Plus KeySmart's Andy Bedell drops by
Also available in live hi-def action on YouTube: youtu.be/khPjZKvOPhs
In this episode:
Forbes: Trump Admits To Blocking USPS Funding Over Mail-In Voting
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Kurt Elster: So, what’d you think of virtual reality? You escape 2020?
Paul Reda: Yeah. I played with your virtual reality machine and I loved it, and I’m definitely gonna buy one.
Kurt Elster: Total game changer.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s a total game changer. I gotta get Alyx, I gotta get all the stuff.
Kurt Elster: Of the three games you tried, what was the one that spoke to you?
Paul Reda: Well, I think Beat Saber was the most fun.
Kurt Elster: It is. It’s a ton of fun.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Beat Saber, like you’re really feeling it. Superhot, because you’re dumb dumb kids didn’t set up the room right, I kept punching the wall. So that wasn’t as fun.
Kurt Elster: And so, you’re gonna do it? You’re gonna pull the trigger on a VR headset?
Paul Reda: Chances are I think I will in the next six months.
Kurt Elster: There you go. That’s like your big, stupid pandemic purchase.
Paul Reda: I bought a house!
Kurt Elster: You were gonna do that before the pandemic! It doesn’t count.
Paul Reda: You should see what I’m filling that house up with.
Kurt Elster: I heard you bought a… This is not a joke. A replica Maltese Falcon?
Paul Reda: I did. Everyone heard about my radio issue two weeks ago in my trophy nook.
Kurt Elster: Trophy nook.
Paul Reda: And then there’s a famous TED Talk where Adam Savage from MythBusters, who’s a big-
Kurt Elster: I love him.
Paul Reda: Who is a big movie props guy, is how he’s obsessed with getting an absolute, not pixel perfect, I don’t know, whatever term you would use for something pixel-perfect...
Kurt Elster: Screen accurate.
Paul Reda: Yeah. In the real world. Meatspace-good? Of the Maltese Falcon from the aforementioned film, The Maltese Falcon.
Kurt Elster: I see.
Paul Reda: And his struggles with finding that. And anyway, I found a dork online that was selling them on Etsy, so I bought one.
Kurt Elster: That makes you also a dork.
Paul Reda: Did you know the famous version of The Maltese Falcon that everyone knows is actually the third version of that movie?
Kurt Elster: Like the third edit, or the second remake?
Paul Reda: It’s the second remake. That’s one of my things.
Kurt Elster: No way.
Paul Reda: Yeah, that everyone’s always like, “Hollywood’s all remakes these days. It’s crap.”
Kurt Elster: It’s always been remakes.
Paul Reda: It’s always been remakes. Everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, you know The Maltese Falcon you love? There’s been three of them.” The famous one’s the third one. I wonder if people in like 1937 were like, “Ugh, again they’re doing this?”
Kurt Elster: It’s like Spider-man. Again?
Paul Reda: Yeah, like there’s a Dashiell Hammett novel called Red Harvest that is like, “Oh, that’s Fistful of Dollars, and Yojimbo, and the Bruce Willis movie, Last Man Standing.” And like 10 other movies are all just this one Dashiell Hammett novel that they just keep remaking over and over again. But no one ever is like, “Ugh! Again?”
Kurt Elster: Do you know why remakes have always been attractive to Hollywood?
Paul Reda: Well, because it’s a built-in audience.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s because the movie is an investment. It needs to make movie. A remake, you have… There’s less risk. You have much more faith that it’s going to be successful.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s easy to be like, “Don’t do any remakes!” But when a movie costs $100 million, you better believe we’re doing remakes, sequels, prequels, whatever it takes.
Paul Reda: Well, I’m sure more in the ‘30s it was just that, “Well, we own the rights to this book, and everyone goes to the movies three times a week where they watch two to three movies at a time, so we gotta crank this shit out.”
Kurt Elster: The other big news, we are sadly retiring the family truckster, our F150, and I cracked. I bought a Tesla. I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. I’ve never owned an electric car, but we’re doing it, and then maybe we’ll… The thing drives itself, I’m told, so maybe we’ll do a socially distant road trip. It’s a lot easier, like there’s a lot less road fatigue when you only have to half pay attention to what this thing’s doing. You still gotta pay attention so that the car doesn’t kill you, because they’ve also done that, but even knowing that, the excitement of like, “It drives itself?” I can’t resist it. It’s too nerdy.
Paul Reda: I wouldn’t trust that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like you have to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention, and it’s not making like sudden movements.
Paul Reda: That’s the worst case scenario, I think, for a car.
Kurt Elster: Is car drives itself?
Paul Reda: No, is car semi-drives itself.
Kurt Elster: Yes, you’re right. It is semi-autonomous.
Paul Reda: If it was fully an old car that didn’t drive, that 0% drove itself, you’d be like, “Okay, I need to drive this car and pay attention.” And if it 100% fully drove itself, also great. You just get to chill. But where the car 65% drives itself, that’s bad.
Kurt Elster: Well, knowing that it’s very similar technology to how my drone works, where like it’ll fly itself just fine. I’ve also crashed it before through self driving or me taking over. I’m well aware of the risks and I’m still like, “It’s a big 4,000 pound drone that we’re inside.” When you phrase it like that, it’s a little scary.
Anyway, eCommerce?
Paul Reda: that’s a thing.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Working at that for 10 years. So, today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to talk about what’s up with shipping, our Q4 predictions, and then we’re gonna hear from master marketer Andy Bedell at eight-figure brand KeySmart, and they’ve recently launched an entirely custom theme, and all right, so it’s a plug for us. We’re the ones who built the theme. But we’re really proud of it and Andy offered to come talk about it on the show, so we’ll hear about that. And then we’re gonna teardown the official Joe Biden Campaign store. That should be fun. He announced his VP pick, so let’s get that fresh VP pick gear.
Paul Reda: Oh, exactly. We gotta join. We gotta get on the Biden Harris gear.
Kurt Elster: There’s no way I wear-
Paul Reda: My old Biden gear is now totally out of date.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yes.
Paul Reda: So, it’s like I gotta throw it out now.
Kurt Elster: Well, no. That’s throwback. That’s like vintage. You want to hold onto that. That could be worth something 20, 30 years from now on eBay or whatever future eBay is.
Paul Reda: Future eBay.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s just called future. Everything just becomes future eBay, or like eBay 2040.
Paul Reda: Cyber eBay.
Kurt Elster: Cyber eBay? I like just eBay 2040.
Paul Reda: Because you like Blade Runner.
Kurt Elster: I do love Blade Runner. I recently watched Blade Runner 2049, like properly. The first time I watched it, it was a terrible cam copy and I still was like, “It’s pretty good.” And wow! It’s remarkably better in 4K as opposed to like handheld camera in a theater.
Paul Reda: Why were you watching a camrip?
Kurt Elster: I’m not. I’ve sworn of camrips, but I was a younger man and foolish. I believe that’s the last camrip I ever watched. I mean, I didn’t watch, because that’s illegal. I didn’t do that.
Let’s do predictions. What’s going on? What’s your prediction for Q4? What’s Black Friday gonna look like for-
Paul Reda: I’m of two minds. One, it could be great, because everyone is… (Jeopardy theme playing in background) I’m gonna throw that thing in the trash. I hate it. This is the morning Zoo Crew show.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Where’s the fart button? Is there a fart button?
Kurt Elster: I’ll have one for you next week.
Paul Reda: Okay, good.
Kurt Elster: I’ll get you a fart button. I’ll put it on my to-do list right now.
Paul Reda: You know, I feel like the last six months have been an absolute gangbusters great time for almost all eCommerce merchants, and if everyone is still scared to pack into stores on Black Friday, that only means that Black Friday’s gonna be even bigger online, and it’s gonna be just absolutely huge, just banging for 30 to 40 days straight the whole month of November and the beginning of December.
Or it could be the complete opposite.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Paul Reda: Because you know, unemployment is incredibly high right now, and the reason that… I mean, we just gotta go into the truth about all of this. The reason that consumer spending has not completely and utterly cratered is because everyone was getting extra unemployment and bailout money.
Kurt Elster: And the stimulus checks.
Paul Reda: And stimulus checks from the federal government. The federal government was just giving people way more money than they normally would have been gotten. And so, that ran out on August 1st, and as we are recording this right now on August 13th, we don’t quite know how much that’s gonna make everything crater. So, everyone could have literally no money in November, and we don’t know, because apparently our government, one half of our government is so dysfunctional and doesn’t want to give people money, who knows what’s gonna happen?
Kurt Elster: But there’s one in… Isn’t it something like one in three or one in four American households has a member who is underemployed or unemployed right now?
Paul Reda: I don’t know. I don’t know anything about that stat.
Kurt Elster: I mean, that’s a frightening number if true. There is a lot of unemployment at the moment. And you’re right, it’s two things could happen. Either the eCommerce boom continues out of necessity, where even if retail gets cut, we still have people, enough people surviving and shopping online, and especially… I believe gift giving could really benefit if come the holidays, people aren’t meeting with their families and they’re not traveling. They’re going to have to ship a lot of gifts, so it could be that eCommerce has its best Black Friday season ever as a result of this.
Or to your point, the other shoe drops, and no one has the disposable income, and gift giving is just a really easy thing to cut.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and I mean just to throw random numbers out here, it could possibly be both, where say a normal Black Friday is $10 billion, but this year ends up being a total disaster and it’s only $7 billion, a 30% drop, disaster. But what if eCommerce’s share of that goes from $3 billion to $5 billion? Oh-
Kurt Elster: Exactly.
Paul Reda: Well then oh, all the eCommerce stores are making a shit ton of money amongst the larger overall drop. So, I mean that could be a very likely situation.
Kurt Elster: So, someone like a big box retailer suffers, but independent direct-to-consumer brands benefit.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That’s probably the most likely scenario.
Paul Reda: I don’t know. It’d be good if the Senate would give… Let people have money again, but-
Kurt Elster: Well, what are the chances that… What’s that look like? Will that happen?
Paul Reda: The House isn’t gonna be doing anymore votes until the beginning of September, so I guess we’ll see. I mean, it’s just sort of like a thing where it’s… The only thing that’s gonna push them to actually do it is if people become… It becomes truly painful. If it becomes disastrous, or like Trump’s reelection numbers crater even more, then they could. That’s the thing that’s annoying me. I mean, I don’t know how deep you want to get into this, but it’s like this guy’s running for reelection. Don’t you just wanna give everyone money so they’re not all mad at you because they don’t have a job?
Kurt Elster: That was-
Paul Reda: To like help your reelection campaign, you idiot?
Kurt Elster: I’m not political strategist, but I really thought that’s what would happen.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Like the man’s trying to get reelected, you could buy the election by giving every American extra cash.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Or a thing where it’s like you just, “Hey, I want to get reelected, so maybe I should try to solve the pandemic so people will like me again, and then I could get reelected.” But he’s decided to go the cheating route with the Postal Service and various other things.
Kurt Elster: Which brings us to our next topic. What’s the deal with shipping? And USPS has a gift store now? A merch store on their website where you could buy USPS merch. They have a surprising number of items. I got socks, a Christmas ornament, and this little UPS mail truck. For the audio version, you can hear it rattle, and for the video version, there you go. There’s my lovely USPS truck that was like $8. But, so there is a long, strange history with USPS and politics, and I have a clip from you from a previous episode. Should we start with that?
Paul Reda: Yeah, I guess you can.
Paul Reda: Well, I don’t want to get political, and this is too political or whatever. It’s like everything-
Kurt Elster: We’re beyond that.
Paul Reda: Well, and it’s also literally everything is political. It’s like, “Oh, well I have a question about the shipping rates on my store.” It’s like, “Oh, you shipping? That’s political.” The existence of the Postal Service, the existence of UPS and privatized package places, the state of the roads, trucker unionization, it’s like anything you want to say. Someone’s got a question right now about SMS messaging. It’s like, “Yeah, SMS messaging. That’s political!” It’s like privacy rights, deregulation of the telecoms industry, it’s all political. All things you see at all times are political. You just don’t want to acknowledge it.
Kurt Elster: So, now that we have established, like yeah, it’s political, and this episode has gone political, we’re just leaning into it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: One thing I want to get out of the way right now is people will say, “Well, so what with USPS. I ship DHL. I ship FedEx. I ship UPS.” Many of those carriers use USPS for the last mile delivery in rural areas, so it’s easy for you to say, “Ah, who cares if USPS goes away, because I don’t particularly use it.” Or they work in a limited fashion. It will absolutely affect you no matter which carrier you use as soon as someone in a rural area orders from you. And those people don’t have access to big box stores or malls, so they’re very likely to order online.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and also if the Postal Service, if you’re UPS, even fully end to end, if the Postal Service service degrades to the point where they’re not an effective competitor anymore, what do you think is gonna happen to the rates you pay UPS? Or the rates you pay FedEx when they don’t have another competitor?
Kurt Elster: And they’re not getting subsidized by this last mile thing.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Absolutely it’s gonna go up. And they’re gonna have to carry a lot more stuff. Demand will go up for them.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Which will delay their times. But yeah, the Postal Service is being slowed down and semi shutdown by the Trump Administration. I mean, let’s just be honest about what’s happening.
Kurt Elster: Previously, that was like… Weeks ago, that felt like a conspiracy theory, but at this point it’s not. It’s an open secret. And today, August 13th, Trump flat out said that he’s blocking funding to the Postal Service because of vote in mail. The man literally admitted it.
Paul Reda: Yeah, he literally said, he said, “I don’t want people to be able to vote by mail, so I’m degrading the Postal Service and trying to shut it down.”
Kurt Elster: And the reason he’s doing that is because in polling, we know for whatever reason, Democratic voters are more likely to vote by mail than Republican voters. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true.
Paul Reda: Well, I think it’s partially I think it’s just to get it out of the way, but also people… Democrats are taking the pandemic more seriously, so less likely are gonna want to wait to vote and go vote out in the public or whatever. And also, for years now, the Republican plan has been to reduce voting access in heavily Democratic areas, so there’s gonna be like, “Oh, well yeah, for this whole giant area of Atlanta, yeah, there’s only gonna be one polling place, so you all gotta wait in line for five hours.”
Kurt Elster: Yes. And again, like none of this… This isn’t conspiracy. It’s not made up. Google it. Do your research.
Paul Reda: Yeah, they do it in Milwaukee, because Milwaukee, obviously a heavily Democratic precinct in a swing state in Wisconsin. They completely are closing down Milwaukee polling stations and so those people are like, “Well, I don’t want to wait in line for an hour, so I’m gonna absentee vote or vote by mail.” And then they just try to end that. So, it just is what it is, and it’s a larger Republican project to destroy the Post Office, because the Post Office is like a public good that helps every American equally, and we can’t have that, because everything needs to be privatized and have some sort of profit motive behind it.
Kurt Elster: You know, is this true? I heard the Trump appointee Postmaster General is invested in other carriers?
Paul Reda: Yeah. Yeah. He owns a bunch of UPS and he owns… There’s like a private company that he owns that UPS outsources work to when they are not… When USPS, I think when the Postal Service is unable to handle things, they outsource work to this company. He owns something like $30 million of that company.
Kurt Elster: And if you don’t believe us, I can tell you to Google it, but I know you won’t care. I think I should go ahead and turn the comments off for this one when we put it on YouTube.
Paul Reda: I mean, I absolutely do not give a shit, because we are fully telling the truth here, and I mean… I don’t care.
Kurt Elster: Well, and I mean at this point, when I said, “Oh, it went from conspiracy theory to open secret.” And then today, Trump flat out said it. When I went on Google News and just typed in USPS, nothing else, just USPS, it was just article after article confirming this or floating the question.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I mean this is… Under the Bush Administration, the most recent Bush Administration, they passed a rule that said that the Postal Service had to prepay for the next 70 years of medical benefits that they were gonna have to pay out to all of their retirees and everything with the pensions. So, like people who literally hadn’t been hired by the Postal Service yet, the Postal Service had to have money for their medical expenses in their bank account.
Kurt Elster: So, once they had put this absurd burden on the Post Office, then that’s when all the stories came out about like, “Oh, the Post Office is gonna go bankrupt.”
Paul Reda: Well, they’re losing money because it’s like-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, because you put an absurd burden on them.
Paul Reda: Yeah. We declare that you need to make, I don’t know, whatever it is, $30 billion a year, and well, you’re just not making the $30 billion we’ve deemed that you need to make.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Wildly move the goalpost and then started handwringing when they didn’t meet it. But they were set up to fail intentionally.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Like name another company in the world, I mean even… You know the car industry more than me. Do all the car companies that obviously have all their union employees that they’re paying all that stuff out, do they have money in their bank account for the next 70 years for all that?
Kurt Elster: Does General Motors, Ford? No, absolutely not.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And they have strong, strong unions. So, if I’m a merchant, should I care and what do I do, if anything?
Paul Reda: Well, obviously one, you should care, because it’s completely affecting how your customers are viewing you. I’ve been buying a bunch of stuff off of Etsy the last month or so and I have had several packages where it’s like, “Oh, well here’s the date it’s supposed to come.” And then that date arrives and it’s like the tracking then becomes, “Uh, it’s still coming. We promise. We just aren’t sure when it’s gonna come.” The Postal Service just kind of loses the tracking halfway through.
Kurt Elster: I’ve had a few just disappear. Literally disappear. And the merchant doesn’t know what to do, and I don’t know what to do, because I’m like, “Listen, I know you shipped it to me, but I paid for it and I didn’t get it. Who’s at fault here? What do we do?” I bought a $9 package of screws and they just never showed up. It’s been a month now. But I had the tracking and it was moving too, and then disappeared. For nine bucks, I’m just letting it go. I’m not gonna make that the poor seller’s problem. But yeah, if you’re shipping at all with USPS, or you’re using like SmartPost, FedEx SmartPost, the UPS version, SurePost I think it’s called, where they use… No matter where it is, it uses USPS as the last mile. 100% this affects you.
The only way out of it is to move entirely to exclusively FedEx and UPS, or DHL, and only the services that don’t use USPS as the last mile. But even in those cases, you’d also have to stop delivering to rural areas.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Where they still have to use USPS for last mile. It’s a problem for anyone who ships anything right now.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And you know, and I mean the way to stop it is make Trump not be president anymore.
Kurt Elster: Flatly, that’s true. Yes. Feels dark.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I need a pick me up, here.
Paul Reda: Oh, are we talking about Shopify Sections Anywhere?
Kurt Elster: I think we’re gonna be hearing from the Yakety Sax theme more in the future. Irresistibly fun. So, let’s call our friend Andy Bedell and see how KeySmart’s going and what it doing. There it is. All right, maybe you do leave this in, because that was fantastic!
Paul Reda: You think it’s problematic to have like a comedian running around in fast motion while a funny saxophone song plays, trying to grope women and take their clothes off?
Kurt Elster: I was with you until the grope women and take their clothes off.
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: I was like what’s the problem? Uh oh.
Paul Reda: That was a comedy classic.
Kurt Elster: I always picture it as just like the guy’s running around in fast motion, and like there’s a lot of shenanigans involving doorways.
Paul Reda: Yeah, but there’s always-
Kurt Elster: But you’re right. Yeah.
Paul Reda: There’s always sexy birds in a Benny Hill bit.
Kurt Elster: So, Mr. Bedell, you are the master marketer brainchild behind KeySmart, is that right?
Andy Bedell: That is correct. That is correct.
Kurt Elster: And how long has this site been on Shopify?
Andy Bedell: So, I started with the company in 2015, but I want to say we were on Shopify, I know in 2014 we were on Shopify. But maybe even as early as 2013, as well.
Kurt Elster: And then you had a custom theme, your previous theme before we got the new one this year. How long were you on that theme?
Andy Bedell: That theme was developed in either… I think it was 2015. And I think it cost $50,000, I believe.
Paul Reda: Oh my God.
Andy Bedell: Yeah. Yeah, so it was bad. This was really early days of Shopify and we got it developed by somebody in Chicago, and yeah, it was super expensive, and you know, it was actually a really nice theme. It was actually a really nice site. But business has changed a lot since then, so we just need to change it and as we grew, the thing became clunkier and clunkier, because it was just totally custom made and wasn’t flexible at all.
Kurt Elster: Is that one of the issues with doing a custom theme versus like off the shelf premium theme, is you’re getting total customization up front, but at the… You’re sacrificing configurability down the road.
Andy Bedell: I mean, yeah, so I’m definitely not the Shopify expert like you are, but that seems to be the case. Especially for us, since ours was made so long ago, and it just didn’t have any of the newer functionality and stuff that they’ve been developing. So, yeah, we were just kind of behind. Yeah, you can definitely get a greater level of what you want done, especially early on. I think there were roadblocks previously that had been removed in the development cycle, but anyway, so yeah, that seems to be one of the cases, that you can get it done exactly how you want, but then it’s so hard to be flexible then and change when things need to change.
Kurt Elster: One of the common questions I get is how do I know when it’s time to change themes, upgrade themes. You were on your theme, which was successful for many years and KeySmart is a tremendously successful business. How did you know it was time to upgrade? What was the… Like you just felt like it? Certain time had passed? You wanted to get… What was the goal here? How’d you know?
Andy Bedell: Yeah, that’s actually a good question. So, it’s for us, it actually… I should say I’m an advertiser, so I like to test things. I don’t like to have huge changes, right? So, because then I just… It makes me worried. But I was getting some pushback from people within KeySmart, like the organization, like a lot of the pages had just been… We’ve done a lot of testing on individual pages and changed things, so the site just wasn’t really uniform anymore, and so there were… Yeah, every page was kind of like its own thing. And we just needed a lot of… We were also not… Updates were being done in a really ad hoc fashion, and we just needed a face lift.
But then on top of that, just the business has changed. Originally, KeySmart was just a single product company, and then we started adding on a few things here and there, but more recently we’ve really… We’ve got into wallets, and bags, and electronics, and the CleanKey and this whole Clean line have been really successful, and so we needed to be able to change the site, and then now we’ve just been launching so many new products, like a product a week. I actually have to launch a product right after this call. But you know, so we need to be able to give new products space on the homepage, like feature space, and we need it to be customized, and it’s easier if I have Alyssa on my team just go in, and she works with all the photographers, and she can just go in and put the photo she likes, and she’s also a copywriter, and she can just get the copy rolling. As before, she had to kind of outsource that to a designer to mockup the design, and then he would have to then send it over to a web developer, and so there was just… There was added cost, and time in the process, as well as just complications.
I’m sure as you know, if you add in if it’s a four-person project instead of a two-person project, just the level of communication and all-
Kurt Elster: It gets exponentially harder.
Andy Bedell: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and you guys are constantly tweaking things, and making little adjustments.
Kurt Elster: Optimizing.
Paul Reda: And optimizing. I remember on that old theme, you’d tweak and adjust every single page for every single product, so nothing was uniform on that entire site. And so, all the little changes piled up on top of each other, and then because you had done so many completely specific changes, there couldn’t have been a single backend system to control everything, so yeah, that necessitated that scenario where you literally need a web developer to go in and poke at everything.
Andy Bedell: Yeah. Yeah. And so, I think, and now we’ve gotten to a point, because we’ve really seen… The pro tip for the listeners out there is if you go… We’ve really done a lot, like the biggest things we’ve done as far as I’ve done for testing has been on bundles. So, if you look at some of our bundles, like the quantity breaks work really well as well, but sometimes if you have like a backpack, it’s 300 bucks, and you’re not gonna buy two of them, get one free. Who’s gonna buy three backpacks? It’d be like 600 bucks. So, for that, the different kind of bundles work, where you add different accessories and you bundle them together, and we’ve done ones that call them ultimate packs and stuff like that. But whatever, but those things really, really drive better average order value, or average revenue per user, like [Inaudible 0:26:36.1] or somebody would be looking at.
So, those can really increase your revenue per user, which then makes… You can have higher return on ad spend on Facebook, but then that just adds in a lot more complications. So, we’ve come to the point now where we can customize the whole page just up and to the bundle on most of them, and then for the KeySmarts, I’m coming out with this product called the NanoFile after this, and it works within the KeySmart, the KeySmart Pro, and I can just… They built this wizard thing for the bundle for the KeySmart pro, where I can just add it in as an accessory now and I don’t have to go to a developer.
So, we still need a little bit of a developer help, just for just fine tuning the bundles, but we can do the whole top designing part really all by ourselves now, and the it’s just like minor changes, like swapping out a couple pictures and then changing the rules, like the discount rules.
Kurt Elster: So, there were really like three things that happened where you went… Number one, you said, “Look, our workflow is getting ridiculous and it’s because there’s so much that has changed and so much that’s not built into the theme, that requires custom development.” And like, “Hey, could we just build the theme from scratch with this?” Number two, there’s a lot of… In relation to that, there also ends up being a lot of cruft for people who are frequent optimizers, or like to fiddle, and in your case it’s a lot of optimization, and changing things, and trying new products, and the business fundamentally changed from year one, where it was a one product, to now it really is… Michael, the CEO, his core skill seems to be sourcing and developing novel and interesting products.
And so, the business itself changed. That necessitated a new website. And then three, you’d been on the thing for several years, and when you start looking at other sites, you start to think, starting to get a little envious and think like, “Well, what if my site looked like that?”
Andy Bedell: Yep. Those were all the things, and for me being more of a functionality and kind of numbers guy, I was just kind of a little bit worried, but then once you just see the site, you’re kind of like… Well, you don’t even really need to look at the numbers to know that it’s gonna perform better.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah, it was such a stark difference, and like absolutely, credit to your designer. We didn’t design that new site. This was the first time we worked with a design that came out of Webflow, which was really cool, because the mockup was a working website that we could see and know exactly this is how it’s gonna work.
On the other side of it, it sounds like you would absolutely do it again. What are some of the… What’s some of the core benefits you got from upgrading themes?
Andy Bedell: Well, first off, I just wanted to give a quick shoutout to Justin, who is our designer. I know-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Oh, so good.
Andy Bedell: So, thank you Justin, and Justin did add the Webflow process to our… We didn’t use Webflow before we started working with Justin, and that’s actually been really, it’s kind of really helpful to use, because it’s really easy to use. But anyway, the biggest things from upgrading are I haven’t run, it’s really hard to run traditionally, or an A-B test, like the VWO or Google Optimize, so you do half and half with new themes. So, we actually haven’t done that, but just overall our conversion rate has increased, so that’s one big win from changing, from the upgrade.
But then everything else has more to do with our workflow, really. The design is really great, but yeah, just really being able to just customize everything and having every bit of it adaptable by my staff, who aren’t coders, who are more marketing people, because you, as you know, it’s like if you have a marketing person who really understands kind of like the hooks and the sales parts of it, but then they give it to a coder and they don’t really understand the importance, and you’re kind of missing a designer in between. You just never really…
Kurt Elster: Right.
Andy Bedell: And so then, and also designing something to be a really good piece of marketing, it’s actually very iterative, right? And so, it’s like you do one, you try one thing, and then you’re like, “Ah, maybe change this, and change this,” and you get ideas while you’re designing, right? So, if you have one person that’s kind of the brains behind the design and the other person’s actually doing it, then that just makes it harder for that whole iterative process to work out. And so, now Alyssa can be much more nimble and really… She can come up with an idea and she has… I have Keith on my team, and Michelle on my team, who are our photographers and videographers, sort of the whole KeySmart family here, but I have them on my team and so she can write shot lists and get stuff made, get pictures made right away, and then within a day we can have the whole website kind of changed up, stuff like that. So, we got a really good workflow going on now. But yeah-
Kurt Elster: I’m really proud of that site, and I haven’t told you this, but we’re writing up a big, fancy case study about it, but my copywriter is so busy, she will get to you in September, and then we’ll go over it. Okay, so two questions for you before I let you go. Paul and I discussed earlier our predictions for Q4 and what the heck’s going on with shipping. So, first, let’s hear what are your Q4 predictions?
Andy Bedell: I mean, well, just for me or for just in general?
Kurt Elster: Why not both?
Andy Bedell: Yeah. Well, for KeySmart it’s gonna be interesting, because we’ve had all these new Clean products, which have been really, really successful. But then again, it’s like do you really want to get some disinfectant wipes for Christmas? So yeah-
Kurt Elster: Maybe!
Andy Bedell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kurt Elster: I’d like an awesome flashlight. I’ve bought that flashlight you sell, which is just the best flashlight ever. I’ve given that to four people now.
Andy Bedell: So, we do have a lot of really cool products and new stuff coming out. There might be a new KeySmart coming out soon. But anyways, so we got a lot of stuff going on, so we’ve really got a ton of new emails, and so I would bet that we double last year’s Q4. But then again, it’s kind of like man, we had a really good Q1 or whatever. Unfortunately, when the pandemic started, I guess it’s Q2, we did really, really well. So, we’ll see how we do compared to that, really.
And then just as a whole, yeah, it looks like shopping, that it’s becoming like a death cycle, right? Mallgeddon or whatever for these… It’s just a circle of just a lot of these stores aren’t gonna be open, and so a lot of people are gonna need to shop online, but who knows with Trump and everything with the postal system what kind of capacity we have, right? I’ve heard Amazon has had to slow down their advertising or stop advertising because they just can’t fulfill anything anymore. They can’t push things through.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Andy Bedell: And you know, they have the biggest private fulfillment networks of any-
Kurt Elster: Well, all right, so here’s a question for you. This is the last question, then I’m gonna let you go. If someone, if you ship an item to a customer and you’ve got tracking, and the tracking shows it’s moving, and then… But it never gets delivered because it just disappeared along the way, which I’ve now had happen several times with USPS. What do you do?
Andy Bedell: Well, if you’re the customer of if you’re the business?
Kurt Elster: You as the merchant, if a customer emails you and goes, “Hey, I didn’t get my stuff.” And you can check the tracking and the tracking shows it shipped, it hit a routing center, and then that was it. It just never updated again.
Andy Bedell: You try and shake them for a couple days, honestly. You try and have your… You try and delay for a little bit. Even Amazon will do that. They’ll try and delay the customer for a couple days, because lots of times it ends up shaking out, where it’ll… Honestly, usually it does shake out, and if it’s like a widespread issue, like if there’s hundreds of packages that are all waiting, then you can kind of guess that they’re gonna shake out within a few weeks. Like when the protests, like when the pandemic happened and then the protests happened, you got a lot of things, like things were just sitting in places.
And so, but the systems aren’t built for things to just sit there for a while. You know what I mean? They’re built for them to move one to the next. And so, then when things start piling up, they get to the bottom, and then it can get scanned, and all of a sudden, so sometimes they make it out anyways, but eventually you just gotta… You have to refund it. Make sure that the person’s not like a repeat offender where it’s just like they’re just taking advantage of you, but yeah, we have to refund those things. So, you’d have to make sure that… You have to allot for that when you’re doing your accounting.
Kurt Elster: All right, Andy. I’ll let you go, and I’ll see you in VR this weekend.
Andy Bedell: All right, all right. Sounds good. Talk to you later.
Kurt Elster: See you, Andy. Thank you. You want to teardown a website?
Paul Reda: All right, fine.
Kurt Elster: Slip it in and then we’re done.
Paul Reda: We can slide in Biden. It’s pretty boring. Just like Joe.
Kurt Elster: Oh! That’s why they picked him. He’s inoffensive. And those teeth. Joe Biden’s teeth. My God.
Paul Reda: He does got some chompers on him.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. No, there’s no way that those are not like veneers, or caps, or something. I see those, I’m like, “I wish my teeth were like that. I want chicklets. Just perfect chompers.”
Paul Reda: Good old Joe.
Kurt Elster: All right. I’ve got… What is this URL again?
Paul Reda: store.JoeBiden.com.
Kurt Elster: Thank you. I’ve got store.JoeBiden.com loaded up in front of me and the very first thing I noticed, it is clean, and uncluttered, and inoffensive.
Paul Reda: Just like Joe.
Kurt Elster: Just like Joe as one might think. I’m gonna hit view theme, or view source, and in view source I want to see which theme it’s running. You know, Shopify used to stick the theme ID into the source code, and I think they stopped.
Paul Reda: No, if you search for theme, it shows up as like a JSON element.
Kurt Elster: Oh my God, it’s on BigCommerce!
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s on BigCommerce, dude.
Kurt Elster: Oh, we gotta go! Oh no! Oh! No!
Paul Reda: I told you that. That’s why we didn’t do it in the first round when we did this months ago during the primary. We skipped Joe, because he was on BigCommerce.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that darned Joe!
Paul Reda: But now by getting the nomination, he’s earned his way onto our podcast.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right. I’m glad I hit view source, though. Number one, they’re running Optimizely, so they’re doing some split testing on here. And that’s interesting. They’ve got what appears to be the Facebook code put in manually, and this is my favorite part. No search engine uses meta keywords anymore. I don’t know why you would put meta keywords into a site, like you do title description, and you used to be able to put keywords in. You’d just use that to stuff keywords.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I was… Remember when we were in a meeting, Downtown Chicago, with an ultra high-end marketing company-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like legit high end. We were intimidated until what happened?
Paul Reda: Until the doofus who was like the highest ranking guy in there was like, “Well, can’t we just put a bunch of keywords in the bottom of the page and make it black text and make our site rank higher in Google?”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And then we had learned from a previous bad experience that he was easy to rile up, so then we had to act like that was a legitimate question and politely explain why that was a terrible idea, please don’t make us do that.
Paul Reda: I thought I said something shitty to him and then he like was sarcastic the rest of the meeting.
Kurt Elster: Oh, he could not wrap his head around the fact that you had alphabetically ordered something on a page. It was like a list of brands and you’d alphabetically ordered it using PHP. We were WordPress developers back then. That was many years ago, man. That was old school Ethercycle. And he was like, “Well, how does it work?” And you were politely explaining it and he just snaps. He goes, “Thanks. I know. I’ve known how the alphabet works for 40 years, Paul.” And you could hear a pin drop, because you didn’t know what to say.
Paul Reda: And I was like, “You asked me how it worked, asshole.”
Kurt Elster: And the answer was it’s alphabetical. It’s like look, I’m not… Sorry that you couldn’t ask the question right. Anyways, so we’re doing this teardown here. All right, you want these keywords? Biden for President webstore. Team Joe Store. You would think Joe Biden would be first. Joe Biden. Merch, gear, official shits, and it just keeps going like that.
Paul Reda: Bumper stickers, hat, Team Joe shirt, yard sign, mug.
Kurt Elster: I don’t want to… I’m never doing a yard sign.
Paul Reda: Well, you know, yard signs, that was like a famous original Obama thing, was that-
Kurt Elster: His yard signs were like cool, and unique, and interesting.
Paul Reda: Well, but-
Kurt Elster: He had that Shepard Fairey stuff.
Paul Reda: There was a famous story about it, though, and that previously campaigns would give away yard signs because they would be like, “Oh, well, it’s free advertising for the campaign. It shows that everyone in this area is supporting the campaign. Yard signs are a net positive.” And the Obama campaign was like, “Yeah, those things cost us money, we need money to run for president. Yard signs don’t get votes out. If you want a yard sign, pay for it, because it’s merch.” And people were mad about it. And the Obama campaign was like, “We don’t care.”
And of course, because they won in 2008, that retroactively made every decision they made the correct one. Anyway, so the Joe Biden store, it’s kind of boring. I don’t like this thing on the navigation where it’s you hover over the main nav elements and you gotta click to bring the dropdown up. Always hate that.
Kurt Elster: I do! Well-
Paul Reda: Very boring.
Kurt Elster: I used to like that, but it’s no longer.. 20 years ago, when we used to argue about whether or not you should even do dropdown menus or flyout menus, we’d argue about how they should function. And whether you like it or not, the standard now is on hover, the thing pops open. Not on click.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re just plain dropdown menus. I noticed like the common theme is these presidential stores are often quick and dirty, and very clean, and just not a lot to it. I notice they’ve got across the top it’s got an announcement bar, obviously this week they announced, Biden announced his VP pick, and so across the top, “Get your Biden Harris gear here. Shop now.” So, I like that they have a call to action button. It appears to go to a Biden Harris collection. And it also matches the big hero image and the title is Shop the Newest Biden Harris Gear. Now, what I don’t like is this is entirely an image, not text.
And this site should be accessible, what… But there is no alt text in there.
Paul Reda: Oh, Joey.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Bad boy. All right, now how do I get back? There we go. And then we scroll down, and it just goes, “Team Joe Gear.” And it’s the gear, and you buy it. We don’t have product reviews. When you get to the bottom, there’s no footer. Oh, administered by BumperActive.com. So, they’re outsourcing all of it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then we have like our… The compliance statement. Okay, so we’ve got some… Which… Well, I suppose we should go to a collection and it desperately wants us to go to this Biden Harris gear.
Paul Reda: Yeah, get the Biden Harris gear. I think we’re gonna get the Biden Harris navy t-shirt, because the shirt offers the biggest chances to nitpick-
Kurt Elster: There are two things I like, though.
Paul Reda: Nitpick at things.
Kurt Elster: They call the official store, in the logo anyway, they call it the Biden Victory Fund.
Paul Reda: Because that’s where the money’s going. This is… Remember from last time, folks. This is a political donation legally. You may be getting a shirt in exchange, but you’re making a political donation.
Kurt Elster: That’s how they set it up?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then I also like that let’s say your store is a micro site, like you’re a content publisher like Hoonigan, and then your store is not like the core part. Well, what do you do when people go to the store? Like how does… A lot of people worry, who are in that situation, worry about like, “Well, what’s that relationship?” And so, they’ve done something clever here above the logo. There’s a link with a left arrow and it says Biden for President. And I assume that goes back to the site proper.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You’re not… No one’s landing, their first landing is on the Joe Biden Store. You’re landing on JoeBiden.com and then you’re going to the store.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Unless you type in one of those keywords.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. Of course.
Kurt Elster: Team Joe Yard Sign.
Paul Reda: Team Joe Yard Sign.
Kurt Elster: And so, I noticed the collections, I cannot sort them. There’s not a lot of products. But I can’t sort them. They’re four wide on desktop. And there’s no product reviews, which that would just be a horror show to moderate.
Paul Reda: Oh, God.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s no filtering, but again, not a ton of stuff. There’s a Biden Harris facemask. We got some old school pins here.
Paul Reda: Well, on the t-shirt-
Kurt Elster: The yard sign’s 25 bucks?
Paul Reda: Yeah, because they’re like, “Screw you. Go give us better stuff.”
Kurt Elster: The t-shirt is 30 bucks. The hat’s also 30 bucks. Everything is 30 bucks.
Paul Reda: I like the-
Kurt Elster: And none of this is exciting. I want… Remember Andrew Yang had fun stuff?
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, there’s nothing great. There’s nothing that-
Kurt Elster: There’s nothing that in any universe either of us would buy.
Paul Reda: Some of the buttons are kind of cute. There’s a-
Kurt Elster: Let’s go back there.
Paul Reda: There’s a coffee mug that says Cup o’ Joe on it that’s pretty good.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s basically a dad joke.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, again, fitting with the campaign. And then if you look at the shirts, I don’t know if they have, but there’s one that’s on a lot of stuff. It’s the Young Joe Biden shirt, where it’s like the thirst trap Joe, if you’re really into like 1960’s Joe Biden.
Kurt Elster: So, I go to t-shirts? Thirst trap Joe.
Paul Reda: It’s under all the-
Kurt Elster: Oh, there’s some good ones in here. Joe is a Willie Big Deal.
Paul Reda: I don’t get it.
Kurt Elster: It’s a Willie Nelson pun.
Paul Reda: Oh geez. That’s bad.
Kurt Elster: There’s an aviators one. I’m surprised they don’t have anything about the Corvette he famously owns. He’s got that ‘60s Corvette.
Paul Reda: Yeah, there should be one of him and like-
Kurt Elster: Him and the Vette?
Paul Reda: Him and the Vette.
Kurt Elster: With the aviators on?
Paul Reda: With a Mustang. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: We Choose Science Over Fiction. All right, so let’s go with the thirst trap Joe, which they label a Young Joe Biden t-shirt. Oh, there’s an interesting thing happening here. You know, we’ve talked… Look at the apparel size. It defaults to medium.
Paul Reda: It defaults to medium. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Isn’t that weird?
Paul Reda: I noticed that. And I clicked around. I was like, “Oh, are extra small and small out of stock?” They’re not.
Kurt Elster: So, what we have… In the past, we talked about this anytime a store has product options, and especially in apparel. Most, in Shopify, it will default to… The default behavior is it will just select the first available variant. Because variants are sorted from small to large, that’s often extra small, and then you have people who get excited, buy the shirt, and then realize they ordered extra small, they have to do an exchange. So, our advice is usually, “Hey, don’t default. If you have this problem, don’t default to a selection.” Do the add to cart button just is enabled, says, “Pick your size.” Then they pick their size, then they can buy.
So, here, it’s just a little… They have clearly tried to solve for this a different way and have it just default to medium, as medium is gonna fit more people than extra small. They’ve got the size chart right there, though. We always complain when size charts aren’t there.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That size chart… Perfect. Well done. Exactly what you need to do.
Kurt Elster: It’s perfect. Tells you how to measure and it’s specific to this product. And so, I want the large unisex. It’s funny that they have unisex or women’s.
Paul Reda: Well, those are like the two cuts of shirt.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Unisex really though means men’s. They got social share buttons and a print button. I don’t know that we necessarily need the print button.
Paul Reda: What if we gotta print out the listing?
Kurt Elster: Want to print the listing? Compare them? Print out several, lay them out? God, I just can’t pick!
Paul Reda: Well, then you bring it to Trump, of which one he wants, and he takes his Sharpie and he circles the one he wants, and then you gotta go back to the internet and buy it.
Kurt Elster: I’m gonna disable comments on this.
Paul Reda: That’s what he does!
Kurt Elster: I know that’s true. I’ve read the tell-all books, as well.
Paul Reda: Listen, he passed his dementia test. He doesn’t have dementia. He’s very proud.
Kurt Elster: Okay, count backwards from 100 by 7s.
Paul Reda: That’s hard. You know, my brother, he was like, “Yeah, that was the test they gave me after…” He fell off his bike down a hill in San Francisco and cracked his skull and had like a major concussion.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Paul Reda: And that’s what they gave him. He didn’t pass it. Like an hour after getting a concussion.
Kurt Elster: So, you know, it may be harder than you think. So, on this page, they’ve got a tab description, but it only has one tab. So, we could probably do away with that. And it does, it says it’s just like a default thing. Young Joe Biden. Purchase is a donation to Biden Victory Fund. Orders ship within 10 days. See, that’s important. Tell people when they’re gonna get that stuff. But I’d put that in the product form. And then interestingly says, “Union printed and made in the USA.” That I would do… That stuff I would just do like 100% cotton, union printed and made in the USA, I would make those icons.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I agree.
Kurt Elster: Could be badges by the product form.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Underneath add to cart, above those stupid social buttons we would tell them to get rid of?
Kurt Elster: Oh, for sure.
Paul Reda: And you gotta remember, these stores are very much afterthoughts to campaigns.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They’re not thinking too hard about this. And you could see the whole site’s red, white, and blue.
Paul Reda: I clicked add to cart and this is good. Really telling us that you added something to the cart.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Okay! One item was added to your cart. What’s next? And it really… Honestly, the cart confirmation window, it’s a modal cart we call this, this is better than the product page.
Paul Reda: No, this is really good.
Kurt Elster: The photo’s bigger, the info is laid out clearly. It gives me more info than the product page did. That’s interesting. And then it’s got-
Paul Reda: What are your thoughts on this? On the product page, when you mouse over the image, it does the zoom in on within the image box. I don’t like that. I prefer the click to get the bigger version, not the zoom in thing.
Kurt Elster: I agree with you.
Paul Reda: I find the zoom in thing jarring.
Kurt Elster: I also know from usability studies that I pay too much for subscriptions for that it’s like something like 40% of people, not that they’ll look at… A majority of people will look at photos. 40% of people, literally the first thing they do is go straight to the photos and zoom in. So, you… The answer is 100% you want the ability to zoom in. As to which one is the right way, I’m not sure. But honestly, like the mouse over one is neat because there’s no click. If I just accidentally mouse over, I’m zoomed in.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But the click one I like. Honestly, I don’t know why we can’t do both, like I hover over, and it zooms in and moves all around, or I click, and it opens. I think that’s how Amazon works.
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Let’s see. I’m gonna go to the click the cart. It’s got a little drawer cart. View cart. Let’s see what this looks like. Oh, it’s got my subtotal. It’s got a shipping calculator, which is an unnecessary. It puts my sales tax right in here, that’s interesting. And-
Paul Reda: Tells you right now the Team Joe Store webstore is only able to ship within the U.S.
Kurt Elster: I assume that’s some… Either they don’t want to do it, or that’s a limitation.
Paul Reda: It’s illegal to take political donations from foreign nationals.
Kurt Elster: Oh. And then here, the Team Joe Store is only able to ship within the U.S. Would you like to add an additional donation? Let’s see what we got here. We’ll throw them 25 bucks. I don’t even have to… It’s just one click. If you just click 25 it immediately does it.
Paul Reda: Oh, of course.
Kurt Elster: And we’re gonna continue as a guest. To continue as a guest, it requires an email address. Oh, I’m gonna get emailed for the rest of forever.
Paul Reda: They need that shit. They want that email.
Kurt Elster: Oh! Man.
Paul Reda: It’s just gonna be like, “How you doin’, Champ?” You’re gonna be watching a movie and like the sex scene’s gonna come on and you’re gonna get an email from Joe Biden that says, “Lookin’ pretty racy there, sport!”
Kurt Elster: Heard you’re into cars. Have you seen my Vette?” No, I was distracted by the teeth. Joe Biden’s teeth! Campaign finance… So, then it’s got the address form, but they’ve modified it. Campaign finance law requires us to obtain your occupation, employer, and to verify the following statements are true. And then, so I put in my employer and application. When we did the other ones, they all have to do this by law. And then I have to certify that like a series of statements are true, and it won’t give me a shipping method until I’ve actually put in my address. So, we’re gonna put in my address, and Matt Brodie is gonna make sure no one could see this nonsense. Actually, I put in the Ethercycle address. That’s fine.
And here we go. Ship by weight. $4.50. Very reasonable. And we know they’re doing weight-based shipping. So, I assume this thing’s going First Class Mail at $4.50.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I can add order comments. Love the teeth and the Vette, sport. Continue. This is a one-page checkout, which truthfully I don’t like, but I know a lot of people obsess over them.
Paul Reda: Really?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, really it depends on the audience, whether it works or not. And when you’re adding all these extra fields to it, like a one-page checkout makes sense if you don’t have a ton of fields. But personally, I think they’re messy. I don’t like them.
Paul Reda: Well, and again, we went over this months ago. These stores face a very special issue in that there’s certain amounts of data that they absolutely have to collect and certain types of orders they absolutely have to reject and all that other stuff. So, they face a harder hurdle to clear than a lot of other merchants.
Kurt Elster: All right. We have done it. We have torn down the Joe Biden Store. It was like literally every other presidential store. Entirely mediocre, but carefully crafted.
Paul Reda: He’s no fun. It was no fun.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and you’re right, the thirst trap Joe Biden is clearly the best shirt they sell.
Paul Reda: And the Cup ‘O Joe mug.
Kurt Elster: But like if these are legit donations and you really… You want this to work, you gotta have… You gotta treat it like an apparel store and have some interesting stuff.
Paul Reda: I think they were kind of like, “Listen, buddy. We got the nomination. We don’t want to have to ship you a goddamn shirt. Just send us some cash.”
Kurt Elster: This has been a fabulous episode. Let’s go out on some Yakety Sax.
Paul Reda: I’m gonna go down in your basement and play more VR.
Kurt Elster: All right. I’ll meet you down there.