Sean Greenblow: When people talk about e commerce retention and they talk about the user experience, we don't think of it as just on site. And I think that's absolutely pivotal. It was seamless, just like our undies. There's plenty of reasons why in any, you know, partnership, you can say why not to do things, but you can also just give yourself a bit of license to have fun.
[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 E commerce talent agency E Suite. Now, it's a rare conversation I have when I admit to what underwear I'm wearing, but today's guest gets that all the time. Luckily for me, I'm talking today to Sean Greenblow, who is the managing director of Booty. They make high quality, sustainable clothing essentials, including underwear.
Nathan Bush: So that's where it all ties together.
Nathan Bush: Boody began when Shawn's dad David and his friend Neil wanted to bring their experience in fashion and pharmacy together to bring sustainable change to the basics industry. Now their sons run the business and have taken it to new heights with their sustainable, everyday, basic range of clothing selling in 15 countries globally and counting. In this chat, Sean shares his insights into Boody's DNA, the power of earned media, and how Boody convinced the goat of sustainability and a living legend at 88 years old to front their most recent underwear campaign. Now, just a quick heads up. Shaun recorded the episode from the new Booty offices in Surry Hills. And like all office moves, the WI fi is not at its peak yet.
Nathan Bush: So there might be a couple of
Nathan Bush: moments of lo fi interruption.
Nathan Bush: But hang in there. All right, so thanks to our partners
Nathan Bush: Shopify plus and Paclio, here's our conversation with Sean Greenblow, managing director at Booty.
Nathan Bush: Sean, welcome to ADD to cart.
Sean Greenblow: Thanks so much, Nathan. It's a pleasure to be here.
Nathan Bush: I believe we've got the privilege of
Nathan Bush: being the first interview in your new offices.
Sean Greenblow: That's correct. I'm sitting in one of these very cool silent booths at the moment in our new space in Surry Hills on Crown Street. And yeah, it's been a really fun week. We had an opening family and friends welcome party on Sunday. AVO with all our team and the vibes are amazing. It's really cool to see the team's actually lifting as a result. It's wonderful.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. So much effort and planning goes into moving office, doesn't it?
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, it's been incredible. And the support from my team has just been out of this world. We've been able to continue the growth of the business while doing office move is something that cannot be underestimated.
Nathan Bush: And did you move just office or was it warehouse as well?
Sean Greenblow: No, just office. We use a 3 PL over in Victoria that's been established. The new one's been established for about a year now and has also changed the. Changed the face of our business from an ability to scale perspective. So yeah, actually happy to call out estore for that. They're an incredible 3 PL partner of ours.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. Let's come back to that because I think 3PL is a really interesting topic that a lot of our listeners will want to know more about your experience with us. So let's come back to that. But before we do, let's set the scene. So you're the managing director of the official underwear of the entire planet.
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, I'm still getting used to that. That war cry of ours, but absolutely love it. And. And it speaks volumes for everything that we've built the business on. Yeah, look, Booty is a. Is a sustainable essentials brand. We're multi channel. We started back in the original days. Our founders who's my father and my co MD Elliot's father. So the business was started by our dads and now we' running it with their guidance. Essentially our journey has been to create a better basic without the premium. So provide a better quality product, extremely comfortable at an affordable price point where it's accessible by people. And therefore if more people are buying better products for the planet, then we're doing better things for the planet.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. So good. And I can vouch for it. I've got a Booty shirt on right now, the underwear, but I won't show you that. But no, it's incredibly comfortable product and I wear it on a daily basis. I love it.
Sean Greenblow: I often laugh when I'm at the dog park or buying a coffee and people ask me what I do. The daily that I get is I'm wearing your underwear right now. Which is often a little bit concerning.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's right. Too much information there. So tell us so your range. We're going from shirts to underwear. Did it start with underwear?
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, we started with underwear and socks. Booty's all about the basic essentials. So we focus in on underwear, bras, socks. We have ranges for both women and men and also babies. Because essentially we were hearing from moms and dads that they loved the product so much. It was so comfortable, and they were having newborns and small children and wanted to, you know, the same level of comfort on their newborns rather than the cheap, scratchy stuff that you buy. We have a basics range, an active range, a lounge range, and as I mentioned, a baby range. And we're expanding into some really exciting new categories in the coming months and seasons.
Nathan Bush: Awesome. So when your dad started the company, was it based around the environmental impact that you're focusing on right now, or was it based more around comfort?
Sean Greenblow: Very much both. So sustainability and comfort are both in our DNA, essentially. When my dad and Neil, David and Neil started the business, their preconditions were were about creating the most comfortable product on the entire planet and doing good by the planet. They went looking for different materials at various shows, material shows around the world, and they discovered bamboo and that they discovered that in bamboo, it was both extremely, extremely comfortable, had a huge amount of wellness qualities like breathability, antibacterial, antifungal, and was extremely comfortable, as I mentioned. And then the huge benefit as well was that bamboo is, as you know, bamboo grows incredibly quickly. It doesn't require a huge amount of irrigation, no artificial irrigation, in fact, to grow in it, and requires about one twentieth of the amount of water that cotton requires to grow. So it was just a huge win, win. And that's why bamboo has become the basis of our materials. However, these days, we're doing a huge amount of materials innovation in regards to both sustainability and comfort and quality. And that's become something really exciting that that's driving our brand and product in the pipeline.
Nathan Bush: I feel like the bamboo message as a material is getting a bit convoluted out there at the moment. You're hearing a lot of pro bamboo like yourself and some people saying, actually, it's not as good as what we think is. Where do you think that's coming from?
Sean Greenblow: Quite frankly, it's coming from some unfortunate lobbyists who have other incentives. You hear about this in the meat industry, you hear about this in all kinds of industries. Look, bamboo is an incredible, incredible source material, and it does require some chemical additives, which is where all that noise comes from. But so do most of the materials that you and I wear today. On the other side of the spectrum, bamboo has such important sustainability advantages which trump that by a mile, which is what I just referenced. But saying that, look, we're looking at all sorts of exciting things. We're doing a mycelium project, which is looking at using mushrooms, essentially the byproducts of mushrooms. We're looking at compostable underwear. We're doing a whole bunch of really cool things in the materials innovation space. So keep an eye out.
Nathan Bush: Tropeaka is an Australian nutrition brand born on Shopify back in 2016. Such a long, long time ago. Four years later, volumes have increased. B2B has become a priority, and it was time to scale. This meant a transition from Shopify to Shopify Plus. And what a transition it was. With the addition of personalized discounts, cart optimizations and a custom checkout, Tropeaka were able to increase their app average order value from $89 to $94 across 15,000 orders per month. That is a sign of a very healthy partnership. To read more of Tropeaka's story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com.
Nathan Bush: Where do you look for your inspiration to stay ahead of the game on new materials?
Sean Greenblow: It's all internal. We've got an amazing design team here in house in Sydney which are tasked with sustainability and materials innovation initiatives. And, you know, they have a lot of fun working with a lot of external organizations and also as a team here to come up with exciting projects that are going to move the needle
Nathan Bush: for us and for that skill set. Obviously, it's going to be a growing skill set that organizations are looking to bring in house and there's going to be a lot of people looking to kind of get credentialed and look at those kind of projects. What kind of background does that team have?
Sean Greenblow: It's a mix, actually. The design team, a lot of them have a traditional fashion design background, but we're putting a lot of work into the development of our team from a sustainability perspective. So they're doing. There's a lot of external education going on and attending conferences and the like to upskill. And we've also brought in some amazing consultants over the years to assist the team and also bring in their expertise into our thinking around design and material innovation.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's really exciting. I noticed on the website you've got a little ticker on there about measuring your impact that you're making. How does that work?
Sean Greenblow: We partnered with a company called Green Story. And what Green Story do is they've got a. They've got literally data scientists that are working in the backgrounds and partnering with our factories to do what they call an LCA assessment, which is looking at the direct impact that both our materials and the supply chain have, or rather neutralize or the benefits of that process. And then they do a really fun thing where they measure the direct impact on a per unit basis, per product, so that we can provide that back to our customers when they're purchasing. So I know we're going to go into some E commerce stuff soon. It obviously has the beautiful benefit of increasing conversion rate and all that kind of stuff, but really what we wanted to achieve was transparency in the purchasing decision for our customers. So it's really exciting to be able to provide them with some metrics, you know, energy being saved, car kilometers, the equivalent car kilometers and emissions being saved, water usage saved, et cetera. It's really, really fun.
Nathan Bush: So cool. And as Booty grows and the impact becomes larger, is there any one stat or figure that you look at and go, oh, it's incredible the difference we're making there?
Sean Greenblow: Not really, to be honest. What we've really tried to focus on, and you asked the question about bamboo before and the questions around bamboo, what we've really tried to focus on as a business is our overall impact journey. And we look at it very broadly from our supply chain and our materials, which is obviously extremely important. And that's where a huge amount of our thinking goes. But it's everything through to our circularity philosophy, our giving back philosophy and even what we do. I mentioned our new office, what we're doing at hq. So we're composting, we're doing incredible innovations here in the office with our employees, giving back to the community. It's really that full spectrum that we're focused on. And that's why, you know, I think from, for us, Boody, it's really in our DNA and we look at it as championing a future that's fit for all, that's become our vision and our goal. And we really see us as being at the forefront, leading the charge and bringing all the other brands that we love with us on that journey and educating them to do what they can for the planet. Because at a company level, that's what we can achieve together. We can achieve much, much more than I can at home composting and recycling my soft plastics, which of course I do. But I see the ability for myself individually to have an impact. I can have a far greater impact through Booty than I can individually.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that word DNA, that it comes through everything that you do. And obviously that started with David And Neil and has carried on with yourself and Elliot and onto the team. Like even before we started talking today, we were talking about the move of office and you said, look, on Sunday the whole team were in here, we helped move and then we had a big party. It feels like that DNA is really strong at booting. You've got a really tight team. They're all on this mission together. When you are bringing new people into the team, whether it is warehouse or product or marketing, how do you determine whether they've got that DNA?
Sean Greenblow: It's such a great question. We have four core values that we live and breathe. And we honestly look at every business decision that we make, whether it's bringing in teams, choosing three PLs, looking at bringing distribution partners overseas. No matter what the decision, small or big, we actually view through the lens of that, of those core values. So, you know, you see a lot of the big, the big banks and all these guys, you know, big corporates calling out their core values. But if you walked around this office, every single one of our staff members would be able to recite those core values and what they mean to them. So we really view those core values as our DNA. And those core values are that we are caring, we're considered, we're driven, and that we're high spirited.
Nathan Bush: What do you mean by high spirited?
Sean Greenblow: That's a really good question because it comes up a lot, especially when we're interviewing, actually, because we might. We celebrate diversity here at Booty. And for us, high spirited does not mean extroverted. You don't have to be the life of the party. We're not fun and silly. High spirited is more seeing the glasses half full, acting with transparency and being positive in the way that we do things and run our day and integrate our work into our life. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Nice. I love that. I love high spirit about being optimistic, but not necessarily being the extrovert all the time or being over the top.
Sean Greenblow: Yeah. So what ends up happening is when we are hiring and in retaining our team as well, what ends up happening is the people that we bring in share those core values on an individual level as well as do the people that they choose in their lives. Their partners, their friends, their families. So, you know, that extends to the community that we foster at Booty. And that's really how we built the brand.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And obviously it's a brand that is resonating all through the community. Most recently, I don't know if anyone's how you could miss this, but you've had Jane Goodall come on as the face of your new campaign, which is just fantastic. Can you share about that campaign and how that came about?
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, sure. It's been extremely, extremely exciting. We literally hooked the goat of sustainability. She's the LeBron James of sustainability to represent our brand out there in market and put her stamp on booty as a sustainable brand. So we were really, really, really excited that Jane was open to the idea of representing an underwear company at the tender age of 88. It was a huge surprise for us. Hugely exciting. Jane has been incredibly humbling and you know, we look up to her so much and in the face of what the world has been through in the last couple of years and us having so much respect for her and then also such a drive on sustainability and diversity and inclusion, we couldn't have thought of a better representative of our brand. So, yeah, we literally, for this campaign, we decided that the best call out that we could make to the world was the official underwear of the entire planet. It is a bit of tongue in cheek. It is fun, but we really mean it and it lays that stake in the, in the ground for us to, to take our brand to that next level. So we literally wrote on a list, our top people, of which Jane and David Attenborough were the top two. And David and Jane had both never done any brand campaigns before. Dave said no and Jane said a resounding yes. So we went along with the campaign and here we are today, the official underwear of the Entire Planet with Dr. Jane Goodall as our spokesman. It's incredible.
Nathan Bush: That's amazing. Tell us about the moment you got that first piece of communication back saying that Dr. Jane would like to be involved.
Sean Greenblow: It was completely mind blowing for us, to be honest. As I said, you know, she's the goat. We still see ourselves as a challenger brand and didn't think that we would be able to, you know, entice her to especially having in her career not doing much in the, in the face of aligning with brands, we totally didn't expect it to happen. And when she did, it was really just validation that what doing has been for the right reasons because she saw that, she saw, she loved the idea that we were a challenger brand and she was excited to stick her stamp of approval and on booty and kind of lay that stake in the ground with us. So I think she sees the same as I just mentioned, on an individual level. You can only go so far when you're working with brands to elevate your message. It can go a lot further. So she Saw the same as us. We align on those core values that I mentioned before. We align on what our vision is, which is to champion a future fit for all. So Jane was the perfect partner and she saw us as the perfect partner as well.
Nathan Bush: Did she have any concerns that you kind of had to get over to get to the final point?
Sean Greenblow: No, not at all. It was seamless, just like our undies.
Nathan Bush: Nice plug. I like that. In reading about the campaign, I thought it was really fascinating how it came together from a creative point of view, because the imagery is amazing, is that, you know, it's in the jungle and you've got these really diverse and beautiful underwear models, you've got Jane in the middle. But I understand that it wasn't as seamless to usual words, production, because it was shot or bit all over the place. Is that true?
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, it is. Obviously because of Jane's age and stage, it was difficult for her to travel to Australia for the shoot. So we worked around her. We shot the diverse models who weren't actually models, by the way. The five guys and girls that you see in the campaign were not models. They were regular, regular people, which we've actually featured on our website. There's a blog about each of them and what they all do. There was a software engineer in there, there was an Aussie R and B artist in there, there was a dancer in there. So we worked with those guys here in Australia and then we flew over to the uk, shot Jane on a green screen and the marvels of technology these days, we were able to integrate her into the cold winter jungle that we shot here in Australia.
Nathan Bush: Amazing. And what kind of feedback can imagine that this is an international campaign, if not international yet, but it has been set up to be an international campaign. What kind of feedback have you got so far?
Sean Greenblow: It's been amazing. Absolutely incredible. As I mentioned, Boody, being a challenger brand, we don't have the budget or didn't have the budget to compete with the big guys out there. So we really recognized that as part of this campaign, being our first above the line campaign, what we needed to do, earn a huge amount of earned media on top of it. So getting Jane on board was able to achieve that. And the press that we've had, we were, we were featured on the project, a number of other amazing publications. There's been a huge amount of talk about what's this amazing goat, 88 year old woman fronting an underwear campaign. It's just been, it's been incredible. It really has. And you know, we talk Often about the mix. I know your audience, audience is very, very focused or excited around E commerce. We talk about the mix between digital performance, marketing and above the line and the funnel, the marketing funnel. It's actually, we've actually seen a lift in our E commerce business as a result of the campaign and all that earned media as well, which has been fantastic.
Nathan Bush: And so how do you measure it? But also how do you set this up? Because it's obviously one of those big moonshot ideas that you go, I know this will work. It'd be a big gut feeling, be a bit of research behind it, I'm assuming. But also it's to your point, it's not directly measurable to sales. How did you set this up for success that you went, if we take this big moonshot idea that we know it's going to pay off, we did it.
Sean Greenblow: That's a short answer. It was something we really had to wrap our heads around. We've been very much above the line, below the line revenue and profit driven business over the last decade since we built our E commerce. I built our E commerce business in 2015, literally just working, plugging away myself at a Shopify store. We focused on digital marketing and roas and that's been the lens at which we've viewed our marketing spend a dollar, how much are we going to earn? This is a whole different world. But what we did recognize with that was the power of brand in creating value and impacting our community. And that forced us, or not forced us, but excited us to start opening up our thinking and coming to terms with the fact that this might not be a ROAS play. It was about awareness, it was about earned media, it was about exciting and engaging our community. And as they say, you know you can 100% of your marketing spend, 50% will work, but you don't know which 50%.
Nathan Bush: And obviously the ROAS environment is tougher at the moment, especially the last three to six months it's been pretty tough. Have you found that by having this branding element over the top, has it had any impact on your roas?
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, it has. It's had a small impact but a positive impact. As you say. It's an extremely challenging environment at the moment. Ads are expensive and they're performing nowhere near as well as they were comping to this time last year. We're still seeing year on year growth comping to this time last year in the midst of lockdown where E commerce was absolutely pumping. So we're excited about that. But yeah, it's A tough environment out there and we're really having to think outside the box and really think about that funnel and the marketing mix and how we utilize our spend most efficiently. However, I'm not the performance marketer in the business. I'm extremely high level. I love working with it. And I was the one tinkering those ads back in the day when we were still celebrating the Ka Ching coming from Shopify. Every single one. I remember that day where I finally said, okay, I think I have to silence the Ka Ching. It's getting too much.
Nathan Bush: How many Kachings a day were you getting?
Sean Greenblow: I remember it was Black Friday, maybe 2017. And we do Black Friday very, very differently these days obviously because we're conscious of over consumption. But I remember back then, I think we were probably a year and a half into me spinning up our first website and we went for lunch over Black Friday and it was, you know, doing the Kaching kajing and I went, okay, this is a really exciting day. I'm going to keep it going. But from tomorrow I think I'm going to have to send this Kaching off. It's hurting my ability to actually work efficiently.
Nathan Bush: It should be like a milestone for all E commerce entrepreneurs. The day you have to turn off the Kaching.
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, that's right. But to be honest, we're doing it all again now. Celebrating in Europe. We're doing the same thing. So we launched our European website about six months ago now and we're back to celebrating the Kaching again. Building the brand over on that side of the world.
Nathan Bush: You've refreshed your website. The new range is about to drop. You've never had more customer service options. Hey, but take a look over there. That boring pile of packaging boxes.
Nathan Bush: Ugly.
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Nathan Bush: How does that feel? Going back to that starting point in a new country and building again?
Sean Greenblow: It's extremely exciting. You know, it's doing all those things again but taking the learnings that you took from when you did it here. Going and setting up a you know, technology, first3PL integrating really well with them, making sure that we deliver on the customer experience and being completely obsessed with making sure that customer journey is seamless and delivering booty into more hands. Because we know that the more hands that we get booty into, we really, really, really back our product. And that is our best retention metric or retention activator is our products. So the more. The more hands or bums we can get our product into, the more we're going to sell. So it's just. It's going back to the basics. It's taking all the learnings. It's super, super exciting.
Nathan Bush: That's brilliant.
Sean Greenblow: And we're replicating that all over the place. So we're running in the us we're running in South Africa. We're running in the Scandinavian region, the uk, Europe, as I mentioned, New Zealand. Yeah, all over the place. We're trying to. We're trying to really, as I said, put the booty stake in the ground globally and become the official underwear of the entire planet. You can't do that just selling to people in Australia, right?
Nathan Bush: No, absolutely. It's phenomenal to see it grow and expand like that. Is there anything in the booty DNA or even the messaging that you've had to change significantly for different territories?
Sean Greenblow: Not so much in the messaging, because I think if you stick to your core values and stick to your ways of communicating, you're pretty safe. What we have had to do is obviously change the customer journey slightly. You know, tweak the marketing, tweak the ways that we do things very subtly in different markets. You know, some markets are colder than others, some markets have more competition than others. Some markets like, you know, a different kind of underwear. We've had to tweak our product, tweak our point of sale in store, because we are omnichannel. It's a constant challenge. Tweak our packaging. So, yeah, it's a fun one, but it's not without its complications, that's for sure.
Nathan Bush: But you're finding the sustainability message is hitting home regardless of.
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, we tweak up the sustainability and tweak down the sustainability slightly in different countries. Just like we tweak up and down the comfort messaging, the diversity and inclusion messaging. Obviously, in the States, diversity and inclusion is a huge, huge thing. So we tweaked that up a little bit over there. So, yeah, we're always having to think about the region or the market that we're selling into and tweak it accordingly. Language is obviously another thing. And customer service and all those kind of things. You really have to think about the broad spectrum of how you're delivering your customer experience and taking your customer on the journey and marketing to that customer through the full funnel. But yeah, all part of the fun.
Nathan Bush: And do you do a lot of planning before going into a new market or is it more. I see an opportunity, let's move quickly.
Sean Greenblow: In the early days it was I see an opportunity, let's move quickly. And nowadays it's a lot of planning before going into a new market. And we've had to overcome some of the challenges of making those early, I don't want to call them mistakes, but taking the learnings from those early decisions. We've been running, as I said, for 10 years. We've been, you know, it's only now that we're really screaming from the hills for the first time. And only in the last two years have we really put a focus on brand and getting the brand and messaging and our core values and all of that out there to the world. So we've been running for a decade. We, for example, our North American business we've been in for six or seven years already and that's grown really nicely. We're at a really nice place over there. But then there's some newer markets like Europe that we're only really starting to focus on now. So it's a real mix and it's what's key is taking those learnings from the mistakes that you make on that journey and not applying them again. And when you actually look at Boody as a business and our product, one of our co founders, David, who's also my father, essentially applied in Booty didn't apply. Rather the mistakes that he learned from 30 plus years of fashion. And that's really the core of or the core pillars of what our product's all about, which is non seasonal. No embellishments that the customer can complain about. One thing that he really learned about product is customers don't like products, they don't like products. And if you can make that purchasing decision easier by taking out points where they can criticize or complain about the product, you have a much better chance of converting the customer and keeping the customer. So Booty is all about the basic essentials. We're not interested in the fancy schmancy, we're not interested in the embellishments. We are about great quality, basic essentials that are made to be the most comfortable underwear, innerwear, outerwear that you'll ever wear and you'll come back. Because when you wake up in the morning and you get out of bed and you open your drawer, you are always think about this, right? Tell me this isn't something that you've experienced, Nathan. You wake up in the morning, you go to your drawer to pick that pair of underwear or that pair of socks, you will always go for the number one comfiest pair in that drawer.
Nathan Bush: Oh, for sure. I hate when it gets to Friday or Saturday and I've got the dregs left over.
Sean Greenblow: Well, that's the thing, right? So if it's not there and the dregs are over or it's in the wash, you're upset. And what we want booty to be is the pair that you go for and the pair that is in there Monday to Sunday. So I can actually kind of, if you'll allow me, I can kind of go into what our omnichannel strategy is there because it's very relevant. I know your audience is E commerce, but our traditions are actually in or our origins rather actually in wholesale. And the reason they're in wholesale is because what we do is we put our product on stands in places of surprise and delight. We stock in places where the customer is wellness focused and sustainability focused. So you won't find our product in fashion retailers around the country. You'll find our products, funnily enough, in pharmacies, in health food stores, in natural grocers, in wellness studios, yoga studios, things like that. The reason why is because the customer is not expecting to buy underwear at a pharmacy. But they're very, very much aligned with our values. So you'll be in a pharmacy or a natural grocery, you'll be checking out and you'll see booty stocked on a six foot display stand with 284 of our products on it across our best selling styles. And you might decide to buy a pair of undies for 1295. You'll go home, you'll put those undies on, you'll realize that they're the most comfortable undies you've ever owned. And what do you do when you find a pair of undies that you love? You go online and buy one for every day of the week. So that's been pivotal in our growth strategy and that's really where I saw the opportunity online in E commerce. So when I spun up our first e commerce site back in 2015, I was delighted to see all the metrics that we talk so much about in E commerce, conversion rate, atv, repeat purchase, et cetera, were Absolutely incredible. Like nothing I'd seen before. And I've been in E Commerce a huge part of my career because what people were doing, where they were going into the stores, they were buying that one pair of undies, loving it, and then going online to buy one for every day of the week and maybe chucking a T shirt or a pair of socks, et cetera. So that is when I immediately saw the potential for our E Commerce business. And today it's well over 50% of our national revenue here in Australia.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's almost like paid sampling.
Sean Greenblow: Totally. And we know that once we get booty onto the bums of customers, they are likely to return. So we really push that sampling mentality with our customers.
Nathan Bush: I love that approach of having a physical presence without necessarily having a physical store. I think that's really smart. I talked to a few companies about this regularly and it's all about if you're a D2C, yes, you need to have some sort of physical presence where you can touch, feel, experience, but it doesn't mean you've got to have a store. And I think what you've shown there is a great example of how that can come to life.
Sean Greenblow: Yep. Boody's present in over 1500 stores in Australia. And we don't pay rent, we don't pay wages, we don't have any of the costs. But our brand is represented like. Well, hopefully very close to like it would be if we had 1500 of our own retail stores. Not saying that that's not in the pipeline.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, hint, hint. And I love your packaging as well. So whenever you get a booty parcel, and I've only had it delivered via E Commerce, but each pair of underwear is beautifully packaged up in a little box. It just feels convenient. Like the packaging really speaks to your DNA. How did you get that right?
Sean Greenblow: It's a labor of love. We've really thought about the packaging like we thought of our product. It needs to be, you know, completely 100% recyclable. It needs to be a beautiful customer experience to open to receive your Booty E Commerce purchase. And we've thought about every single detail from your E Commerce box can be resealed up for return. It can be turned into a cat litter box. And we've had a huge amount of customers post on Instagram and tag us of different uses that they've found for our E Commerce boxes. It's printed with vegetable dyes, all the rest of it, and then the actual booty package units inside there, all the same, it's delivering that beautiful customer experience. So you know, when people talk about E commerce retention and they talk about the user experience, we don't think of it as just on site. And I think that's absolutely pivotal. It's full funnel, it's getting them to the site, it's delivering when they're on the site, it's delivering in the post purchase experience and it's continuing to engage with the customer for their lifetime, hopefully. And the lifetime value.
Nathan Bush: Oh, and it adds to that experience too, that, that ability to unbox experience the product, get it out and then take all the packaging, bundle it up and put in your compost is something pretty unique, right?
Sean Greenblow: Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's some really exciting things in the pipeline there which, which I can't disclose at this point. But where our small team is extremely driven, they're extremely dynamic and we encourage them to think outside the box. So we're constantly innovating and doing, you know, we've got some fun projects on the go at the moment.
Nathan Bush: Very cool. One of the fun projects that I saw you did recently was that you partnered with Milk Run which is the on demand delivery service in metro areas. Obviously getting a lot of publicity as well. Right now they promised to deliver in under 10 minutes. What's that offer? Because they obviously do a lot of grocery. What's that offer take up been like for underwear?
Sean Greenblow: That was such a fun one for us. We started chatting to the guys at Milk Run. We thought it would be fun, you know, if you can get your groceries delivered in 10 minutes. When are there situations where you can need your undies delivered in 10 minutes too? And yeah, so we started chatting to them. So we, yeah, we partnered with them on a pilot, ended up rolling out to both their Sydney and Melbourne on their app in both Sydney and Melbourne. It was just a fun one and we're starting to really think, our brand and marketing team are really starting to think, think about fun collaborations that we can do like that. You know, we, I don't know if you saw the actual ad copy that they rolled out the Milk Run guys, but it was a, it was an eggplant and a peach wearing our undies and we, we took the customer on a, on a whole journey where they started as eggplant and the peach wearing undies. The next one they were cuddled up with in bed with the undies sprawled on the side table. And the third and final installment of the eggplant and peach story was little baby eggplants and peaches with, with booty Baby as well. So it was a lot of fun. Again, it got us some earned media. We really enjoyed working with the Mill Crown guys on it. We executed fast. And it's really that mix of. In your marketing, in your marketing strategy, it's that mix of, you know, having that full year annual plan, but then also able to think on your feet and kind of execute fast and fun on some of those fun little activations.
Nathan Bush: And how nice that you get to test a new service delivery option but also get to play around with the branding because to your point, some of that messaging wasn't necessarily booty branded, but it was still in your territory. But someone else's branding and having fun with that.
Sean Greenblow: That's right. You can get so hung up on reasons not to do things. And obviously we do look at everything. It's going back to what I was talking about before. We looked at that in the same lens of our core values. Do we share the same values as the Milk Run guys? Yes, we do. They ride around on E bikes. You know, they're about delivering an incredible customer journey. They're about surprising and delighting the customer. There's plenty of reasons why in any partnership you can say why not to do things, but you can also just give yourself a bit of license to have fun and make sure that, that if you're looking at it in that lens of your core values, you can't really go wrong.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Oh, Shaun, there's been so much. We've got a list of questions in front of us and I don't think we've even got to half of them. But we're running out of time. I will be hung and quartered if I don't go back to our question about 3 PL, because we've got some people who are really passionate about 3 PL listening. What advice do you have for anyone considering moving to a 3 PL solution, especially if they're looking to go international?
Sean Greenblow: So one of the things me personally, that I'm incredibly passionate about is instilling best of breed technology and efficiencies into your business. The same level of focus that we have on delivering an incredible product and an incredible customer experience. I believe that in all areas of the business that needs to be backed by technology and efficiency. So whether it's our erp, our inventory management system system, our integrations, our E commerce stack or our three pl, we look for technology first. Best of breed partners. So we've gone through a journey with three PLs. We've had some amazing partners that share our values but we got to a point where at the scale that we got to, they couldn't continue to deliver that same level of customer experience. So when we went out to Tender about a year and a half ago, we looked nationwide and we ended up partnering with east or Logistics. If you've seen those amazing YouTube videos of the Amazon warehouses with the robots, that is actually what it's like. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: We've had Lee on here before, too. He's great.
Sean Greenblow: Yeah. Yes. I think you have interviewed Lee, so Lee's. We work very closely with Lee and his team. They went scouring the US for the same thing. You know, who is doing this best and how can we emulate it? I think they partnered with. With Ruslan Kogan, who invested some. A little bit of money into their business, and they're able to deliver within SLA every single day, day in, day out. They're technology first, but they're backed by great people, and we look at Booty exactly the same way. So we knew from the moment we met them and visited their facilities that they were the partner for us. And it's been an incredible journey so far. We actually went out there to see them just Friday, a week ago.
Nathan Bush: How good in the show notes. We'll put a link back to Lee's episode if you want us to hear more about Estore Logistics. That was about 12 months ago, so things may have changed rapidly since then, but at least you get an idea of who they are and what they're building to build on what you've already said, Sean, so thank you for that. Now, you've hinted at a few upcoming developments, Sean, and held out on us a few times. What can you tell us about what's coming up for you and the team at Booty?
Sean Greenblow: Without giving too much away, we're incredibly focused on our brand, our business and our customer. That's really our three focus areas. What that boils down to is, as I said, screaming, our brand from the hilltops. We're in a position, finally, and very graciously, that we really believe in our brand and our product and we're ready to tell the world about it. So it's continuing to deliver on that promise to our Australian customer base, in which we're becoming quite mature, but we certainly see a lot of growth and then really focusing on expanding that message internationally. So the biggest development of late, and you'll be the first to hear it, is we're actually in the process of merging or acquiring back our USA distribution partner. So we're bringing them into the Fold. We're continuing to work with their amazing team and they've grown the business to an incredible point so far, but we both see potential for future expanded growth or extended growth with them with the support of Booty HQ here in Australia. So it's a really, really exciting time. That's one of many developments that we've got in place, both front end and back end and product, customer experience, all these sorts of amazing things. But I really do want to use it as an opportunity to call out our incredible team at this point, because this isn't me, this is Elliot and I leading an incredible, incredible team of highly capable, driven people who share our core values and want to integrate the Booty philosophy and lifestyle into their own lives. You're hearing a bit of background noise now. Even even though I'm in this amazing little pod, our team's sitting out in the. In the lounge room having lunch, so it's a good time to call them out.
Nathan Bush: Sounds like an awesome environment that you're creating there and your team staying ahead of the game and really pushing the limits of what we should accept in fashion. So congratulations on what you built so far and I think it's really exciting to keep an eye on and watch where you go from here as you take on the world. Now, if we've got listeners who have heard today and gone, I love what Sean's talking about. I love the Booty Story. Where's the best place for them to
Sean Greenblow: go to learn more booty.com au we have some amazing information on there. You obviously see our suite of products and categories that we offer and, yeah, jump on there. Hopefully we deliver the same experience that I've been talking to. We certainly put a huge amount of effort into it.
Nathan Bush: Absolutely. Sean, thank you so much for joining us on ADD to cart.
Sean Greenblow: Thanks so much, Nathan. Cheers.
Nathan Bush: Look, I'm sorry that I had to make mention the underwear that I was wearing while recording that conversation. You really didn't need that in your life. Luckily, it's audio only, so take your blessings. Anyway, here are the three big lessons that I took from my conversation with Sean. Number one, loud and proud. Sustainability. One of the things that Booty do really well is they share their sustainability mission and publicize the impact that they make. Sean mentions that they use Green Story. You can check them out at GreenStory CA. And they use Green Story to put values and targets on the impact that they're working towards. Having this data verified by a third party then allows them to be confident about their sustainability direction and their messaging to customers. Number two, the physical gorilla tactic. And and no, not the Jane Goodall gorilla. We're talking gorilla marketing. We are seeing a physical presence becoming more and more important for online brands. But this doesn't mean that you need to have a store. Boody is present in 1500 Pharmacies, health food stores, yoga studios, basically anywhere their target market is at and it gives their target customers a chance to get hands on with the product and in an uncluttered environment.
Nathan Bush: Environment.
Nathan Bush: Physical presence does not necessarily mean traditional retail. Just think about where your customers are. Number three, Strong values means no more boring branding. As we heard from Sean, the booty values and the DNA are entrenched through all parts of the organization. But instead of having those values kind of strangle out any creativity or fun with branding, it actually opens them up up. And we heard that with the Jane Goodall and the milk run examples. So branding can be changed up and it doesn't have to be a precious thing if you stick to the organization's values. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to addtocart.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 E Suite. 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 training job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to card.
