w/ Brandon Dill, Fuse Lenses
“We’re doing about 1,500 pairs a day… we’re gonna hit eight figures this year, probably next year for sure.”
You know that favorite pair of sunglasses you can’t throw away? Brandon Dill turned that frustration into an 8-figure business. He’s the founder of Fuse Lenses, a brand built on bringing those scratched shades back to life.
In this episode, we trace Brandon’s journey from side hustle to scaling a manufacturing business, built on curiosity, ingenuity, and a lot of hustle. But it’s not all smooth sailing—Brandon dives into the realities of cash flow struggles, seasonal peaks, and the surprising challenges of bootstrapping. And as his company grows, he reflects on what success truly means when passion becomes a job.
Tech Stack:
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Omnisend. Do you sell stuff online? Then you need Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend, the powerful yet refreshingly intuitive email and SMS tool that helps you make $73. for every dollar spent. That one's so good it's almost boring. Like watching steady lines go up in charts and up and up. Just automate your email and SMS campaigns with Omnisend. Set it up once, then sit back and watch the sales roll in while you snooze. Oh, you're still awake? Then give Omnisend a try and start getting sales so steady, they'll definitely put you to sleep. Omnisend, your dot omnisend. com/slash unofficial shopify podcast. My friends, have you ever had a favorite pair of sunglasses? I certainly have. And when you have a really good pair of sunglasses, maybe you can't find them again. They don't make them anymore. Maybe they were just expensive and you certainly don't want to lose them. like the time I left a pair of Ray Bans on the counter to Walgreens. But I got a favorite pair of sunglasses that I got from someone who uh was on the show years ago. They sent them to me. I lost them in the ocean. Then I found them. Oh my gosh. Then I scratched them. Then I dropped them on my bike. And I scratch I'm still wearing these scratched up glasses because I am too cheap to replace them. But I love them and I wish the lenses weren't scratched. Did you know that there are replacement lens product companies out there and we're gonna talk to one who is on Shopify and is built uh through bootstrapping an incredibly successful business for people like us who have a favorite set of frames and they want to replace those lenses for whatever reason. And they're even getting into making their own sunglasses as well, I hear. Joining us today on the unofficial Shopify Podcast is Brandon Dill from Fuse Lenses. And I, of course, am your host, Kurt Elster. Jack Nasty. Brandon, thank you for joining us.
Brandon Dill
Thanks for having me, Kurt. I'm a big fan. Listen I listen every day.
Kurt Elster
That's uh well you know, I I don't believe you. The it's a weekly show, sir, you can't listen every day. A lot of repeats in there.
Brandon Dill
You got some cash I have to do, yeah.
Kurt Elster
So Fuse lenses, tell me about it. What is it? What do you sell?
Brandon Dill
Uh Fuse makes high-end replacement lenses for name brand sunglasses. So just like you mentioned, you have a pair of Ray-Bands or Oakley or Cosa do Mars or even Revo, we make lenses that fit those models. So if you scratch or break them or even just want to upgrade Uh we have about 60 different color options for about 6,000 different models of frames and growing.
Kurt Elster
Man, I it is dangerous for me to be able to customize or personalize things. Because I I'm one of those unfortunate do-it-yourselfers who believes you don't own something until you've customized it. Um and oh, you just opened up a world of sunglass options to me. This is very dangerous for my pocketbook. The But so how long how long has this business been around? When did it start?
Brandon Dill
We started about 2012, uh out of my garage and uh just a little lens cutting machine. And uh it's grown now uh to uh we have 39 employees now. So um we've been been growing since 2012, trying to get the word out.
Kurt Elster
You said, oh, with just a little lens cutting machine. I don't even know what a lens cutting machine is. I didn't know such a thing existed. How do you end up cutting replacement sunglass lenses. How does the in your garage? How does this occur?
Brandon Dill
So my uh father was uh the first lab manager of a giant big box retailer store like you know like that you would go to get your eyeglasses from. So I kind of grew up in that industry and I was uh running a wholesale lab that makes prescription glasses. So the lens cutting machines are called lens edgers. Um so I know all about this equipment. I was running this lab and my next door neighbor had a pair of sunglasses that had scratched lenses that he wanted to replace the sunglasses. uh that I did not have an account for. I couldn't get that brand for him. So I just put new lenses in, non-prescription lenses, which is way easier than prescription lenses, by the way Uh he's a firefighter. He took that pair of sunglasses to with the new lenses in them to his fire station. And the next day I had five orders. I had people calling up, like, I've got a drawer full of sunglasses that need need new lenses. So Uh I originally was planning on doing this business with my boss who owned the company uh you know for him, for his company. And um he didn't want to he didn't want to get into the business of selling stuff on eBay. So He let me do it on my own and we just kind of started there.
Kurt Elster
How give me an idea of the scale here. How big or successful is this business today?
Brandon Dill
Well, so we started out doing about two pairs a week. Uh right now we're doing about 1,500 pairs a day. So uh and and peak season. So we're very seasonal, as you can imagine. Um I think most people start getting really busy this time of year. We start getting really slow. Um but yeah, so we're doing we're doing uh we're gonna hit we're gonna hit eight figures this year, probab m probably next year for sure.
Kurt Elster
What's a typical pair of replacement lenses cost? I know there's a range.
Brandon Dill
Yes, on on average we're averaging about fifty dollars on our average order value, fifty-five bucks. Um just a pair of lenses alone. We start at twenty and our high end goes up to sixty. Uh so our average.
Kurt Elster
That's my napkin math.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, we get pretty busy in the summer.
Kurt Elster
Jeez. That quite the business. So is the your old boss kicking himself?
Brandon Dill
Actually I have a really good relationship with him. I was worried about that. Um I gave him a year's notice uh before before we left. We were doing a million in revenue uh when I was like, hey, remember that little side business I started? Um I need to put more energy into that. And uh I gave him a year's notice, so backed out, you know, six months full time and then Kind of three days a week after that. So I made sure he was set up very well and he's actually a neighbor. He his his his building's right down the street from mine.
Kurt Elster
So what's the what's the moment where you knew this was gonna work or like, hey, we're gonna take this this is gonna be my full-time gig. Is there a moment where you recognize that?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, I I think about that a lot. I don't know. I uh I'm kind of blissfully uh blissfully ignorant about stuff like that. I just kind of move forward. There's no Uh like my girlfriend at the time, we we had five employees. I was still working full-time uh for my boss, and she walked into my building to pick something up and she and she'd never been there. It was like This is a f real business. You have like a real business here. There's like people working in here. This is crazy. That was probably the first time I ever thought of it as even a business and not just like a side hustle.
Kurt Elster
But I had to- Five people working for you and pay. But it takes someone else. It takes someone else telling you.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster
Is there are is it was there a moment where you you doubted it, you didn't think it would work?
Brandon Dill
No, that's that's that ignorance again, I think. Um no, I I've I've tried to start a bunch of different stuff uh throughout my life that I just kind of felt was like maybe too hard or too worth not not worth the effort. Um Like I did some duplex property management for a little bit. And that was just like a lot of, I don't know, it wasn't me. This just always felt like this is where I belong. This is what I should be doing. I feel like I really got lucky stumbling into this.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I yeah, I have friends who own rental property. And I'm like, that seems like a nightmare. Yeah, I'm sure it's a good business. That's not for me. So you you started cutting lenses by yourself in your garage. You have family experience doing this. So we have a little we have an edge here, an unfair advantage, and that this was not unfamiliar to you. And pretty soon you've got you're going do it yourself, and then you're it's still your side hustle, but you've got five employees. Today, how big is that team?
Brandon Dill
Today we have 39 employees. We do everything in-house from marketing to web dev, customer service uh to manufacturing. And part of our tactical advantage, uh also not on purpose, is that we manufacture in-house where we have uh a couple of competitors. We have one big competitor that's about the same size as us, and everybody else is way both below us. They order inventory from China pre-cut, stock it, and then just ship it off a shelf. We're we're actually manufacturing. So that gives us a lot more opportunity to add more shapes. Like If you have a frame we don't have in stock, we can have you send that frame in to us where we can cut them to fit and send back out to you.
Kurt Elster
And we're in very three pairs of sunglasses that were like they're not Oakley's, they're Revos, you know, much smaller brand. And you're like, oh yeah, we have replacements for one of those. The other two, send it to us, we'll we'll make it for you. I couldn't believe it. I thought that was incredible.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, our competitors don't have that ability because they're not manufacturing in-house. So That that allows us to store. Like I'll be storing those Revo shapes and for future purchasers. So if somebody else down the line has that frame that needs lenses, we'll have it on file.
Kurt Elster
And so all right, we're up to 39 employees now. What are the first roles you hired for?
Brandon Dill
The the first role I hired for was I had a buddy building building websites on flat HTML.
Kurt Elster
A little front page action?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah. Dreamweaver. But he's the only person I knew that knew how to build websites. I hired him to cut lenses for us in my garage. Because I knew one day, I'm like, one day we're gonna want a website, you know, just we were we were just selling on eBay and Amazon at the time. And I was uploading those, you know, like manually one at a time. And uh I hired him because I knew I'd need the web help. Three months later, as soon as I hired him, that opened me up to put more frame color uh lens colors up. And we started getting more sales. I could focus more on like the product and and customer service. And we started getting more sales. I hired somebody else to cut lenses and I moved him into Initially just uploading spreadsheets to Amazon and things like that and then building our website. So kind of he was our first employee, was a web developer we hired to cut lenses.
Kurt Elster
Did he have lens cutting experience?
Brandon Dill
No, nope, I trained him.
Kurt Elster
Alright, eventually you're gonna be doing web development. First you need to cut these lenses. The So as you w as you began scaling that business, you know, and adding more and more people. Any early missteps? Any times you went, uh we almost derailed this thing here?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, this is still a problem for us because we're seasonal. The first couple of years uh it uh in actual business where we were where I was actually tracking numbers and like you know, treating it like a business. It was just month over month growth nonstop because I mean even to a point today a lot of people don't know this exists, but back then I mean it nobody was doing it. Like there was no frame companies didn't know it existed.
Kurt Elster
I didn't know this existed until you reached out to me.
Brandon Dill
Yeah. Yeah. So um it was month over month growth. We're profitable. We we profit on the first sale um because we bootstrap. So Uh we got I remember we hit our first season and I was just like looking at these numbers. I'm like, like we're gonna run out of cash. Like how are we, what how is how are we profitable and gonna run out of cash? So it was like a lesson in cash flow and seasonality. That was probably about four years in when we first hit seasonality. And now from then on it's been this juggle of like you know, kind of make the nut in the summer and save up for the winter, you know, it's um I mean cash flow
Kurt Elster
For e-commerce businesses. I mean cash flow is the is is necessary, it's the lifeblood of any business, but you're a US manufacturer, you're bootstrapped, you've got A huge catalog, right? There is cash flow is a a bigger deal for you than some other e com brands for sure. And you've got seasonality on top of it. This is casual-wise, this is a tough business. How do you resolve it? Is it just planning and forecasting and you know crossing your fingers?
Brandon Dill
Yep. Uh I think ignorance is the theme here, uh for me. We uh I think you you I think you're humble.
Kurt Elster
A lot of it you're like, well, I stumbled into this and it's uh Uh yeah, I didn't really know what I was doing, and but you know, I just kind of thought maybe I'd succeed. And my girlfriend mentioned that I actually have a business. You're you're it's because I'm ignorant. It's because you're humble, right? I think that's That's more accurate as to what's going on here. And certainly you're very successful.
Brandon Dill
Well, I know that I don't know much, and so like I'm constantly looking for and we teach our and we teach the whole team here this same thing, like just constantly look for ways to improve. We don't We wanna we wanna get better. But yeah, it was forecasting. I had no idea what forecasting was or how to do that. I couldn't understand how my competitors could forecast what inventory they would sell, like had to uh in order to order order them pre-cut from overseas and stock them like they would know what lenses and what colors would sell in what days and months and stuff. So now I forecast two years in advance. I've kind of worked on some spreadsheet and thought it was a genius. I'm like, man, I figured this all out. I figured out this forecasting. I showed up a buddy of mine who's a CFO. He's like, yeah, that's that's how you do it. So what's the secret?
Kurt Elster
I because I get this question all the time. It's like, how do you know? Well, how do you forecast?
Brandon Dill
I do an average of the last three month trend. uh with year year uh year over year comparison. So like I have like right now about eight years worth of comparisons and I take out anomalies like you know COVID March and COVID was like I don't use that. Um, but I just take the average of the previous three months for three to five years in the past to kind of see what this 'cause we have seasonality in Linz colors also. We get a lot less mirror coding colors in the winter than we do in the summer. Um, so I kinda kind of follow the trends and historical data on years and I I I I can forecast out my month by month uh for the next forever. I mean, I'll honestly I could go a lot longer than two years. I just do two years like that. So I know what lenses to order and what colors and what what to have on the shelves ready to go. We even hire based off of that. Like how many people do we need next summer? Like we're talking about who we need to hire in February for next summer.
Kurt Elster
And do you find it fairly accurate?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah. And it's it's a it's a living it's a living sheet. I'm doing it on Excel, which is crazy, but it's a living sheet. So like as as financials come in for the for the previous month, the whole sheet will change, but it's pretty uh pretty accurate. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
That's super cool. Also nice that I finally got a concise legitimate answer to the question, how do you forecast cash flow? It wasn't a 40-minute episode that kind of danced around the idea.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster
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Brandon Dill
Well, so we were uh ps I guess it helps to go back to the static HTML. It it was it the static HTML was non-scalable, especially like we have six hundred thousand SKUs or something like that. And So we have these product components like a blue lens. If that blue lens goes out of stock, we were going on manually 6,000 listings and removing inventory from that. So we switched over to Magento, honestly, because one of our competitors was on there. It took us 18 months to build it out. I mean uh over $100,000 using an outside agency. And we have web developers on staff here, but we needed outside agency help. And it was so slow. I it was just because we needed so much help, it just took us so much time to be able to move and change. Like Hey, I want to change the prices or I I want to add a lens color or I want to add a shape. It was just, you know, it took so long, weeks to add a lens, a lens shape. And um I need that to happen in like 15 minutes. I can't, I can't wait weeks. And so um we ran Magento for like three months. So we were we it took 18 months to build. We ran it for about three months. I had a year left on the contract and I cut it off. Switched over to Shopify. Shopify looked like they had uh I was actually personally trying to build it myself because my web developer didn't think it would be possible to put our catalog on Shopify. So I was trying to do it on the free I think it was a free Shopify um account at the time. And I kept failing uploads because I had huge amounts of uploads I was trying to upload in. And somebody from Shopify Plus reached out and was like, hey, we see what you're doing here. And it keeps freezing the system, but like we can help you with Shopify Plus. So we made the switch. Stop uploading half a million SKUs. Yeah, like once a day I'm I'm contacted them like, hey, can you unstick my account? I'm from frozen again. Um, API rate limits. Yeah. So we switched over, got Shopify built in about three months. It was like record speed. And I paid the I just paid for the rest of the Magento even though I wasn't using it. And immediately like I saw an immediate increase in revenue. Uh conver increasing conversion rate. It was it's night and day. It was it was a huge pivotal point for us.
Kurt Elster
That's that's what we like to hear. Hindsight Big 2020, the migration to Shopify, obviously a big win for you. Any but you know, you have a complex site, right? Shopify certainly cannot be the perfect solution across the board. Any uh anything that didn't meet your needs that needed workarounds, there's always something.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah. We're very custom. So like we're I always kinda liken it to like Custom wordwork woodworking. Like we have components, like I'll have a lens blank that I can cut to six thousand shapes, but I inventory the blank, not the shape, because the shape is just a non-inventory. It's a shape, it's a non-inventory item. Uh and so there's a lot of options for the customers and a lot of variations. I don't know what the variation limit is on Shopify right now, but it's not it's not 80, you know.
Kurt Elster
Um the hundred it's a hundred variants is the limit, and then you could go, I think, up to two fifty in the future or a little more complicated.
Brandon Dill
Oh good. Well yeah, so we have so we had lots of we have lots of different colors on lots of different tiers on lots of different lens shapes that also come in multiple sizes. So it gets when you compound that it gets to a lot of variants. And um we at the time, Shopify, I can't remember what they called it, but Shopify had people that helped. Us break kinda break the code and help us build that code out. I don't think they do that anymore. I'm not sure if it's been launch engineer.
Kurt Elster
I mean they have Uh we were on a call yesterday with um somebody from Shopify who was they were gonna scope out a shipping issue that we were struggling with on a Shopify Plus store. So Yeah, I don't know what what titles we use for these things anymore, but certain there's assistance out there at times.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, so we used we used the Shopify expert uh that worked with us directly for those three months with our web team. um to build out solutions and you know um we mainly our product page is the big is the more complicated of the pages but yeah it's It's d definitely the the right solution for us right now.
Kurt Elster
Isn't your site uh headless?
Brandon Dill
Uh no
Kurt Elster
No, not a headless site?
Brandon Dill
No.
Kurt Elster
Sweet. So it's really it's like a really uh customization heavy product. And so on here, I'm just uh of jumping through here. I imagine one of the struggles here is getting people to order the right thing. Because immediately, like, oh, I just want to go get wayfarers. Well, there are so many variations of Wayfair. The size, the style. And then I gotta pick my, you know, w which lens. How do you deal with it? I mean, this seems like a nightmare.
Brandon Dill
From the beginning, I mean our f our first the reason the business is even built is because a customer needed it, you know. So like our whole ecosystem is revolves around a customer's needs. So even the pricing builds in enough for us to no questions asked, we'll replace it. You know, we we customer making a mistake on a on a on their frame size or shape is completely understandable. Most people don't know there's 12 different aviators that Ray Ban makes and those all come in three sizes each. You know, it can get complicated. We try and do as much as we can to explain how to read what frame you have on the on the on our site without cluttering up. and confusing the the pages. Um but overall we don't have a crazy return rate and we stand behind every single sale. No questions asked if a customer orders the wrong. the wrong pair of lenses, we send the new ones out. We verify what they are for them, you know, via email or or chat or whatever. And we e we mail the new ones out before they even send the old ones back. Like we, you know, we try and make it. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
What's nice though about the product is these are I'm guessing these are mostly like polycarbonate lenses, so you could ship them fairly flat. and not, you know, they're lighter weight and they're gonna be fairly, you know, brake resistant. It's not like sending glass bottles in the mail anyway. So one certainly an advantage there on shipping for uh this product category. With well, speaking of that product page, you do any split testing?
Brandon Dill
Yes, but I would need some web developers from my team to come in here and explain that. I'm pretty sure it's Google Tag Manager. We do a lot of split testing with that. And to be honest, like we we test a lot. I we never see anything that just like blows the doors off.
Kurt Elster
Like That's the reality of a lot of split testing. It's like quite incremental, or you discover how little small changes make a difference unless you get really lucky where it's like, oh, that was a thing that was like functionally broken. And it probably speaks to just you're doing a good job.
Brandon Dill
Well, yeah, and but you know like like our nature is to always change and always try and improve. It's like we're actually trying to tone that down a bit and kind of make more of a a process that makes it harder for us to just be like, hey, let's just change the color of the add the cart button, you know, because it's just time and effort for usually not a ton of of reward.
Kurt Elster
So with um with a site like this, you know, that that's doing impressive numbers and you've you've bootstrapped things here, what were the some of the marketing strategies or channels that have been effective over the years?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, so our biggest problem is education. You know, like you said, you didn't know this existed. Industry, you know, optical industry, people don't know this exists. So it's it's a lot of top-of-funnel, which is very expensive. Um Probably one of the biggest mistakes I made was assuming that Facebook ads didn't work back in two thousand two thousand twelve when they really worked well. But um So it's a lot of uh a lot of Facebook ads for us, a lot of meta. Um we do Google, of course, we play that game too. But um meta is the one that works for us. And we find for us that it's you know The organic kind of walkthroughs. This is how it's made. A lot of our ads are just me walking through the lab. Lab is what we call where we make the lens as a manufacturing place. Um walking through the lab showing how we make a pair of lenses for a customer's frame, you know, and those those hit really well. Um and then You know, we use like our repeat rate's high. We're about 30% repeat. Um, so you know, Clavio has been great for get getting our campaigns and flows out there. But uh yeah, top of funnel has been huge for us.
Kurt Elster
So you did you say you missed out on some early Facebook advertising when it was a lot cheaper ten years ago?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah, I think so. We we did we did pretty well. We just started advertising on Meta and like 2019 and then COVID hit and ads started really working again. Um but Rec even last year there was we noticed some huge uh drop offs in in meta like increases in cost and Um I think it's beneficial for us a little bit too with our meta ads in that like I think most D2C brands perform better in the winter where like their ads get more expensive in the winter where ours are performed better in the summer. So we're not as Or maybe not competing on the same landscape, but Interesting.
Kurt Elster
So that seasonality works for you?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, I think for ads it does.
Kurt Elster
The it's of like marketing channels right now, it sounds like meta, Facebook, Instagram's working well for you. Do you ever try uh TikTok?
Brandon Dill
We uh so we had a video go viral, a video of me walking around the lab go viral on TikTok. We got like three million views in about two days, and it generated quarter million dollars in those couple of days on an organic video. So that was when TikTok first launched an advertising platform. And we were like, if you you know how like on TikTok you can look up like top advertisers and what their ads look like. We were the top four ads. Like there nobody was advertising on TikTok. This is like four years ago or something. Um and We rode that wave. All it it started outperforming meta. We were pulling spin from meta. I think there's some cannibalization there, but um we pulled some spin from meta and now now we actually just removed all spin from TikTok. We it stopped kind of working or maybe got too competitive. Stop working as well for us.
Kurt Elster
Well, I also th it seems like the stuff that's successful in TikTok tends to have a a lower average order value and tends to be real impulse purchase focused. So I could see like replacement lenses at starting at fifty bucks not necessarily being a good fit for that TikTok audience. And sure, that'll probably change over time. Um but you also you sell sunglasses too. Depending on like what the price point is or if there's like some novelty to them, that would probably do better. I'm speculating. I've never run a TikTok ad in my life.
Brandon Dill
Yeah. We're we're we're trying to get on shop. We've been having some problems with that just from some like always gonna ask you about shop. Yeah, I think ads would be I think they pref I think they kind of favor stores with shop. Um but I think you're right. I I think like a lot of the stuff you're buying on TikTok right now is kind of like that that Timu type of product. Um but that should change. And yeah, I mean our our sunglasses would open us up to be able to create ads that were needed less education. I mean everybody knows what sunglasses are. Um so that that is in the future.
Kurt Elster
Thinking about getting onto the shop sales channel. But I imagine because of like all the product options, the lenses won't work. But you could probably get the sunglasses to work.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah. And we have some we have some account setup issues. Like my marketing director is the admin on the Shopify or the sh uh the TikTok account and then I'm obviously the admin on Shopify. So like they're not allowing us to connect the shops.
Kurt Elster
There's some like little things like that that are we should be through. When s I have to troubleshoot uh sales channels for people, pick uh marketing pixels, that's the stuff where I'm like, oh no, here we go. Cause it's never straightforward and trying to get support from anybody, you know, we're just like pointing fingers at each other. But alright, so of the of these marketing channels, how I'm I'd have to believe that word of mouth is probably the actual big winner here
Brandon Dill
Yeah, I mean word of mouth um organic search, you know, we don't have a ton of competition. So if you if you're typing if you're Google searching replacement lenses for Oakley. Like there's like three of us that do it and you know we're the biggest, so you know, it kind of comes up. We've been doing it for a really long time. Um And yeah, word of mouth is huge. That kind of it's hard to know what our customer lifetime value is. I don't know how anybody knows what their customer lifetime value is, to be honest, but um, you know, like if you have a a pair of sunglasses that you replace lenses in and you have a friend that has scratched lenses, it's hard not to say something, you know? So it's a good product to spread the word about.
Kurt Elster
I love that it's like cheap sunglasses, if you scratch them, you don't care and maybe you replace them. Expensive sunglasses, you scratch them, you care, and then you're gonna keep wearing them anyway.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster
Which is like why this the rep Yeah, fair in a in a a good pair of sunglasses, what are you gonna spend? A hundred, two hundred, they you could go wild, get up to three hundred. If replacement lenses, you know, are and they're good, like let's say I'm spending those Revos I loved. I loved my Revos because uh those are my first non-like Ray bands, and I went, oh, They're act the the quality in the optics, these lenses, this is different. This is better. I like this. The unofficial Shopify podcast is sponsored in part by Zippify, and they've got the ugly truth about direct-to-consumer sales to share with you. And spoiler, it's really 82% of the people who buy from your store once will never buy from you again, and there's nothing you can do to win them back. That's why you need to get as much revenue as you can from each order. And that's where OneClick Upsell comes in. OneClick Upsell is a Shopify app that offers your customer upsells and cross-sells with every purchase, and it can increase your average order value by $15. With one click upsell you can add AI-powered upsell funnels to every product on your store in just three clicks, including your product pages, shopping cart, checkout, thank you page, and even on the shop app. So you earn extra revenue automatically. One click up sell is already the number one choice for 15,000 Shopify stores. And guess what? So It's made merchants like you an extra $750 million. So don't miss out on another dollar in free upsell revenue. Try one click upsell today and start making 10 to 15% more from every customer today. Go to zippify. com. com slash curt to start your thirty day free trial that's zipify dot com slash k U R T Tell me about that that lens technology that you have. Because you sent me your glasses. I put them on, and I couldn't believe that they magically made colors brighter.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, so there's uh there we get a we we poll customers on this what they consider to be quality and lenses and 65% of our customers think polarized means quality And you can buy some really cheap. Yeah, you can buy some cheap polarized lenses. Um polarized blocks clear. Of course we have polarized lenses. Um And then there's optical clarity. We have the top for polycarbonate, the top clarity you can get in polycarbonate lenses, is it's as good as it gets. It's anything you're gonna get from an oakly or you know, it's the same same quality. There's crash resistance and durability. We I I'm not gonna get myself in a lawsuit and s say this, but we test our lenses in-house and our l our lenses test three times more durable than most big sunglass brands lenses do three times more durable. And we also have this proprietary color enhancing technology that filters light at certain wavelengths. Um to brighten up colors. A lot of big players do this.
Kurt Elster
This is it, this is but it really works. It's cool.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, it's it needed to for us. Like as we've been developing these lenses for about five years. And you know, you could measure this stuff on like uh a spectrophotometer that measures wavelengths of light. You could see it functioning, but when you put them on, it was like To the average user, I don't know that they would have noticed a difference. So we needed to be something when you put on, you're like, oh wow, like these are these are crazy. Um And so we have our AMP line of lenses, is has all of these features, the polarized durability with the color enhancing technology that actually adds more clarity. These these AMP lenses are The clearest lenses on the market are glass, typically, but because these uh our AMP lenses are enhancing color, they actually effectively add clarity, making them on a on a on a tool that measures clarity, making them more clear than glass. So it's cool as hell. It's pretty pretty cool technology. And right now it's exclusive to us. I argue it's the best technology on the market for sunglass lenses. I'm sure some big dogs will come out with something better here soon, but you know, for now, I think we have the best lenses.
Kurt Elster
You gifted me. it three pairs of these lenses and I wasn't out of town. I came home. My wife had already stolen one pair. She's like, these are mine. She's like, these are girls. She loved them. She's wearing them. And then I d I said, all right, I'll try these. And I I was wearing them on my bike and it's fall. And I was like, wow, the I'm like, it's so pretty out. And then I took them off. And I realized, oh my gosh, it's the glasses. The sunglasses, like the leaves just looked incredible.
Brandon Dill
We we kind of love it. We want to find some study or something somewhere that can prove that these are improving your mood somehow because like it just makes everything brighter and nicer out is plausible. Yeah, yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. I think plausible. The the the big the big buzzy thing for the last eighteen months, of course, has been has been AI, generative AI. Any AI stories you got for us? And they you could just be like, no, it's fine.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, I mean technically uh our our color enhancing lenses were developed with AI. Um so we work with a we work with a company that develops this color. Like we're not colorometrists here or anything. These guys are like scientists. And um they took a very popular color enhancing lens and stuck it into a spectrophotometer that was hooked up to an AI machine. So, hey, like this, this that lens didn't pass certain FDA requirements like yellow light, uh uh traffic lights, it didn't pass. So we're like, um, let's make a lens that enhances colors that is less harsh on yellow and will pass FDA standards on you know on these factors and it spit out this curve, you know, uh uh uh a color a color curve, a wavelength And with the work matching colors to filter out lights that gave us that curve. And so that is really what the proprietary uh technology is. It was developed by AI. I mean
Kurt Elster
That's pretty incredible.
Brandon Dill
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Am I wearing do I have AI sunglasses?
Brandon Dill
Is that yeah, I mean technically AI developed sunglasses, yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, move over uh those Ray-Ban metaglasses.
Brandon Dill
Yep.
Kurt Elster
Okay. So what uh in that Shopify store, any apps or features that you're like these are we can't live without these?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, I would say Clavio is probably my favorite.
Kurt Elster
I mean that It probably drives a lot of sales for you.
Brandon Dill
Tons, tons of sales, it's 20 to 30% of our revenue is it's so it's so it's so big. And we were on MailChamp before, and um I just remember thinking like God I'm gonna pay how much for a mail uh a program and it's just worth every penny. Um we love that. We use a 10 ev for SMS. That's also very, very good.
Kurt Elster
I mean the what you rattled off were two moneymakers. Yeah. What do you guys do know what you use for reviews?
Brandon Dill
Oh, uh man, we changed that a bunch. Oh, Kendo, I think. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, we've gone through Yachtpo, Smile. We went through a few.
Kurt Elster
What's next for fuse lenses? What are the you're always improving. What are we working on now?
Brandon Dill
So right now, um, we've had sunglasses out for a few years, uh, and we were just kind of like, let's just get our lenses on the faces of people who don't have sunglasses already. Um, we're Lynn's first company. Now we're we've this year, this last year we focused a lot on improving the quality of those frames. So like these sunglasses you're getting from us now are the same quality that you would get from Ray-Ban or Oakley. um from the frame standpoint, better on lenses and they're they're under a hundred bucks. So all of them, even our top of the line ones. Um so frames is a sunglasses is a big, big push for us and prescription is uh really big. We do all of these same coatings and materials and all this and and prescription as well. Stuff that you cannot go into a big box store and get a prescription in, we can do. So that's another, we think there's a big opportunity there in the sport market for prescription sunglasses.
Kurt Elster
You one of the things I love about you is your your mindset. You've got uh this humility that enables you to not get stuck in your ways while you're simultaneously always looking for iterative improvement, it sounds like Um what what do you feel are your your mindset or habits that are contributing to Fuse Lenses success?
Brandon Dill
I say we have we have uh cornerstones of uh employee virtues that you know we developed here, which if you told me this like five years ago, we'd be coming up with employee virtues, I would have laughed at your face. But um Uh and curiosity is the number one uh one. I I think uh being curious is uh it just makes the job fun. You know, never thinking that what just because it worked right for the last year doesn't mean it's gonna work right in the future. And I don't know. I like moving the goal post. There's no touchdowns here. We're moving the goalpost every day. So It just makes the game fun to play, I think.
Kurt Elster
Looking back, are there any mist early mistakes you would go back and change if you could?
Brandon Dill
I would go back and advertise on Facebook in 2012.
Kurt Elster
I think a lot of us are like, man, 2012, like here's the stocks I would buy. And you know, I'd be buying Tesla and NVIDIA, and we'd be advertising on Facebook like crazy. We didn't know how good we had it.
Brandon Dill
Yeah. And you know, I I don't know. Like like we we sponsored race car drivers one year, and that was a big bust. It but it just all we did was spend money. It literally made us nothing. But Like that might work for some brands. So I would hate to encourage somebody not to do that, but it didn't work for us. And we learned from it.
Kurt Elster
That can work for somebody else for sure. Exactly. Any piece of advice you wish you'd received early on or your advice for other Shopify entrepreneurs early in their experience?
Brandon Dill
Yeah, I say know your numbers. Like that forecasting that um, you know, like I said, I I I spend I spend a lot of my day with my head in a spreadsheet. Um, it's it's using past data to kind of tell the future and it helps me make uh better decisions for growth. It helps me know where to put money and focus, especially like you mentioned earlier. We have to juggle advertising, manufacturing, payroll, cost of goods. You know, we're ordering Costa Goods six months in advance. Um it's hard to juggle all of that. So knowing what the future looks like potentially um as accurately as possible is really important um for any business I think.
Kurt Elster
I heard a survey That said it was like one in three US manufacturers was ordering additional stock now to head off costs on potential tariffs in the future. Not that they're guaranteed, you know, but what if? Are you is it a consideration for you?
Brandon Dill
Um, we don't I don't know that we have the the runway to do that, but we are we are starting tomorrow talking with our partners, our vendors, about uh how do we mitigate or you know, handle these tariffs because there were there were 25% tariffs on all incoming goods for us, you know, the previous um the previous term. So it was uh we're used to seeing it and we expect it fully to come again. But you know, it's part of the business, I guess.
Kurt Elster
So not something that's new to you.
Brandon Dill
Yeah, yeah. We've been there.
Kurt Elster
What do you think is one thing people get wrong, either about you know, entrepreneurship, Shopify, or sunglass lenses? You pick, you have, you got the floor to correct one piece of misinformation.
Brandon Dill
Easy. Like everyone thinks entrepreneurship is sexy. They think it's like, oh man, living the dream is I have a nine to five job. I created a nine to five job here, man. And it is. It is not I'm here in the office nine to five and I think about it nonstop. My poor wife is like, you know, I'm up at night in the slow season. I'm up at night in the busy season. It just doesn't, it never stops. I love it. I'm built for this. I love it. Um, but it's not for everyone. Um and then for replacement lenses, I would say like our biggest hurdle is convincing people that these are not cheap replacement lenses. These are the same or better quality than what you used to wearing in your expensive sunglasses. That was my fear.
Kurt Elster
I was like, I'm gonna try these, but you know, I don't know. And of course, you know, they were I was quite impressed as we we discovered. Um so thank you for for gifting me those. I greatly appreciate it.
Brandon Dill
No problem. Thank you.
Kurt Elster
If someone else wanted to get their own replacement lenses, where do they go?
Brandon Dill
You go to fuse lenses. com, F-U-S-E-Lenses. com. And uh we're on all the social outlets too. You know, you can see us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all that stuff.
Kurt Elster
Branded deal, fuse lenses. Thank you so much. I gotta go put these glasses on and just start like staring at various colored things.
Brandon Dill
Future's bright, Kurt. Thank you.
Kurt Elster
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