"Most brand virality is paid for. That’s the secret no one wants to admit."
Available on YouTube: [youtu.be/wDlijQtbLJo](https://youtu.be/wDlijQtbLJo)
What if your brand could sell a million orders before shipping a single product?
Bryant Garvin, marketing lead at Ozlo Sleep and former CMO of Groove Life, did exactly that. In this episode, he shares how performance branding, differentiated product, and a viral video formula helped Ozlo launch with massive traction. From his early work at Purple Mattress to Groove Life’s rise, Bryant breaks down what it takes to turn pre-orders into a brand-building machine.
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Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you. instead of your competitors. And forty-five thousand stores already use it. And it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to Git Swim dot com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com. Today on the show, we're gonna talk how to build a brand before you quite have a business. I love this idea because it reduces risk for the entrepreneur. It's a you know, what if you could raise millions before you are ready to ship the product? Of course, I'm talking about pre-orders and crowdfunding and all that stuff that sounds great on paper, but in practice, okay, it it It's hard. It's still hard. It's all hard. But we've got a guy who has who's done this before quite successfully. And he's going to share his story with it. Story with us, Bryant. Garvin has done it. At Purple, his ads turned a mattress company into a household name. Like certainly you've heard of Purple Mattress. At Groove Life, his video playbook helped them scale their ads. And now at Oslo Sleep, it seems he's doing it again. And so, Bryant, w welcome to the show. What uh did I get that all right?
Bryant Garvin
Yeah, you got that all right. Excited to be here, man. Something I'm passionate about.
Kurt Elster
Excellent. And so we're talking how to build a brand. But before you have a business, uh so you start this this journey with purple? Purple mattress?
Bryant Garvin
Yeah, I started this particular journey with Purple Mattress, but I've been doing this 20 years helping brands. Um started way back in the day at Lycos. If any of you are old enough to remember the search engine Lycos. as Lycos was dying, Google was rising. I was an account executive there. So I was a Google ads rep, only I was really, really useful. And so uh that's uh where I got my start and then moved into brand and uh I love it. I love growing brands.
Kurt Elster
So it at Purple, what was that breakthrough success you had that you well you had like a viral success is the dream, it's what everybody wants. It's easier said than done. What was yours?
Bryant Garvin
Um, so at purple, I'll be completely honest, the amazing thing that we did there, first off, it started with the right product. I don't care how good your videos are. I don't care how good your marketing is. Like the product has to also be good because that's the foundation you're building everything off of. And if you've got a truly unique differentiated product, then all of your marketing can build on top of that, right? And so having the product first. And this was a product that the founders had been working on for over twenty plus years, essentially, until they came up with the purple mattress. They literally invented the machines that were big enough to make the mattress that gel material in that size, which was a thing that they had made proprietary. That gel that was inside the purple mattress was the same formulation in some ways differentiated so it could be in a mattress that they had originally licensed to Dr.
Kurt Elster
Scholes, the blue gel instance.
Bryant Garvin
And so they ha they were some uh sixty, seventy year old guys that had been inventing for years and finally invented a machine that they could actually take that purple material and make it in the size of a California King of King size mattress. Uh so just the machine that made it had tons of patents, right? So that product was key as a starting place. But then one of the things that they did really early on is they were willing to invest in the creative, which is another one of those pillars, the content. to be able to actually grow a brand. And so they invested in that pillar of content by actually going out and hiring the Harman brothers to help create that first Goldilocks video.
Kurt Elster
In marketing, that's like gives people goosebumps. Why, for people who aren't familiar, what is so exciting about the Harman Brothers?
Bryant Garvin
Uh the Harman Brothers are the original ones that helped do squatty potty, pooperie. Some of these viral brands that everybody knows about, right? I think like Dr. Squatch. Uh yeah, very similar to Dr. Squatch. Dr. Squatch was not done by the Harmon Brothers, but very similar in the in those aspects. So Poopery and uh Squatty Potty were the two big ones that they had grown up at that point in time. Um they're also those guys eventually went and started Vid Angel which is, you know, a big production company at this point in time. So they're really good at taking product and telling the stories around it. And making it quote unquote viral. But here's the thing that I want to make a point of. Most brand virality is paid for. So most brand virality, when you think of viral videos, very, very rarely is it truly a viral video that just organically happens. especially in this day and age. Like TikTok and meta, sometimes you can get some virality there, right? Like it picks up the algorithm, stuff like that. To get a viral video on YouTube these days is next to impossible. And most brand videos, videos that are for a brand or a product, the only way they quote unquote go viral is because they're able to put money behind it. Even look at Super Bowl commercials. They have millions and millions of views and oh my gosh, it's so viral and so funny. First off, they spent millions to produce it. They spent millions to run the ad. And then there's millions behind the PR and that Super Bowl thing in order to get millions of views on YouTube. Right? So every video that you see out there from a brand, 99. 9% of them, if they have millions of views on them, it's because they put money behind it. And as startups, especially bootstrap startups like Purple and Groove Life, the only way to continue to put millions of dollars behind a video is if it's making you millions of dollars.
Kurt Elster
So this is where our our pre-order campaigns come in?
Bryant Garvin
That is one of the way the reasons why pre-order campaigns come in because it helps fund and validate what you're doing, right? So the original purple pre-order campaign videos didn't look anything like the Harmon Brothers ones. They were shot really really cheaply, low cost, just to get the product out there. There was humor, there was all of those things there, but they used the pre-order opportunity to validate. to get cash to actually produce the product and then to take it to market. We did the same thing at GrooveLife. We did the same thing at Oslo, where we two of those pre-orders to first validate the product market fit. actually get some revenue coming in the door, which the goal of that revenue isn't just to make a ton of money, it's to help with the production process and to get feedback. Right? Because that's one of the things that a lot of people when they think of pre-orders, they just think, oh, get a bunch of money to pay for the product to get it shift here type of thing. But Really what a lot of it is is also getting feedback, that feedback mechanism. When you think about Kickstarter, when you think about Indiegogo, even if you did pre-orders on Shopify, a lot of those people, they're willing to take a risk. To get your product, not 100% sure that they're going to get it, but the cost savings and the ability to be one of the first to actually have a product that they love. and be in the front, right? I was one of the first purple mattress companies. I first customers. I was one of the first groups, right? It it builds this tribe. And that tribe gives you feedback. And if you take that feedback, you can scale your business along with it.
Kurt Elster
Part of the reason they're jumping in early as these early adopters is because of the discount. And typically you pre-orders a crowdfunding campaign, there's a discount on it. What's the typical discount from you know what will eventually be retail?
Bryant Garvin
It really depends on the product, and part of that depends on the margins on the product, right? Like if you've only got a 40% margin on your product, you can't be giving 50% discounts. But it also depends on how long before the product's going to be available, the discount that you're going to be able to give. So every single brand is going to be significantly more than they will normally ever give on their website. And one of the reasons why is you want to give these customers an opportunity to say, hey, thank you for joining us. Here's a discount that we will never see again. Right? Like if you look at all of the discounts that they that we did at Purple, at Groove Life at Oslo, we never have given those discount percentages at any place in time ever again. And part of that was to reward the people that are willing to raise their hand, put money on their credit card, their bank account, whatever it is, and say, hey, I'm willing to join you for this ride. I know that there's some risk here. I know there might be some hiccups, some other things like that, but the story you're telling me, the product you're delivering to me, sounds really unique and different, and I would like to be one of the first to do that. And so you reward with them with that discount.
Kurt Elster
That purple campaign, how long ago was that?
Bryant Garvin
So that was in 20 the end of 2015 is when the Kickstarter campaign happened, the original one for the mattress.
Kurt Elster
And then it's a
Bryant Garvin
I did like a hundred thousand dollars. So it wasn't like this knockaway success, but they were able to sell a couple hundred mattresses, validate it, get some feedback, that type of thing. And then they took all of that and put it into the Harman Brothers campaign, which launched in January of 2016. So to put that in perspective, they launched the video campaign and the company in January of 2016. At that point in time, very few people knew about purple. By the end of 2017, we were have we had as much brand search volume for purple mattress as there was for memory foam mattress less than two years after launch. When you think about memory like a non-brand keyword That's something that lots of people think about. It's not a brand. It's a category keyword. It's a type of thing, a memory film mattress. It's a Bluetooth, it's a Bluetooth headphone versus an AirPod. purple mattress versus memory foam mattress or latex mattress or bed in a box mattress, whatever it is, right? So to have as much brand search volume as one of the main non-brand keywords tells you a little something.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well it's such it you dominate the category.
Bryant Garvin
Exactly. And it was built off of performance because the only way we could continue to invest money was if we actually made money.
Kurt Elster
All right, hindsight being 2020, if you had to go, you know, it's 10 years ago, if you were to go back and do it differently, what would you do differently?
Bryant Garvin
Differently, I would definitely invest a little bit more if it was available into the Kickstarter campaign because I've seen the success of those campaigns over and over again.
Kurt Elster
Did you only run the one Kickstarter campaign or were there multiple?
Bryant Garvin
No, that's the beautiful thing. We started on Kickstarter with mattress, then they developed the purple pillow. The purple pillow, we actually went back to Kickstarter and we went back that next like August September timeframe. So it was kind of around a year after we had launched the original Kickstarter campaign for the built mattress. We had already launched the publicly, we're delivering mattresses, we're selling hundreds of mattresses a day at that point in time. And we took the purple pillow and we developed a Kickstarter for that. But at that point in time, we had always already reverse engineered What the Harmon Brothers formula was and all of our campaigns that we did internally at that point in time were all built in-house. We had a video creative team in-house We worked through the process and able to launch those things. So we did a Harman Brothers style campaign for our Kickstarter launch for the Purple Pillow. The purple pillow at the point in time that we launched it did almost $2. 7 million.
Kurt Elster
That's a lot of pillows.
Bryant Garvin
That is a lot of pillows, okay? Here's the other really cool thing. At the time that we did it, it was the 42nd most funded Kickstarter campaign of all time. At that point in time, it had beat out the Oculus Rift. As far as cells. Okay.
Kurt Elster
So all of those had like a high AOV too.
Bryant Garvin
It had a high AOV. Like the purple pillow was a hundred dollar pillow at that point in time. One of the cool things that we did with every other company that I've been with, we not only pushed the purple pillow, but at the same time, While we were pushing the purple pillow, we also built out packages on the campaign page for a purple pillow plus a purple mattress. So that they we were uh using the purple pillow to build awareness of the mattress at the same exact time. And so we saw a lot of adoption there of people that bought the purple mattress there because they got a discount on that bundle. And because we introduced people there, they're getting the purple pillow, they're getting that. We were able to get press from all of this, right? And then we funneled all of those people into Shopify. We actually took all those orders that we got, exported them, and imported them into Shopify. So we actually shipped directly from Shopify, and all of those orders that came through Shopify, we then already had set up for reviews. So when we launched the actual purple pillow direct to consumer, we had hundreds and thousands of reviews on that pillow.
Kurt Elster
That's that's the magic. I mean it's very different to land on a site. That's got, you know, an expensive product that you're gonna be married to a while, like a mattress you own many years. Exactly. I think I'm on ten years with mine. And If you show up on that site and there's zero reviews, it's not gonna be a good look. You're really gonna struggle. And so this system to get reviews is smart. And this that purple site was on Shopify then.
Bryant Garvin
Yep, it was Shopify. It kind of built semi-headless when we did it. We were actually one of the very first brands to actually custom build a headless. Shopify, especially back in the day, was product pages. That's it. It wasn't really built for landing pages, wasn't built for any of these things.
Kurt Elster
Free online store 2. 0.
Bryant Garvin
And even back then, landing page builders weren't truly a Shopify thing in 2016.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, back then what'd you do? Like you have to run you know like a separate thing on a subdomain. We ran WordPress on a subdomain.
Bryant Garvin
Yeah. Oh, you poor man. And then click them through to the uh cart page essentially to purchase. So like the friction there was ridiculous. When we think about that, right? As we started off. But because the product was so unique and differentiated, just showing up nine hundred ninety-nine dollars when they hit the page for a mattress That that's not gonna do it with a couple product images and some text, right? We had to sell them. We had to actually go to a landing page to sell them on why they should look at purple versus everything else that was out there. And remember this was the heyday. of bed in a box mattresses.
Kurt Elster
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Bryant Garvin
Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster
Tell me about scaling Groove Life. Like, you know What was that business like when you joined?
Bryant Garvin
What's really cool about it is I actually spoke in uh Ezra Firestone Blue Ribbon Mastermind back in 2018.
Kurt Elster
Oh, love I draw and I enjoyed Blue Rubbon.
Bryant Garvin
So I I spoke at this mastermind and at that point in time, like I'm the type of guy that I will tell you everything. Because here's the thing, 99. 9% of people will not even go attempt what you tell them.
Kurt Elster
Yep.
Bryant Garvin
And so I laid it all out for everybody there at the at the Blue River Mastermind. And we were able I started with consulting at that point in time with them and helped starting them grow on that side with the video with their advertising with all of those things, right? But they did all of that in-house. They did it really scrappy. They were bootstrapped They weren't venture backed. So they took it really scrappy. They decided to take based off of nice pocket blue ribbon and go all in on YouTube and test it out and play with it.
Kurt Elster
That blue ribbon talk was that was essentially you laying out like this is the this is the purple video formula. This is this is the Harman, you know, format we think.
Bryant Garvin
Yeah, this is the purple video formula, and this is why video is so impactful. I laid out the product information, right? Product is king. Then I laid out the content, how you do it. I showed literally us testing different things and how we showed up with specific intros because the hook, the intro, whatever you want to call it, is the most important thing. If you can't grab their attention in that first half a second, one second, two seconds on on on Facebook Meta, whatever you want to call it, they're not stopping as they're scrolling, right? On YouTube, they're going and they're going to hit the skip button So how do you grab their attention and then how do you take that attention and actually turn it into education and selling? And that's the big thing. And so I showed all of that information and went and they decided to do it.
Kurt Elster
My notes say that you scaled this from 3 million to 40 million. Is this true?
Bryant Garvin
Yeah, plus.
Kurt Elster
That that's wild.
Bryant Garvin
And we did multiple Kickstarters. So Peter had actually done a Kickstarter before I knew him to launch the Grooving. And then we took that and we launched next watch bands. We did silicone watch bands with grooves and stuff like that. Then we launched a wallet. Right. So like did multiple things along the way here. Uh um we launched the belt and then the wallet. And so all of those we launched on Kickstarter. Even though we were already an established brand, we went back to Kickstarter. Again, part of the reason was to get all the funds to just manufacture and produce and get things, right? Like if you can have it paid for before you ever have to ship something. Why not? When it's a new product, see how much people like it. Test your marketing out. Get to test your creative, get to test your hooks, get to test those different things. Test Even though you can only have one landing page for Kickstarter as an example or Indiegogo, you can test if you move things around, how you order the page, how conversion rates fall, right? And you can test all of those things before you ever drop it into your direct-to-consumer site. Yes, you may not have all of the pixel data that was there, but you could see the cells coming in, right? You also give an opportunity for those that if you launched on Kickstarter at one point in time. Go back to those people that already launch and be like, hey, this is the new thing we're coming out with. Do you guys want to be first? So you can leverage your email list, your text. all of those things to push people to that Kickstarter. Then it builds the virality there because there's comments, there's likes, there's shares, there's all of those things happening on the ads as well as on the Kickstarter itself. And it just continues to grow.
Kurt Elster
So what did what did your your Kickstarter at Groove Life do?
Bryant Garvin
So the watch did about $300,000 in sales. Okay.
Kurt Elster
The watch or watch strap.
Bryant Garvin
Wat watch strap watch bam.
Kurt Elster
Okay.
Bryant Garvin
Just a watch pen. Just to watch.
Kurt Elster
That's a lot of units.
Bryant Garvin
It's a lot of units. And then we launched the belt, the groove belt. The groove belt did almost a million dollars. And remember, this is at the time when everybody's um doing all like the mission belts and all of those other types of belts at that point in time. But it was true but it was unique. That was the thing. There was something unique about each of those products that was different than what was in market. And if you can point to what the benefits are, how it's different, that's the core of your content.
Kurt Elster
So going from you know, but scaling from three to forty million, it's over 10x. It is huge growth. And so expanding the product catalog, I imagine, is a big part of that. Um, you know, the success of these two Kickstarters for sure. Is there, you know, one thing you could point to as like this is the thing that changed the game?
Bryant Garvin
I'm thinking back to Groove in particular. One of the things the group did really uniquely was they actually were able to do all of the designs and stuff in-house in the warehouse in Tennessee. So they could launch a new design actually test it out, see how it sold. And if it like sold well, they could just produce a bunch more right there because they had all of the base material there. And then they had developed a proprietary process to actually print, engrave, do all of those things in-house. So again, it goes back to product differentiation and ability and r rapidity to scale things. When we were scaling, at that point in time, fifty percent of our cells were female.
Kurt Elster
Were they buying for themselves or men?
Bryant Garvin
They were buying for themselves and their husbands. Right. So like one of our best promos with the belt as an example was buy a belt, get a free ring, right? For because we weren't really discounting the belt when we launched.
Kurt Elster
So it was buy a belt, get a free ring.
Bryant Garvin
They would buy a belt for their husband, spouse, whatever, and then get a free ring for themselves. And because the rings were not just functional, they were also fashionable, There were literally people that had stacks of rings, 20, 30, 40, 50 tins of rings, because they would buy the fashion and then they would enjoy the function. And a lot of times that fashion first, they wouldn't care about the breathability as much or this or that. And it wasn't like they were all crossfitters or this or that or the other thing. They were like, oh, sounds comfortable. I really like that ring. Oh, and it's fairly inexpensive compared to other rings that they could buy in the market. And if they bought one because they're buying a belt for their spouse or significant other, even better, they got a fruit one. And then it introduced them to the product. And there was introduction, like being able to in some way be fast fashion and introduce new product that way allowed us to scale out things. One of my favorite things that we did was COVID came and hit, right? The year before they ended right when I came in. Cash flow business, right? Bootstrapped. We started the year with only a certain amount of runway. By the end of the year, we 10x'd how much cash was in the bank. But one of the things that we did that year while we were trying to figure things out and like pushing for stuff is Peter went out and was like, hey, if we could get more licenses, because we had launched NFL. We had launched Mossy Oak and some of these camo type of brands. If we could get other licenses, what would you do? And I just like Marble. Marble would be pretty cool. Right. And this is 2019. Okay, so he literally just went out and started calling Disney stores to try and see if he could get with somebody at Marvel. Connected with somebody at Marvel. We launched that product in November of 2020. That product itself in November of 2020 did over a million dollars in sales, the Marvel product line. Now that was not core hunting, fishing, camping. cross-fitting audience. It allowed us to reach into a new audience pool at a more premium product price point.
Kurt Elster
You know, clearly like the video is your baby, the thing you love. Are there creative angles that just consistently perform?
Bryant Garvin
So the one thing that I will say is really impactful. First off, humor is always a good thing. I don't care what type of the world is going through. First off, humor is a universal language. Okay. Secondly, even if the world is going through hell in a handbasket, right, is going to hell in a handbasket. If you can actually get somebody to smile or laugh, you've made their day better. And they're going to remember that feeling. And everything we do is based off of feeling first, logic second as humans. So if you can get somebody to feel good about your brand. slash product slash whatever because you made them smile even like did a little chuckle or whatever, right? All you've already won half of the way there, if not 80% of the way there. The second thing, start with a question. And here's why. Subconsciously, we are wired to see questions, changes, other things like that, subconsciously to answer that question If we if I ask you a question, hey, what's the weather like where you're at? You're immediately start thinking about it before you even wanted to.
Kurt Elster
I I even knowing the setup, I tried to resist. And the moment you said the question, 90 degrees Fahrenheit popped into my head. I was like, damn it.
Bryant Garvin
And that's the thing, is the subconscious mind, we are built because we were wired to scan for danger. Difference, whatever, right? And so the moment a question is asked, our subconscious is trying to answer that question because the answer may determine whether we're safe or not. And so asking questions like with the um groove life group life, the very the question that he started the YouTube videos with that we kickstarted all of the growth there was have you seen this ring and you hold up one of the groove like rings and it made you immediately think I don't know have I what ring is that
Kurt Elster
And there's a person, like it's a like a person you're seeing someone's face and I mean it really short circuits a lot of your defenses. A hundred percent.
Bryant Garvin
Because then you're talking to the person. Like we see big brands that do a lot of like camera over here, camera over there, and it's like kind of documentary style stuff. But when you're talking to somebody, we immediately are hardwired to pay attention.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, they try to go like full, you know, Netflix documentary cinematography when that's not what we're Yeah, they're they're making it harder than it needs to be, is what I'm hearing.
Bryant Garvin
A hundred percent harder. You don't even have to do a big Harmon Brothers production. That video was produced in-house. If you go back and look at that groove life video, you're like wow that production wasn't that great. But that is what kickstarted everything. And if you look at that video, there's millions of views on that video. Why? Because it helped increase sales.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. And now especially, you know, post-pandemic and with uh young younger people being digital natives, the expectations around video quality have completely changed. Just entirely. What we're looking for is authenticity. What we absolutely accept that, like, yeah, may this was probably just shot on a phone with a ring light. You know, that's No one thinks twice about that. It is totally fine now. And so but for a brand founder, it is scary and intimidating to be face to camera in a video. And so you're like, well, I can't do it unless I add all this other stuff. You know, and pretty soon you've got like a two thousand dollar DSLR and a a studio light and you're hiring oh man, then you really go crazy, you hire the Harman brothers, right? When in reality You know, it you didn't need any of that. You needed great product and a hook, you know, face to camera. Okay, this is starting to sound more accessible.
Bryant Garvin
Exactly. What's your story? What why should people care about your product? Well, why should they care about your product versus somebody else's? Why does your product actually solve the problem, whatever that problem is, perceived or real? Because that's the thing, is you can create problems in people's subconscious. Right.
Kurt Elster
Agitate the pain.
Bryant Garvin
Exactly. So how does your product solve the problem that you help them recognize because you want to dig in on the pain there? and compare to other solutions in market. That's basically the formula. And if you can do it in a really entertaining way where they don't realize they watched a four-minute video, even better.
Kurt Elster
You that's and that's the trick. I think that's the hard part. Well, first is you know, knowing your positioning, especially early on. Fundamentally, you're making it up. You're like you're basing it on your own experience, and that's fine. And then over time, you're you, you know, maybe you get this successful Kickstarter. Now you've got your feedback loop, you're getting that customer feedback. We can get reviews on the site, we can revise, but now we have a much better understanding of our positioning. Right, because we know who is buying, why they're buying it ideally, and that makes life a lot easier. And now if we yeah, the hard part is trying to be funny. Oh man, some people just aren't funny.
Bryant Garvin
Honestly, that's okay too. Like to be honest, the most important thing is to tap into emotion. Humor is one of the best ways. Like YouTube has done study after study after study, and that humor emotion is the thing that cooks people the most. But suspense, stress, like any of these other emotions can get people to engage. What you are just trying to do is tap into that core Primal bodily function of emotion to take an action, even if that action is just to watch your video. Because if you can get them to take an action to watch your video, Then you can sell them, then they can learn more, then they can logically go through the process on their own, go look at reviews, go look at this, go look at that, and decide to purchase. But by the time somebody's decided to go look and review and compare, they've already decided they want your products. And that was an emotional decision.
Kurt Elster
Interesting. Yeah, the purchase decision happened before I start doing the research. Man, those order change emails suck. They're always like, I ordered the wrong size. I meant to change the shipping address. Oops, I was drunk. Instead of making customers email you that stuff, let them fix it themselves, with Cleverific. Cleverific is a self-service portal that lets customers edit their orders without bugging you. That means you get fewer headaches, customers get faster fulfillment, and there's fewer returns overall. Everybody wins. Peter Manning, New York Cut their support tickets by 99% with Cleverific. You want in on that? Get 50% off the Pro Plan, just $49 a month. exclusively for listeners of the unofficial Shopify podcast. Go to Cleverific. com slash unofficial and use promo code Kurt50. Done. Problem solved. That's Cleverific. I love when the conversation turns to like core human psychology, because it really, like fundamentally, so that's what marketing is, right? It's is appealing to a an irrational creature that knows language. But you know, going you know, oftentimes if you go back and read like older marketing books, you know, go back decades, you discover the concepts don't change. You know, copywriting really does not change much over time. And so a lot of the stuff you could take and apply, and it's because it's like you're right, you're just appealing to the our reptilian lizard brain. Um so after Groove Life, you moved on, you're working on uh Oslo sleep buds. The heck is a sleep bud.
Bryant Garvin
So glad you asked. Look at that question. Now everybody in the audience is going to be asking the same question. Even if they didn't want to know what it was, they're now thinking, yeah, what is an Oslo sleep bud? So, sleep buds are little tiny Bluetooth earbuds specifically designed for sleep. What's cool about it is these are so small that you can tempt them, put them in your ear. And they can sit flush.
Kurt Elster
Geez, that's a lot of blood though. What? Why is that? I'm messing with you. I'm like what I'm saying. No, I'm just messing with you. I'm messing with you for people who are listening to the audio only version.
Bryant Garvin
Well, no pain, no gain is what I always say.
Kurt Elster
Um The man did not bleed from his ears, just to be clear.
Bryant Garvin
These were originally invented by Bose. Bose is an amazing audio technology company. So they invented these sleep buds.
Kurt Elster
And they spun it off or gave it its own brand name?
Bryant Garvin
So what happened is they were going through some restructuring and they decided to spin off kill whatever their health business and focus in on their core headphone and speaker business. And so when that was happening, there were passionate people about this product that existed. And so N. B. Patil, who is the co fo one of the co-founders of Oslo, decided to see if he could get the rights to the sleep buds. So he got the patent rights to it, and then They actually developed when it first launched, it was literally just white noise in your ear controlled through now. And the whole point is to block out the noise in your environment They added Bluetooth streaming and sensing in the case so that they could actually stream anything you want, detect when you fall asleep, and then transition to white noise special sounds that we've developed. to help you stay asleep and not get interrupted, say by a train going by in the city, a snoring partner, other stuff like that. So it's a functional device that actually helps you do something better, which keeps you asleep.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, all of these things though, you know, solve pain or problem.
Bryant Garvin
Exactly.
Kurt Elster
Hey, I want to sleep better. That's quality quality of life, which is a great you know, great appeal, uh and groove life. All right, a little squishier, but if I recall rec correctly, uh you know, a lot of silicone rings positioned metal rings as a liability, right? Like you get your finger degloved or you get electrocuted. Like y you could really injure yourself with a ring, um, if it's metal. Yeah, everything always goes back to painter problem, doesn't it?
Bryant Garvin
Yeah, even I don't know if anybody's lifted. Like, I've got an aura ring on this hand, and for those watching the video. Lifting with an aura ring is not that comfortable to be honest because it's a metal ring essentially.
Kurt Elster
It's hard.
Bryant Garvin
Lifting with a silicone ring is really easy. Because it's comfortable. You don't have to worry about taking it off. You don't have it doesn't get pinched your finger when you move the wrong way. Any of those types of things. And so, yes, it's solving pain. Again, real or perceived. in a way that is unique to your product. That is what really good products do is they solve a problem in people's lives This just happens to solve a problem of literally blocking out the noise in your bed or in your head. Right? Like allowing you to block out the noise that keeps you awake, wakes you up during the night, or block the noise in your head by allowing you to stream whatever you want to calm your mind. Get the racing thoughts to go away, get you to sleep, and then keep you there. First off, AirPods don't have the battery life that you need for a whole night of sleep. Secondly, they're not comfortable Right. So these little things have 10 hours of battery life on that little tiny device. And in order to do that, they had to engineer systems that had never been invented in order to make it that small and make it that comfortable.
Kurt Elster
And Oslosleep. com, of course, this is on Shopify. And I notice uh some great social proof here. 2,349 reviews. But something I've not noticed before, after the review stars, it says over 104,000 sold. I like that. I've just never seen a site do it. I'm like, oh wow, that's a really that's kind of powerful.
Bryant Garvin
Yeah, it's just a it's just another validation point because again, as people, we don't want to experience new without some assurity. So knowing that over a hundred thousand people have already bought or purchased and are potentially using, it's another validation point.
Kurt Elster
I like I took a screenshot of it. That's how much I like it.
Bryant Garvin
And one of the fun things that I've done there, just so everybody knows, is like I've literally I know how many we're selling a day, that type of thing. And so it's a script that we put in on the back end with the dev that we had a starting place. And then if you come back to the site a couple hours from now, that number will have increased.
Kurt Elster
So oh yeah, I just hit refresh and it went up one. That's very clever. This got to re get rebranded, reinvented, and sold again. Did you do another? uh crowdfunding campaign port? Because the first one was Indiegogo on or Bose on Indiegogo. Okay.
Bryant Garvin
So on Kickstarter, um, and this was a little bit contentious in the industry because it there was already some credibility from Bose, right? But This truly is a unique product. Like out of the number of components in here, 95% of them are completely different than what the Bose ones had. So it is essentially a brand new product. And I knew that along the way, manufacturing can always go sideways. What you think the product will do can be different. Like it's a hardware product. We weren't a hundred percent confident. Yes, we can ship by this day. Yes, it will be a hundred percent. And so We're going to test it out. Let's actually run ads. Let's actually see things. Let's see what kind of potential we can get. Let's test our messaging, test our marketing, do all that stuff, and build some credibility along the way. So our Kickstarter campaign did over $1. 4 million. But I had had to experience moving from Kickstarter to Indiegogo. when I was at Groove Life. And one of the things that that helped is allows us to continue taking pre-orders until we were essentially ready to sell on our website. And so we're k it wasn't just revenue stopped. We were able to keep m of the money coming in through Indiegogo in demand. And so we did that at at Oslo. And one of the reasons we did it, we thought it was only gonna be for a month, maybe two months, but then product issues happened and they had to re-engineer a bunch of things. So we went from delivering in November potentially to our first product was shipped very end of February, March. of twenty twenty four when it was supposed to have been the end of twenty twenty three.
Kurt Elster
With crowdfunding, you know, you're you're pre-selling all this product and then at some point like the more you sell, the You you've got this great liability that keeps building. But you also you know ideally you have the cash to answer it. And so have you ever had you know A product flop, a campaign miss, or you know, you gotta go back and you know you have customer support nightmares potentially. Like maybe that's what happened with Oslo here.
Bryant Garvin
We definitely had some customer support issues along the way. One of the things that I will say that I've learned in particular with Oslo is be very transparent. People, we position this as new. We position this as special. We position this as something different, right? We position it as a new company So if you're going to have hiccups and mistakes along the way, just be more transparent with people. Like explain what's going on. It was the silence or the vacuum that fills more issues than a to conversation. And remember, these people wanted to be along for the journey. They raised their hand. So it wasn't like, oh well, never mind. Yes, we had to give some refunds along the way. Yes, we've given some sense. But like the point was if we had actually been communicating with people and engaging with them and building that community more than what we did. It would have gone even better. And that that's one of the things that people need to learn. Like, consumers are really forgiving. You're honest and transparent with them. And that goes back to the authenticity. Instead of, oh, well, we can't say anything because we aren't really sure. Say that. Say, hey, we ran into some hiccups. The chips that we used in this have never been used by anybody before because we wanted to be forward thinking so that we don't have to go back and re-engineer this six months from now. But in doing that, there are some hiccups with this. And we're having to re-engineer this and this and this. Like being transparent is going to win every single time versus and some people might get pissed off and leave. That's okay. But not saying anything is going to have more people fill the vacuum because silence is the one thing that gets people to fill in.
Kurt Elster
If you have silence, they'll make up the answer.
Bryant Garvin
Yeah. Notice what you did. You started talking.
Kurt Elster
I filled it in.
Bryant Garvin
You filled it in.
Kurt Elster
Like I'm launching a new product. When is crowdfunding the right path? Like who's a good candidate?
Bryant Garvin
So when you've got it probably prototyped 80% of the way there, and you have some manufacturing potentially lined up. Like that is one of the things. Especially in today's age, because there have been so many crowdfunding that has completely taken lots of money and never delivered. Like think of the coolest cooler, right, as an example. Never exist. Tens of millions of dollars delivered nothing Right? Think of the Pebble watch. Think of all these things that don't truly deliver after crowdfunding because that's one of the risks is going through Kickstarter going.
Kurt Elster
I did eventually get the Pebble watch.
Bryant Garvin
The Pebble Watch did eventually show up, but what I'm saying is like there's all of these things that happen and they don't always have to blow over. Because when you actually are in Kickstarter or in Dgogo, and this is one of the reasons to go through one of those platforms. They are technically not buying your product. They are actually saying, hey, I want to donate. and invest in you guys funding this. As a reward, I'm hoping to get this pro Okay, so there's a very big liability difference there, and these starter indigo are specifically set up to limit liability for the companies. But with that, because there have been so many issues, you basically have to have a physical prototype now in order to actually start a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign.
Kurt Elster
Which it makes sense. You know, I'm glad they they do it that way. Um yeah, uh I don't know that if you've never done it before, people may not realize for Kickstarter Indiegogo, you said you apply and they have to approve. your listing before it ever goes live, before anyone sees it. Uh all right, so with all of these campaigns, you get to pick one KPI. What KPI do you track?
Bryant Garvin
Blended ROAS.
Kurt Elster
Okay. Blended ROAS.
Bryant Garvin
N-E-R, whatever you want to call it. MERS. Basically, yeah. How many? What are my dollars out? What are my dollars in?
Kurt Elster
That is that is the heartbeat. That is our lifeline.
Bryant Garvin
What uh one thing that I do here is everybody calls it ad spend. I actually call it ad investment. So I have when I billet on my Google Sheets in the beginning, it's investment divided by revenue. If you look at advertising as an investment instead of a spend, it changes how you look at things.
Kurt Elster
I think that's that's smart. Like it it Spend says this money's gone. Investment says, hey, we're by spending by advertising, we're investing back in the business. But also, you know, implicited there is risk. All investment carries inherent risk. Um Yeah. 100%. I like that.
Bryant Garvin
And if you're investing and you're not getting the returns you want, you change your investment strategy.
Kurt Elster
Also true. Money seeks alpha. What uh worst piece of marketing advice you keep hearing?
Bryant Garvin
Uh trust the numbers in the dashboards?
Kurt Elster
Oh. We're skeptical of our attribution.
Bryant Garvin
Attribution is a four-letter word to me, in that everything should be directional. If you look back at the great marketers of all time, if you look at the madmen, all of these things, even the people today, the attribution, I'm using that in air quotes. in the dashboards, in the tools, everything else should be used directionally. I don't care if it's saying I got a five ROS, if at the end of the day I'm losing money on the business. Like what that's why I go back to the court. What are the true dollars out versus the dollars in? Not what the platform says.
Kurt Elster
Any favorite underutilized marketing channel?
Bryant Garvin
YouTube, I think is still the most underutilized. YouTube, I believe, is the most valuable impression on the web. And the reason why is because YouTube is, first off, There is no other channel on in the world that you can literally target consumers that searched for something in the last 30 days. You can build out custom intent audiences on Google and then serve them video ads.
Kurt Elster
That is powerful, isn't it?
Bryant Garvin
That's really powerful. And one of the things that's really powerful about that, that doesn't mean they came to your website. So you're not reliant on pixels, your reliance within the ecosystem that exists there. Plus, when you serve a YouTube ad, CPV, whatever you're doing, essentially you don't pay if they skip the ad, but you have five seconds to make a brand impression for free.
Kurt Elster
Oh, okay. So if they, you know, they see the ad, they let it run for three seconds, they skip it, I don't pay for it, but I still, you know, they still saw it. Like Twitter is like, oh, you saw it for a tenth of a second? Impression.
Bryant Garvin
Same with meta, same with everywhere.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And okay, where can people go to follow your work or learn more about you?
Bryant Garvin
Um, I'm on X, LinkedIn. Honestly, if you just Google Bryant Garbin, you can find me pretty easily.
Kurt Elster
So Okay. We will we'll include those. And uh Final thought for uh the folks in the trenches.
Bryant Garvin
Um I think the biggest thing, and I know lots of people talk about this, but remember that And maybe most people don't think about it. But the numbers on your computer screen, in your dashboards, in your Excel sheets, in your um analytics, platforms, whatever, every single one of those numbers actually equates to a human being on the other side of that device. And then on the other side of that impression, that click, that website. And so don't lose sight of the fact that you are actually talking, interacting with, educating, communicating, building relationships with humans. The moment you forget that, you lose the core of what marketing truth is and what you're doing.
Kurt Elster
I love the The amount of humanity that was included in your answers for this whole interview. That's great. Brian Garvin, Oslo Sleep. Thank you so much.
Bryant Garvin
Absolutely.
Kurt Elster
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