w/ Jeremy Bradley, Happy Bulge Swim Co.
On this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, Kurt Elster speaks to Jeremy Bradley, the founder of Happy Bulge Swim Co. Jeremy started his company in April 2019 and by August 2020 was pivoting to e-commerce due to global shutdowns cancelling events. With tongue-in-cheek puns and wordplay, Jeremy recounts his journey from radio host in Hollywood, to bestselling author, and now successful clothing business owner. He shares strategies for success such as appreciation for customers and content creation with focus on seasonality and being reactive. Other topics discussed include customer conversions, creativity and experimentation, understanding one's audience, and more. Tune into this episode to get all the details about Jeremy's journey with Happy Bulge!
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
May 9, 2023
Kurt Elster: Hello, my friends. Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And today, we’re speaking with Jeremy Bradley, Founder of… Ready? Happy Bulge. Jeremy started Happy Bulge in 2019 as a traveling Pride booth, appearing at five Prides that year with over $6,000 in sales. I love when people do in-person events. It is such a great way to connect face to face with customers. By August 2020 with preordered inventory arriving and boxes piling up, Jeremy had to pivot to eCommerce. Yes. One of us. Since, well, global shutdowns happened, there was the bad thing and it canceled events, and we are gonna learn from this radio host how he went from radio host in Hollywood to running a successful clothing company.
Jeremy, welcome.
Jeremy Bradley: Thanks for having me. Great to talk to you.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure. And so, I introduced you as like you’re the founder of Happy Bulge, but you have two eCommerce brands, right?
Jeremy Bradley: Yes. Happy Bulge Swim Company, our men’s swimwear and underwear line, and then that spun off to Buff Boy Brewing Company, a coffee line in July of 2021.
Kurt Elster: All right, so we started one and we liked it so much we had to start a second one?
Jeremy Bradley: You know what? Happy Bulge had such great success being a cheeky swimwear line for men that we thought why not have half-naked men drinking coffee? And it just seems like it’s a natural progression and it’s worked.
You know, I gotta tell you, last Sunday was our best sales day ever for Buff Boy, so something’s working, and I love it.
Kurt Elster: Well, let’s start with Happy Bulge. I’m detecting a series of puns here; some word play for sure. You’re like… I heard cheeky, so we’re cluing in here on who the audience is or who the core customer is with this. Tell me about-
Jeremy Bradley: Senior women. Yes.
Kurt Elster: I’m gonna go get Grandma Susan on the phone. Grandma Susan. So, what is Happy Bulge? What does it sell? Who’s it for? Spell it out for me.
Jeremy Bradley: Well, the core audience is primarily gay men. I mean, it’s done very well, as you mentioned, launching at Pride in 2019, and that was sort of the idea of it from the very beginning, was many years ago our company published a novel, an erotic novel for gay men, and early in 2018, our company accountant had said, “You know, we’ve got this book that was put out 10 years ago. It’s not really selling very well, so what’s the best platform to get this book in front of people?” And so, she’s a big music lover, and so she said, “What about at a festival?” And we thought, “Well, you can’t really have an eight foot table at a festival with one product.”
And so, then we started to look at just maybe we could do t-shirts, right? Because what else do you buy at a festival? You buy t-shirts. And then we quickly realized that those are expensive and they’re also heavy to ship. So, then we kind of thought let’s go smaller, smaller, smaller. What can you do? And my husband is a Brazilian fitness model who wears very small swimwear because that’s one, part of their culture, and two, appealing to a certain demographic. Your target audience.
We thought, “That’s the lightest type of product you could sell.” Maybe aside from socks. But you know, a pair of underwear is the smallest and the lightest, so we ended up just sourcing and finding out what we could do, and then in 2019 we launched at Phoenix Pride in April of that year, and like all businesses, you sort of rejig as you go, right? You retool. You learn. We certainly learned about shipping boxes to a hotel and having it not show up on time, and sitting there going, “Wait a second. Our Pride booth starts in one hour. We don’t have everything here yet.”
And so, to take the leap to eCommerce, which was something that we’d never wanted to do, we never wanted anything to do with shipping, returns, refunds, it not fitting, and all that kind of stuff. We just thought, “Let’s do this at a Pride event. We’re here in the moment. We can sell it to the people right now and then be out of the city the next day.” And people know that it’s going to fit, they’ve already held the product, it’s not like they’ve taken a gamble on the internet and going, “Well, maybe this product will be good. Maybe it won’t be.” They can physically hold it in their hands, try on the t-shirt if they want, and then it’s good to go, and then we were onto the next city.
And then, of course, we know the shutdowns happened, and there went Pride for 2020.
Kurt Elster: This initially starts with an erotic story?
Jeremy Bradley: Yes, actually. It’s called My Journey From Top to Bottom, and we actually just put the digital version on the Happy Bulge site a couple weeks… the other week.
Kurt Elster: What’s so interesting about that is I had a similar story on here. Cesar Torres from LED Queens, which sells leggings, same deal. Started with… He was an author writing dystopian sci-fi erotica and then somehow that pivoted into a store that sells leggings for men. What are the chances?
Jeremy Bradley: Well, but that’s the funny thing. I mean, if you were to ask me… Well, first, if you were to ask me 25 years ago, “Jeremy, would you ever think you’d be a syndicated radio host on the red carpets in Hollywood?” I would have said no. But it’s not that I would have closed the door to it because I think as an entrepreneur, especially back then, we didn’t have social media to get that instant audience and grow a following. You keep the door open for every sort of possibility.
Would I have written for any publication back in the day? Yes, I would have when I was starting out as a newspaper columnist. Now, almost 20 years in the same newspaper, you can sort of pick and choose. But certainly, I find it fascinating that I can go from a radio host, to then a best-selling author, to then an eCommerce store owner. I mean, it’s just… And we’ve also with our company, SpeakFree Media, there’s actually been a way that they all fit together. So, it’s not like it’s… I mean, it might sound on the surface very scatterbrained. You’re like, “Wait a second. You do radio shows, then…”
But we have platforms that we can market everything together. We can cross promote on the different channels. And we have so many different audiences that it ends up working. So, yeah, it sounds strange. Oh, you were just talking with Howie Mandel about America’s Got Talent and then you were picking out underwear with your husband, and then promoting your best-selling Cheapskate book on TV in Winnipeg? Yeah, that’s just kind of the fun of being an entrepreneur, is that you can do random stuff every day and get paid to do it.
Kurt Elster: I love it. And the advantage to it is it’s a lot of creative play, which I find is very rewarding, and healthy, and keeps you going and interested, and then… My gosh, when you can monetize it, then it adds so much validation to engaging in that creative play.
Jeremy Bradley: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, small businesses don’t have a marketing… I mean, everybody is so hung up on Facebook ads, and paid advertising, and all this other stuff. I mean, for me, not just only because I’m an author of a Cheapskate book, but for me it’s kind of like that’s the fun of it, is how can I get this seen or with the radio heard by people? And what can I do? How can I be front and center, right in there in the trenches, and developing something? And it is. It’s so much more fulfilling to be able to go and say, “Hey, we hit six figures in sales,” and not spending a penny on advertising. We’re not giving our money to anybody else. We are doing it.
And that’s the best victory lap that you can have, I think anyway.
Kurt Elster: So, we heard a little bit about your background. Tell me about this past experience as a radio host working the red carpet. How does that play into this success?
Jeremy Bradley: Well, that’s the thing, is back when I started in radio, and I mean… Behind me on the wall, these are all red carpet photos and press badges and things like that. But back when I started in broadcasting and in publishing, I mentioned already we didn’t have that social media outlet where you could… You couldn’t just pay to have an audience, right? On social media now you can boost, “boost,” and be seen and recognized by random people, whereas back then we didn’t have those sorts of outlets. And same thing with the eCommerce store. Not everybody has the marketing budget of Amazon and Walmart and all that, so having to have done that and created a brand, and everybody sort of throws around the word brand quite loosely, but to have created the brand as Winnipeg Cheapskate in my hometown, I had to do that organically. I had to do that by slugging it out and reaching out to publications and reaching out to the TV station. “Hey, do you want to do a segment about money saving? Hey, this is the book that I put out. Hey, I’ve got a book signing.”
And you learn very quickly, especially as an author, that just because your book is in a bookstore does not mean that it’s going to sell. I think we all have this great belief that oh, there’s gonna be a line up around the corner for people to come to my book signing, and that’s a reality check that… You know, I think every author needs. It hurts your feelings, and it sets you back. It makes you want to throw in the towel. It makes you have a pity party for yourself for how long you’re embarrassed or humiliated. I told everybody about this. Nobody came. And you pick yourself up and you figure out, “Okay. Well, what can I do differently? How can I create more buzz for the next one?”
And I think it’s no different than you would with a Shopify or an eCommerce store.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s the trick there to creating that hype and buzz where people actually care? I think the default is nobody cares and you’re not the main character, so how do I fix that?
Jeremy Bradley: I think that people make the big mistake, and I mentioned to you a couple of days ago, that I’m not the star of Happy Bulge. Our product, if we’re ranking things… Our product is the star, obviously. That’s what you’re selling. But our customer, and as cliché as it sounds, our customer is the star. And we call them friends. We don’t call them customers. We call them Happy Bulge friends.
So, right there we’re personalizing it, and the interaction is… It’s more customized to them. We have the most playful, silly messages going back and forth with followers. Followers, not necessarily friends, right? We don’t know if they’ve ordered, so they’re followers initially on social media. And it’s stuff you would never see the big companies do because they have that… They’ve got to be that serious brand. And so, for Happy Bulge, and in a roundabout way it spun off into Buff Boy with the coffee, that work your audience. Come up with content.
I think we have so much focus on influencers now. You’ve gotta sustain that, though. As an influencer, you can see so many people fizzle out after six months, a year, because they haven’t thought it out. And so, content, content, content would be my suggestion for people. I mean, we did a photo… We’ve done photo shoots back in 2019 and we’re still using those photos and that content and spinning it off into other products now because with us, we have our models that people recognize, and we use their first names, and sometimes even come up with a playful name for a model. You know, Hercules or whoever it might be because he’s the big guy with tattoos, and people wait for him and ask when he’s coming back, and message him in the morning when he’s doing the takeover for the weekend.
So, I don’t know that we can necessarily say that advertising is the way… No. You’ve gotta have something that people can relate to. What sets Happy Bulge apart from any other swimwear store? It’s not the product and I’ll be the first to admit that. It’s the experience that you’re getting on the social media pages and the customer service that you get.
Kurt Elster: I love admitting that the experience is what sells it and that social media experience where you have made the product models real. You have made them people that I can interact with. You have made them characters in some cases, right? That’s brilliant. Now, because from like episode 50 on I’ve said people buy from people, not brands. And that’s what you’ve enabled here. And you’ve made it, done it in this really fun, interactive way, and you touched on the content hole. There is a content sinkhole out there that is perpetually emptying itself, and so the content hole must be filled, but you can never stop. And you mentioned it. People fizzle out after six months when they discover like, “Oh man, there’s no stopping. Gotta keep going.” You said they didn’t really think through the plan.
What’s the plan? How do you come up with that evergreen content topic?
Jeremy Bradley: Well, it’s always fluctuating. It’s always up and down. I mean, with a radio platform, for me, it can be based on award show season, like we know in advance what’s happening and what’s going on. But in the news business, which is also what I report on, it’s completely different, right? Because you go into every day not knowing what’s happening. Same thing with an eCommerce store. You have no idea what’s going to be in stock next week. You can forecast and see this is a good seller, we’re running low on this one, but if you preprogram or schedule your content days and days in advance, we could now be posting about Disco Blue Persuasion swimsuit, and then realize, “Oh crap. We have one in stock. Why are we promoting this one? It doesn’t make sense to do it.”
So, you always have to have a plan, but then do it in a smart way that it makes sense. Why am I promoting that? It’s out of stock. Unless it’s something that people can backorder or something, it doesn’t make sense to do it. So, in terms of content, it’s looking at what you have. And again, with an eCommerce store you’re looking at everything in terms of, “Okay. Well, when is spring break for people? When is the right time to start promoting content about spring break? Is it…” Let’s say it’s January. Is it now, in January? Is it in February? When are people buying their swimsuit for spring break?
On the flip side, Pride month is June. Okay. Well, is April too soon to start talking about Pride? Is it May? We’ve gotta factor in shipping time for a lot of people, as well. So, when is the right time to do it? And you plan your content accordingly. I don’t know that we’ve ever really… I mean, sometimes we will react to something. We’ll get in trouble with Instagram for a post because our model has a strawberry in his mouth and the post is flagged as nudity and sexual activity. Well, we came in steamrolling with a ton of strawberry content. We’ve got a pair of strawberry underwear. Great, we’re gonna post that. We’ve got pictures of… Okay, I need a picture of our model with a strawberry in his mouth. I need three people with a strawberry in the mouth. I need just a closeup of a wet strawberry. And so, we react that way because we’re playing on that. It’s funny.
And then, of course, we get Buff Boy on it, as well. We’ve got these coffee guys now with strawberries and things. So, it’s that timely content that people now relate to and can interact with. And so, with… Let’s switch to Buff Boy then with our coffee line. There’s a bunny nest in the back yard in West Hollywood, and there’s something now with posts called The Bunny Cam, and it’s basically showing this little rabbit’s nest of six or seven bunnies. It’s got nothing to do with coffee. Nothing. Nothing. But it’s something that now people are wondering about. They’ve got that connection because hey, there is this bunny nest at Buff Loft. Let’s see the bunnies.
And you know, now the bunnies are another star of one of our stores. So, it’s you can put random stuff out there, but it’s also in how you present it and how it connects and ties into your story, your brand.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like… As part of this social media content strategy where you’ve really nailed it, part of it is the tone, the voice, the style, you call it like a… What would they call it? A style guide? Tone guide? I don’t know. Something guide. Tell me about that. What does that look like and how did you come to it? Or is it… I often feel like maybe you take your own personality and ramp that up 20% and then like, “Ah, we’ve got this…” Essentially a character of yourself becomes the tone of voice.
Jeremy Bradley: I think… Well, if we’re going right back to the very beginning, this was one of those things, cart before the horse, chicken or the egg kind of stories, which… I remember laying in the bathtub between Christmas and New Years 2019, or 2018, excuse me, and all of a sudden out of nowhere the name Happy Bulge Swim Company came to me. So, we already knew that we had playful swimwear. We had already sort of picked out the inventory and the product line. We didn’t have the name. And then when we came up with the name, we take it to our graphic designer. Remember, we’re a media company, so we have writers, we have graphic design. We had those resources from the beginning.
And so, hey, here graphic designer, here’s the name and here’s some product pictures. This is what we’re doing. Give us playful fun. Let’s see what we come up with. We had two different logos that came. One was an actual cartoon of a man, and now we have this one who’s more of a cartoony kind of a guy. And as soon as we saw the cartoon one, it was kind of like, “That’s it.” And then, because we launched at Pride, we had the Happy Bulge banner made up in front of the table, like at your booth, and there were people walking by that were commenting on the name, commenting on the logo, taking pictures of just the banner. They didn’t purchase. Thanks a lot. But the fact is that they took a picture and now they’ve posted on social media, or they’ve taken it home and shown their gay friend or whoever it might be. So, that was something where I think the name and the vibe set that tone for us, because initially remember, we weren’t on social media. We didn’t have that presence. We were in Pride. Nobody heard of us. And you know, our staff hadn’t even heard of us, quite frankly.
So, you know, I think it’s cool to kind of see it come to life that way. You know, a brand or a style guide is often done by a big corporation because these are the colors we use, we only use these words, which I appreciate. Because again, being a writer and a communications major in school, I appreciate that. But for us, how can you have a serious tone when your store is called Happy Bulge Swim Company and you’ve got models kneeling on the bed with strawberries in their mouth? It just fits.
And you know, I think that’s where people struggle with content is having that consistency in the voice. When you tweet a company because you have a problem with their product or something on social media, you’re getting their initials, and so that’s to track back who replied, and who helped, which is… That’s good. But for us, because we all have worked together for almost 15 years, I can go to the page and not know who posted that, or go to the messages and not know who replied to it, because we all get it. We’ve all subscribed to the same kind of vibe.
And there’s just something about middle-aged women jumping onto a Happy Bulge account and messaging people, and me going, “There we go.” It just comes over you. As soon as you log into the account and you post, or you handle the messages, you become Happy Bulge. Whether you’re a 60-some-year-old grandma like one of our producers, or a 30-some or 20-some year old model in underwear.
Kurt Elster: I think it’s about assuming that character and having fun with it. That’s what makes it irresistible.
Jeremy Bradley: Right. But let me just… So, again, you see all the time people post on social, or Instagram, Twitter, their new shoes they bought, or just got this shirt, and they’ll do a shoutout to the company. But how many of those companies are actually getting a picture of the mail from the customer? I mean, Happy Bulge, and to some extent Buff Boy, our friends are literally taking a picture of the mail when it arrives and sending that to Happy Bulge. I mean, that is so awesome, to have that appreciation for them, a paying customer, to then be so excited and show you the mail that arrived.
And we will get the subsequent photos of now the product’s laid out on the table, and then the selfies in the mirror wearing them, but to show the actual mail when it arrives… Kurt, tell me. Have you done that to Amazon? Have you gone and tweeted Amazon? Oh, my box just came and here. Holding up the Amazon box? I mean, maybe you have. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: You know, I have, but only because it was like, “Hey, I found my box in a pile down the block.”
Jeremy Bradley: Shredded. Dripping wet. Yeah. And I found it, thank you. But yeah. No, I get you, but yeah, that’s I think one of the best sort of testimonials you can get from your audience, and your… I’ll use the term customer. We know that they’re called friends but that’s the best response you can get from your customer is having that love and that excitement for it. And the fact that they can’t wait. You know, oh, I’m wondering when it’s arrived. Oh, has it shipped yet? Settle down. You’re gonna get it. And I love that you can’t wait. I love that you can’t wait for it.
Kurt Elster: On Happy Bulge, if I go to the swimwear collection and I sort by bestselling, I notice an interesting thing about the photos. They’re cropped really consistently, which I appreciate good, consistent aspect ratios, but more importantly these all look like iPhone in my bedroom customer-submitted photos. They look like user-generated content. There is tremendous authenticity to this, doing it this way. Tell me about… This looks intentional. Tell me about the strategy here.
Jeremy Bradley: Oh, absolutely it is, and that’s… It is done purposely or deliberately, strategically even, because again, Happy Bulge Swim Company, like I said, the name kind of sets that tone for it being playful and fun, and so it would not jive to have… You know, we’ve all seen those Under Armor models who are straight faced, and they look like they’re gonna kick your ass. Let’s be honest. And that’s great, because that’s also their rugged, tough guy kind of brand. And so, these are done very amateurly, and that’s… Again, we have a media company. Do we have a photographer and a professional camera? Absolutely, we do. But a lot of the photoshoots we do are in those cities that we were at a Pride event, as well. So, we would be having the Pride booth on the weekend, and then either in the morning, or evening, or day before, day after, hiring local models to come and do the photoshoots, as well.
And so, it was done… A lot of them done in a hotel room, and on the fly, where it’s like, “Okay, here. Now go jump on the bed in this one. Okay, now change out, and now go sit on the counter holding a bottle of vodka. Okay, now go stand in the shower. Okay, now go do pushups.” And these photoshoots are just so rapid. There’s no lighting. There isn’t that… You know, the person going around holding that thing in front of your face to make sure we’re good.
Kurt Elster: A light meter? I think it’s just a light meter, right?
Jeremy Bradley: There you go.
Kurt Elster: I’ve never used one.
Jeremy Bradley: Yeah. But I mean, that’s what people expect, and we’ve had photographers reach out and go, “Hey, I can kind of help you.” No thanks. That’s not what we’re-
Kurt Elster: They act like they’re doing you the favor.
Jeremy Bradley: I can appreciate them having an opinion on going, “You know, this isn’t really great.” But at the end of the day, let’s be honest. Our audience wants to see the swimsuit, they want to see the goods, they want to see the body, and as long as we’re presenting that in a fun and cheeky way, then we’ve still got their attention. So, yes, you’re right, it’s a great observation, and it’s certainly done intentionally.
Now, Buff Boy is… Our biggest expense is men, and photoshoots, and professional lighting, and all that kind of stuff. But with Happy Bulge, very low key. I was gonna say low end, but very low key. Very low key is the photoshoot.
Kurt Elster: And the advantage to that is it’s real, it’s authentic, it’s believable, and I think with… We’ve certainly all had the experience where the photo of the apparel item you’re buying looks one way and then the thing you receive looks another, and so in this vertical, I think when you have the very real looking photo, it also makes the product seem very real. Where you’re like, “All right, I’m not gonna end up with a thing that doesn’t look anywhere near what I ordered.” You know, the wish.com experience.
Jeremy Bradley: Yeah. For sure. And I think that that’s… That actually has only happened one time, that I’ve heard of, anyway, where somebody has come up and said, “That’s not the same product that I ordered.” And it’s like, “But you…” All of our orders, by the way, when they’re sent out, are actually photographed, as well. So, they’re checked to make sure. We’ve never had anybody go and say it was damaged, it was whatever, because we photograph it and we can actually send that to a customer and say, “This is what was sent to you.” And that’s also just for verification, loss prevention, whatever it might be. And small business owners, especially Shopify stores, will know that you’re gonna have those unscrupulous people who say, “I didn’t get my order.” Or, “I was missing an item.” We can pull up the file and go, “Well, there’s actually three pairs of underwear. Did you still get it originally sealed?” Yes, I did. “Well, there were three inside, so how does that happen?”
Kurt Elster: Those people are always so shameless, though, where they’ll just be like, “I don’t know. You tell me. Replace it.” And then when you give into it, you’ve made the mistake of giving into the shamelessness, then you’ll discover like, “All right, they’re gonna do this four or five more times before we finally ban them.”
Jeremy Bradley: There has been one person who did, who tried it twice, initially said, “I ordered two pairs of underwear. I only got one.” And then we go back and do some digging and find the pictures and say, and again, being a communications person, I kind of know how to ask, so I guided that and said, “The customs form, the weight on it shows that there are indeed two inside. Did you still get it originally sealed?” Yes, I did. Okay. Well, great. Well, here’s the photos of your order, so explain it to me. And unfortunately, it’s sad that a small business has to do that.
Again, we have a much bigger company where we’ve got a lawyer and all that other stuff, but I don’t want to have to go to that expense just for a $25 pair of underwear. But certainly, as you say, maybe this person will learn their lesson and stop trying to take advantage and feel bad that they’re trying to bilk a small business out of it, or maybe they’ll move onto the next one, which, again, you hope that they don’t do, but maybe it’ll make them go, “Oh, shit. A small business is actually tracking the orders and not just willy nilly sending them out in the mail?” Yeah, buddy. We’ve actually got photos of your order, your customs form and everything, so…
Kurt Elster: I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, and it seems really smart and obvious as soon as you’ve heard it.
Jeremy Bradley: But it all came about after we had that experience, so it wasn’t something that was initially done with the eCommerce orders. It was kind of people going and saying, “Well, the envelope came opened,” or, “I got an empty envelope. It was literally the tape, whatever, it was taped, and it came off.” And so, from that point on, I think… Again, you learn that lesson after you have to give maybe two refunds. You sort of sit there and go, “We need to protect ourselves in some way.” And that’s just now something that we’ve done.
Kurt Elster: So, it sounds like you do your own fulfillment. You’re not using a 3PL?
Jeremy Bradley: No. It’s all done from Winnipeg.
Kurt Elster: How do you feel about that? I don’t know what the right answer is.
Jeremy Bradley: Well, first of all, I’m a control freak first and foremost, so for me, as I’ve already mentioned, I know that your underwear does not have a tear, a stain, the swimwear, the string hasn’t come out. I need to know that. Now, again, I’m not personally doing every single order anymore, but I’m trusting… I have the confidence that my team does look at these things. And like I said, we photograph every order. So, I like that. I prefer that. You know, if you outsource, or if you have a warehouse, or… I don’t know that we did send them the right thing. I don’t know that it didn’t have that blemish on it. And so, I appreciate it. That’s my preference.
Kurt Elster: You have two brands here that are seemingly unrelated, right? Coffee and swimwear. How do you end up with… There it is. He’s drinking it right now, folks. How do you end up going from swimwear to coffee? And simultaneously?
Jeremy Bradley: Do you know what’s funny about that, though, is I think it’s a common mistake for people to make. If you watch Shark Tank, you know that people always want to franchise. They always want to have their one food truck and have 13 of them. So, initially I was kind of like, “Let’s build Happy Bulge. We’ve only been doing this for…” I guess at the time a little over two years, I guess. And so, I kind of thought, “Is that getting too far ahead of ourselves? We still have room to grow with Happy Bulge. There’s still things that we can do. Still marketing techniques that we haven’t tried. Still just different things.” So, why would we now go and spread ourselves too thin? Now you’re asking your, again, customer, your friend, now you’re asking your customer to spend money in two places. Is that a smart thing to do? And what is the connection between swimwear and coffee? Well, there isn’t.
Kurt Elster: Well, half-naked men seems to be the connection here.
Jeremy Bradley: There you go. But then-
Kurt Elster: Drinking hot coffee shirtless just seems like a recipe for disaster.
Jeremy Bradley: But you know what’s funny, though, is that again, with our audience, and with our demographic, coffee in your underwear is not uncommon, and we only discovered that after we launched Buff Boy. So, yes, what does coffee have to do with naked men? Absolutely nothing, but a lot of people will drink their coffee in their underwear. In the morning, when you’re getting ready for work, on Sunday morning. So, we didn’t know it at the time but there is that connection to underwear and drinking your coffee.
Now, when you think about it, right, Kurt? You didn’t think about that initially just now when you asked the question.
Kurt Elster: And now that I see this man half naked at his kitchen table drinking coffee with perfectly quaffed hair, I realize that’s just how a lot of people start their day. This seems now perfectly natural. So, that cross-promotion, less crazy than it would seem at first glance, and fairly straightforward in how to implement it.
Jeremy Bradley: But if I were to… Let’s say we’ve got Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Same company. Same parent company. Obviously, completely different… Well, mostly different products. Think about if Pizza Hut had a mascot or a logo or something, think about now all of a sudden that Pizza Hut guy or character coming on the Taco Bell social media page and doing a takeover that weekend, or giving you Pizza Hut giveaways on the Taco Bell page. It seems strange, but how does that work? Again, it’s always about what is that connection.
And we’ve done that crossover, where we will have our Happy Bulge model, Hercules, on the Buff Coffee page, and we’ll have one of the coffee guys doing the Happy Bulge giveaways, and now you’re merging your two brands, your two stores, your two audiences together. And again, if you go to the Buff Boy Brewing Instagram page, you’re gonna see every few days a Happy Bulge crossover. And that’s what it says. The big headline: Happy Bulge Crossover. And you’ll see a Happy Bulge model. Not drinking coffee, just a random guy in his underwear.
And so, you’ve got that brand awareness now if people are not following one of the other ones, that now they know. They link those two company names together. And it helps that the logo is very similar. It’s the same guy, just reversed.
Kurt Elster: We’ve established the advantages to having these two brands, and the cross-promotion, and the crossover with it. What are some of the disadvantages? Do you ever run into issues with just you’re trying to run two very similar things?
Jeremy Bradley: No, it’s never happened. Because again, it’s all very strategically planned out what’s being promoted and what’s not. And so, we won’t upstage the other ever. We might have something similar. We might be having with Buff Boy shelter dogs sleepover weekend, and there are shelter dogs running around on Saturday, so that’s… 10% of sales are being donated that weekend, so that’s not really a sale or a promotion. It’s more just kind of PR and it’s more just feel good content. But in a roundabout way, you are sort of encouraging sales and transactions because you’re saying 10% of the sales are going towards Los Angeles animal shelters, so that’s great.
But then if Happy Bulge is rolling out the spring collection of underwear, we are absolutely not upstaging that. Let’s be honest. Happy Bulge is where the money is for these two, so we would never step on the Happy Bulge audience when there’s a product launch or when there’s something big happening. So, they can have two simultaneous… I’ll use the word promotions in a sense of this is a social media campaign even, but they’re not… We’re not having two big sales with the stores at the same time. We’re not competing with each other that way.
Kurt Elster: What’s the driving force here for you? Is it build a successful business, like build an additional income stream? Or is this about hey, I own the brand, and now I’m getting true creative freedom here?
Jeremy Bradley: It’s neither. It’s quite honestly… Now, it’s more so just what can we do to sort of have more success? I mean, it’s maybe terrible for a businessperson or an entrepreneur to go and say we’re not really planning to increase sales for Happy Bulge because at the end of the day Happy Bulge really has no full-time staff, because that’s not the way it’s set up. Our staff is doing radio syndication, newspaper syndication, book publishing, things like that. That’s what we do.
So, if Happy Bulge or Buff Boy goes away tomorrow, it’s a ding to your income, obviously, but it’s not that we’re out of business, because it’s never been and it will never be, as far as I can tell, it will never be the bread and butter of our company, SpeakFree Media. So, again, you ask a businessperson what’s your projection for Q4, what’s happening in 2024, there are no answers to that. And that might sound on the surface like a terrible business decision, but we’re going with the flow. And I think that’s one of the great things, though, about entrepreneurs, is that you have to be able to… We learned that with the pandemic, is you have to be able to pivot.
We could have just had those boxes still piling up of the inventory in 2020, but quite honestly it was more kind of like, “Well, what the hell? Let’s just try this and see where it goes.” And it’s no different than everything that I’ve done with radio, and with books, sort of like this sounds interesting. Let’s give it a shot. We might not know anything about it. We might not have an education in retail marketing. But let’s just have fun with it.
Kurt Elster: I love that advice. It’s just a healthy way to go through life, like, “All right, let’s just try this and see what happens and try to have fun with it.” And then at the point we’re like, “All right, this isn’t fun anymore,” then let’s reconsider and reevaluate the way we’re approaching this.
Jeremy Bradley: Oh, I mean hey, don’t get me wrong, though. When you look at your sales and you see that you’re up 60% over last year or whatever, that… You get a thrill out of that. I’m not even gonna lie. The fact that I can… When we started this, almost four years ago now, again, would Happy Bulge be making six figures a year based on something that was thought up in a guy’s bathtub? And essentially, thanks to Shopify, can generally be run from your phone in a bathtub aside from having to go to the post office and ship product or whatever. But I’m saying the meat and potatoes of your business really can be done from a café. It can be done… Don’t go to a café. Drink Buff Boy at home. But certainly, it could be… You can manage your store from anywhere.
And that’s the advice that I would give, is… You know, I had a friend and a colleague who she wanted to do something similar with women’s accessories, so scarves, right? Something again very lightweight. Something easy to ship. Not a big box. Just something that you can put in an envelope, and a scarf is very lightweight, it’s gonna be cheap to ship, and she made the store all about her. She was the face of it. She was this. She was not one of those… Again, I use the term influencer in quotation marks, because I don’t care for that. I don’t get it. But she was the star of this “brand.” She was the fashionista. She was it.
And you have to sit there and go, “It’s not all about you.” And you know, she threw in the towel on her Shopify store in under three months because she comes in there guns blazing, again, very optimistic as an entrepreneur that I’m gonna get $1,000 in sales that first week. Honey, the reality, no. And even on a decent week, Happy Bulge isn’t even doing that. If I’m being honest, if we pull back on our content and our interaction, Happy Bulge is not even taking in $1,000 a week, and Happy Bulge has been around for years.
So, that’s that advice, is don’t have that ego about you where this is my store, I’m the founder, I’m the CEO, here’s my bio, here’s my… Yes, it puts a face to the brand, but do people care? Certainly, if you’re a model yourself and you have a good look, and you want those thirst trap photos to attract attention, sure. Use that in your marketing. But I am not… I mean, I and my husband appear on the Instagram pages every once in a while, but mostly as kind of something funny or silly. But it’s not that, “Oh, that’s Jeremy from Happy Bulge.” Because if you were to ask our audience, they would not even know my name. And I’m fine with that. I don’t need to be the star of it.
Kurt Elster: Normally, I conclude these interviews and I look for advice, like you have such a wealth of experience, so looking back on it, what advice would you give other entrepreneurs listening? And in the last five minutes you just rattled off so much good advice that I was just here checking off questions I hadn’t asked yet.
Jeremy Bradley: But it goes back to that having that passion for what it is that you do. Is my passion coffee? Absolutely not and I will admit that. But how can I interact… Again, let me rewind. Again, almost 20 years on the radio, we back in the day had an audience of 300,000 listeners, so you’re constantly interacting with people. It’s coming at you from every side and every angle. So, you have to know. I’m not a middle-aged female, but that’s my radio audience, so I have to know what they like, what they don’t like, and how to talk to them. With The Bachelor finale the other day, I just tear to shreds the people on that show, but that’s also kind of what you do on Twitter when you’re watching and tweeting The Bachelor. Am I using foul language? Am I being sexist and… Yes. But that’s the fun of tweeting at Bachelor and the audience gets it.
Kurt Elster: There’s a self-awareness to it?
Jeremy Bradley: Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s the thing is that you have to know your audience, and so I know what I can say. I know how to push the limits. I know how to make the jokes about the fantasy suite, and they call it sex week on The Bachelor. I know how to push that line. I know how to make the double entendres or the innuendo. And I know that the audience appreciates that. On the radio, again, there’s certain things you can and can’t say just because of the rules, so I know, and I know, “Okay, wait a second. If I’m doing a morning show and I’m talking about entertainment headlines, I can’t use certain words. I can’t necessarily say bitch at 8:00 in the morning even though it’s a pop culture laughing kind of a segment because there’s just…” You have to know your audience, and what’s allowed, and what’s not, and what’s acceptable, and what isn’t.
And we see a lot of broadcasters essentially doing that all the time, putting their foot in the mouth, and crossing that line. And so, you have to know your audience. I know being a gay man, I know how to talk to that audience and how to approach it. Now, going back to that women’s line of scarves and things like that, would I know how to market to that audience? I could figure it out because that’s our radio audience, so I could easily just go and post it, and talk about it on the radio to 300,000 people, and probably get sales, but my heart wouldn’t be in that because I’ve got no interest in talking fashion with women. I just don’t.
So, certainly having that interest, and I think that again, as an entrepreneur, if you’re quick to throw in the towel, and you’re quick to just go and say, “Oh, well, after two months it didn’t work,” sure. If you blew $40,000, throw in the towel. But if it’s inexpensive product, if it’s third party, if it’s drop shipping, if it’s whatever, and it’s not really costing you anything, give it five or six months. Retool what you’ve done and what you haven’t tried. And give it time to work. We’re still just coming up with random things to try, and do, and you have to… It's a learning curve. It really is. And I think it always will be, especially depending on the industry that you’re in. Fashion trends change, eCommerce habits from consumers change, and it’s about how you either get ahead of it or stay in line with it.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like the magic that you’re performing is occurring on social media. I want to see this in action. Who do I follow?
Jeremy Bradley: @HappyBulge and @BuffBoyBrewing. And just while we’re talking about social media, that’s also something that I would remind people is that don’t rely only on social media for your audience, because you know, Happy Bulge has had its final warning from Instagram, and we even threatened to sue. We’ve had a big media campaign because they were gonna shut down. Our swimwear products were exploiting COVID was the violation. Figure that out. And so, just-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’d like to see the… What’s the rationale there?
Jeremy Bradley: And again, I mentioned about the guy having a strawberry in his mouth. That was sexual positioning, and it wasn’t allowed. And it’s like okay. And so, we’ve had to go to media relations. Again, we’re in a different situation where we have a radio platform that we can go and say, “Hey, look. We’re gonna call Instagram homophobic, so you might want to reinstate this page and stop threatening it.” Because we’re gonna get GLAAD, and PFLAG, and all those organizations commenting and siding with us. You’re gonna look bad. It’s Instagram and Facebook that already have the PR nightmare. Not us.
And that’s where you have that stronger audience. You have that support. So, don’t rely solely on your social media audience because that could be gone. They shut down your page, you’ve now lost your 20,000 followers. Could they find you again? Would they think to look for you? Would they even know that you’ve disappeared? No. Because you’re just gonna disappear from the feed and they already follow 2,000 other pages. People will not know that your Instagram page is gone.
Kurt Elster: It’s the danger of playing in other people’s sandboxes.
Jeremy Bradley: For sure. And so, that’s where we don’t do much email marketing because that’s not… It’s not interactive, so we just kind of avoid it. Is it a smart thing to employ with your marketing tactics? Absolutely. So, have your email database of your customers and whatever, and so you still have an outlet to reach them then if your page does in fact get shut down. And if you do have a secondary brand as we do with Buff Boy, well, the Happy Bulge page could disappear. Well, at least we still have… It’s not quite as much of an audience, but we still have a couple thousand that follow our other store. So, you do have that backup if need be.
But you know, don’t rely solely on your social media audience. Or if you do, have your own website. Maybe have a forum. Have your own sort of… Maybe even create your own app. That’s something that we’ve been talking about for the past couple of months, where we would have our own app called Appy Bulge where it’s a platform where you can set… Oh, I’m giving spoilers. I’m not even supposed to be saying the name. We’re talking about it. But that’s something that we thought, “Hey, you know what? We can now corner our audience, and keep them, and not…” Because you know, it’s not just Happy Bulge that gets threatened with shutdowns on Instagram. Historically, now I’m getting kind of deep here, but historically GLAAD and the different LGBTQ organizations say that gay and lesbian content is overpoliced and over censored on those platforms. So, it’s not uncommon for us to have our followers or friends reappear with a new account, and having backup accounts, because they get shut down because they posted a picture of their underwear.
So, that’s something where we are hopefully heading to this year, where we will have our own social media app where you can post your underwear photos, and it will be a direct sales channel for our store, because we’re not gonna risk being at the mercy of somebody else going and saying, “Sorry, you’re closed. You’re shut down on our platform.”
Kurt Elster: It’s a smart move and I’ve known enough brands where if you’re able to implement an app, but also have a content strategy that gives people a reason to get the app, like that’s the part people miss, then more often than not it’s going to work. And so, what you described to me, from experience, I’d say that’s a great idea. Run with it.
Jeremy Bradley: And for us, that’s where… Again, a customer can relate to it because they’ve had the warnings, they’ve been threatened with shut down, or they have been shut down, and so if we can go and say, “Hey, look. Happy Bulge is coming in to save the day. We’ve got a platform. You’re free to post within reason. Have at it.” That’s truly what we get. And we were targeted last October. I think we had 40-some notices that this image has to be removed, this product tag can’t remain, you’re at risk of being shut down, and we said, “We’re gonna come knocking to media relations. We need a statement. We need comment. We need this reviewed by a human, not some AI review panel that doesn’t even actually look at it. And we need a human decision.”
And it’s worked for us. When they shut down our Facebook page back in 2021 it might have been, and within 30 minutes of me going to media relations and saying, “Look, we’re doing a nationwide media campaign beginning Monday if this page isn’t put back on and I need a statement. I need a comment.” And they apologize and they reinstate the page. But it’s sad that you have to go through that. Why would… We have the resources to fight them, so that’s not an issue, but the average small business won’t. They won’t. What are they gonna do? They might start a new page but now they’re starting from scratch again.
Kurt Elster: And we’ve seen this happen to people where their page gets shut down and there’s no recourse. And they go, “Well, what do I do?” And they reach out to me like, “Oh. Well, certainly you must know someone who’s been through this. Can you help?” And my advice has been you’re out of luck unless you can get their attention, and getting their attention is like, “Well, all right, spend the money to have a lawyer send them a nasty gram via certified mail.” That’s the kind of thing that works. Or you’re like, “Hey, we’re gonna run a PR blitz against you.” And then suddenly, oh, now a human will look at it.
But yeah, it drives me nuts that in social media platforms the idea that they have to moderate their content appropriately, they’re very resistant to it and seemingly very bad at it. And many times, I’m like, “Is this intentional? What are you doing?”
Jeremy Bradley: And what do you make of that? Our audience is very quick to go and blame homophobia, but what do you make of pages, not necessarily gay and lesbian pages, but of a store? I mean, I just saw for the first time last week somebody complaining that their Shopify store was shut down. Now, I believe, I don’t know the full story, so this is just an assumption on my part, but I believe they were selling licensed products, so t-shirts that were designed that they didn’t have permission. Now, you’re more the Shopify expert than I. That would get a store shut down, is if you’re selling licensed… Let’s say Batman. It wasn’t, but let’s say it was a Batman shirt. That would get a Shopify store shut down?
Kurt Elster: There’s two things that’ll happen. There’s acceptable use policy. AUP. And that’s like, “All right, you were selling guns, so we shut your store down.” All right, fine. Here’s the list of things you can’t sell, and then someone tried to sell it, and they’re out. But then the other one that happens, and if you Google this you can see this in forums, in Shopify forums, is I’m selling something licensed, probably, and there’s automated services out there that will just send off DMCA takedown notices when they detect something licensed that’s not on an officially sanctioned list from the brand. And so, your store will just get shut down because Shopify takes those requests in good faith, it seems, and then so you have to turn around and it’s in the Shopify help docs is, “Well, you email legal at shopify.com and respond to it.”
But the email they send you is very scary. It’s like, “Hey, your store is shut down. You can access the data.” But then you have X number of days and then it goes away. And I’ve had this happen to two or three clients now. They were able to recover their stores through the process I described. Unless you get that original trademark holder or copyright holder, whatever it is, to say, “Oh yeah, that was a mistake,” it’s still very difficult. So, what do you do? That’s a very scary thing to be up against.
And social media, same thing. That we’ve seen happen before, as well. And oftentimes you’re not even sure what you did wrong. And then you lose the account and it’s like years of work that went into that of audience building.
Jeremy Bradley: Yeah, one of the-
Kurt Elster: Just a horrible feeling. And it hasn’t even happened to me directly. Just seeing it.
Jeremy Bradley: I mean, that’s also where… I mean, it goes into the greater conversation of Shopify is a great platform but again, now I’m certainly not condoning people selling copyrighted, infringed products. I’m not endorsing that. But what I’m thinking is sometimes it’s best to have your own eCommerce platform.
Kurt Elster: Self-hosting is always an option with WordPress and WooCommerce. The tradeoff for that total control is total responsibility, and so it’s like, “Well, now I’m in charge of 100% of everything here.” The cost really becomes convenience and time is the thing you gave up. And I say this as someone who used to be a WordPress developer. No, and it’s always worthwhile to consider your options.
We gotta wrap this up. We’re coming to the end of our time together. Jeremy, where can I go get some fine swimwear and learn more about you?
Jeremy Bradley: HappyBulge.com and check out the swimwear line, the underwear line. It’s not uncommon for even women to browse, especially at a Pride event, and say, “I’m gonna get this for my husband.” So, it’s not specifically… It’s not solely for gay men. I know that’s our target audience, but it really is just fun. If you’re wanting to just even have a laugh at cheeky photos and you want the eye candy, go for it. And if you love coffee, absolutely BuffBoyBrewing.com. BuffBoyBrewing.com. Get some coffee. And even, you know what? Send a note. Send a DM on social media that you heard this, that you saw this podcast and you heard me, and you heard Kurt, and we’ll hook you up with a discount. Done. Done.
Kurt Elster: Thank you so much. Happy Bulge, Buff Boy Brewing, tell them Tech Nasty sent you. Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Jeremy, thank you so much.
Jeremy Bradley: Thank you very much for having me.
Bill & Ted Sound Board Clip: Excellent!