w/ Nick Mertz, Pins & Aces
Entrepreneur Nick Mertz on Challenges of E-commerce, In-House Operations, and Hiring the Right People.
Today's episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast brings you Nick Mertz, the reclusive yet unstoppable e-commerce juggernaut behind $100 million in revenue. This unstoppable entrepreneur has generated over $100 million in revenue with ventures like Rugged Apparel, Adam's Polishes, and Pins & Aces. How does he do it? Discover his strategies for hiring, in-house operations, and mastering growth.
[00:01:21} Podcast featuring successful e-com entrepreneur Nick, discussing challenges and successful ventures, including Leno's Garage.
[00:04:38} Started e-com business in college selling survival bracelets, sold it after a few years.
[00:08:59} Starting an e-commerce business does not require a lot of money. Differentiation is key to success in a competitive market. Validating the idea is important before starting.
[00:12:21} Stick with it, have grit, and don't expect overnight success. One mannequin company survived the 2008 recession while 90% of competitors went out of business. Some products have TikTok booms, but persistence is necessary to turn it into a business.
[00:13:50} Two successful products: beer sleeve and liquor stick, with a focus on innovation and marketing. Dealing with copycats involves legal action.
[00:20:39} Small brand collab with Bud Light - no license, no royalty, just make cool stuff and use it. Unlimited
beer sent. Those brand collabs legitimized the brand leading to other collabs. Some licensed stuff, like NCAA.
[00:24:38} Starting as a side project, Pins and Aces grew to become a real business by hiring key people while maintaining a fun culture. Hiring slowly and firing quickly is important for building a strong team.
[00:27:19} Employees have equity in the company and a bonus program; giving opportunities for growth leads to retention.
[00:33:55} DIY approach has drawbacks like lost packages, missing inventory, shipping wrong item, but offers personal touch and control over shipping experience.
[00:38:58} New products, collaborations, growing brands, relaunching Hooga Lab, and moving to a new building.
[00:41:33} Stay focused on your product and niche, even if it doesn't sell immediately. Grinding it out for at least 6 months can lead to success.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
6/6/2023
Kurt Elster: Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And today we are chatting with Nick Mertz, a serial eCommerce superstar, I don’t say this lightly, who has built several successful businesses and helped others do the same. He’s been an investor in several successful eCom businesses, including Rugged Apparel, Adam’s Polishes, his newest venture, Pins & Aces, and another that I’m gonna tell you a story about in a second. Collectively, these ventures have generated over $100 million in revenue.
And so, in this episode we’re gonna dive into the challenges of eCommerce that he’s experienced, how they deal with them, hiring the right people, running in-house operations, and so much more. If we have time, there’s so much to unpack here. Many years ago, I was in a Shopify Facebook group and Nick posted in the group and he said, “Hey, I’m working with this brand. Leno’s Garage, and we just set up our store, and we’re happy to be here.” And I DM’d him. I said, “That’s amazing. I’m a car guy. I taught detailing.” And from Adam’s Polishes YouTube videos was how I learned detailing. And he said, “That’s great. Let me send you a sample.” And I got this nice Leno’s Garage box set. And that is how we ended up working with Leno’s Garage and that kicked off how I ended up meeting Jay Leno, so it’s very cool.
Nick has been an instrumental part of my career and growth. And based on his story and his bio, that’s been the case for many folks, so I’m hoping that we can peel off some of that experience that I have benefitted from for you. So, Nick, welcome.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s start with how many eCom businesses are you currently involved in?
Nick Mertz: I’m currently involved in four. Previously, like in Leno’s Garage or Adam’s Polishes, I was a small operational partner, investor in the businesses, but didn’t have a ton of skin in the game like I do now with the four brands, eCommerce brands that I’m running right now. So, if you… Biting off more than you can chew, you kind of lose focus on all of them, so four is about the max I can work on right now.
Kurt Elster: And so, of the four, which is your baby? Which one’s your favorite?
Nick Mertz: Pins & Aces, for sure. You know that.
Kurt Elster: I love Pins & Aces. It’s such a fun brand. Tell me about it. What is it?
Nick Mertz: Pins & Aces is an alternative golf brand I think is a good way to put it. You know, we saw during the COVID pandemic golf was really growing, becoming super popular. You helped build the… I think actually I built the very first website and then started to turn into more of a legitimate operation, and now I think we’ve done probably two redesigns with you on that brand. But it’s an alternative golf brand. You know, fun golf polos like this. It’s not your typical stuffy, striped solids. We don’t do any of that stuff. It’s just kind of a more loud and fun brand to wear on the golf course.
Kurt Elster: Fun is what I always think of with Pins & Aces. That one’s a ton of fun to work on. How long have you been at this, about a decade? How’d you first get into eCommerce?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. About a decade. It’s really, really tough for me to work for anybody. I’ve been fired from every job that I’ve ever had, so when I was a senior in college in 2012 I started Rugged Apparel, which was my first venture into eCom. We were on BigCommerce back then. I don’t even know if Shopify was a thing, or if it was, it wasn’t where it is today. Started on BigCommerce. We started selling these survival paracord bracelets. You know, they were a fad back for people who can remember kind of in 2012, 2013. And they were only available in a few colors. We went to the manufacturer, had other colors made, wove these bracelets together, sold them online. You could choose your custom color. Very rudimentary eCom back then, for sure. Not what you have today, certainly.
So, did that, and then I actually sold that to my largest competitor. He was growing, and I kind of saw the market turning into… I saw sixth graders, seventh graders starting to sell these for a tenth of what we were selling them for, so I kind of saw this as being a fad, ride the wave and get out, so did that for a couple years. Sold it. Had a nice little exit there. And then just continued to run in the eCom world.
Kurt Elster: I’ve had the same backpack for 10 years. I love it. The store was on Shopify. As far as I know, I think they went out of business. It was Just Porter. And on it are several paracord zipper pulls fashioned into… It’s called a monkey fist knot. And that was from 10 years ago that paracord craze. I had a bunch of paracord, and I was watching YouTube videos trying to make my own paracord bracelets. You know, I never quite finished a whole one. But I did manage those zipper pulls. They’re very nice.
Nick Mertz: They are. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Running four eCom businesses at the same time. How? That seems too difficult. Do you hire it out and you’re doing vision? How involved are you day to day with these?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. I’m pretty involved on a strategic level. Definitely Pins & Aces is the focus. That’s kind of the breadwinner. But we’ve started these brands from zero to millions in revenue, for sure, so it’s an evolution, not a revolution with eCom, so it takes time to build them, and we have a really strong team now. Project managers on each brand. And they kind of have these little goals. Okay, the first goal when we’re starting a brand is let’s get $100,000 in sales in the first year, and can we do it sooner than that? Great.
And then when that happens, you start to get some momentum, and things can scale quite quickly. So, when they get to that point they start growing, you can resource it a little bit more, and then it grows from there. We have a really, really robust team. We have kind of like a mini-CEO or project manager on each one of those brands that they’re responsible for and that’s just kind of how we do it.
Kurt Elster: And so, is there a standard operating procedure for we’ve gotta… You get an idea, and you say, “This is viable, plausible, we want to pursue this.” Is there just an SOP that every brand follows that you launch?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. A lot of them are. And we took a lot of it from the Adam’s playbook. You know, they had a really-
Kurt Elster: Adam’s Polishes, the detailing site.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Adam’s Polishes. The detailing company. And you know, when we took on that brand, it was very small. We really kind of hit the reset button, built out a really nice strategy deck on, “Hey, this is what’s important. This is how we’re gonna achieve our goals.” You know, so I think… Yeah, every brand kind of follows this playbook that we have, and it’s nothing too crazy. You just want to have some focused approach on different categories. And that’s kind of what we’re doing. And if you can hit that and plug in a different widget, I think you can be successful with it.
Kurt Elster: And so, when starting a brand for the first time, the initial challenge is you have to put a bunch of money into it to start it with no guarantee that you’re ever getting that money back out. And so, for you, how do you view that? How do you tackle that challenge of startup and growth costs?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. I think it’s definitely easier to start with a ton of money and scale it, but you know, for Pins & Aces, I started with $6,000. That’s all we had. That was enough to buy inventory to get onto Shopify, some packaging materials, get started, and go from there. So, it doesn’t require a ton of money. I think what I see an issue a lot of times are a lot of people are playing in a red ocean. A red ocean would be shark infested, tons of competitors, no real differentiation. We want to play in a blue ocean.
So, if you’re thinking about starting an eCommerce business, you gotta have a great product and you’ve gotta be either in an industry that you’re well differentiated from, or you have a completely new product that other people aren’t selling and that people are gonna want. You know, you need to have a technical success, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna have a commercial success, and so you need to have both of those, and so if you do, the people are gonna come. And you can follow the right playbook, you have a high quality product, you got good marketing, you got people who want the product or the brand, then it’s gonna grow. Then it’s starting to focus on those core key pillars in order to be successful, but too many times people are trying to ride a fad wave, whether it’s drop shipping, or it’s a fidget spinner, or something that’s just there’s way too many competitors in that space and it’s gonna be hard to be successful in there.
Kurt Elster: Validating the idea is just launch the brand and can it get to $100,000 in 123 months?
Nick Mertz: I think… We say execution without a strategy is a nightmare. So, you can’t just go in and execute something and put it up on a website and think you’re gonna sell and get to $100,000. There are some steps that you have to take. Do some market research. Who’s selling this product in this industry? What are you selling? Do you think it’s a good product? A lot of it with Pins & Aces, I’m a golfer, so I love golf. I understand that market and I figured there would be a need for some of the products that we sell, so that helps.
But I’d definitely do your research and be passionate about what you want to sell. What’s in the market already? And then see how you can differentiate yourself from that.
Kurt Elster: You know, I keep going back to the amount of decision making you have to do. Just both strategic and day to day to be running four businesses. Even though you have… You know, there’s a person in charge of day-to-day operations there. Is there a secret sauce behind this approach to business decisions so you’re not tearing your heart out?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. I mean, it’s cliché to say, but it’s hard work. It really is. You know, when you’re jumping into eCom, or your own business, you’re taking a pay cut and you’re working longer hours. You know, especially at the beginning. It’s tough to say. It’s not just there’s one silver bullet that’s gonna make you successful. I think it’s a culmination of things and really working harder than other people, and if you do that, I think you’re gonna find success.
Kurt Elster: The extension of it is it’s often how long can you stay at it. Because in some cases you can just wait until you’re last man standing.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. You certainly can. I mean, there was a time after Rugged Apparel and prior to Adam’s Polishes in this kind of 2014 through 2016, I started just doing some consulting and working in my father-in-law’s business, and he owned a mannequin company. They made mannequins. Someone has to make it, right? And they really… A lot of their competitors went out of business in 2008 in the recession and they just kind of rode the wave. They got super lean. They said, “We’re gonna just push through it and we’re gonna get through this.” And you know, 90% of their competition went out of business and they struggled.
So, I think that’s part of it is having some grit, and determination, and if you truly believe in the product, you should stick with it. But it’s never gonna be an overnight success. You know, I think there’s some other things. Some of the products we sell, like the beer sleeve and liquor stick, that’s definitely helped with TikTok, because you can have those booming days, but you gotta continue to ride the momentum and turn it into a business. Not just a product.
So, it’s never overnight. It’s a lot of hard work.
Kurt Elster: Pins & Aces does have some of these… The core product is like head covers, golf bags, polos, apparel, but then there’s a few novelty fad products in there that have done extremely well. Talk to me about that a little bit.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. The probably two biggest ones are the beer sleeve, which kind of was a new twist on an old product. If you remember, I think it was like a snowboard product. It was called like a Beeracuda maybe, but it held like 12 beers. It was like a big sleeve. It was too thick. And I saw this, and I was like, “Man, that’d be great if you could put that in a golf bag and sneak some beer onto a golf course.” And so, we redesigned it a little bit, made it shorter, made it fit in a golf bag, and that product blew up. But that’s operating in a blue ocean territory. There’s no competitors. It was a great product. It was easy to market. I had a 15-second ad on Facebook and Instagram that I think it has over 500 million views now to this point.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Nick Mertz: And it just absolutely crushed it, so that’s a great product. Same thing with the Liquor Stick. It’s our new product that we patented. We got a lot of knockoffs. You’re gonna get that if you find success. There’s people who are gonna be copying you, which is very frustrating. It frustrates me every day still. But that one’s patented and that’s kind of the same thing as beer sleeve. A little skinnier metal tube, like a Yeti tumbler. You can pour alcohol in there. It’s got a pump on the top and can spit it out, so they’re fun products. They’re different. And we like doing stuff like that.
Kurt Elster: How do you deal with copycats?
Nick Mertz: A lot of legal. You know, you’ll get to that point where now I never figured I’d have an attorney on retainer, but we do have an attorney that kind of scours the market and looks for copycats, copyright infringement, trademark infringement, patent infringement, and then you just kind of fight it one at a time.
Kurt Elster: Oh, interesting. So, they actively find the infringers, these bad actors.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. For sure. I think the worst is on Amazon. You know, people will… Nothing we can really do about the beer sleeve. It’s unfortunate. Now there’s probably 25 competitors for that product and they’re making the same stuff. But what they’ll do is they’ll literally take pictures with me, or our team that shot those, and they’ll Photoshop their logo over ours and just steal our copy, steal our picture, so it’s like it’s pretty brazen, but yeah, they’ll go out and find that and then we’ll pursue it as best we can.
Kurt Elster: I am not shameless enough to attempt something like that. And even if I did, oh my gosh, the moment I got success with it, it actually worked, that would be the terrifying part.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah. It sucks.
Kurt Elster: It does. You’re not alone. I mean, a lot of people deal with it and it’s really… It’s like either you chase it, or you don’t. It’s frustrating.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Part of it.
Kurt Elster: You mentioned, you said you got like half a million views promoting these things.
Nick Mertz: Half a billion. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. Whoa, I was way off. I was off by-
Nick Mertz: Yeah. 500 million. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: A considerable factor there. So, what marketing channels are your go-to with these brands? What’s generally working these days?
Nick Mertz: I think Facebook and Instagram still work to an extent. I think we got really lucky. I think it’s tougher and we’re finding that kind of now with our newer brands that we have that we’re starting, the four businesses that we have, it’s tough to kind of market the way you used to be able to on Facebook and Instagram, especially with the iOS 14 changes. The trackability and remarketing to people who’ve been to the website is a lot more difficult.
So, I think it comes down to, and we’ve talked about this a lot, is having the website as conversion friendly as possible. Getting there, if you can get someone to your website, very easy for them to check out, very easy for them to understand the process, or the product, and go through with that process. So, Facebook and Instagram still work for us. TikTok is difficult. The ads, we haven’t seen too much success, but the organic piece on that, if you could have a video go viral and we’ve certainly done that, that really helps for sure. But the traditional channels are working well. We’re just kind of reconfiguring them from more of a low funnel, immediate conversion ad, to high funnel, get them into the mix, get them familiar with the brand, and then have the website kind of finish it off for them.
Kurt Elster: And so, with TikTok, you’re posting as your own brands, portrait videos, and hoping to get an organic viral success out of it, which does translate into sales. It’s just difficult to track it. How much effort’s going into that? Are we posting, are we trying to come up with ideas daily? Are we reposting stuff?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. I have a couple guys that make stuff. Don’t do a lot of reposting. It’s all of our own stuff, for sure. And I’m not on it as active as some people on the YouTube experts, you need to be posting seven times a day at these times, and you need to use these hashtags. I think when you try and force it a little bit too much people can see through that. Just like the influencer thing. I mean, influencers were the way to go three or four years ago. You could get an influencer, you could get them your product, and they would sell it. It would do really, really well. That’s kind of how we started it.
Now, everyone can see through that. Oh, it’s just Kurt, he’s a famous podcaster and he’s selling his favorite chocolate milk. It doesn’t work like it used to, you know? So, people kind of see through that.
Kurt Elster: A variation on that, though, is brand collabs. You’ve done some work there with some huge brands. One of the big beer companies. Which was it?
Nick Mertz: Bud Light. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Bud Light. Okay. And they did a collab with you. How do I land a collab with a household name?
Nick Mertz: That one was really crazy. That was… Our first one we did with them was two years ago. We did another one last year. I was just in the warehouse shipping orders. We weren’t verified. We didn’t have a big business. I probably had 20,000 followers on Instagram. Small brand. And I was just on Instagram, saw a DM come through from Bud Light, and they were like, “Hey, we should do a collaboration. We love your gear.” They were cool. They’re like, “Hey, here’s our logo. You guys have a cool brand. Do whatever you want. Sell whatever you want. Just make it cool.” For how big Anheuser-Busch is, there was not a lot of back and forth. No license. No royalty. It was just like, “Make some cool stuff and use it.”
They sent us an unlimited amount of beer, which was awesome too. But yeah, that was fun to work with them, for sure. And those brand collabs help. That kind of legitimized the brand. And now we do other collabs. I really like the collabs where it’s not a license or a royalty type deal. It’s a true collaboration. But we do do some license stuff, like the NCAA with colleges and that, and that just adds legitimacy to the brand, for sure.
Kurt Elster: One of the really clever things I learned from you that I ended up sharing with our Facebook group is that the NASA license, you can just get. You’ve used this. Tell me about that.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. It’s free. Yeah. NASA is a great one. We have a couple really cool products. We’re gonna do another one this summer, head cover, polo, ball markers. It’s actually free, so you can go to NASA and apply for the license. You can use their logo. You can say it’s a collaboration between your brand and NASA and it adds a lot of legitimacy. I mean, it’s cool. They make rockets, it’s rocket ships, and people… I think that’s probably maybe the only government agency that people maybe have an affinity to. So, it’s a good brand, and yeah, it’s great to work with them.
Kurt Elster: One of the issues with digital marketing is you’re kind of… There’s pressure to always be chasing the shiny new thing. And there’s always something new. Like right now, our big thing, of course, is AI. 18 months ago, it was like NFTs. Everything was NFTs. For you, you’ve been around long enough to see stuff come and go. How do you identify like, “Well, these are channels that we should be pursuing.” How do you stay ahead of the game with your marketing strategies without wasting resources?
Nick Mertz: I think… Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think you kind of have to look into it, but you don’t want to jump the ship too quickly, you know? It’s the hand sanitizer craze in the pandemic. A lot of people thought they could have an eCommerce hand sanitizer business and Purell was never gonna figure out how to get isopropyl alcohol back again. Well, they did 2 months later, and those people were hosed. Same thing with NFT. People spent millions on NFTs. Now they’re worth… I don’t know who it was, spent a million and it’s worth like $8 or something like that.
So, I think it’s good to be ahead of it, like AI, and figuring out how you can incorporate that into your business, but you also don’t want to completely abandon your core competencies and forget about some of the things that made you successful. I think it’s again, it’s an evolution, not a revolution when it comes to those things.
Kurt Elster: So, I want to talk about hiring. If you’ve got four brands going, you gotta build a team out, how do you find the right people? And with the first business, how do you know when it’s time to hire?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. That’s a good question. So, I started Pins & Aces but still was at Adam’s Polishes, still had a responsibility there, so this was always just kind of a side project we were working on, just having fun with, but it got to the point where it was like, “Okay, I can’t come in and ship all these orders,” or, “I can’t manage the marketing. It’s time to hire somebody. Let’s grow it. Let’s make it a real business and scale.” So, hired our first guy, he kind of ran, did everything that we were doing, and then it obviously grows from there and you continue to hire people.
I think finding key people is really important, you know? So, you need to have good people on the team. It’s not just me. It’s not just two other people here. It’s the entire team that’s rock solid. I think when hiring them, a lot of times, and maybe you’re familiar with this, other people, you hire one person, whether it’s through a reference, or a friend, or you hear people are looking for something. You interview them. Okay, this is a good guy. Then he has a friend. Then she has a friend. You just kind of build this network of, “Hey, come on in. We’re growing. Yeah, we need another body.” See how they work.
And most of the time, they do work out if you have a good interview process and you treat your employees right, and you’ve got good benefits and programs for them. It’s a fun place to work too for us. You know, we’ve got a really awesome culture. We do a lot of fun things. It’s not your strict nine to five.
So, I think they kind of come in organically and then sure, there’s gonna be some bad apples that come in and what we try and do is hire slow, fire fast. If we need to get rid of somebody, you get rid of them right away. And if you’re looking to hire somebody, let’s go through the process and make sure they’re the right fit for your business.
Kurt Elster: Any stories or anecdotes where you’re like, “I definitely learned my lesson on this one?”
Nick Mertz: It’s not too crazy but I had a buddy I knew, and he had been through kind of a rough patch back in the day, and I knew him when I was growing up looking for a job. Okay, come help ship orders. And I saw… It was like, “Hey, where did this guy go?” And no one could find him. And he was doing heroin in our bathroom.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no.
Nick Mertz: Yeah, so that was pretty tough, so he lasted about six hours at the job and quickly got that one out of there, for sure.
Kurt Elster: Oh, so this was same day.
Nick Mertz: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same day. Came in, was doing drugs in the bathroom, and yeah, I fired him.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. All right. The inverse of that, once you have someone and you’re like, “This person’s great,” how do you keep them? What are your top tips for retaining talent?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Really good question. We have a really… I mean, really, everyone we have now is just rock solid. My photo guy, my media guy, my content or creative director, customer service person is awesome, my Amazon guy is awesome. These people, I think they want to have skin in the game, so all of our employees, we do have an equity share component of the business. So, we want to take care of them. If we’re successful, the employees are successful, so we have a really nice bonus program at the end of the year based on profitability.
And then all of the employees have ownership in the business, so they’re investors, they’re owners, albeit a small share, but that’s a nice thing to have is we go and we’ll grow, and then sell the business, and have a nice exit. It’ll be life-changing money for our employees. And I think that’s really important if you want retention. You’ve gotta make them feel a part of the team. If you can’t do that, again, I think pigs fat, hogs get slaughtered. Do you want a small piece of a huge pie, or do you want a big piece of a small pie? I think if you can share in that with your employees, it’s really important.
But giving them opportunity as they grow, as they get figured out, “Hey, here’s another project for you.” You know, we have one of our customer service ladies, she has been with us for a couple years now. Just started off in customer service responding to emails, answering phones, but she knows every aspect of the business. She’s running one of our other brands now. She’s in charge of it, so she’s had a lot of growth opportunity in the business and she’s an absolute rockstar.
Kurt Elster: When we work with other eCommerce brands, I’m always looking for like, “All right, I want to talk to or work with the person who knows where all the bodies are buried.” And it sounds like that’s that person for you. There’s always the person who knows the intricacies and oddities of a business.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Yep.
Kurt Elster: Let’s talk about in-house operations. You don’t use third party logistics. You do all your own fulfillment.
Nick Mertz: Yep. Everything. Everything fulfilled in house. I hate 3PLs.
Kurt Elster: Why do you hate 3PLs?
Nick Mertz: I just… You know, I think… I am not good with the inventory aspect. If someone has a way to really dial in Shopify inventory without using an ERP system, or if there’s a really good app, let me know. Because that’s a tough one, right? And I think as we scale and grow so fast, we went from $50,000 a couple years ago to $15 million this year in revenue, that’s just hard to do with a 3PL, and manage all the inventory. We added 400 new SKUs last year just to Pins & Aces. That’s more than one SKU a day is what we’re selling, so that’s a lot to have a 3PL manage it, and by the time you ship the inventory to a 3PL, they have receiving fees, palleting fees, pick-pack-ship fees, I think there’s obviously a model for them to make money. Why don’t I just incorporate that model and make operations a profit center for my business instead of paying someone else to do it?
So, that’s kind of how we look at it.
Kurt Elster: I get how a 3PL is squeezing profit out of picking and packing orders for you. How does it become a profit center for you?
Nick Mertz: So, yeah, instead of paying the 3PL, right? $1.50, whatever it is. I haven’t looked at them in a while, to pick, pack, and ship. Again, we’re doing that in house, so we can… They’re obviously making money on that pick, pack, and ship, so can we. And then we’ve also really leveraged our FedEx, UPS, and USPS package rates, so I’d recommend that to someone who’s doing it in house. You can call your FedEx, or USPS, or UPS rep, and get negotiated rates. Get a discount on your shipping. Don’t pay what the advertised price is. And they’ll come in and they’ll negotiate for you. They want your business.
So, by doing that, we actually can even save money over what the 3PL was charging us or would charge to ship, because we have heavily discounted shipping rates, as well.
Kurt Elster: And a trend I’ve noticed is every so often a successful eCommerce brand who does their own shipping suddenly decides we should start our own 3PL, which… This always… I’m like, “I don’t know that this is a great idea.” But it happens. Has it crossed your mind where you’re like, “I should start a 3PL?”
Nick Mertz: Well, unfortunately I’ve done it. Yeah. It has crossed my mind and we’ve done it. So, there’s… I won’t say the person’s name, but it’s a pretty famous person that I have a relationship with, and they wanted us to ship their books, so they wrote a few different books, and we ship all their books for them. It’s not something that I’d… I’d not recommend it. You’re not gonna have a 3PL business. Just because you have the warehouse space or think, “Wow, man, this would work great,” it just becomes more of a headache. I’m doing it more as a favor. I would never recommend it if that’s not what your forte is. Don’t do it.
Kurt Elster: So, any drawbacks to the DIY approach here?
Nick Mertz: In terms of what for DIY?
Kurt Elster: Of doing your own fulfillment?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s different headaches. Packages are gonna get lost. Customers are gonna say that they’re stolen. You’re gonna have missing inventory or gonna ship the wrong thing. There’s those kind of headaches that go along with it. But I think it’s such an important piece. Again, why you’re doing it in house is we can set tags. We use ShipStation in Shopify. We can set tags that, “Hey, if this person’s ordered more than 10 times before, put a tag by it.” And we’ll see that order come through and we can write a very nice, handwritten note. Usually, I write them personally thanking them for their support, their order. Throw in something free. Maybe another polo or a ball marker.
But every order that we ship gets a handwritten note from one of our shipping specialists. It includes the free ball marker over $50. Includes a free pack of tees. It’s about the experience that when the customer orders from us, we want that nice touch, personal touch that we’re taking with every order. So, that’s something that we can control, that we also appreciate, but of course stuff can go wrong when you’re doing it yourself. It’s not gonna be as dialed in as maybe a 3PL service.
Kurt Elster: I want to shift gears to the future. One of the things… Unfortunately, I spend too much time on Twitter, and I shouldn’t, but every 60 days somebody on Twitter is like, “Oh, well, here’s the death of direct to consumer eCommerce. It’s over.” What are your thoughts on the future of eCommerce?
Nick Mertz: Oh, I think it’s stronger than ever. I think… You know, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves in COVID, right? I think maybe you posted something, or someone did where it accelerated the eCommerce trajectory by five years, right? So, that’s not gonna be stable, but we’ll get back to that point. But who wants to go and shop in a store, or drive somewhere to go get something? I mean, sure, sometimes, but eCommerce is definitely the way of the future. I think you see it with the Amazon model, how Shopify is doing, look at both of their market caps. They’re successful. I don’t think it’s slowing down anytime soon and there’s still plenty of opportunity for people who have never gotten into eCommerce, have never even done it before to still make money doing it.
Kurt Elster: I fully agree, and I think the thing that will always save eCommerce is the near infinite choice. If I go in a store, I go in a mall if those still exist, there’s only so many options for me. Versus like I need this specific thing to fill this specific need because I’m into XYZ obscure hobby. Guaranteed, there are like five to 10… If I get the most obscure thing ever, there’s still gonna be 5 to 10 Shopify stores that will gladly send me an item in two days. That’s fantastic.
Nick Mertz: Right.
Kurt Elster: And that’s that infinite choice and selection, I think, is what really drives it toward the future. I mean, look at a brand like Pins & Aces. There was tons of golf apparel out there, but Pins & Aces was the one that went, “Look, this isn’t your dad’s golf brand. You want something that’s wild, and different, and expressive. Here we have that for you.” And then it just expanded and exploded in a fabulous way.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. Totally agree.
Kurt Elster: Now, one thing, for someone operating at your level, where you’re doing a lot and you’ve been doing it a while, it’s easy to burn out. So, how do you stay motivated, inspired, and keep going?
Nick Mertz: Right. Well, luckily I think you gotta find something that you’re passionate about. For me, it’s working for myself. Again, it was tough for me to work for anybody, so I’m passionate about the business aspect of the different ventures that we have, the different brands. But you know, golf is like the ultimate for me. It’s my own business. I can do it and I love playing golf, so luckily with a golf brand there’s a lot of opportunity to play golf. You know, I’m taking my team to Scotland tomorrow and we’re going there for a week and we’re playing golf, and filming, and shooting content, and doing all that stuff. So, it doesn’t really feel like a job, to be honest. It’s something that you love to do. You’re motivated when you wake up and to get the job done, so I’m just really lucky to be in a position where I have two things that I really love that I get to make money from.
Kurt Elster: So well said. That is 100% what it’s all about. So, after you get back from Scotland, which I’m jealous, that’s awesome. What’s next for you and your ventures? Give us a sneak peek. Anything on the horizon?
Nick Mertz: Yeah. I mean, we’ve got a lot… We’ve been wanting to launch, and I think probably I’ve told you before, but you know, we’ve got a couple big collaborations in the works. Really big ‘90s nostalgia brands that we’re doing with Pins & Aces that we’re super excited about. Have a lot of new products in the pipeline, new collections, new brand partners, stuff like that that we’re working on.
And then the other brands are growing really, really fast. There’s a couple brands, I think you built a website for one, American Tribute Brand. It kind of started off as this apparel business. We bought it from one of my friends who moved, and he didn’t want to run the apparel thing anymore, but we made it a gun cleaning business. So, it turned into this little two, four ounce bottles that we sold on Amazon, and we’re doing amazing with it, so there’s new products coming in on that pipeline. Doing really well on Amazon. And then we’re relaunching our other business, which is a direct to consumer cleaning company, kind of like the Adam’s thing but more in direct to consumer on the household cleaning product brand, and so we’re really excited about that. That’s kind of a relaunch that we’re gonna have here at the beginning of June.
And then we just bought a brand new building on Monday, so we moved in last week, last Thursday through Sunday. It was full court press, 20-hour days, moving in, moving the entire operation from one building to the other, so a lot of good stuff going on there.
Kurt Elster: That’s cool. I love that you leverage past experience in interesting ways. You’re like, “We’ve got essentially… We’ve got this gun cleaning brand.” Well, you’re leveraging manufacturing, packaging, a whole bunch of techniques that you would have learned through auto detailing.
Nick Mertz: Yeah. For sure.
Kurt Elster: If I could clean a car, I can apply that to home goods. I could apply that to any other cleaning kit. And same with the packaging and the marketing. A lot of this stuff, there are economies of scale where you’re able to leverage these ideas and reuse individual elements by just reapplying them in creative ways.
Nick Mertz: Sure. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right, last question. What’s the one piece of advice you would give to our Shopify merchants listening right now?
Nick Mertz: I think the one piece of advice is to stay focused. You know, again, we talk about having a good product in a good sector or niche, blue ocean strategy. If you have that good product, you need to stay focused with it. When I launched Pins & Aces, I had one product, one head cover, and I put it up online and I said, “I’m gonna be a millionaire in a month. This is gonna sell like crazy. It’s a great product. People are gonna love it. We’re gonna sell the shit out of this.” We didn’t. I think we sold five in the first month and probably spent triple what we made on trying to figure out Facebook and Instagram ads.
And you know, right then and there you could have said, “Hey, this is a failing business.” And you definitely know… You have to know when to take it out, and get rid of the business, and stop putting effort into it, but you gotta stay focused for those first six months at a minimum. Really grind it out. If you truly believe in the product and you think there’s a market for it, stay focused with it because most likely other people are gonna be interested in that, as well.
And you know, you could be so close to having success with it, so it would be to stay focused on it, for sure.
Kurt Elster: And where can we learn more about you?
Nick Mertz: Me? I’m kind of a reserved guy. I’m not big on the social media. You can go to Pins & Aces and I’m in some of the stuff there. But you know, not big personally on social media. I do too much of that at work. I like to keep a low profile, don’t post… My Facebook account is only for managing the ads side of stuff for the business, so definitely go check out Pins & Aces. That’s probably where you’ll see most of us.
And we are launching a YouTube channel. We’ll have more interaction with our team and different things that we’re doing kind of behind the scenes of our business, but also the golf side of things, which I think will be pretty interesting.
Kurt Elster: Nick Mertz, pinsandaces.com. Thank you so much.
Nick Mertz: Cool. Thanks, Kurt. Appreciate it. See ya.