w/ Chris Garcin, Pit Viper CEO
Pit Viper isn’t for everyone. And that might be the secret to its success.
It starts with a guy on a ski trip. His sunglasses break. So, naturally, he walks into a military surplus store, finds an old pair of ballistic glasses from the early 90s, and thinks, these are perfect.
Fast forward a few years, and those surplus shades—once traded for beers and ski lifts—have turned into Pit Viper, a brand worth millions.
But here’s the question: how do you build a business that doesn’t just sell sunglasses, but sells attitude? A brand that’s loud, weird, and completely unignorable?
Today on the show: Chris Garcin, CEO of Pit Viper, explains how they took what should have been a joke and turned it into a cult phenomenon.
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Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Address Validator. Incorrect addresses cost U. S. businesses over $20 billion each year. If you're tired of paying for re-delivery fees and dealing with frustrated customers, Address Validator can help It integrates with Shopify to catch and fix address errors before they become costly issues. Every day Address Validator checks over 300,000 orders. and prevents more than eleven thousand failed deliveries. Big brands like Sennheiser, Heli Hansen, and Kylie Cosmetics already trust it to save them money and keep customers happy. You could even try Address Validator on your first 100 orders for free. With a dashboard showing your savings, head over to the Shopify App Store and make bad addresses a thing of the past with Address Validator. I have owned many sunglasses and one of my favorite pairs that I have just owned used And abused are my pit viper exciters. These are gigantic, ridiculous, in your face, you know, and a they make a statement. These are statement glasses Um, my stunner shades is what we'll call them. And I'm thrilled today to, years later, after buying those, have Chris Garson joining us, who is CEO of Pit Viper, Pit Viper Sunglasses And we're going to talk through that brand, how it came about, their messaging, their story, their site. I mean, if you have not seen their Shopify store, it is one of the most extraordinarily opinionated designs ever. It you the current version is like a twenty five year old looking macOS website that threatens uh threatens killing sea turtles as part of the current hero image. I was just Just a phenomenal exercise at branding. And so Chris, I I need to hear the story of how you built uh what is this a $40 million brand? Where are we at? How are we valuing pitfiper these days.
Chris Garcin
Yeah, Kurt, um uh thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Always stoked to be talking about uh Piv Viper's website and uh the history that's gotten us here. Um yeah, I mean, you know, uh could we judge our growth on jokes per hour or Number of sea turtles saved, sure. Um, but I guess we'll just judge it based on like number of customers served, and that's well into the millions.
Kurt Elster
Incredible. So tell me, like take me back. How long ago did you sell the first pair?
Chris Garcin
Oh, that was twenty twelve. And I have to say before we like dive into founding story and everything, uh, was cruising around and I think that um one of the things that you and I have in common And one of the like most core founding principles or inspirations to Pit Viber is yacht rock.
Kurt Elster
I do love my yacht rock.
Chris Garcin
I think uh it was back in the day uh Chuck and I were absolutely obsessed with a YouTube series called Yacht Rock. Have you seen this?
Kurt Elster
I have not seen it. I did watch the the music box, the HBO documentary about Yacht Rock. That was that was really good.
Chris Garcin
I highly recommend you go and see this
Kurt Elster
I will throw it in the show notes, but alright, 2012, you sold your first pair of sunglasses. How and where?
Chris Garcin
It all starts with a um serendipitous uh ski trip with m our founder Chuck Mumford. He is headed to Jackson Hole and he breaks his um performance sports sunglasses and uh ends up at a military surplus store and finds a pair of sunglasses that the US military manufactured in the early nineties and uh loves them. Decides this Totally his vibe. Uh he starts skiing them. They work great. He uh finds a stash of them that are uh basically dead stock in a warehouse uh that uh is just military surplus and buys a handful of them and starts trading them for anything he can. Um that's, you know, maybe a beer at the mountain, uh a ride up to go ski. He was living in his van at the time. And um yeah, so really the first pair was wasn't bought, it was traded. And uh, you know, it was uh at that point it was just like this plain black frame and uh nothing special to it, but he was calling it Pip uh he was already calling them Pip Vipers. Then Chuck went and spray painted them. Uh I was running a uh little sticker company at the time and I could cut out little die cut stickers and put logos on the lenses. And uh yeah, we started, you know, I think right in 2012 I uh was watching him trade him. He had his uh phone number listed on a Facebook page that said, if you want To buy a pair, text him. And I said, hey Chuck, I can build a website. Like, let's do this. And went straight to Shopify, started building our first website.
Kurt Elster
Didn't was that 2013? Yeah.
Chris Garcin
Like October 2012.
Kurt Elster
I had no idea that this had been around so long. Because I probably I discovered it probably like 2019. is when I you know first first got onto Pit Viper for sure by twenty twenty I was like deep in it. Um so wait the original pair are upcycled new old stock military glasses, like pop the frames out, spray paint them, spray paint them, and then stick the Pit Viper logo with uh tiny die cut vinyl stickers onto The lenses, put that back together, boom. And then he and then on top of he's not selling, he's bartering them. Yeah. Alright, this is one of the stranger origin stories, but it fits, you know, a brand like Pit Viper.
Chris Garcin
I mean it's the wildest way uh like uh in no small part we call this the joke that went too far. But Chuck and I always had this um This relationship of you know, we're we want to ski, but we also just talk about products and business all the time. And he he had found these things He's a star spray painting him. I'm I'm like, man, yeah, this this could be the product. And yeah, we went through 10,000 pairs of military surplus, and that's how we started the company. We were uh No investors. We didn't have a penny to our name because we were just kind of ski bumming it here in Salt Lake City. And uh yeah, just Roll the any sale we got back into the company and built it from the ground up like that.
Kurt Elster
So you got him on? It got Pit Viper on Shopify. That's 2012. Two years later, you run a Kickstarter, and it gets 500 backers who pledge almost $40,000. Yep. Tell me about tell me about this crowdfunding campaign. Because this especially at this time, this is a a common way that people are raising money for D to C businesses?
Chris Garcin
Um it was right around that time uh we had been, you know, buying, like I mentioned, from this warehouse, this um dead stock of military surplus. And Call them up, put in another order, and they're like, oh, nice, that's uh that's our last box. And we have a we have a panic moment. We're like, oh no, what? Uh hmm. And yeah, we're f forced to start thinking forward of like how are we gonna actually do this and like parlay this like fun little project into a real business. Um and we needed some money to start up the production. Um you have to at least uh create the like giant heavy steel molds for the um uh injection plastics for uh sunglasses and that's not cheap.
Kurt Elster
That's not cheap. You could spend 10 grand on one mold easy and then discover it's not right and you get to remake it.
Chris Garcin
Higher uh yeah, it's easy to spend thirty grand on a molt. So anyway, that's w that was our goal was thirty thousand dollars on Kickstarter. Uh looking back at it today, that's a pretty modest goal, but uh we were Hustling trying to make it work. Um and yeah, by the end of the month we had brought in thirty-eight thousand dollars and that was going to be enough to start our production and um actually start manufacturing these sunglasses that yeah it was a w a wild time we um we had a lot of fun with the uh Kickstarter had like a hilarious video um got to make uh what I think is a very funny celebration video when we hit our goal. And then yeah between uh our Shopify site Uh, I think we brought in about 40,000 in sales that month and the Kickstarter brought in 38,000 and Yeah, Chuck and I were like, okay, game on. I uh owned a house at the time, but decided I couldn't uh like just take on Pit Viper full time and have uh mortgage payment, so sold the house. Quit the job, started doing Pit Viper full time and uh it's been no looking back since then.
Kurt Elster
Man, you went all in early. Uh well I suppose at that point you're at this two, three years. So you saw the potential, you believed in it. But still, how does it feel to sell your house, quit your job for, you know, selling d what are really just outrageous sunglasses?
Chris Garcin
I was fully out on a limb. And I mean I still get uh stories today about you know walking into a room talking to uh you know skewer friends or acquaintances uh about Pip Viper sunglasses demand respect and authority. These are the optimal blend of style and performance. You guys need these. They have three adjustment points. And uh everybody's like excited and then walk out of the room and they're like, uh I what are they talking about? I don't know if that's gonna work. And I think it was uh you know, a lot of Skepticism around what we were doing, uh, that led to us being uh very motivated and We still talk about it today as like the underdog spirit of Pit Viper and willing to approach our uh business from like both a place of humor but also a place of like this is not a guaranteed thing uh and we have to like work and be uh like ingenuitive about how we approach problems to actually continue to exist and to grow this thing.
Kurt Elster
So I think a big part of the power of the brand, you know, more the product is great. But more so than the product is the brand. You know, it it's not just a brand, it there's a whole persona here to Pit Viper. How do you s describe that Pit Viper personality and tone of voice?
Chris Garcin
Well, everybody uses the word irreverent, and really at the end of the day, it's just a combination of my personality and Chuck's personality. I just uh like I have this writing style that it is can't stay on topic. It has to go devolve into humor and conversation. And Uh Chuck, if you ever have the pleasure of meeting him in person, is one of those people that you're immediately friends with and he can immediately make fun of you to your face and you think it's the greatest thing ever. And like It's it's never it's always just disarming humor, never like aggressive or mean or anything like that. And between those things, uh, we've always had this concept of just like uh Okay, what is everyone else in the industry doing, you know, what uh and it industry I use loosely, like really e-commerce. What what is everybody doing? And then can we flip it on them? How do we look at it in a different way? And how do we approach it from like, you know, just thinking about how we would want our favorite brand in the world to be interacting with us. And that's how we think about anything that we do here.
Kurt Elster
And it it's worked because it it is so fun, it's so engaging, it's also one of those things where you see it, you read it, you hear it, and you know right away if it's for you or not. That it was it's polarizing. And there's something good about that because you separate the wheat from the chaff. The unqualified visitors go away and you're really only going to keep the people around who are interested in this. This market like obviously this approach works for you. It's been successful. How but how successful? Is it Does it have you ever had like a a viral marketing moment with this? You know, everybody wants to go viral, but it requires being, you know, kind of bold and outrageous.
Chris Garcin
So twenty uh COVID era was um uh turned out to be a huge boost for us. And I think we all uh looking back on it now, we had we had no idea going into it. then there's some question and then anything with the outdoor industry just got this huge bump. Um and yeah we'd we you know sell these sure, outrageous, but also performance oriented sunglasses uh that are fantastic for skiing, mountain biking, trail running. I mean, we'll live here in Salt Lake City and Park City and That's like part of our core. And um yeah, twenty twenty-one uh we uh just prior to that uh uh Christmas season, we actually had a banner on the website that just said, We're an apparel company now. Because we had sold out of absolutely everything. We had not a single pair of sunglasses on the shelf. Like we w you know uh between manufacturers delays and increased uh demand it was it was gone. And so Shortly thereafter in January, which is slow season for sunglasses because not many people buy sunglasses in January, uh, we had a restock. And that was the single biggest sales day in Pit Viper history. We did we did over two million um in sales on our Shopify site alone that day. Whoa. It was insane. Uh so that it was that 2021 January restock that is just Whoa, something's happening here. And yeah, it was uh incredible moment.
Kurt Elster
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Chris Garcin
We started small with our brand ambassadors. We c we call them key players. Uh and our pivot are key players have always been like crucial to our success. We started early with uh a lesser known guy named Larry Enteiser. Um and he uh made uh a viral video of himself uh crashing a snowmobile and uh the moment we saw it we're just like oh my god just like send this guy some pit vipers he just needs them and that is how we've approached a lot of our um brand ambassador relationships is We see something that we like, we think that resonates with our brand, and we just send them product and say, hey, we're Piv Viper. We think you're funny. If if this product speaks to you, then let's talk and see what we can do. And with Larry, it was incredible. I mean he at it you immediately took the product, it became part of his persona. He continued to like build on this Instagram account and like build this core following, I think in YouTube as well. And it It became this very like positive syner synergy between the two where like he was so on brand and we were so behind him. Um And it's been like that uh as we've grown and so sure it's been gone from lay to Travis Prostrana, to Rob Gronkowski, and like each step of the way it has been this um like mutual like respect but also like appreciation for their style and their humor that makes just all of it make sense. I mean, each of these things were uh at the beginning at least handshake deals were Yeah, I I remember uh sitting down with Travis at uh dinner and he's just like, I I don't have to do this, but I just think you guys are fun and funny and I like what you're doing. And that was just like a mind-melting moment for me of like, no way. Like the it like Uh but like looking back at uh the people that doubted and were uh like, okay, Chuck and Chris, like you're putting stickers on lenses and coming all the way up to like Travis Pastrana and Rob Gronkowski just telling us that they like what we're doing and they want to participate is just uh you know incredible. So I've built on the back of product seating? Yeah, yeah. And I I I think uh like the true takeaways to just like you first you have to like establish the brand and know your brand and then look outward and try to look for those people that embody your brand already. And like you know, at the end of the day, um giving them some product and letting them decide for themselves whether or not your brand speaks to them is the way to do it. Because if it doesn't speak to them, then it's not the right partnership anyways. And Yeah, we've been incredibly lucky with that. It's been a really fun ride.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. And again, that continues to be the power of a a polarizing brand that has a strong voice and opinion. Has there ever been a moment where you go, you know what? Like where you pitch ideas and you go, yeah, that that's too far. We can't do that even though we're pit viper.
Chris Garcin
Yes, every day.
Kurt Elster
So how do you like where do you how do you know where the line is?
Chris Garcin
Oh god. I I mean we don't. We we we have to test it all the time. And y inevitably as uh our company's grown We've had to like we've tested the line and we've found it several times and had to like pull it back and like reevaluate and like figure out what is actually like at the core of our humor and like, oh, do we need to like have a bunch of curse words on our packaging because these moms are getting really mad uh when this package shows up on their porch and uh we're like oh you know we can probably execute our brand without uh as many f-bombs sitting on the porch as uh you know. We have right now.
Kurt Elster
So I can see where swearing may work at first and not necessarily scale, especially when applied to packaging.
Chris Garcin
Yeah, yeah. So it it's like I I mean, quite honestly, w we've made every mistake in the book. And the the only way that we've moved forward is to like try to look at what we do and understand that, you know, we are going to make mistakes, but we have to learn from them and we have to change our minds almost constantly about what our brand is too and being able to try to provide continuity in that brand but also be able to change your mind about the details and what uh Pit Viper really is on a day-to-day basis is a It's a task in mental gymnastics, but I think it's crucial to uh a growing company.
Kurt Elster
And you know the the Pit Viper Shopify store has long been one of my favorites because of its opinionated design. And it has always had, for as long as I've known it, a 90s retro aesthetic. That is like that is core to Pit Viper's look. Is that just really leaning into an almost extreme version of the 90s? How do you is there any thought beyond that to approaching it without it feeling like a gimmick? It does not feel like a gimmick to me, but when I have pitched similar ideas to other people, they resist it. And they're like, no, I you know, I want the same beige website that everybody else does, because otherwise it'll be a gimmick. Which you know, what do you say to that? Oh, I mean it's a gimmick.
Chris Garcin
No.
Kurt Elster
I
Chris Garcin
Our only goal is to uh kind of just break the monotony, right? And to provide some kind of humor and entertainment in everything we do. And like at the end of the day, if if we execute on a website that m gives such an impression to someone that they say, oh, you have to go check out the Pit Viper website, then we've just like saved ourselves a significant amount in, you know, advertising cost by this organic growth. And really that's what we want is Pit Viper to be something that's shared among friends. So if you go to the Pit Viper website and you're like, oh my gosh, this is great, and you tell one other person then mission accomplished. Um and yeah, we have it we have to do that through unique design that is fun and funny to explore. And then it still has to be an effective sales tool. So we have to balance that with like an extremely shoppable, well-made um user experience that is simple to get through and easy to check out.
Kurt Elster
So it's so good. I love it. I do. Everything about this is 90s themed. In the nineties, I you know was a teenager and there was always we were always accusing anything that was too successful or too big of being sellouts. Like you couldn't If it was too big, a brand got too big, a band got too big, it's no longer cool. How is that ever a concern for you? Do you fight it? Do you like do you intentionally try to look smaller, independent to maintain that cool? Or do we just not care?
Chris Garcin
Well, we are small, we are independent. Uh as you grow, of course, you get that like, oh, they're just sellouts. Like you know, we've um forever had made fun of um Wayfair sunglasses. It's like a the classic like Ray Band shaped sunglass that like absolutely everyone wears. And you know, through like part of the mental gymnastics of redeveloping what we think our brand is, we're like, okay. We are actually going to sell that because we want to like meet our customer where our customer is at. And there's going to be a certain uh cohort of our Pit Viper fans that are like, oh, Pit Viper's sold out. But At the end of the day, uh, we're just trying to make it the brand that we want to exist in the world and we want to invite as many people to the party as possible. So if that means like creating a product that is going to be more approachable to more people, then great. And we are going to invite them into the party and then show them what Pit Viper is all about. And hopefully after they like get their like little first hit of the wayfarers that we come out with the called the highball. You know, they'll go back to the Pit Viper originals and put them on and go to the beach and be like, man. I feel like I'm bringing the party right now. And that's what we want everybody to feel when they are wearing a pair of pit vipers. So Yeah, it's uh I you know, uh uh we'll always get that kind of feedback from a small group of people and there will always be people that are either critical of the direction we've taken the company or just critical of uh the choices we make. And if you spend all of your time thinking about that, then you're never gonna move forward and be able to like grow uh this company. And uh that's our goal is to you know show the world uh a little bit more fun through uh the Pit Viper brand
Kurt Elster
All right, I'm I'm on board. The whole thing, you know, everything about it embodies fun. That is a core theme to Pit Viper. But it's still a real business. It is a big business. You've been doing this over 10 years. Tell me about what's not fun about it. Oh man. Um I mean other than like Instagram comments. I'm sure those are a delight.
Chris Garcin
I tell you even w with those I take with a grain of salt where it's like you have to find the humor and everything and you're just either banter back and forth or just let it be there and yeah, just oh allow them Allow the grumpy people to be grumpy. Um what is not fun about this? I mean uh when we go out and make mistakes, any company that's trying to like Put themselves out there and especially a company like ours that has such a loud brand. We'll step out on a limb and you know, we'll make a mistake on like social media or something. And uh trying to retract that and like light the ship is not fun, but it's a useful endeavor in learning like where the guidelines are on our brand and and what you know uh we should or shouldn't touch. I guess like cleaning the bathrooms sucks. And I still end up somehow having sometimes I have to do that. Uh I'd like just use the toilet brush, guys. Like All right. I don't know.
Kurt Elster
I'm glad to hear it. Social media is is where you live. It's a big part of Pit Viper. I don't think a brand like Pit Viper today can exist without social media. What uh what platforms are working for you best at the moment?
Chris Garcin
TikTok has been incredible for us up until I mean, yeah, recently, like our past year, we've um like focused on growing that uh following. I think that it's you know still TikTok and Instagram are the most important Yeah, uh that's really because that's where a following is. And that's where those are the platforms that we internally understand like I'm the age demographic that uses Instagram and we employ a lot of the younger demographic that's really into TikTok and like between those two we are capable of um like focusing on really endemic uh content for that platform. And like it's never a copy and paste from one platform to the other. It's like, okay, how do you engage on this specific platform and how do you make a video that is going to work in TikTok? How do you make content that's going to work in Instagram? And we, you know, have started looking more uh like closely at YouTube too and we feel like um there's a lot of opportunity there um and hopefully it's in longer form storytelling, which we think we could be really good at. We have like I don't know. In my opinion, we have a lot of fun videos already on our YouTube channel, but uh, you know, it's very low viewership and we haven't quite crack the code of how we approach um the fans or the followers there. But yeah, that's what we're focused on right now.
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Chris Garcin
I think it's the formality of the video itself. It's like I uh I perceive it as the way to be authentic on TikTok is by a much more raw conversational style video. It doesn't necessarily have like very high production value or like strong intention. And then I I think more so on Instagram, and I'm really splitting hairs because they're relatively similar, but more so on Instagram, the expectation is a a more well-formed thought when it comes to a video. Like uh better executed production. Um yeah. Sprit and hairs there, but that's kind of my perception.
Kurt Elster
Okay. No, I I believe it. I buy it. Some brands try hard to be cool. Pit Vipers I perceive as cool. You know, that's what you want to hear from a 42-year-old man. I think you're cool. But you know, you even sell a pair of glasses called the tryhards. The Gen Z kids may accuse a brand like this of of being a tryhard, of trying too hard. What do we do about that? Like is there we just include some intentionally sloppy shit in here? What is the what's the approach to resist it?
Chris Garcin
Uh I mean we try to keep our humor on the nose and call ourselves uh what we are. So it's uh At some point, like intentionally deprecating humor is like how we express ourselves to people and say, like, yeah, we are what we are. I mean, if y you perceive us as being uh contrived or inauthentic because we are just attempting to sell you something with humor, then you were probably thinking too much about it and you might not be our customer. And you touched on it earlier. It's like Uh we're not trying to create a brand for everyone. Like there's people out there that want to be serious and take everything they do very seriously and those people should buy wayfarers. And most people are welcome to shop at Oakley. Uh I we we want people to see the fun and the adventurous stuff that they do and bring you know, the party to um the the ski hill and that's why we always talk about our uh kind of lofty aspirational imaginary place of party mountain. And uh Party Mountain, it's just like good times um and good vibes and you're gonna bring the fun and bring a smile and yeah, not too not worry too much about the people that are being grumpy.
Kurt Elster
A couple years ago, this just came back to me. A couple years ago I was in Shields, a sporting goods store, and they had a pitfiper display that was like a interactive arcade machine. I thought this was the coolest thing I had seen in a while. Tell me about that.
Chris Garcin
Oh man, we killed ourselves over how do we go into stores and like bridge the gap between our brand on online where you get so much of who we are and our jokes and you get our confirmation emails, which I love. And um like how do we bring that experience into a store where we don't get to have as much of like a conversation? And Yeah, uh we came up with this idea um for an arcade machine display case. Um it was actually our distributors in New Zealand who uh first uh had it created. We call it the Arcader. Uh has a working joystick, three working buttons with sound effects. Um Changes all the lights when you uh move the joystick around and it was the one thing that was the thing that was like, okay, now we can go uh execute our brand in retail. And it was um yeah, incredible. We we managed to produce I I think it was well over a thousand of those. um arcaders and place them all over the US and some abroad and um yeah you can go into almost any SHIELS now and they'll have an arc arcator display case there and yeah go Oh I think it was so cool. I was on a road press the third button it's I almost bought the third the third button
Kurt Elster
Why what's the third button do? I mean I remember playing with it. I don't remember what the third button did.
Chris Garcin
You'll have to go.
Kurt Elster
It's like five hours for me. Alright. Go on our website.
Chris Garcin
We've got a dealer locator. You can find something closer.
Kurt Elster
All right, good. And man, where's where's Pitfiber headed next? Where do you go from here? More products?
Chris Garcin
Yeah, I think um understanding, you know, what our customer wants And like developing into more products. Um it the our product process is so fun now that we've like figured it out and had the time to establish it. Like we've been doing this twelve years. The originals were like uh probably six years of that The exciters that you have are the second pair that we ever launched. And now we've gotten to the point where we're mature enough of a company that we have a product development process and we get to make this the eyewear that we want. And that's a really cool place to be. And like you see me now wearing a pair of the Sky Surfers, which is my favorite pair for I'll admit I I do run and uh these are my favorite sunglasses for running. Um Yeah, I think it's uh expanding product looking um outward internationally, uh working on you know, uh with Shopify, uh, you know, working on either expansion stores or working within Shopify markets to um grow our international reach and um Yeah, also go more into our uh retail partners who uh you know we've uh has phenomenal retail network now of like over fifteen hundred doors across the US that um mostly like specialty shops that crush it in either like mountain biking or skiing or and Like and they they are responsible for projecting our brand out in the world in a physical space. And you know, they've do an incredible job of doing that.
Kurt Elster
They yeah, I'm always thrilled when I see pit vipers out and about. Like I was in we were in Colorado and we saw like a huge banner said now carrying pit vipers. I'm like, I wasn't I didn't need any more sunglasses. I wasn't gonna buy any, but I'm like, oh let's go check it out. My wife was like, what is your deal with these sunglasses? Uh all right. Final question. What's one rule in business you think is total bullshit?
Chris Garcin
I don't know if it's as much of a rule as is a guiding principle, especially online. Everybody seems to just copy each other. It's the clean simple shoppable like white or cream background website and the uh oh if the email pop-up kills me. And granted we do it too, but it's I think it's or th that people perceive is that they need to do everything the same as everyone else is doing it. People don't push hard enough against those like norms. The email pop-up is something that like I think about probably way too often. As like I you know, I probably have a way bigger problems to like try to handle, but I find myself just stewing about Like, why should I be incentivized to give you my email for 15% off my first order when absolutely everyone is doing that? Like Think about that just a little bit differently. Like, give me something that I care about. Like, I we've been talking here about um changing that to Be like, enter your email and we are giving giving away a jet ski once a month forever And if you enter your email here, you're just on the list to win a jet ski. We're doing a drawing every month Take those discounted dollars that you would have spent on the fifteen percent off and just buy a jet ski with that. And give that away. I mean it's just like approaching the problem from a different angle and just trying to like just trying to like break the mold and see like how you can
Kurt Elster
I think there are a few pairings as good as Pit Vipers and Personal Watercraft. Like you just you don't find a better pairing. Um and we've worked with with bl brands that have done those big monthly giveaways. Like, you know, Hoonigan used to regular giveaway cars and the result is quite incredible. Um, you know, and it immediately speaks to like, wow, this is a big brand. And, you know, when it's on a welcome pop-up Those yeah, you're right. You're absolutely right. Look oh, give us your email, save ten percent. Or I'm gonna click escape, close, or just back. And I don't care. Right. But If the site opens with, we're giving away a jet ski, and you know you know Pit Viper will have just like an outrageous photo of said jet ski in action And like that's gonna get people's attention. Where even if they don't give you the email, and I bet the opt-in rate is great, they're still like that is gonna get their attention enough that they they're engaged, that they at least go visit the site, and that's the stuff that turns into purchases. Or they're gonna bounce because they're like, this is clearly not for me. I will not waste my time. And that's fine too. I mean, I love that idea. I expect by this summer you're giving away jet skis. I I hope so.
Chris Garcin
If we're if we're not, we're doing it wrong. And I definitely agree that few things pair better than Pit Viper and an aspiration to own more watercraft.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. So if I wanted to get myself a pair of uh jethawks, I you know, and the exact jethawk, I think that speaks to me. What website am I going to? Let's plug it.
Chris Garcin
Pitviper. com, baby. Pitviper. com.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, check it out. It's so cool.
Chris Garcin
Yep. Uh for all your shopping pleasure.
Kurt Elster
Chris Carson, Pit Viper, thank you so much. This has been well, I've loved it. This has been uh everything I hope for and more.
Chris Garcin
Yeah, Kurt, it's my pleasure. It was really fun. Uh thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster
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