w/ David Gaylord, Bushbalm Skincare
In this Unofficial Shopify Podcast episode, we sit down with David Gaylord, the mastermind behind Bushbalm Skincare. From his Shopify days to leading a skincare revolution, David reveals the art of growing a business from its online roots to retail success. He emphasizes the crucial roles of web design and ongoing marketing refinement. David's journey with Bushbalm, Ottawa's fastest-growing company, serves as a playbook for Shopify entrepreneurs, highlighting the virtues of patience and strategic growth in e-commerce. Expect a straight-to-the-point, insightful discussion, tailor-made for those looking to make their mark in the digital marketplace.
Kurt (00:07.35)
On this episode, we are going to talk to a Dragon's Den alum, a former Shopify-er and the CEO of one of Ottawa's fastest growing companies. The yes, we have with us the CEO of Bush Balm Skincare, a one David Gaylord, and he is going to walk us through how they went from an idea at a Shopify offsite to one of these incredible, fast-growing companies, and how not just going direct to consumer, but also omni-channel, retail, wholesale, how all of that came together to achieve their success. Let's see what we can unpack and learn here in this episode. I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Tech Nasty. And this is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. David, welcome.
David Gaylord (01:01.433)
I forgot about those. I love the sound effects. That's incredible.
Kurt (01:05.166)
The, you know, I've been going easy on the sound effects lately. I think at some point I hit peak sound effect. I was really abusing it.
David Gaylord (01:15.038)
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Super, super excited. Been a long time listener, so excited to actually be on the show.
Kurt (01:20.598)
Well, I'm happy to have you, but let's start with BushBomb. What is BushBomb?
David Gaylord (01:27.273)
Yeah, so Bushbomb started as just an idea that we weren't sure on the use case. Bush, as you can imagine, down their care. And then Balm, no, not talking about gardening. We actually call it Bikini Line Skincare.
Kurt (01:37.322)
We're not talking about gardening.
Kurt (01:44.117)
Okay.
David Gaylord (01:44.809)
But when we started, we were gonna launch a bomb, hence the name Bush Bomb. And then we turned out, it was actually quite difficult and we didn't have the resources to launch a bomb. So we went with an oil product and then a sugar-based scrub. But at the heart of Bush Bomb, ingrown hairs, razor burn.
It's horrible, sucks, nobody likes it. And that's all we do. And our focus really is on the bikini line. So we're, we're more geared towards the female market. We actually don't do anything on the male side. Um, and yeah, right now we're, we're D to C. We're sold in about 3000 waxing salons. And then we're also in about a thousand Alta beauty doors, uh, this March, which has been a big, big change.
Kurt (02:26.254)
I was going to say that it's quite the success to get into a big retail chain, and then thousands of them. But before we get to that, the thing I assumed that came first was the idea, when did this start?
David Gaylord (02:42.713)
Yeah, so it was 2016, Tim and Mel, the founding couple, they're on their honeymoon and Mel used Tim's beard oil to freshen up down there.
And kind of a weird conversation led to one thing. And then at a Shopify offsite, Tim, I worked with him at Shopify for many years. He said the idea to, there's about 60 of us at an offsite and everybody laughed. Thought it was like this terrible idea. This was 2016, kind of ahead of his time. And then I have eczema. So I've been using oils, skincare for eczema, which is also no fun. And I love the idea. I thought it was great.
Shopify was kind of corporate and I didn't get to do marketing, which is what I went to university for. So I ended up doing a lot of the marketing, like the web, the Shopify, Tim did all the operations and then Mel is a very gifted graphic designer. So the three of us kind of got to work.
Kurt (03:40.45)
So, they had this idea, you loved the idea, you had a marketing background, where, how quickly from idea to this is a thing you could buy do we go?
David Gaylord (03:54.849)
It probably took us about four months to launch and we actually only launched with about $3,000 so we didn't throw a lot into it. We all had full-time jobs. Mel had a...
business as well at the time. So yeah, we didn't have much time. We didn't have much money. We were still like fairly junior Shopify employees. And this was before kind of all the chaos and uh, yeah, we launched and we had a few hundred products. Um, and then the first year we probably sold like two grants or the raw, like that's it. And it didn't take us, it took us until about 2020 to actually start to find our product market fit, our niche, our packaging, all of that. So a good four years to, to really get going.
Kurt (04:37.418)
In that four years, what do you think is the impactful changes that happened where this thing went from, okay, it makes sales, but less than what it costs us, to a business so successful you wanted to quit your job to pursue it?
David Gaylord (04:54.737)
Yeah, so it was a few things. One was we went to a Etsy show. So the platform, I don't even know if we had an Etsy account. I don't know how they accepted us, but we had a booth, like a trade show booth there and customers came in and we tried to sell our product. And every single day we actually changed the sign.
So we use different language. So the first day was like bush oil. The second day was like pubic hair oil. And then the final day was like ingrown hair prevention. And right away people were like, oh yeah, that's actually super useful. Like I have that issue. The first day people were like spitting their drinks out. They're like, oh, that's disgusting. Why would I? So that wording really changed. And then we did a really professional photo shoot, which helped the brand in so many ways. And then the last thing we did
was we found an ad creative that told the story really well and that right there just kind of got us to a new level where it essentially people just understood what we were selling whereas before it was hard to even imagine what it was
Kurt (05:58.722)
So you, through testing in person at an event, one-on-one, which that in-person event stuff, really quite beneficial early in a product development path is what we've learned on this show. And so you've got the tagline figured out when the moment you start agitating the pain, you lead with, well, this is the pain or problem we're solving, which ingrown hairs.
Ingrown hair is universally bad. Nobody wants this. And you picked a, you then combined it with an area, bikini line, where people really had not been addressing it in this way previously. And so you've got a specific pain or problem, a solution for it, and then we're adding a niche to it, a niche. How?
Did your Shopify experience come into play here? Like I mean, I obviously I assume this is on Shopify
David Gaylord (07:03.474)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So people actually do ask me that a lot and I learned a lot of stuff at Shopify, but as far as like the folks at Shopify that I work with and most people there are excellent and they're amazing, but I think the thing people don't realize is like Shopify is a tech company.
So like the fact they think people are like, oh, if you work at Shopify, you'll know how to run an e-commerce business, which is like so far from the truth. Um, so the things that Shopify really helped is like, as we scaled.
I just knew how to build spreadsheets and models and understand finances. And you had a lot of those business operations things. But on the marketing side, yeah, there actually wasn't many folks who understood how merchants really ran, how they operated that way.
Um, as far as like product development, like the things that Shopify would do is very expensive and difficult and fancy. And whereas like our business is so different than that. We're trying to make costs like efficient and affordable. Um, so yeah, the things that really did help, like now I look back as our team, we're about 30 people.
That helps a lot as we have this bigger team. I've seen what like bigger teams at Shopify look like, how they do the annual budgeting process, all of that. That's been incredibly beneficial. But yeah, in the early days, the ways that it helped is like, they just encouraged it. And Shopify was like, yeah, start your business, learn how to use the platform, which is amazing. But yeah, some of the hard marketing growth scale, like we didn't quite have the support that I thought I would just naturally learn.
David Gaylord (08:40.501)
being out that kind of mothership.
Kurt (08:43.586)
So you learned a lot of soft skills, but then at the same time, there were some that kind of surprised you. And it sounds like it was some of the marketing stuff, maybe even like down to positioning.
David Gaylord (08:56.617)
Totally, yeah, like seeing some of that. And then the other piece too is, like I didn't realize, I didn't know what total addressable market was until I worked at Shopify. And then you hear it all the time, like our TAM for this new channel expansion or that. And then within BushMom, you bring those things and you say, okay, are we actually a super niche company? Or do we have like a potentially big enough TAM? And you're like, oh yeah, here's why the numbers are, you do the research.
So yeah, those I'd say like is just business skills in general. Shopify actually did an awesome job of like helping people understand how, how businesses function. Um, and then yeah, obviously like the, the high standards of Shopify also is, uh, is very good to know.
Kurt (09:39.758)
And despite those skills, and what I assume was a good experience, at some point you quit, right? When is that? What's the moment?
David Gaylord (09:46.621)
Yeah.
David Gaylord (09:50.181)
Yeah, so we got to actually about, I think we're about two million in revenue and we still hadn't hired
employee. So it was just all of us part time doing this on the side of our desk. At one point I was doing fulfillment and then we got a three PL so life got a little easier. Um, and then we, we kept growing. And I believe that was middle of 2021, uh, is when we had our first employee. Um, and then a few, Tim quit first and then I quit shortly after that. And, uh, it was a hard, that was actually a really hard decision because at the time I had my
my best job ever at Shopify. And I was doing things that I didn't think I would have been doing two, three years ago. But yeah, Bushbomb at that point, when I went full time was about five people. So doing it from the side of my desk as the CEO was not the right play at the time probably. But bootstrapping and being lean like that, it actually helps you to build tons of systems, like be really careful with your time. So I do appreciate that. But looking back, yeah, maybe I should have quit a year or two earlier.
Kurt (10:52.302)
But you know, hindsight's 20-20 and you have success bias. Like, from where you are now, you know it works out if you quit. When you are on the other side of that decision, it seems like a much riskier proposition in quite the gamble. At the same time, if I had a product business that I'm doing part-time, is it already doing multiple millions, I'd probably be like, all right, what happens if we go full-time with this?
David Gaylord (11:00.629)
For sure.
David Gaylord (11:21.757)
Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. Looking back, you're like, oh, we should have done that. But at the same time, looking back at the, those years, I didn't even know how big this company could be. And every year I realized like, oh, how much bigger the company could be. And then we bring on more people. We scale. Like it's been quite amazing. But yeah, at the same time, like the last five years has been hard. Everything about this journey is hard. There's ups and downs all the way. Um, it's just, yeah, now seeing it.
We've had a good year. So I'm at the end of the year. Now I'm all happy about where we're at. But yeah, definitely ups and downs.
Kurt (11:57.982)
Yeah, for sure your ego and your livelihood are wrapped up in it in a way where it's hard not to take wins and losses personally. Which could be dangerous.
David Gaylord (12:11.221)
For sure. Yeah, I think that's the toughest part of being a founder is yeah, you're tied up in your livelihood.
And sometimes it's not just you, it's like the team, right? So if you hire someone, you want them to grow, be successful, and then you have 20, 30 people, like you want to all to be successful. And it does get challenging. You take a lot personally to make sure it is a success. Whereas when I was kind of doing my corporate gig, if this whole thing fails, I've still got my corporate gig. So you feel less pressure, whereas now I feel all kinds of pressure every single day,
I think healthy.
Kurt (12:51.05)
Yeah, there's, as long as it doesn't overwhelm you or eat you alive, that stress becomes positive. It becomes motivating. It's you stress. The one that really blows my mind, you were on Dragon's Den in the summer of 2020, and you would have still been working at Shopify.
David Gaylord (12:59.489)
Exactly.
David Gaylord (13:11.189)
Yeah, yeah, so we were both actually working at Shopify at that time. So we both had quarter jobs. We actually didn't have a single employee when that was filmed. So yeah, on the show we said we were on track to do 1.8 million in revenue.
And what was crazy about it is 1.8 million is still a small business, but we pitched in February, right before COVID, and we said we're on pace to do $600,000. And between February and July, when we filmed, our yearly revenue changed by like, I guess, 1.2 million in that span. And I don't know how we did it, but somehow we managed to keep up with inventory, all that. We barely sold out during COVID. And then the following year,
The following year we went from, I think we were 1.8 million and we went to 8.3. Uh, and that year was the staying in stock was like physically impossible. And that was like the heart and heart of COVID when that was the glory days of DTC, I would say, and I had to add spending.
Kurt (14:11.554)
So the... what the... the dragon's den. Did they... did you get the deal? Did they give you the money?
David Gaylord (14:17.789)
Yeah, we did. We got a deal, yeah, but I think it's a little different than Shark Tank. I don't know what percentage of like how many deals on Shark Tank go through. Yeah, we actually have one of the best episodes like I've seen. Like everything was smooth. There was like almost no negativity, almost no pushback. And we got a deal for exactly what we asked for. So like you almost never see that, right?
But yeah, after the show, the deal actually never went through. We're quite close with the Arlene and her team that we got the deal with. Just they tend to do bigger investments. So on the show, they probably only do a couple of those, whereas we're actually bigger now where we're talking with their team and we actually fit their, their like investment thesis much more now. Whereas before, yeah, we were just, we were way too small to even work out, I would say.
Kurt (15:06.67)
So yeah, that's the thing that's not obvious from watching Shark Tank or Dragon's Den. Just because they made the offer on the show doesn't mean it actually gets followed through on after the fact. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, you still got the public win and the publicity, but it sounds like you're, so it didn't get funded, but now you're back talking to them again.
David Gaylord (15:25.109)
Totally, yeah, yeah.
David Gaylord (15:34.769)
Yeah, exactly. And I think the piece people don't realize about Dragon Sand or Shark Tank is we actually went into that show and left that show being the tightest with our financials we've ever, well, now we're really tight from it, but you like lock everything up. You understand your data better than ever.
So it actually was a great lesson for learning in the business. Because without doing that, we might have had sloppy financials, whereas right away, we sent them due diligence, they understood what was going on. It was very useful on the business side. But yeah, I can only imagine 10%, 15%, 20% of deals go through. Can't be much more than that.
Kurt (16:11.434)
and I saw you have done a very clever thing. If I Google Dragon's Den Bush Balm, I don't necessarily get the TV show page about it. I get the landing page on your website.
David Gaylord (16:25.681)
Yeah, I'm a big SEO fan. Anything we can kind of work out on the SEO side. Lots to learn there, but yeah, any of those little subtle links will likely get you, I don't know, one, two, three, four clicks a day, which adds up over a few years.
Kurt (16:43.222)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this page looks good. And we've had other merchants, other clients on Shark Tank do the same thing after they saw, oh, every time the show re-airs, we get this huge traffic spike. How do we capture more of that? And the answer, of course, is make a page, a landing page, direct match keywords, sharing your experience directly. And often...
David Gaylord (17:08.083)
Yeah.
Kurt (17:10.282)
It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Google's gonna put you in the top few results. Because it's talking about you specifically.
David Gaylord (17:15.189)
For sure. Yeah, I'll have to look at how many clicks we actually get, but we do get the odd spike, and every time, I'm like, why is Canada having sales right now? And it's, yeah, it re-airs usually two, three times a year.
Kurt (17:28.238)
Pretty cool.
So you've got the other thing I noticed you are been named Ottawa's fastest growing company twice it was two years in a row 21 22 who are you who is saying who's the arbiter here who is saying that you are fastest growing in Ottawa and how did that happen?
David Gaylord (17:46.523)
Haha
David Gaylord (17:53.917)
Yeah, so it's actually the Ottawa Business Journal. So they run like a business thing every year. They, you have to submit and then they verify your financials. And what's kind of funny actually is years, years before us Shopify won the same thing. So I think this is before they're publicly traded probably in like 2012. But yeah, we won and
They take your last three years revenue growth and you have to be over, I believe it's a million dollars to qualify. So we've obviously grown really, really quickly and had a good baseline. Like we started, I think it was 1.8 million and then we went to 8.3 and then we went to 11.5. So pretty steady growth for like a small period. But yeah, I've never been one to like submit for awards and stay pretty low profile. But yeah, that's, that's been a good one in the city to get, to start hiring.
We've actually grown quite a bit through that awareness in just our local city.
Kurt (18:47.854)
And so I'm looking at the Bushbalm site. It looks really good. How many products do we have on this store? How many SKUs?
David Gaylord (18:57.545)
Yeah, I think we're like, I don't know, probably like 16 skews, maybe eight are core and then 16 are just like other products. And then you probably add on top of that, another 10 bundles. So give or take, like we probably have about 30 skews that we promote in various ways. Um, we do a lot of bundling actually every week, typically our number one skews, not an individual item, but it's a bundle.
which has been like unreal for our AOV has gone up like 3x in the last four years, just by like focusing on what bundles to promote and how. So, yeah, we focus mostly on bundles and we separate based on like concern is a big part of our business. And then we also sell our trimmer, which is a it's a totally different audience. So trying to
Merchandise all the different audiences on the site is our probably one of our biggest challenges but so far So far it's worked quite well, but we're still kind of learning there for sure
Kurt (19:57.554)
I think there was a ton of value in what you just said. You said, hey, we lean a lot on bundles. We're trying to increase average order value. And we have different audiences. So we're tweaking our offers, our landing pages, et cetera, for them. Which brings me to my next point. You said you've got like, there's a few dozen skews on this site, but you actually have over 2000 pages indexed in Google. And so there's, yeah, there's, you know, let's say even if you had 100 skews, all right, well the other,
Two thousand pages. Where did those come from? Are they landing pages? SEO efforts? Is this a surprise to you?
David Gaylord (20:33.289)
That's a lot of pages. Yeah, that's quite a few. We do have quite a large number of blog posts, which do quite well for us for SEO. We've got a few blogs now that get over 150 clicks per day. So those just drive a lot of organic traffic, which is amazing. And then we do have tons of collection pages that we have throughout our navigation. But yeah, that's a lot of pages. My guess is it's probably also landing pages, which
I, it was funny, since I worked at Shopify, we got free Shopify sites. I was like part of it, you could just build a shut site. So instead of buying a landing page software back in the day, I just would have different sites and I would just link them back to our site. And they would be like the Trimmer page, this page, and I have six variations of each. So under my account and Shopify, it was 50 page, 50 different sites, probably. And then our data was all screwed up in our.
version rate on the original site looked like 6-7%. So now we brought that all, obviously, to the one theme. But yeah, we've been using landing pages the last six, seven years for all of our ads. Ever since the beginning, we've been doing that. And yeah, now you won't see a Bush Bomb ad that doesn't go to a landing page, for sure.
Kurt (21:50.59)
Is that one of like the easiest low-hanging fruit for people who don't are just sending ads direct to a page as opposed to dedicated landing page that kind of echoes the offer?
David Gaylord (22:03.517)
Yeah, I'd say for sure and for us we do it on certain things like we do a lot of limited edition sense that we launch
And so for those, we optimize a page where you actually sign up to get on the email list for it. And then once it launches, we have like a custom page for all of that. So I think just everywhere in the funnel, if you can make it so someone clicks a landing page, they get 20 percent off and then they click a collection page off that landing page. You kind of want to have the 20 percent come over with them as well. So just looking at the funnel and where people end up, I think is quite important. So, yeah, we have a lot of pages that are, I would say, like first tier.
and then second level landing pages as well.
Kurt (22:44.798)
And it shows that hyper segmentation to keep everything as relevant as possible, it's a lot of work up front for you. There's a lot of pages here relative to the number of products, but it has paid off in that this business is very successful and growing quickly. And so relative to the amount of revenue generated, it no longer seems like a ton of effort, now does it?
David Gaylord (23:05.225)
for sure.
David Gaylord (23:11.789)
No, not at all. Yeah. We actually hired, I was the website person for quite a long time. And it was actually last year I hired a merchandiser full time and that, that role and hire has been, it's just freed me up to do so much more in the business and also somewhat focused on it full time. There's so many more tests we can run. We actually just did a, we just did a end of year review. And so far this year, I think we've already ran
It was something like 300. It was almost a test a day for like A-B tests on the website, which I thought was kind of crazy. Maybe that's not that high, but for our team, a year ago we probably did like 10. So it's kind of been crazy growth on our end.
Kurt (23:53.238)
No, a test a day is extremely aggressive and impressive.
David Gaylord (23:58.365)
Yeah, it's been a lot of fun, the merchandising side, because a year ago we weren't sophisticated at all. And that impact, especially with the iOS changes, being able to actually convert at a rate that we can stay profitable has been really hard. I'm sure everyone's kind of gone through the same thing. So yeah, that role in general has been pretty big for us.
Kurt (24:20.038)
Yeah, you would have seen what happened to a lot of people, which was e-commerce is creeping up. Then if you're in the right place at the right time, it explodes for you during the pandemic. And then Apple decides to ruin everybody's fun with the iOS changes that made ads really expensive and difficult to run for a period of like a good 18 to 24 months. So where, how did that...
How did that impact you? It sounds like you saw this and then the just absolute segmentation landing pages, etc. is how you got your way out of it.
David Gaylord (24:59.057)
No, not at all, actually. We were still doing, we were doing that before. So we were like segmenting audiences. Like the thing with us is we were humming, like COVID, we were spending, Facebook ads were converting extremely high. Like everything was really working. And like the cycle of it's really, really working, maybe you hire too many people. We didn't quite get there. So we just scaled with our team that we had and luckily that worked out. And then last year, it was probably our toughest time in Q4.
issues and ads just weren't converting and what we realized is like our business is quite seasonal now so we know the summer months are going to be much better for us but how we actually caught out of it into being I'd say our business right now is the strongest it's ever been probably because we have
Canada as a DGC business, US as a separate DGC business, like totally different app, structures, accounts. We also have this wholesale business. So we're in about 3000 waxing salons and we don't run that like your traditional wholesale business where it's like a sales rep calling up, converting people over the phone and you have 20 account managers. We actually have one account manager and one salesperson. So majority of that program is run like a DGC company. So people come in and they create their own account,
and then the last one was retail so this year we got at Ulta and then a few other retailers so that revenue has been huge but on the same end D2C is still like hard the only difference now is we know when we could spend a lot
And we know we should pull back spend to be more profitable, which for us, it's like October, November, December, we actually pull back spend quite a bit because it's seasonality wise, not our time to shine. And then that wholesale waxing salon business, it's really hard to figure out wholesale for a DTC business. And if you can actually build it out in a way that is scalable like the DTC model, it's incredibly powerful. So that business...
David Gaylord (27:05.333)
Like we, the 3000 accounts, our retention on that over like one year, I believe is at 75%. So like repeat rate and frequency of purchase is so fast just because when their shelves are empty, they know to rebuy instead of requiring like an email or an ad or whatnot like DTC.
Kurt (27:26.33)
So you add, you start as pure D2C, and then you're adding a wholesale business in the form of retailers and of various sizes, independent salons plus Ulta. And well, if, all right, let's say you had to pick just one. Do you go straight D2C or straight wholesale?
David Gaylord (27:40.285)
Yeah.
David Gaylord (27:47.985)
I think it's impossible to do. Well, you could figure out how to do just one. The thing we get is the...
Ideally the cycle. So D2C, we spend a ton of money on ads, we push people. And what happens through that is we get a ton of people to the wholesale accounts because they see Bushbomb or someone comes in for a wax and tells them about Bushbomb. And then the other side of it is like, the more we spend on D2C, the more our Amazon and all the business grows. So they all kind of cycle. The biggest challenge is how do you make sure everyone's happy?
Kurt (28:15.18)
Interesting.
David Gaylord (28:18.333)
because like Alton wants to run a deal or the waxing salons get like an offer a certain time you launch a new product.
So you have to do what's right for each different channel, I suppose. Um, just so everyone's appreciated, understands what you're doing. But yeah, that's the hardest part. Um, but yeah, our, our waxing salon business is just, it's incredible. First off, you're supporting like small, small businesses or like solo estheticians, which is super rewarding and you kind of see it. And then, uh, it's also just a channel where
our product market fit is the, like it couldn't be better. Like everyone loves it. Our ratings on it are amazing. Like repeat rate obviously is amazing. So that channel is probably my favorite. It's also, we're in startup phase with it, right? Like we went from, I think we're zero accounts and then last year we got to a thousand and then this year we'll get to about 3000. So it's still in that early startup phase, even though like revenue from it now is creeping up to be one of our bigger channels.
Kurt (29:19.882)
And you said you've got, there's 3000 waxing salons. How do you, and they're all independent. How do you maintain relationships at that scale? Is it like just a variation on retail or it's a newsletter? How do we do this?
David Gaylord (29:38.173)
Yeah, that's the part. Every time I talk to someone, they're like, that doesn't make sense. There's no way, or they think we have a huge sales team, but how we've done it is really through like automation flows. And then we do insert some level of relationship in there, but typically it's a webinar, which is kind of one to many, or you introduce a new product at a certain time and build a lot of engagement on social. So sometimes people actually don't need that one-to-one.
communication. So we do a lot of one-to-many in the channel and then some of our top tier accounts obviously they get more special attention but the thing that we've realized is for us
We do a lot of product launches and those limited edition sent launches. So with retailers, the more new and exciting things you're doing, the more purchase orders that they want to do because they think I should have that on my shelves, I should bring that to my customers. So by launching more product, we actually get away from the need to have 15, 20 account managers and we can have a lighter weight process and then also like the systems like Shopify and your CRM. Your.
and email, like that needs to be really, really strong. And most people flick on the Shopify wholesale channel and like no offense to it, I'm sure it's gotten better over the last five years, but we have like a full separate site with like a custom theme, everything's built differently, like how you purchase, how you view pricing, like it's totally different. 100%, yeah. Yeah, and we run like landing page tests over there.
Kurt (31:08.046)
So you run an expansion store just for the wholesalers. Okay.
David Gaylord (31:15.965)
We run like funnels to different guides, like webinars. Like there's, there's a lot of different marketing tactics, kind of, I would say more so old school tactics.
Kurt (31:27.178)
Interesting. Yeah, it's that you're sounds like you're putting a lot more effort into it in building those relationships and getting those wholesalers than we've seen other retailers do. But you're doing it in a in a smart way. You know, where we have seen people in the past was like, it's a lot of just individual managers who have to reach out. It's like, all right, well, you get, you know, there's three and we've broken it up by geographic district. And it's just
going by quantity over quality. How many people can you reach out to?
David Gaylord (32:01.169)
Yeah, in the early days too, if you asked me like, oh, you guys do wholesale to aestheticians, it was probably like someone emailed me and then I'd do a draft order and then I'd send it to them. And then, so it was super manual and frustrating. I think at one point I just like broke and was like, I'm going to rebuild this from scratch and we, we kind of pulled it all together. Um, and the last thing about the channel is since it's professional aestheticians, right? So this like professional backing for our business is actually massive.
that we fit so well with estheticians and professionals, it means that our relationship with Alta, they want to have like professionally backed brands. So that actually is like a nice little fly-by-law for the two of them. The more estheticians we have, the more professionals, the happier Alta is with our positioning in the market. So this whole cycle is pretty important. And then D2C, like it converts better because people trust it, right?
Kurt (32:55.038)
Yeah, all these things seem to feed each other. Like a flywheel is occurring between these three channels. Small Indie wholesale, the large retail wholesale, and direct-to-consumer.
David Gaylord (33:09.373)
Yeah, totally. And then the only one that's kind of an outsider is like Amazon, right? And like we don't really promote Amazon much, but obviously it's there. It does fairly well. We tend to focus more on, yeah, the DTC as well as like a wholesale professional and then wholesale retail.
Kurt (33:27.018)
Have you tried a TikTok shop yet?
David Gaylord (33:30.257)
No, we're Canadian, so we're not allowed, sadly. Yeah, it's what we've been asking. But yeah, mostly we just do TikTok ads and they seem to work fairly well for us.
Kurt (33:32.935)
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Kurt (33:41.29)
Yeah, the early, you know, part of it's the excitement of it having launched not that long ago, but we're seeing a lot of people make orders and sales with TikTok Shop. But then the struggle is the integration could be a little rough and just maintaining it. But as far as like, you know, is it an effective channel? Does it get sales at the moment? Yeah, it does seem to work with, and of course, with the right offer.
David Gaylord (34:06.165)
Right, right, right. Yeah, we're kind of lucky, either lucky or not lucky as a Canadian business. We tend to get everything second, but it usually means they like work out the kinks and then they find out what works. The only problem is sometimes you miss that like glory in the first year of something where it just, the results are way better than the years after, but it kind of slows the business down over here because we can't do it probably until next year.
Kurt (34:31.126)
The, so having been at Shopify, having run the site for years, having built now realistically multiple stores, right, because we have expansion stores for different markets and customers and all these landing pages. What's your, what are your thoughts, what's your philosophy on web design? How perfect do we got to get?
David Gaylord (34:56.605)
Yeah, so we went through a big process to redesign the site a few years back. So we're probably going to get there with our next site. So the wholesale site, we're going to do another redesign there. But yeah, my motto has always been like clarity in like photography and text.
The piece for me that I'm struggling with between is things can obviously look amazing and not convert. So it's really you need to find the right agency that looks at the data with you and understands like, okay what actually converts and what are we going to test to get there? So I'm, there's a fine line between like huge new website rebuild versus like incremental components. The tough part about the incremental is
it's hard to make it look good, right? Cause it's always just like slight changes. And then the redesign, there's risk, like huge risk there. And like, will it convert worse than what you already have? So it's a balance of like kind of where you want, what you see and like our redesign that we did that made the site look a lot better and branded better.
it actually converted like the same. So like nothing changed. AOE did start to go up, which was helpful. But the fact that we did that redesign, it actually led to, uh, just a better viewing of our brand. And that's probably one of the reasons we got with Ulta Beauty because they went to our site. They saw, wow, this, this is like professional, this beautiful, super well done. So like there's obviously different things to measure against. But yeah, now, now that we're a bit bigger, I'm like,
We're testing everything, trying to find out the right language, verbiage, pictures, uh, versus, uh, in the early days, it was like free theme. I did it, did it myself. Our free theme probably got us to like 8 million in sales. So not anything crazy. There was no frills, no like upsells, nothing like that. Um, but then again, uh, I spoke with someone that manscaped and they have a team or they used to have a team of about 12 people that just did subscriptions.
David Gaylord (37:00.177)
So like you can obviously with the right developer team, you can do all these things that add tons of revenue and value, but as a small business, we're kind of fighting through the incremental changes as we go versus maybe this year actually, we're gonna invest especially in the wholesale business, like a real wholesale website with lots of testing before we launch and yeah, doing a huge, huge change there.
Kurt (37:25.034)
And when you say lots of testing before you launch, what tools are we using? What's our approach here?
David Gaylord (37:31.805)
Yeah, we just switched to, I forget what the company's called, um, like an A-B testing software, but we got it just for the wholesale site. Um, so we switched to that. So we're going to be running a bunch of A-B tests on just different heroes and homepages. We've been using Replo to build quite a few components to test before we kind of bring them into the full theme. Um, so yeah, we've been doing that. And then the other thing is we actually just hired
like a freelancer to help us on CRO to run more tests with us. And we have a great merchandiser, but more junior. So having someone come in and act as like a CRO coach, but what makes it tough internally is like, we don't have a developer on staff. So it's a, yeah, I think that's a challenge just across the board for probably everyone.
Kurt (38:19.106)
Right, yeah. Hey, here's a test we want to run. So here's what we need to build a way.
David Gaylord (38:24.505)
Yeah, so yeah, that's been true. So Replo has actually been quite helpful to test all kinds of things before we actually get it built out.
Kurt (38:34.458)
So let's switch gears. I want to pick your brain on some advice for Shopify entrepreneurs and merchants listening. If someone has an existing brand, it's successful, they're in that position where they're like, hey, we're selling 2,000, 3,000 a month. And obviously at that point, they're like, there's something here, I want to expand it, I want to grow. How do they do that?
David Gaylord (39:00.529)
Um, it's changed a lot since we started, obviously back in the day, it was like, yeah, throw some money into Facebook and see if people react and you should be able to grow that way. Whereas the biggest thing I would say now is build like a great product, obviously, like everyone would say that. And then the other piece is whatever you can do is build community somehow. So what does that look like for your brand? Like, are there people that
can be big ambassadors for what you're doing. For us right now, like the estheticians are our best ambassadors, talk about us all the time, they're always pitching us to their clients. So yeah, if you can find anything organic, it's pretty big right now. And I would say the last thing is probably expect to grow slower, then people will tell you, like if you talk to me, here's how fast we grew, here's how quick. But just with the market, unless you can truly figure out how to scale ads, it's not like it used to be.
just grow slower and it's totally fine. Like it's not a big deal. You look at a lot of brands, like they started in 1990 and they're still like doing well now. So yeah, it all kind of compounds, I would say over the years.
Kurt (40:07.65)
For sure. I mean, just it's that old metaphor of you're building a house brick by brick. And when you're standing up close to it, it doesn't seem like much. But after a while, you look and go, oh, there's a house here. One piece of advice you wish you had when you were starting BushBomb, which you may have just given it.
David Gaylord (40:28.265)
Yeah, no, I would say the big thing for me, if I was starting out, I wish I had more insight into like, what's impactful. And early on, you tend to just crush work because you're like, I'm going to make this thing a big success, like here's what I'm going to do. Versus like building out your one year plan for it. So it's almost like slow down to go faster. Because generally speaking, like first year I just tinkered with the theme.
And like, I had zero traffic to the theme. So like, why did I take her? No one saw the theme I was working on. So I really should have been focused on, hey, get more traffic. So things like that where if someone just said, hey, what are you focusing on? You'd be like, oh, this, and this. And they'd say, oh, have you thought about this? Those types of just conversations I didn't have. And then I think the other one would be the more you could talk to people about your idea, the better.
So no one's generally gonna steal your idea. And if they do, I'm sorry, I just told you this. But talk to people, ask, hey, have you thought of this? Or what do you think of this? Have you seen our, can I show you our website? Can you give me feedback? Like just getting opinions. For us, it changed at that Etsy show, right? Like we could have went with what we thought worked. And what we thought worked actually was very far from what the customers actually wanted.
Kurt (41:48.37)
Oh yeah, it sounds like that was really kind of a pivotal moment early on. What do you think are, like, one or two key factors for success?
David Gaylord (42:02.397)
Um, yeah, it's tough, tough right now. I think channel like understanding what channels are going to work for you and what channels are going to scale are pretty huge right now and in the world of beauty and I'm sure other industries, um, there's a lot of, uh,
scrutiny on say you're like direct to consumer only. There's a lot of scrutiny on okay, how sustainable is this? So if you're running just paid ads and that's all your traffic, you probably should diversify and make sure you have traffic from other sources. For us, getting into retail was actually a much better play because if you think about the scalability, like where do women
razors, it's typically like the pharmacy, right? And how many pharmacies are in the US? Like hundreds of thousands. How many waxing salons are in the US? There's like 300,000. So it's like an absurd market, whereas D2C, we're fighting with everyone else. So understanding your channel options as well as your...
I guess consolidation of spend and where it's going. I think it's pretty big. This time of, like if you're launching right now. And then the last one would be, do all the basic things that seem very obvious. Like set up your email welcome flow, set up your email abandoned cart, make sure you have like an about us, a contact us page. Like all those basic things, like check those off first. Cause most people I find forget about that stuff. And then.
you wonder why your eyes aren't converting and it's probably because you're not collecting emails and you're not nurturing people through the funnel, that kind of thing.
Kurt (43:32.859)
It's good advice. I couldn't agree more.
David Gaylord (43:35.269)
And don't, you guys say it all the time, don't look at your website on desktop once. Like just don't do it. Like we, that's a big thing. Our merchandisers, like don't even look at it on your desktop because it's less than 10% of traffic. Like it's not even worth it. Like only look at mobile.
Kurt (43:51.366)
Yeah, that desktop site exists for the owners, for other web professionals, the mobile sites, what everyone else actually uses.
David Gaylord (43:55.193)
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's a nightmare. Yeah, exactly. That advice is the silliest one, but you'll catch yourself every day looking at the desktop and you shouldn't even bother.
Kurt (44:07.614)
Yeah, no, it needs to be said. It's December, 2023. Looking forward, any predictions, trends, what do you think, anything shaping the future of e-commerce we should be aware of?
David Gaylord (44:21.897)
Yeah, I think the next couple of years are going to be kind of like, hold on and hold your breath. And a lot of people right now say, especially in our industry, like scaling D2C, investors years ago would say, oh, yeah, like, why are you...
retail, it doesn't make any sense, like scale DTC. Whereas now it's completely flipped. Like in the three year span, it's gone from now like, Oh, we actually disregard most of your DTC revenue. And you're like, what, how do you. So most people now are like retail, retail. But how I see it is it's like build a strong foundations and like scale appropriately, whatever that means for you, whether it's like profitable, not profitable, depending if you're like venture backed, all that.
scale appropriately and I think there's going to be a moment in time where D2C becomes extremely desirable again because there's levers that we can pull again. So it's going to come back ads are going to come back in some way. It might even be a new channel, a new place to get eyeballs, whatever that is. And then, yeah, I do think the other side of it too, is there's going to be a lot of different channel options that might come.
in my opinion. So we're focused on waxing salons, but there's a lot of these other channels that, uh, aren't in like the digital world yet where like the ability to service them is very old school. And there's going to be a lot of disruption and just how do you service certain markets? Um, cause there's, there's a lot of distributors for different types of markets, which I think some disruption will probably come there.
Kurt (45:49.686)
I think you're right. Well, we'll see. Now that we have committed this to the internet, can always go back and prove how wrong we may or may not have been. I'd prefer not to. What? What's next for you and Bushbaum?
David Gaylord (45:51.593)
Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, hopefully.
David Gaylord (45:59.761)
Yeah, exactly. I love that.
David Gaylord (46:08.537)
Yeah, so this year was our best year ever, I would say. So next year, right at the start of the year, we're growing the team. I think we have four jobs opening, which is amazing. So yeah, our goal for the next few years is there, like I said, there's about 300,000 waxing salons in the US. So we want to get to 10, 15,000 in a couple of years, which is a huge endeavor to do, but we're kind of working on that. And then...
We're with Alta Beauty and there's so much more growth for us there. So we're doubling down on that one retailer to push sales and people to and grow. And then yeah, the future we'll see kind of what happens. We haven't done any international other than for us, USA is international, but nothing in Europe, Australia, anything like that, but that could be a big place. We grow. And I think next year we're launching 12 products, which is a bit absurd. Um, so it should be our, it should be our busiest year ever.
product launches. And typically in beauty cosmetics, you'll see like two launches a year. So we're trying to build a new business model that's a little outside the norm of the industry.
Kurt (47:17.706)
No, absolutely. And David, if we wanted to get Bush-Bomb for ourselves, where do we go?
David Gaylord (47:24.613)
Yeah, so we do not the same store with Shopify markets, but we have two separate. Someday I'll sort that out, but Bushbomb.com or Bushbomb.ca and then probably best off, you can just go to Alt. We've got one kind of everywhere in the U.S. And then if you do want to support someone local, we've got about 3000 estheticians across Canada and the U.S. that I guarantee if you go to our stockist on our site, you'll find one probably within five kilometers to you.
for sure, like very, very close.
Kurt (47:56.906)
Excellent. David Gaylord, Bush Bumps Can Care, thank you so much.
David Gaylord (48:03.253)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.