Meller's co-founder on expanding across the Atlantic
"We were close to closing the company two or three times. Every winter was like, okay, that's it. Goodbye company."
Chris Erthel built Meller sunglasses from a Spanish side project into a brand that sells a pair every 28 seconds. Along the way, he helped scale HelloBody from €30M to €107M as fractional CMO before its €330M exit to Henkel. We talked about why US brands fail in Europe, the cultural quirks that kill conversions in Germany, and why Italy requires cash on delivery or you're dead on arrival. He's run 3,500+ A/B tests and shares counterintuitive findings that challenge everything you think you know about landing pages and ad creative.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swim. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swim actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Clavio or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts, and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swim's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. Today on the unofficial Shopify Podcast, I'm joined by a serial entrepreneur who has the rare distinction of well he had a $330 million exit. It were joined by Christian Erthel, who sold Hello Body, a German Shopify store. Uh and then also is running now Meller sunglasses, Mellerbrand. com. That uh that store sells a pair of sunglasses roughly every 28 seconds. So really very successful. European entrepreneur, rare for the show, you know, we're very North American focused. So but happy to unpack this and adhere Yeah, what what that level of success looks like. How did you get there? So we're joined now by Christian ortho. Christian, how are you doing?
Chris Erthel • 01:57.280
I'm doing very, very good. Thank you. And all of you, you'll hear a lot of German accent in the show. Very happy to bring a bit of German spirit to this uh North American podcast. And I'm currently here in Spain and doing very good. I moved to Spain 11 years ago because, as I can recommend you all, Spain has great life quality.
Kurt Elster • 02:14.460
All right, you're a serial entrepreneur. The f for the business you sold this is HelloBody. Just give me that story quickly. Hellobody. eu
Chris Erthel • 02:24.220
Yeah, exactly. So we made it exactly where it was like uh when I moved 11 years ago to to Spain, I first looked for a job and then realized okay it actually is much cooler to start a company so then every month I did a new company And some of them failed, some of them w worked out. Um Mellar, one of them it it got it got sold uh just a few few months ago. And also um Hello Body got sold uh three three years ago to Hencktur as a billion euro com company. And um And the this this one I was uh con consulting them for two years. So I was the outside CMO. Like they were like, we have hyper growth. They contacted me when they were at 30 million. Yeah, like we're at hyper growth, but we have an agency and we cannot do it in agency. We need in-house. We want you to be on on it 30 hours per week. So I was going between um Berlin and Barcelona, flying every two weeks back and forth. Yeah, but it was very, very worth it. And um when we we could there, we could go from thirty million to a hundred seven hundred seven million and then we got a three hundred thirty million euro exit on it.
Kurt Elster • 03:26.200
Three hundred thirty million euro.
Chris Erthel • 03:32.820
I I would always think that uh it's not so much for the US, you know I think it's like it's like for German exit is a high one, but I think like in in America you have even crazier Shopify stories. So But yeah, if for us it was a big thing, yeah. So we are happy.
Kurt Elster • 03:46.700
Nothing to sneeze at, for sure. Uh I would be happy with it. So what do you and then tell me about Meller, Meller sunglasses.
Chris Erthel • 03:55.560
Yes. Um yeah, so this one we are really like kept on tell test testing testing things and uh Uh at one point we we saw that sunglasses is a very hot hot market. It actually developed because um a neighbor of a friend of mine, he started to do sport sunglasses. And online 11 years ago and it was going really, really well. And so we asked him of like, hey, would you mind if we do fashion sunglasses? And he was like, no, I don't mind. I'm doing sport sunglasses. This is my my niche. You can do fashion sunglasses. And then yeah, started selling 12 and so on. And uh when it went uh bigger. We had this big, big problem every winter, right? Because every winter was like, okay, we can it's so hard, we were only in Europe. And it's so hard to sell. Um in February we were always like, oh we have to close a company. We are like so close, like two or three times we were like, okay, that's it. Good goodbye, goodbye company. And uh it was a lot of stress and panic everywhere because Winter was just very hard. At one point we decided to um to do watches. So we also had like mellow mellow watches on top of that. But um Our investors were against it and they ultimately proved to be right. It was a good move for three or four years to have both because we could survive for winters more easier. Um because we would sell more watches in winter. But ultimately now we if you go to melabrand. com, you'll see it's only sunglasses. So we went back to our roots of being very, very good at one one single thing. And you will see like Where's way over 400 pairs for a very very fair price of uh $49. And um if everyone wants, you see my my name here, Chris Erfill, you just put it in at Mela discount and you will get uh The highest discount ever, so you'll be very, very happy with uh with your your transman. C A. And you will see like our idea was always to the beat Ray-Ban in quality, but be at a fair price. So like it was a clearly beating Ray-Ban, beating Luxotica, the company behind it, in quality. That was our ambition since always, but having a way, way fairer price. And uh I am pretty certain we made it. Everyone who is wearing it, and I get every day on my WhatsApp I get pictures sent from friends of like ah I'm here in I'm here in Brazil and I'm seeing Mellasunglasses. Oh I'm here in Indonesia like all around the world you will see Mellasonglasses now And uh the customers are really happy. Like actually check out Trustpilot. That's what we are really proud of. And Trustpilot, we are super highly ranked with uh I think 40,000, 50,000 reviews plus and people really love loving us.
Kurt Elster • 06:23.860
So you're certainly not the our the first sunglass brand we've had on here and yeah the others were very successful too. Talk to me about why you like sunglasses. Because everyone struggles with the seasonality of it, but then like the unit economics of it must be amazing versus to put up with the seasonality of it.
Chris Erthel • 06:43.500
What I I've been seeing in market in many many years now and I was seeing there's different timings for different products. Like now it's impossible to start a sunglass brand because we have so many big established players in it. And um before Facebook ads or meta-ads It was impossible to do it. And there was just this very short gap of timing where it it worked to start a sunglass brand. And everyone who did it then, or a lot of them who then executed well, uh could get so successful because Most people don't know this, but sunglasses there's a more more monopoly on it. Like if you buy an maybe you know Oakley, Ray Ban, all these brands, and you go to a also called Sunglass Hut in the US, these stores? Yeah. You go into a you go into a sunglass hut and you feel like you have a lot of choice. But actually it's one brand, Luxotica owning all of it.
Kurt Elster • 07:30.880
So like uh doesn't matter what you buy
Chris Erthel • 07:34.740
And uh obviously it costs eight US dollars to to produce one of these pairs. But they give you this mark markup and make you think it's two hundred fifty dollars, three hundred dollars, I don't know I don't know how much you're paying in Chicago or where. But uh here it's around 190 250 euros. So um may just get this heavy mark up because we can because we have a no poly monopoly on it. And you could not break it until Facebook ads came came uh came around. So that was that's why the sunglass became one of the first big things. Later was jewelry. When skincare became the hot thing, like that was like six, seven years ago. Currently I see fashion. What I'm seeing right now is like fashion is the hottest thing. Like But I'm helping brands right now, the ones who are skating crazy is uh fashion. Also I'm helping Uniqlo in Japan. So they have probably a way higher budget than Like the budget of Uniqlo uh meta ads is higher.
Kurt Elster • 08:25.919
Yeah, you have Uniqlo as a client.
Chris Erthel • 08:27.520
And the budget of Uniqlo is higher than what uh what Hello Body was sold for, what you what we said before. So just imagine the budget per per year.
Kurt Elster • 08:36.919
So okay, this Miller brand sunglasses, you're a German man in Spain with EU experience. But I'm a on the Smeller brand website, I'm in the US and it appears I could buy. If I were to order on the site, would I can I get sunglasses in the US?
Chris Erthel • 08:52.360
Yeah, you can get them fast. You get them in 24 hours or less. We have a couple of warehouses in the US. Like we are really For us it's very important to be very, very quick in every market. I think we have two or three warehouses in the US. We have one in Mexico. Mexico is also a great, great market. Um yeah, we are all around the world and we try to always deliver. People get shocked, like 24 hours or less. Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 09:12.940
So Mellerbrand, when it when you started this, there's no way it was global. Did you was it available in the US at the start? Uh only only in Spain. How long uh how long ago did this this get started? Eleven years ago. And then when did you launch in the US?
Chris Erthel • 09:31.160
I think it was like six years ago where we launched and failed. So we launched and failed and retreated and then we launched again because we're like such a big market and everywhere else was working. We're like we we're getting Yeah all the markets working and then we relaunched two years later again and then we got it we got it running.
Kurt Elster • 09:49.800
Alright, you said the first time it didn't work. Where did it go wrong the first time?
Chris Erthel • 09:54.440
So we we just we were like surprised with the higher CPMs we didn't expect with CPMs are that much higher. So that that that made it everything a bit harder.
Kurt Elster • 10:03.680
And also we Wait, it's cheaper to run ads in the EU than here. Much cheaper. Much, much cheaper.
Chris Erthel • 10:08.560
It's pretty much uh you know again everywhere in the world is cheaper than in the US, especially like Florida, California. Yeah, yeah. It's like It's a it's a good market, but I would say there's even better ones. Um whereas like to make high profits whereas like there's like let's compare like let's see what other people see but like If we are a lot have to do it in euros, but like it would be in dollars. I think it would be eight. Like in Germany, to everyone who's listening, we are seeing very frequently we're seeing a six to eight US dollar CPM. So for every 1000 people viewing your ad you're paying just six to eight dollars. But in the US you would be way, way above it. Depends on the on the product band, but you would be way above it.
Kurt Elster • 10:48.279
One dollar one US dollar gets you 0. 85 euro at the moment. So yeah, if you're going euro to US, how'd you make it work the second time around
Chris Erthel • 10:55.660
So we had to dial the ads up a bit, you know, like in uh we're always seeing that uh what works in German is to have a bit more bit more serious ads and you know like it not not over high like you know not not Not going like one good example is like for one product we said like a life-changing product best thing ever, you know, like and you wouldn't say these things in j in Germany or in Europe so much. But in the US these these things work. So we didn't know it. We have exaggerate in a way a little bit that like di dial things a bit more up. We were not not used not used to to that that style. So that's that was one of the biggest And we also made ads. Like our content now is way funnier. Like, um, because I believe a lot in making people laugh. You know, not everyone's gonna not everyone's gonna buy your product. Well a lot of people then may scroll, they're a bit sad and they're like, you know, they're having a hard day. I meant just to cheer them up, you know, you're just giving something back. So we we love just making people laugh at that. And we just try to make very, very funny content. So that's uh yeah. A lot of Budbird.
Kurt Elster • 11:52.920
So do you think humorous content, do you think that is somewhat universal in its appeal? Yeah. Cause I've seen some some really funny ads come out of Europe.
Chris Erthel • 12:01.660
It happens more and more. We should also talk about this. Like nowadays, don't believe everything you see in your feeds because I would say now, for me, what I'm seeing is like when you actually look at it, like 40% is AI and just increasing. Like a lot of times friends sent me this crazy cool golf shots and I'm like, yeah, but you know, but this is AI. Or like there was like a A friend, my best friend sending us today a new newsfeed story and it was like a very funny thing about CNN and I'm like, yeah, it would be very funny, but you know, this is AI, you can you can tell. And he was like, oh shit, it's it's getting so close. And obviously we're getting to a point where we'll no longer see. So we might actually go from the feed, we might go to a to a phase where just no one believes anything anymore. What they see. People believe what they see in real. But it's like nowadays I'm just like, okay, could be real, could be fake, and we're living in very, very weird times but maybe the phone use will go down because it's just boring to see mostly like made-up content, which is actually a good thing, you know? We should be more We should be more in the now. Like I love this watch, you know, like the power of now, like being connected and not not being on the phone and uh seeing other things.
Kurt Elster • 13:09.500
Yeah, maybe that's the AI is finally the thing that can yeah weirdly gets us to put this on social media.
Chris Erthel • 13:14.940
It will just get boring. You know, it's just everything will be fake and you're like, okay, so what?
Kurt Elster • 13:19.880
Yeah, at what point is like the entire timeline just programmatically generated specifically for you and nothing is real? Exactly.
Chris Erthel • 13:26.200
That's you'll see like that's a disturbing. Triple four times backflips on snowboards, which looked very cool first, but then you're like, okay, but it's not not real. So yeah.
Kurt Elster • 13:36.240
My yeah, my teenager, my oldest, he was like He's making fun of us, my wife and I. He's like, oh yeah. He's like calling us boomers because we fell for uh an AI, you know, video or something or other. He's like, I never fall for AI. At which point I sent him a photo that I had generated of our Christmas decorations that were it was AI. Like I was just trying to plan some stuff out. I sent it to him. He's like, Oh man, I walked right past this. How did I miss it? I said, 'cause it's AI and you didn't know. And it was like within, you know, a minute of him accusing us of being boomers for not recognizing AI, and he immediately fell for it. But like at this point, it's good enough where You know, it it s especially just scrolling quickly through a feed, a hundred percent you're gonna get got by AI.
Chris Erthel • 14:17.080
Exactly. And it's obviously it's just just getting better. It's just getting better. I was just uh And you can do so like for the for the power it gives you, you can do so cool things. I was just helping like uh just before our call now, I had a two-hour call with this uh hundred-year-old German company and we're doing um bad bed sheets but like we had to wear they are the inventors of the fitted bed sheets. So basically we are like trying to make this look cool. So we just put it into a Vivi which is a tool which is very like an AI Swiss knife where you have everything in. And we use Google BO3 and so and made made it made the bad sheet fly and you can see it from all all c all all things and so for this to showcase a product better it's amazing because like How long would it take it until we actually have in the studio uh bad sheets and filming it from all sides and so it would be doable but it would take super long and like it took me 10 minutes to make it. So in this it's a cool cool thing.
Kurt Elster • 15:09.520
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Chris Erthel • 16:19.360
Uh Weavy.
Kurt Elster • 16:21.280
Wevey? Okay. And that's like one of those ones where you could pick your it has the different models.
Chris Erthel • 16:26.320
Yeah, it's like you have like a hundred different models in it. So because for me I get lazy, you know, like uh maybe people can relate. I don't want to use 11 labs and then topaz labs and then like uh VO3 and like and every time taking one image, editing one thing, Downloading it, putting it to the next tool, like because I have a lot of steps in the process. No, so I want yep, I want one tool where I have all of them that can just connect to them. So it's like Imagine like a Figma board and I just have all of them in and they just connect connect the dots and uh they also actually is another cool exit case story. Um they just so get actually sold to Figma. after eleven months of running. So they took seven months of programming it, four months on the market, and the people it went so crazy that they got sold for 200 million or so. Oh, there's another That's crazy. Three three big exits today to talk about. Yeah, that's crazy.
Kurt Elster • 17:16.500
Yeah. Yeah, I've been using Adobe Firefly, which is similar where it's like, you know, you You could pick the different models it's already loaded in. Exactly. It's convenient because it's in my Adobe account. Um but Weavy sounds really good. And if Figma owns it, that's great. Um Yeah, because my team uses Figma. Yeah, perfect.
Chris Erthel • 17:32.100
Yeah, it will be integrated event, so that that's gonna be good.
Kurt Elster • 17:36.100
You you know do you have experience growing these these really successful international brands? You have experience getting them, you know, brands outside the US, getting them into the US. You also have experience, you know, vice versa, going, getting, uh you've helped launch four US brands in Germany successfully. Yeah? Yes. Okay. I wanna know it I want the thirty day playbook. Like what what's kinda what are the things you're you're doing to successfully launch in Germany that, you know, me as an American who has been to Germany one time in my life, it w just wouldn't understand.
Chris Erthel • 18:11.860
Normally in all of these cases, um I would first uh Have like a call with a founder and uh like let's let's have like one example there's a company as a real example uh they're doing video courses right So we would have these video courses of doing a certain cer certain task and um and I would like talk to the founder first to really understand what's behind it, you know, like what's what what they explain me everything in about the company so that I understand it really well. And then I would look at their US ads And I would try to translate them into German ads, you know, of being like, okay, Mess Hobbit, how be marketing there? And when I'm thinking like Because obviously my whole life I'm a German, you know, like it's very easy for me to see, okay, how does this this fit to my culture? And normally we would tone it down. Like we would We would look into it and like how can we market it more like okay, what's the practical point of it? Like how can you like like saving in this case we market a lot of like saving time, you know, you could use you could learn the skill watching a lot of YouTube videos, but like this, you're you're saving time and you have it very precise in one course. It's high like premium is very high quality recorded and you you see it and also then explaining to them very very clearly of like look And you can even like Germans love it if they can what really worked in this case is like you can cheat the system. Like the ad even invites you to be like, hey The first year costs you this and it was very small amount. And then if you keep ongoing customer, it costs more. But if you're smart, and we even explained them, if you're smart, you take the tool, you you um pay with small first year subscription. And then you cancel and the Germans love it. Like you feel a lot of trust. But then a lot of them ended up liking the tool so much that we're like, oh no, they actually deserve it. Like Germans are then they are really we love paying for things where we see is worth it. So then they are like, oh, we actually plan to cancel, but actually it brings us so much value and we can keep on using it. So they they they continue. So this is something that This I think this ad wouldn't translate so well to US, but in Germany it it it does. And um in German also is like we really we really check the comment section before we buy. Like we would overthink like I think Germany is a very, very rich country, and you also market Tutzerland, which is the richest country in the world pretty much, uh, in terms of this. But um We they always question a bit more before buying something on online. So it's a bit harder to get the first first buy, but if if you got their trust once, they will buy a lot. So that's a That's something that really works. We're also seeing like people on in Mela in Germany, it's crazy the retention rate. Like people buy again and again and again. It's like it's not unheard of of someone in in their lifetime history having fifteen or twenty plus mellow sunglasses over the last years. Like that's quite a and then they give it as present. So it's like That's um that's quite a thing. So once you have the trust, it's uh it really works and the market is really, really rich.
Kurt Elster • 21:13.840
Let's assume I'm using Shopify as my platform. In North America, I Shopify's the default for e-commerce. What about Germany? Like Tobias Lukey, Shopify CEO, is is German Canadian.
Chris Erthel • 21:24.640
Exactly.
Kurt Elster • 21:24.960
Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Chris Erthel • 21:25.680
It's crazy.
Kurt Elster • 21:26.560
Do you have the same accent?
Chris Erthel • 21:27.760
Yeah, hund a hundred percent. Uh he speaks probably a bit better than me even. But uh exactly he is and he's actually very nice. I like his I like his podcast. So in Germany what happened uh is like um Another German quickly saw oh this is something that's growing and Tobias made it. So then he copied it. So there's shop shopware and they took a German market. So Mela is a Shopifier, because we are we are smart. But um Um most German companies, like I would say the split I have to see, but what I'm seeing, like I don't have official data, but what I'm seeing when I see a lot of brands. I would say 80-20, so 80% shopware, which is just pretty much a one-to-one copy, and uh when Shopify. So they are co really struggling in Germany, where other company uh built a lot of uh yeah trust and uh Market share and this is another thing. You know, when we talk about in Germany, we need much more trust in the ads to sell. That's why like we check right away, we right away have the comment section filled with people who love the the product, like real buyers. But I just asked my my friends who are real buyers like, hey, can you quickly comment something when a new address live so then people People would before they buy they would check this and then they would check um they would check uh trustpilot and we always have trust pilot in the ads. We do a lot of image ads with trust pilot in it. And if you actually look at Melabrand and the checkout page, you see before when you put your credit card in, you again see trust pilot with a score of 4. 4 on 38,000 reviews. And that that's really, really helpful.
Kurt Elster • 23:02.600
And then it obviously like we're we're narrow we're really focusing on Germany itself. It does it is some of these same purchasing patterns. I I assume This would extend to Austria.
Chris Erthel • 23:13.400
Yeah, yeah. For any for any US e-com owner who is listening to this, I can tell you to entering Europe, there's two easy steps. Very, very two easy steps. The first step is you keep your ads in English, change the currency, change the dollar to the euro, and um and you you make but you make the ads like you would make it for Germany, but in English, okay? But you take it like this and you go to Nordics. So Nordics, I call them, it's technically a bit wrong, but every time I make an ad campaign, I call them Nordics, would be uh Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands. These are five small countries for you. For us, we are medium sized in Europe, but for you we are small countries. But very, very rich and all of them watch TV in English. So there's no problem at all to make the ads in English. So Even I don't bother to translate them always in English.
Kurt Elster • 24:04.799
Oh wow.
Chris Erthel • 24:05.279
So like yeah.
Kurt Elster • 24:05.919
I mean I knew English was English fluency was prevalent. Is it you know often it's part of high school education.
Chris Erthel • 24:12.179
Uh and in these countries like Germans we don't speak so good, but uh as you can hear, but uh these countries they speak amazing English. So uh always this is what so everyone listening to me from the US, please Bring go to Europe is a crazy market, crazy profit margins. Go to the Nordics first, step number one. Step number two is you go to a Dach region. So Dach region is what we call Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. And you target German in this uh people who speak German in this area, which is like a crazy, like I think must be Germany's 82 million plus 10 million plus 10, so around 100 million people which you can target there, which are all Richer than Americans. Sorry to say that.
Kurt Elster • 24:55.440
With l less amount of depth.
Chris Erthel • 24:57.680
So um so and uh yeah, that's that's the thing. Oh and also for this region you want to have Klana. Do you know Klana? It's like I think a Swedish company. Yeah. You really want to have that for the younger generation. The oldest not. So you need to know a couple of things about the European markets. Like you want to have planet.
Kurt Elster • 25:16.960
I wanted to ask about payment providers. You know how how do payment providers change?
Chris Erthel • 25:22.020
Well it's mostly like it's mostly people pay credit card or clana or pay paypal So I think it's n n nothing nothing too too new for you. But maybe the same is here. But here comes a big thing. So you have and give and I'm gonna share a k couple more uh market n nuggets for all of you. Because now I helped 144 companies, so I've seen a lot. So the next thing is afterwards you would want to go to England probably. It's an easy one. You have a language, so it's easy. Um, Ireland, also easy. You have Euros where English you have a pound and then France. You would want to have France, Monaco, Luxembourg in French. Okay, that's easy. Uh but way you have to have it in French. Then Poland, you need Polish ads. It can be English sometimes. And another um it's not such a rich country, but people are so used to e-commerce, people buy everything online. So it's a crazy like for Hello Body and so it was a crazy market for Poland. Again, also it's quite easy and like here you will see like three four euros cpm, which I think for people who do ads will blow their mind Um trust me. They gave a blow their mind. And then you have Italy, which is also working okay. Not the best market, but it's working okay. And there's no competition because everyone enters where it doesn't work for anyone. Why? And with this trick you will not get it to work. You need in Italy, you need to offer cash on delivery. If not, it doesn't work. People are super used. People are super used to buy and then once they get the product in their hands, they give cash. So we didn't know this and but we learned pretty quick. Took us only a couple of weeks. We're not so stupid. We figured it out fast. But um There's something in Italy that's why there's also no competition because most US brands don't know that and they run ads, doesn't work, and they're like, oh shit. But once they see that they need uh COD, cash on delivery, they'll win there. So that's another Another good one. So this is uh we're one-on-one to Europe by Chris.
Kurt Elster • 27:16.620
No, that's all I mean just fabulous advice. I want to go back to your hello body story that we talked, you know, the we mentioned at the top of the show. Sold for 330 million. And in my notes I know that's a three X multiple because when you joined, they were doing only 30 million and then it at exit 107 million sold for 330, so 3x multiple. That that's exceptional all around. Uh what man, how How much of that was you? I mean how do you go from how did they go from 30 to 107?
Chris Erthel • 27:52.680
No, this this I have to be humble. Like that was like already a great, great team. So like I mean getting from zero to thirty that was a big big step. So the team did such a good job and the the two the two founders were did and a crazy crazy good good job. And I was just like what happened is like as founders we always helped each other. So they were helping us at Melda, we were helping them, and then there was a lot of trust. And then they just came in and they were like Chris. We gotta make you an offer you cannot re- re- refuse. We have big plans of Hello Body And uh we have an agency running our ads and we want to sell. And if you sell and you have an agency, you always get a lower multiplier because you know people want to buy the know-how. And they're like, we want you to come here. We have influencer marketing. It's also working well in the US, I guess, on many, many parts. We have this part, we are rocking it. We are really good at it. We have a lot of influencers who say our skin is really good because of these creams. And we have no microplastic, you know, there's like no animal testing, like everything that Germans love every time. Like Germans love the environment. It's another thing for US brands. You always want to market With the environment in Germany, like the green party is super strong here. Like Germans love it. There's no animal testing and so no microplastic in it. Like super important points. But um so then what I my job was just uh to go there, hire the right people and train the right people. So I was like my job was to replace the agency. So I came. I came in, I hired the right people, also like I found, also I looked in the company who's already good. Like for example, the assistant of the boss, she was amazing. And I was like, hey. Can I have her 20 hours and you have to 20 hours? And he was like, yes. So she was also running ads and uh coming up with ads and she knew the company well already. So um Yeah, she is amazing. So like yeah, I just hired eight, nine good people, trained them, and then we took over and then we quickly surpassed the numbers of the agency just by Creative output. Now we looked how many ads are we doing right now? And how can we how can we triple that? Like how can we go from we were like we're doing 15 new ads every week. We're like, okay, how can we go to 45 new ads every week? And then we went on top of that. So Here what I can share with all these. Yeah, but you need that. But here what I can share my my my my my my value nugget here for your audience. Because I hope many of them are Shopify e-com owners. That would be perfect when I can help you the most. So here would my idea what you want to do for ads you make every week. It's a year of 100%. I would tell you to divide this 40 per 40%. You make video ads. They are harder to make, but you have longer content to show and you can convince people more. And then 60% you have image ads because they have a higher conversion rate and they're easier to make. So 60, 40. And then these two blocks you divide again. into three categories. Into completely new ads, and you fully sit down with a blank paper and come up with new funny or cool ad ideas or like from different angles of like every angle the customer could think like, you come up with new ads. Then the second category is um you make a competitor ads um inspiration so you get inspired you use like tools like foreplay which is by the way a cool Canadian or US guy Zach who made this. Um use some tools, look at competitor ads or other people's ads that works, like for example Hello Buddy, we looked at looked at some ads of L'Oreal from Paris or from some some uh Australian brand that we liked. Right, and we're like, okay, how can we translate this and how can we get inspired by what's working for them? So you don't fully copy, but you get inspirations and then make ads all of this. And then one uh one third is um is ads that uh you do winning iterations, right? So you would make this and then depending on how many ads you make. So if you say you make a hundred ads a month, And you would make 60-40 and then you do what one one third in each and then you know exactly what to do every week. But that's really important to follow a certain structure and to make sure to get the crowd content machine running, right? Like obviously UGC is still working good in many many parts and you just check, you know, like what ads I want and Another thing I can really tell to all of you, because I really want to give a lot of value to your audience, is to not always, let's say now you're the founder of Gymshark and you're listening. Okay, don't always do the ads as Gymshark. You know, it's cool. People like the brand, it's good. But why people don't trust it too much if I say okay Gymshark says okay we make the best quality in in pullovers. Of course we're gonna save it. But now if I use a passion page and it's it's called uh uh uh UK's best sports apparel and then in this page they recommend different pages and they just recommend uh Gymshark is much cooler. That's one part, passion pages. The second part is now they would do a collaboration with Liam and Messi. They could do a whitelisting where it's just running through Messi's content, like through Messi's page. And it it's it's getting published there. Like it's like in the ad, it's just messy up there, like which whichever people they they chose, no. And that's that's working really, really good. And you can also keep it doesn't matter, they can also be a non-famous person, but just going from a private profile and then there, uh whitelisting is great. And then there's partnership ads where you actually have like uh messy with Gymshark and you have both together. That's what Facebook is pushing the most. But all of these work better than just putting Gymshark because Gymshark and it says sponsor people know it's an ad and people get blind to ads like Like 11 years ago it was easy, but now people get blind to ads, so you have to avoid that. So you try to um try to be more smart and creative around it.
Kurt Elster • 33:30.700
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Chris Erthel • 34:30.500
It's just I I love data. I love data. As a German, we we love I love A-B testing. I made over three and a half thousand, uh actually three thousand five hundred fifty-two A-B tests. I currently checked it. And I love data and the data clearly shows like we make tests and if you put trust pilot on our Shopify or not, the conversion rate is crazy different. Like we're talking 23% up uptick. So like it's clearly that Trust pilot um especially and this is again a little bit why maybe you don't like it as much as me in Europe trust is even more important. So we really um people really hate spending money and then it would not arrive. Like this with risk, like for example, I had I had a conversation. The biggest spender on meta-ad is Temo right now. Okay, we are spending way over a billion. Like they are actually, when you look at it, I think it's like two and a half percent. of the total Facebook ad spending is Temo. It's one company. You know them, right?
Kurt Elster • 35:27.360
And the other day I had like a serious whale client for them.
Chris Erthel • 35:30.640
Yeah. It's too too big. We are worried. Honestly they are worried. They're telling me like they don't like it that one company is spending so much. But basically here um a lot of times now I'm currently in Spain a lot of people ask me like when it's all blue Have you ever ordered on Temo, like I see the ads everywhere, but I'm like worried that they I I spent I spent ten euros and it wouldn't arrive. And it's not about that the worry but it's ten euros very loose. But it's about the the feeling of like I paid and it didn't arrive, like this like There's something that's a stronger thing in in in in in America people would be like, okay, I tried it. It's like is it's more risk-taking. We see also in the startups. People here failing is seen as worse. I give example a lot of like one of my companies. For example, I recently made a new company at Universe, which I thought was a genius SAS idea. Started it, we put half a million in with um me and free free free free and co-founders and we failed. And that's okay, you know, but in um In the US, you're like, okay, cool, you started something and you failed and you realized and you, you know, do other things, but we had this idea of like with SARS could be worth 300 million, we went for it. And after eleven months we were like close. It was growing and it was growing slower. And we don't want a slow growing company. But in Europe it's like, oh my God, you failed something and it's like the the shame of failing is bigger, you know, so that's That's something that people have to understand is like the getting them through you but the amount of trust that you need in everything is higher.
Kurt Elster • 37:00.220
Yeah, I mean those are serious cultural differences that just would not be obvious, you know, from the outside looking in. You mentioned running 3,500 split tests. Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love split testing. That is really the opposite of what I thought would happen.
Chris Erthel • 37:13.560
Yeah, I would say. Let me give you an easy example. With ad for uh snowboard jackets. Like I'm telling you, fashion is going really good right now. With ad for snowboard jackets. And I know with brand, I know what are the four bestsellers But now above there's a cool cool video, a guy doing double backflip, you know, and this like and when you see the jacket, super cool, you get it giving your attention. Below We have um we have we upload one file by the way we have upload one file which is half video half images which is also a hack I like But then you have these four images below. And now you can choose do I show the four bestsellers, which were everyone buys, or do I show four very different colored jackets? Like one which is yellow, one which is red, you know, like And I was like, look, I know people come and buy these, and these are by far, they always sold out. They have the best sellers. So I was very sure that the best sellers would be working best. But now we see clearly that people want the contrasts. People want to see that oh they have yellow, oh they have uh bright bright uh green, they have this. Then they click on it and they still buy the normal beige. They buy the normal boring colors. But uh people to click you want to show how much variation you have, which also makes sense when you think about it. So also now for um Today in the call two hours ago, I told them if the bad sheets, let's start and market yellow bad sheets. You know, it's like it's something different and it looks more happy and so on. Like people will still click and buy away the white bad sheets. You know, but uh we're gonna market uh different color variations. Now you have let's say you have uh a company selling what are you selling?
Kurt Elster • 38:51.140
Uh backpack type bags.
Chris Erthel • 38:53.059
So now you have two variations, right? You um either you have with one product in in black, let's say. Okay, so now they add showing the black product. Now if you click what most people do they bring them to the black black product okay to the product page And then they're complaining of like, oh our average order value is not very high, conversion rate could be better and so on. Why? What happens? People come there and they assume, oh my god, this brand maybe it just has this, you know, like It could be a small startup that has this and I don't like it. No, okay, I'm gonna go back. Whereas you send the traffic to a collection page where you see like 400 different products. You seem like a super old, big, big, big brand is always important. And obviously you make it easy for the customer. So you make it that this product that we just saw is on the left top. So they can easily buy and find the one that they might be interested in. But also now if they don't buy this or they see okay they have this and this other product and they can mi max and niche and they can buy more. So always send it to the collection page. That was something it's a bit counterintuitive because it's one more click and normally always wanted to have it very fast and very good.
Kurt Elster • 40:01.900
But um yeah, that's uh it all right. So your the discovery you're making here is like, hey, send them to a good collection page versus, you know, the default might be the home page, or if we're doing, you know, these catalog ads, they're gonna go to the product page. You're saying collection outperforms. Counterintuitive because we're adding click debt. I gotta browse the collection and then go to the product page. Exactly. But you know, I'm giving them a different starting point. And maybe, you know, that's I'm starting them with hey, just browse and you can see more of what is in the catalog with starting on a collected page.
Chris Erthel • 40:36.400
And also like big big shout out to Marco and Bocha because in in Miller, um these two uh current current co co-CEOs and we are also the head of speed at Mela. So we're constantly finding tools like um tools for Shopify and ways to make the page faster. So now when I just help straight up just performance load time. Exactly. And like it's so like I'm very proud of it now. Like when you actually lay if anyone wants to go to Melabrand to come and change colors, change products. I I think now it could still be better. But it's like way faster than nearly all the other e-commerces I see. And we really see that every speed change um helped a lot in terms of um uh in terms of um of revenue. So that's that's crazy.
Kurt Elster • 41:22.180
Yeah, because it's, you know, it's a really beautiful site. These product detail pages are really nice, but it has to load a ton of images. And you've gone through the effort of like, if I pick a different frame and lens, it's gonna reload. And so there's just a lot of a lot to load and a lot of page loading just to browse. Yeah. And so I could see where on a site set up like that, it having reducing page load in between all of those clicks really you could have uh an outsized impact on your bottom line.
Chris Erthel • 41:52.640
It's it's so important. And another thing Another example that I want to quickly share is like how sometimes meta doesn't care about your company and you have to be careful. Like we made something very cool. We took a lot of time to really make a crazy good Instagram filter. And then it took the time to put every sunglass ever. To scan it and put into a filter. So you could have this Instagram filter, the ads will go to the filter, like Bosco have this idea, but the ads will go to a filter. And then you don't go to website, but you try on all the sunglasses and you find one that fits you very well. You try it on and you're like, oh, this is perfect for my shape. And you buy it very certain of like this is the one. And then at one point, uh Instagram just decided to discontinue filters. So from one day to the other, with no announcing, like we are spending good money there, we are a good customer, nothing, just out. And uh yeah, we have to re-refine that like that's something that's uh yeah, there's always big big changes and things happening.
Kurt Elster • 42:50.220
But play in someone else's sandbox.
Chris Erthel • 42:54.299
Exactly.
Kurt Elster • 42:54.859
Would be the the US expression for that. That's that's a good expression.
Chris Erthel • 42:58.299
I never heard it, but I I liked it. I'm gonna start using it.
Kurt Elster • 43:01.059
Oh, have you ever done uh this filter essentially that you're describing for Instagram was essentially a virtual try-on where I could just like try on the sunglasses on my phone. virtually. Have you ever done that on the Meller Shopify store?
Chris Erthel • 43:15.740
No, no, we didn't. It's like it's a thing of of of load times and you have to accept camera permissions like It's all of these things, but you our Instagram has it already integrated. So it was just it has to be smooth. So we we uh smart we tried it but it didn't work. So that that's the right right play. But we loved it. It was so cool. Like it was really cool. And like yeah, at parties we always tried it out. But yeah. It's things. It happens.
Kurt Elster • 43:41.460
Yeah, before we go, any other favorite tools or resources?
Chris Erthel • 43:45.860
You know, with meta ads, you always get a lot of traffic to a page and you can help companies grow, but you don't you might get like a four or five lowers. or ROI, but you don't it wouldn't get higher because if you get higher you just push more, right? But you need to have some tools or some some channels where you have like um 60 plus ROIs. So you have like crazy, crazy ROIs. And for us, this is here, I think Clavio. Clavio was like a US company, I think, if I'm not right. I'm Arthur Jacket. But we used first MailChimp, then we used went to Clavio for email marketing. But then what we did We we checked that there's a European company coming up, Omnisend, like Omnichannel, OmniSend, because it sends everything, notifications, SMS, and email. And then we we changed to them and our rowers got up a lot. No, we are at the 68 ROI, thanks to them, because we have more channels, we have better better funnels, we could integrate everything. And also in terms of uh the cost effectiveness, it's more cost effective uh than Claire View, which helps a lot for to getting so I I tell every European econ company, also US ones, To like really have one tool which is just like a cash cash cough. Is there having a good email marketing tool which really has a fair fair price and then you can really do anything you want and uh market your audience well that really helps and then shout out to A friend of mine, Ezra Firestone, like Ezra and Nick Nickel. Oh, I love Ezra Scheckleford were like my speaking speaking bodies like eight years ago when I gave my first speech. I was nervous. They were calming me down. And since when we've been in so many conferences together and uh I I uh when he I heard about his tool Stupify, we checked it out and we we love it. Like uh for us the landing pages were and the The up sales are really good. So for us this is like um a tool that we we love because I I saw it thanks to him and uh exactly I have to give shout-out. I think also Omnicent, I saw it thanks to him. He was also recommending me this. And uh the VV tool, I found it thanks to Robbie Flynn, which if you don't know him yet, uh go follow him on LinkedIn. He has like 110,000 followers. Because you post the coolest AI content like Rory Flynn, another very, very cool um public speaker on marketing.
Kurt Elster • 45:59.579
The okay. Uh Final thing, you mentioned a coupon code for Meller sunglasses. Remind me what it was?
Chris Erthel • 46:06.920
Yeah, you just type in my my name, Chris Erfel, and then everything together.
Kurt Elster • 46:12.119
Beautiful. Okay. Uh I will we'll include that in the show notes. Chris Herthel, uh Miller Brand, thank you so much. This has been great.
Chris Erthel • 46:22.039
It was really fun. I hope I could give a lot of value and really When you're rocking it in the US, like if you make more than ten million revenue in the US, it's time to also step over to Europe. And the same I'm telling all the German brands to make more than ten million It's time to step over to yours because it's just a bit more work for double the revenue. So it's like it's such a good deal to to market in both places because you know you just need one marketer to make both ads. And uh yeah, it it's also worth it. So I I think I hope there's more collaboration and in general I wish for more collaborations again with between European Union and the US. Like we used to be very, very good. And let's go back to that. But we have very good uh I still love all my US friends, so it's good, but like you know, let's go back to collaborating really good together again.
Kurt Elster • 47:05.640
Yeah, fingers crossed. Uh Chris, thank you so much. Cheers, all the best. Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, Promo Party Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with purchase promo in the near future. Install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use. Let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search promo party in the app store. Promo Party Pro's the app. Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks.