around starting out as a D2C brand and the growth through that. And then I'm keen to hear where you're expanding to from there.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Jason Thomas: So the last six months we put a big focus on bricks and mortar. We launched retail very, very similar to how we started the business. We launched retail very, very, I guess we held it back for a long time. Where we launched retail was we did no I guess reach out or cold calling or anything like that. We purely just opened it up, a wholesale sort of email and then just sort of waited to see what opportunities arose. And really what you get is sort of people asking to stock the product and luckily for us that fit exactly sort of into our, our niche. You know it was yoga studios, it was Pilates studios, it was boutique gyms for a bit there. It was sort of boutique health food stores. Very, very independent. We had a lot of I guess control over how the product was displayed. We had a really, really great relationship with those vendors in terms of they understood the benefits of the product. They were happy to hand sell on our regard. They were users of the product, they had used it for years. They thought they want to help grow the brand and they were very much buying into our brand as a whole. So that wholesale and was great launch for the brand because it's just extra eyes on the brand. So we grew that ourselves to about 120 to 130 retailers around the country. It ranged across different uses and that sort of opened the door to conversations with distributors and different sort of wholesale arrangements as well. Fast forward four months down the line. We're in about 650 to I think 700 retailers around just Australia now. Ranging from chemists to those health food stores to gyms to smaller independent supermarkets. We've got a wholesale footprint in New Zealand as well as our E commerce trade in New Zealand and then about 10% of our online trade goes internationally as well. To which we're sort of in discussions now around launching into those opportunities out there for countries. I think Australian products always fare pretty well in an international environment. We're kind of renowned for high quality products and I think electrolytes is sort of no different in that car. We've got a, we've got a great high performance sport, I guess call it a market in terms of we're renowned for our athletes as well and sort of like what a lot of what our athletes are doing sort of people follow as well. So I think there's really good use cases for the product in sort of in that European sector as well. There's a lot of great cases there for the sort of Asian markets in sort of holiday destinations as well, for an Australian product that uses Australian salt. And of course the US market is, is just booming. The issue is that the fun part there is around competition and sort of where their products are positioned and who they're positioned to.
[Voiceover]: So I can imagine as you expand internationally, there's a whole bunch of considerations around messaging as well. Because like you said at the start, the Australian market might be a bit behind when it comes to awareness around benefits of salt and how that impacts our lifestyles. But then overseas, if they're a bit more advanced, does it turn then to an origin story around the lake? Deborah story and you know, ingredients more so than benefits?
Jason Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I mean you'd be surprised. I think those messages are obviously with the access to sort of Internet and information now that that message is getting fast tracked and forward. I think there is a great origin story from an Australian brand there, but I don't think it's unique. I think there are markets where the, the product itself is really, really what people are looking for and there really just isn't anything else like it. Like if you sort of look at UAE or the, those sort of. Yeah, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, you know, Dubai's sort of fitness capital of the world now. And from a market really, really relatively new, people just need electrolytes there. They don't really care what, what they get. I think that opens up the product, then opens the door and then you let the brand do the rest in terms of the look, feel and sort of how it's positioned and the ingredients in it and let people let the market decide, I guess, what type of product and the ingredients. There's sort of what value because there's, there's a big enough, I would say the electrolyte market is growing, it's growing quite big. There's a lot of sort of players coming into the space. It's really exciting. I think everyone's sort of carving out their own niches. Whether it be performance sport, whether it be triathlete focused, whether it be medicinal or medical focus. There's enough there for everyone. And sort of consumers will chip and change between what's right for them.
[Voiceover]: Quick Google search and Facebook and Instagram feed shows that you guys are pretty aggressive in performance marketing. Any tips that you've come across, say in the last six months because that world is constantly changing.
Nathan Bush: Have you found any tips from an
[Voiceover]: execution perspective that's helped you get cut through in those environments?
Cale McPherson: Yeah, we've tried a bunch of things. We've tried a bunch of multiple different sort of agencies to assist with that. We've always struggled to get on the same page as performance marketing agencies. With our background in design and branding, we kind of always put that as the primary lens to view things through. Where we've found if you're not working with the right partner, there's a bit of friction in terms of how to approach things. For example, if their primary focus is results, which is obviously important, you only wasting dollars. It's going to be a very different approach to someone who prioritizes brand and perception and all of that. So we have great agency working with now who are very much on the same page with us, a brand focused agency who are actually getting great results. Where we've potentially gone wrong is not sticking to our gut of what works for our brand and listening to an agency with pushing their, their tactics and as a result there's just a colliding, just a collision turn to what the content looks like, to what our brand sounds like. So someone clicks through an ad, goes to a website and it's the polar opposite. There's no, there's no join, there's no, it feels completely different. So the thing would be make sure that what you're putting out represents your brand, how you'd be happy for a first person to, to see it. So we work very hard to make sure our meta ads represent our brand at the highest level, even if we're not getting the most maximum return as we could from a dollar perspective. But the consumers that do click through, they get it, 100% get it rather than just sort of taking a sale for the sake of a sale.
[Voiceover]: So you're just trying to open the
Cale McPherson: funnel to the right type of consumer is the, is the trick with that?
Jason Thomas: Yeah. And every time cows right, like every time we've navigated away from our core values as I guess not even just in Soti, but in what was in divide as well in terms of that there's so much out there from content right now in terms of like even products being produced. Every time we navigate off of why we created the product in the first place or, you know, how we got it is to where it is now, it never really works out and it always goes awry. Whether that's, you know, giving price to someone who we know doesn't really align with the brand or it doesn't have the uses in mind for it. And you know, the perfect example of that is, you know, people advertising it as a hangover product or trying to advertise it as a hangover product. Like yes, the product works for hangovers, but by no means do we want to be associated with the use of it as a hangover cure. I think there's plenty of other products that can fill that void. If people want to use it for that, that's fine. But you know, coming out and, you know, making ad poll ads around it, being used to hangover is just not something that, as a small example of, I guess, navigating off of the core value of who we are as people. And then it doesn't feel right. The consumer feels that hesitancy as well, and it just doesn't lead to good results. Kaz. Right. Where we kind of sacrifice selling to 100 customers to find the one that will keep coming back to us 100 times. I think that's a much better use case for us.
[Voiceover]: And avoiding those vanity metrics that some agencies might push onto you.
Cale McPherson: Exactly. There's so many metrics that they can throw on your face, and if you don't actually dive into them, Jason's very good at actually digging into reports and figuring out what actually matters in those reports and going back to them. Being like, this doesn't actually make any sense or where are you pulling it from? There's so many metrics that they can sort of. That you can look at and go, things are working, but in reality they might not be. They could just sort of be facade. Facade metrics.
Jason Thomas: Yeah.
Cale McPherson: So I think it'd be figuring out what is actually valuable for. For your brand and business as a metric. And what's your goal with, I guess, these digital marketing activities? If it's purely sales and you want to bump up revenue as much as possible, then by all means you might have to have some tough internal conversations. If you want to use them as one only one lever or one channel for growth and sales, then stick to what. Stick to what your brand is. Stick to your positioning. Stick to what matters matters to you. Because in the long run, you're going to get more accurate numbers. You're going to be able to do things better in the future. That would be the advice, I think.
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[Voiceover]: If you're approaching performance marketing from a brand perspective like you guys, what are some of those key metrics that you look at?
Jason Thomas: We've always focused on the educational side of things for our own sort of, I guess direct marketing education has always proved to be a huge thing for us in terms of not just giving back, but creating, I guess, interest in leads. Got to go back to the start of the conversation around salt. Lots of education does need to happen in that space. As Carol mentioned, that mass market, in that product lifecycle, the mass market is very, very, I would say, solution focused. Like in terms of they have a nail, they want to have it, you know, that kind of thing where they're looking for a product appealing to innovators, appealing to early adopters. They require a lot more nurturing through that process. Why am I taking it? You know, what, what is it going to do for me? What's the price of it? You know, and we're like, as you can see, we're very, very passionate about it. So this kind of stuff just oozes out of us really very easily. We want to talk about. So across a multitude of ways, it's really hard to distill that into a metric. When we're taking that to, as Carol mentioned, agencies to say, hey, can we educate on Google Ads? It's like, well, no, Google doesn't really work that way. So that's when it kind of comes back to a whole holistic view. It's like, what kind of blogs are we writing? What kind of content are we putting out into the world? What kind of research studies can we collaborate with universities on? There's all these other factors that come into building up what the consumer, I guess you mentioned the funnel. How many people are coming through that funnel and finding the information that they want to find?
[Voiceover]: It's almost like how can we be of service to you at this stage of the journey that you're on?
Jason Thomas: Exactly, yeah. The product for us or the sale at the end of the day is obviously the last, last thing in most, I guess, marketing sense. The sale is the Most important thing for us is that nurturing stage after the sale when we think the majority of it begins. How do they use the product? Why did you buy this product? Are you going to come back again? What sort of information can we send you to actually implement this product? Because we get plenty of people, you know, there's enough orders coming through where people sort of message us after 30 days and say all my products, you know, all my products gone. No, sorry, I haven't used the product in sort of 30 days. Or they might use one a month or you know, for those, whether it be hangovers or something and you know they're really not seeing the benefit. Whereas the polar opposite of that and where you get the five star reviews and people who have leave reviews saying this product has literally changed my life is when they sort of implement it into their daily routines that you know, sharing that with friends and family, they're seeing the benefits of it. And that all comes from I guess the content that we're sharing. Say that hey, try this in your routine or use it this way. You know, not even product related information, just how to just general optimization stuff is all adding value to their life. Rather than buy this, buy this sale, sale, sale, sale, kind of, you know, discount, discount, discount, which is what people are sort of bombarded with. We kind of like to see our marketing as a breath of fresh air maybe between what is general sort of marketing sort of tactics as well.
Cale McPherson: But as for important, as for important metrics to us to sort of measure that. The main one we just sort of keep an eye on is returning customer rate which is massive for us and also conversion rate and sort of time to rebuy. So that customer cohort kind of what we just keep an eye on if those things are trending in the right direction. We know sort of our marketing approach and everything putting out is doing the right thing because we're hitting, we're hitting the right people. We're not so hitting those consumers that are just taking a flyer, but people that are buying because they want the product, they've come through, they've been nurtured and they're going to come back. We have almost, we bounce between about a 48 to 50% repeat, repeat purchase rate and anywhere from 8 to 9% conversion rate on the site. And it doesn't fluctuate too much from that. So when you sort of put money into scaling that up, you know, as long as those two things stay the same, you're hitting the right, the right consumer doing the right, that's a huge conversion, right? Massive. Yeah. Which is really nice when you're sort of going, we want to scale ads. You go, yeah, as long as this doesn't budge, we're all sweet. Rather than scaling on a loose conversion rate or a poor returning customer rate, just opening up the door to the wrong type of consumer and just money goes down the drain from a ad spend.
Jason Thomas: Yeah. And I think it's all in that. Like again, we built the website ourselves. We, we know why the website's just getting redone again at the moment. We're constantly working on this, this customer tinkering.
Cale McPherson: This one needed to happen, I promise. Yeah.
Jason Thomas: You know, obviously like there's a myriad of tools like where Shopify plus, you know, there's, you know, you can add reviews to check out, you know, they all add up to this, you know where it is to get to a high conversion rate. But you know, I just know what I'm like as my, as a consumer myself, I've been looking at a cold mattress topper for the last six months, you know, on, I think eight sleeps the brand. But I'm in their funnel. I go to their website like literally every week, read something new and like, am I willing to make this purchase? I keep going back and you know, I'm getting like closer and closer and closer to making this purchase.
[Voiceover]: You are a hard sell on a mattress topper.
Jason Thomas: It's a six grand mattress topper, so it's so easy. It's a, it's pretty high tech.
[Voiceover]: Next level.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, but hence my average. But if you take that to a 15 sample pack of electrolytes and you know, we look at the customer journeys on our website and we've done heat mapping before where people can come to the website, you know, 10, 15 times and go to different pages and read different things and get to different reviews and like you can kind of see them working out. Hey, is this a product for myself? I know I've got the need for it, but I need extra convincing from that. You can kind of build a really, really good customer flow and journey and work out what makes these people tick, what makes them convert, you know, and then you find a, boil it down to there and you just realize everyone's different. But you can kind of just build up the best case scenario and just hope that it works. In our case, it's working really well.
[Voiceover]: Awesome guys. I love this chat. I've learned a lot about salt, learn a lot about design, learn about performance marketing, what a spectrum we've covered. Tell us next 12 months. We've talked about website redesign, we've talked about packaging and brand redesign, international expansion and more retailers on board. What else is on the cards for the next 12 months?
Cale McPherson: Yeah, so just really focusing on pushing our sort of B2B wholesale channels a little bit more. Like Jay said early on we didn't really focus on it and now it's a big push for us. Really want to push sort of that thousand, thousand retailer store mark. We have some new innovations sort of down the product line coming up, a couple of new flavors launching soon as well. And then really looking to I guess solidify what international markets we want to push into and then figuring out the best way to do that without sort of dropping that consumer experience. Obviously here we can control a bit more. We do our own packaging, spend a lot of packaging to really nail that consumer experience from when they order to when it rocks up to all of that. Obviously when you push into international markets, you might have to sacrifice some of that. Maybe not. We're sort of going through all that now to make sure that when we do something we do it right with sort of a strategy and purpose rather than just sort of throwing a hail Mary and gone. That didn't work. So just sort of mapping that out all out now. And we've got some pretty big sort of financial targets as well. We want to sort of hit this financial year and over the next couple of years too. But hopefully all that combined will get us there. That's awesome.
[Voiceover]: Very exciting.
Nathan Bush: Now if people want to check out
[Voiceover]: more, if they want to go to the website or get in touch with you guys, what's the best way to do that?
Cale McPherson: Yeah, just probably the website sodi.com you can get, you can contact us on there obviously through socials. The way we get to our have internal marketing team, you get through to them and they can point you in the right direction or get to us on there as well. Just on the normal channel, website socials. Yeah, you get to us there.
[Voiceover]: Just don't go to the website and not buy something because you don't want to take that conversion rate down from 9% if you, if you land on that website, you are buying.
Cale McPherson: Don't tank the stats.
Jason Thomas: Yeah, at least get us on.
Cale McPherson: But yeah.
[Voiceover]: Jason Kale, thank you so much for joining us on Add to Cart. Thanks.
Cale McPherson: Thank you, mate, it's been nice. Cheers.
Nathan Bush: That was a bit of a master class on salt and electrolytes. Took me back, back to my sports science days, but there was a heap of e commerce tips.
[Voiceover]: Sprinkled in there.
Nathan Bush: I hope you caught them from two very experienced brand specialists. Here are my top three takeaways from our conversation. Especially useful if you're looking to launch a new product soon. Number one Reframe the narrative to create demand Jason and Kale didn't just launch a product, they flipped the script on salt and hydration. By focusing on education and science backed benefits, they reshaped how people think about electrolytes, not just their product. They called out the sugar and artificial ingredients in existing products and offered a cleaner, salt focused alternative sourced from how good did that sound? WA's Lake Deborah this fresh perspective didn't just appeal to athletes, but it struck a chord with wellness enthusiasts and everyday Aussies. It's proof that creating demand can often start with changing the conversation. Not an easy thing to do, but sometimes that's where you need to start. Number two Brand First Performance marketing. Those two words don't often go together, but in a race to drive clicks and sales, it is tempting to lean into aggressive performance marketing tactics focused on the bottom of the funnel. But Jason and Cal both believe that prioritizing your brand's identity and values over quick wins can lead to greater long term success. By crafting ads and campaigns that authentically reflect the ethos of wellness and clean hydration, rather than pushing a sale, they're able to take their customers on a journey from ad click to purchase when the time time is right. I love their philosophy of being there to help the customer at whatever stage they're at and not just going in for the hard sell every time. And number three, building a base through niche communities. When Soti launched during COVID they avoided rushing into the mass market even though the growth opportunities were huge. Instead they targeted niche communities like Keto, Facebook groups and Booty Gyms to introduce their product and get lots and lots of feedback. By collaborating with group admins and trusted influencers, they establish credibility and loyalty within these tight knit networks. This grassroots approach laid a solid foundation before expanding and today SOTI is stocked in over 650 retailers. They've got a brilliant brand base behind them now. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. Perhaps someone who needs to know about the benefits of salt. And if you can, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and support our amazing sponsors Shopify and Klaviyo who make this podcast possible. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e commerce learning platform Add to cart campus, meet
[Voiceover]: other professionals and learn from ecommerce experts
Nathan Bush: to take your business and your e commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus@addtocart.com au campus now. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague. Or even better, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple.
[Voiceover]: It really makes a difference.
