speaker-1: Absolutely. I mean, I still at the end of day it’s it’s human conversations, it’s iteration, and it’s just trying to be one percent better every day. Honesty Commerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today. Honesty Commerce is proudly produced by Electric Eye, a Shopify Plus. partner helping e-commerce brands sell more with strategic design and development. Visit electrigueye.io for more information. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest E commerce. Today I’m welcome to the show the director of e-commerce at Liberty Safe, Casey Wees. Casey, welcome to the show.

speaker-0: Chase excited to be here and chat about honest e commerce.

speaker-1: absolutely. so for those that are unaware, let’s talk about your current gig. you know, what are the types of products you’re bringing to market over there at Liberty Safe? Yeah.

speaker-0: So at Liberty, we are a home and firearm safe company. So pretty much a big metal box, steel box, it’s pretty house to keep things secure. we really want people to protect what’s most important to them. So it could be firearms, it could be heirlooms, it could be documents. think about things that are irreplaceable, if you will, things that are really important at that point in your life that you should secure. we offer A plethora of safes for your needs, anything from small to very, very large for like a collector, if you will.

speaker-1: Absolutely. And we are absolutely gonna talk about Liberty Safes, but we’re gonna save that for a little bit. especially knowing how heavy they are. I’m sure there’s some interesting things you have to solve for with with shipping that product. Yes. but you know, your career in e commerce didn’t start there. So I guess take me back in time. Where do we wanna start this conversation?

speaker-0: Yeah, so I think the the fun thing about my my career path is kind of where I started, which is really early on. I mean, I’ve been in the econ lane for 20 years. I got my start with a mom and pop shop in North Lake Tahoe, a ski and snowboard shop. That’s really where I started. we showed up on the space in the digital space to sell ski and snowboards online, and we were really competing at that time with the bigger guys, but we showed up with a footprint, right? We were very small, but we packed a punch and it was really fun because it was It was my first like Fourier into data and saying, man, I can really impact tomorrow based on what I know today in e comm. And that was really fun to me because I had kind of been in this marketing, traditional marketing space in my head for so long, like that’s where I thought I wanted to be. Where I was working, there was this need to kind of bridge the gap between marketing and digital. And I stepped into that and I was like, Okay, this is really cool. So it was really a pivotal point too for me to say, okay, nope. Marketing’s great, but I think I can kind of combine these and go into that digital space where things are impacted a lot faster. You see a result a lot faster than you would with like a traditional marketing, like showing up and doing an event’s great, but that return is like months later, right? Whereas with e comm, I quickly figured out that this this was a lot more fun to see results, right? It was almost that instant satisfaction. and then I continued actually in that space. I mean, the majority of my career has been in the outdoor industry. and then I went from the retail side to the manufacturer side, and that’s primarily where I have been with one stop at Orvis, which is a apparel and and fishing and hunting and dog gear company out of Vermont. But primarily sitting on the manufacturing side, which has been really interesting too, right? You have to you’ve got a fine line with selling direct to consumer, but then also supporting your your dealer network and your specialty retailers, right? So you’re kind of Trying not to compete with yourself while competing with yourself at the same time. and so kind of just meandering through all the ebbs and flows of digital in 20 years has been very interesting. Like, I I liken where we are with AI right now to where we were 15 years ago with SEO, right? It’s like it’s this whole thing, and really at the end of the day, it comes back to content, right? And that’s where we we started with. If you went to MozCon back in like 2012 or 2014 in Seattle, it was con Content was king, right? Like that’s all we talked about. And now you’re kind of having this conversation with AI and and LLMs and how you show up there. Well, it’s content based. So it’s kind of like everything’s cyclical in fashion. I think it’s somewhat cyclical in e com as well. Absolutely.

speaker-1: Absolutely. I’ve got already a dozen more questions for you, Casey. And I knew this was going to be a fun conversation. Take me back to 2006. How are you selling online? What is the software? Is it custom? Was it something? I know it wasn’t Shopify. What was it?

speaker-0: So yeah, our front end was custom. and our back end, my goodness. I’m I’m gonna totally botch. I don’t even remember what it was, but we had a we had an ERP that we were able to connect to. they were based out of Henderson, Nevada, but I am drawing a blank on what they were called. But yeah, so basically we had a web dev guy that he not only ran built all the front end in the UX, but he also did all the back-end tech stuff too, of being like you know, how the connector worked basically to make sure inventory was correct on the website. and I think back to that and the UX and and again, cyclical and things that change, you know, we didn’t have filtering. You basically had to just go and kind of crapshoot at what you wanted. But over time, we worked towards that. But again, I feel like it was especially in the outdoor industry, it was so early on in terms of adoption of direct to consumer that we weren’t road mapping. We weren’t testing. We were just kind of shopping on our own and bringing that back to the table. Being like, what if we tried this or what if we tried that to try to make the experience a lot better? But yeah, it was a really interesting interesting time and space to be in where now where you have basically all these like plug and play like Shopify where it’s really a merchandiser’s dream versus like a Salesforce experience, right? but yeah, it was very custom built, all in house.

speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve also talked to a few folks that w had been around back then. and yeah, one of the things was it was always kind of just like a really interesting way to to sell online. Some were, you know, saying they were online, but it was actually a, you know, we had a phone number and you had to call in and it was more mail order in that regard. do you remember you know, where you were working when some of the more Plug and play type platforms released and did you guys adopt them quickly? And how did that kind of change the game?

speaker-0: Yeah, so from from that first role I went in house to a pretty prominent ski and snowboard manufacturer in the Pacific Northwest and that was ten brands under one umbrella. And while I was there, again, home baked, CMS, you know, everything was done in. We had a we had a web services department. They managed all of that stuff. we were selling completely online too, like full cart, you didn’t check out. Very interesting model business model there, but That is really when well it was demandware then, it wasn’t Salesforce, yet that’s when demandware started to show up into the space and realized that there was money in the outdoor industry and started presenting, hey, this is the solution you need. And at that time, the company I worked for, the parent company, was called Jarden Corp, and it like basically Mr. Coffee and Rubbermaid. And they were moving all of their brands to to Salesforce. So towards the end of that role, that’s where we were or sorry, demandware. That’s where we were. We started to kind of go into that demandware space. But if you think about it, even then, it was still heavy debt. You still had to have, you know, a pretty big dev team in-house, both both back end and front end, to make that stuff work. It wasn’t where we are with like some of the Shopify instances we’re seeing now. And even demandware is starting to try to play into that a little bit more too for Salesforce. But that towards the end of my role there and then into my next role. I would say about around twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen is when that stuff started to really show up for me. in terms of WooCommerce and Shopify started coming in a lot more heavy handed, and that’s when they introduced Shopify Plus as this elevated experience for brands that really needed to see growth. so my next role after I left the K the the ski company, the manufacturer there, was when it does like a startup outdoor brand. And they were on WordPress with a cart plugin when I started there. We re replatformed to WooCommerce and then shortly after that we replatformed to Shopify Plus because we needed something else that was we needed to grow fast and WooCommerce wasn’t gonna do that for us. So that’s when it became clear that these platforms were starting to push back into that marketing and e com. space where you could kind of tell both stories at once, like on a home page and made it it made it easy for for the owners of those

speaker-1: What is the next big idea that could change your business? A pricing change? A new bundling strategy? Adding subscriptions? Tweaking your shipping offer? Most brands make these decisions based on gut feel. They roll out the change, hope for the best, and have no real idea if it helped or hurt their business. IntelliGems fixes that. It is an AI-powered testing platform that brings CRO level clarity to the decisions that actually move the needle. Not just button colors and headlines, but the big stuff. Pricing, offers, shipping, new apps, even major site changes. Brands like Ridge, Jones Road, and True Classics are using IntelliGems to test their most important decisions and see exactly how each one of those impacts profit before they commit. Momu Fuku used it to test promotional offers ahead of Black Friday and found the version that increased profit by about 28%. Mott and Bow ran structured pricing tests that drove roughly 30% more incremental profit. We use it at ElectricEye with almost every client we work with. And now IntelliGems has a free AI-powered audit that gives you three specific ideas that you can test on your store today. No commitment, no credit card, just three opportunities worth exploring. Head to intelligiums.io slash audit and get your free audit in just a few minutes. That’s intelligents.io slash audit. Intelligiums.io slash audit. As you have kind of grown in your career and grown in your role, what have you seen? Even like let’s let’s let’s narrow the window here. In just the last five years, how have you seen your role or someone in a similar role to you? How have you seen that position change in the last five years?

speaker-0: Yeah, I think the position is a little muddied sometimes. I think you end up kind of bridging this gap between being a s a strategist and an operator. But I think what we have now is tools that make the operation side a lot easier than it used to be. Right. I think we have tools now that really help build the strategy to then hand the operator, whether it’s yourself or or someone under you, right? it makes it a lot easier to kind of develop that strategy now. Whereas in the past you maybe had to go through like a business case and prioritization and and stuff. I think now we’re really in a in a great position of meeting the customer where they are a lot faster because of of the advancements and the tools that we are seeing for your tech stack. And I mean, Shopify alone does that easily for small brands. And then I think if you really know what you’re doing from an operator standpoint, you can add tools or not or do some customization on any platform that really gets you where you need to be. Nowadays I feel like it’s a lot faster. We’re moving faster to align with the th the speed of the customer.

speaker-1: Yeah. Not only is the platforms evolving and making it easier to be nimble and to react, but also it’s for better or for worse, AI is making it easier to be informed, but it’s to a detriment. And so I I kind of to that question is like with with AI coming in and everyone being an overnight expert and whatever they just ask their assistant. you know, on our end, we’ve seen some really interesting. exchanges where strategy is being driven by AI that has kind of no clue what’s going on. so how how would you say are our e commerce, you know, managers like yourself, directors, et cetera, what you know, how are they using AI the right way and then maybe what is like a wrong way to use it?

speaker-0: Think you nailed the wrong way already. I think that everybody’s really loaded down right now and e-comm. Like I and I don’t want to go too far into the weeds of like the economy and like kind of where we are, but like I think we’re all very much like, my god, traffic, we have this zero click attribution, like what are we doing? And I think I think there’s these instances where it’s like, crap, I gotta build my twenty twenty seven roadmap and my strategy and all this stuff, dump everything into AI, and then they think that they’re done. But to your point, there is this They don’t know, they’ve not done it, they don’t have the experience that that you as the operator or or director do. So I think that I’m seeing that too, where I’m things are coming out and you’re kind of being like, that that doesn’t seem right. And I I mean e even myself, I’ve done it where I’ve like, I just need to dump, brain dump and get things organized. And then it comes back to me and I’m like, but that’s not no. No, first of all, no. so that’s like I think we’re seeing some of that where you almost are leaning into AI as this easy button when in reality you still do need to roll up your sleeves and you do need to do, especially from the strategy side. And I’ll use Liberty Safe as an example, right? I’ve been having this conversation recently internally of I’ve been doing this for a long time. There are tried and true like tactics that work, but they’re not, right? And I’m I’m saying this from my business. Not necessarily I can’t I haven’t had these conversations with colleagues that are maybe doing apparel brands, right? we have a very unique product. And so there’s things where I’d think, if I merchandise this to the first slot, that’s gonna increase conversion. Well though no, that’s not necessarily true because we have such a span of pricing, right, in our in our offerings. So I am having to now learn again, which I love to do in a different industry and how those customers react. And sometimes I don’t think there’s AI for that. I think it’s really you have to understand the customer and you have to dig in, right? So While there is this easy button that is so wanted to be used and everybody’s like, just use AI, it’ll make it easier. I think there are some things that you still have to do yourself as a e com director or leader. I will say that I am working towards building agents to basically digest and and help with data though, right? Like when you have you’re using Shopway analytics or G A G A four, you’re using Adobe Analytics and whatever platform at Triple Whale, you still have all these like sources. And so how do you kind of build an agent to distill all that down with action? Right? So you’re not in the weeds every day. And then how do you build that into like a dashboard that you can share with ELT? I think that’s where we really need to get is out of the data weeds of how we business is performing and how we can react. That’s where I think you need to use AI the most. I think that there’s still the human touch for strategy and and that kind of stuff for for econ because we’re all still customers ourselves. So understanding that journey needs to be personal.

speaker-1: Most brands outgrow their legacy choices long before they switch. Bad platform decisions do not fail all at once. They fail slowly, then suddenly. First, it is one workaround, then another tool, then another integration that is duct taped on top. And eventually, your team is spending more time managing the stack than actually marketing to customers. Eventually, rebuilding is less painful than staying, usually when it starts to show up on the PL. That’s when scaling brands simplify and standardize on Clavio. Clavio is the AI first B2C CRM. It combines your customer data, email, SMS, analytics, and customer experience tools into one platform. So you’re not stitching together five different systems just to understand what your customers are doing. Your database updates in real time, your segments update automatically, your flows, campaigns, and personalization all run off the same source of truth. And that shift is why many brands are moving to Clavio. Brands like Dollar Shave Club have reduced total CRM stack costs by over 30% after consolidating onto Clavio. Multibrand operators like Mark Fisher have migrated multiple brands and drastically reduced the time required to execute CRM marketing. And brands using email and SMS together inside Clavio are seeing massive ROI compared to running channels in separate platforms. The big unlock is simplicity and scale at the same time. Clavio is built for marketers, not for engineers. It is built for online businesses just like yours, and it is built for where e-commerce is going, not where it was five years ago. If you’re running email and SMS across multiple tools, or you’re on a legacy platform and thinking about your next phase of growth, it’s probably time to look at Clavio. Go to Clavio.com slash honest and see why hundreds of thousands of brands have already made the switch. That’s Clavio.com slash honest. K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com slash H-O-N-E-S-T. The way I explained AI to my family and how it’s not going to take our jobs anytime soon is, you know, it’s not AI, it’s a large language model, and it is an amalgamation of all of the content that you put into it. So by definition, it is only going to be average at best. Yep. And so if you’re outsourcing strategic swings to AI, it’s gonna a it’s gonna give you a very mediocre strategy, which in this day and age will not help you, you know, stand out. And even to that, I see some people I mean, it’s just it’s honest it’s rude. It’s rude. Just don’t don’t copy and paste your AI slop to me. At least edit it. You know what I mean? Take away the answers you already know. Take away the answers or the questions that are not that that that make no sense to your you to your use case or your business at all. It’s like just just d do everyone that favor.

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Well I think it comes back to read it. Like I think you’re right. I think people are like they don’t read it. They just like d done deals, copy paste, and out it goes and

speaker-1: Yeah, your your AI is gonna talk to my AI and we’re gonna be millionaires.

speaker-0: Perfect. When do we start? But yeah, I think that there’s I think that’s a great point, you know, and I and I think you have to be careful. Like even when I was at Orvis, we we were on Salesforce Commerce Cloud there and they had their Einstein AI and it was kind of like, yeah, you can tell it this and this and this. And I’m like, but it fully wasn’t trained, and so we didn’t sometimes leverage it, you know, and and at the when I left there, they were just Salesforce was just starting to really push into like you could use it to write your product copy, right? Because it was sitting on your platform and it knew your product. I’m like, right, but doesn’t know the brand. It doesn’t know the voice. It’s just gonna black and white bullet it out, right? And so I think even then, which was I left there and twenty f last year. Losing time. You know, last year at twenty twenty five, it was still kind of this It still kinda wasn’t there. And I know there’s been like a ton of advancements, but I I do really think that if you’re gonna use it, just be smart. Make sure you’re double checking that it’s saying what you want it to say too and like not just the copy paste.

speaker-1: Yeah, exactly. but as I am being a naysayer about it, I am also one hundred percent a defendant of it. Like we use it all the time. I use it all the time. I think it has helped me in leaps and bounds and things that I do, you know, for for the agency and for our clients. And it it does a great job of if you have a good idea to helping helping you expand upon that idea to help find other angles for that idea. and so we’ve like evolved how we do CRO at the agency. and some of the tooling that we use to do so, you know, one of the first things we’re looking for is like, does it have an MCP connector? Can we pull this into our the, you know, we’re clo we’re a cloud-based company. you know, I feel like everyone has to pick a pick a an AI these days. But

speaker-0: Elaine.

speaker-1: you know, so we’ve we’ve got processes and we’ve got things and but like like you said, you get all these data inputs, And now we instead of looking for the answers in three different ways, it’s like we’re looking for the answer in i within Claude. And even by like driving hypothesis through, it’s like, hey, here’s a here’s a idea we have. Can you help us find maybe some document some some stuff to support this and also maybe to dis d dispute it throughout like all of these data sources and it’s been it’s been really fantastic and really speeding up kind of the ideation part of of C R O and coming up with a roadmap. And that’s it’s been that’s been a huge advantage lately that we found.

speaker-0: Yeah, and I’m not saying that we don’t use it, right? Like we definitely do. I mean, for us, that Liberty product images, right? Like we can’t shoot every individual safe because first of all, we don’t keep them in inventory, right? Like some of them we do, some of them we don’t. So and then part of like our safe finishes tell the story of the product. Like if you’re spending, you know, eight thousand dollars on a on a safe, like You want to know that that gloss is really gloss. And and we it’s really hard to get across digitally. And we have some AI that we use for our product configurators right now on our PD on our product detail pages. They they miss the mark. So now I’m going through and I am adding like real images. But again, like it’s it’s not feasible for us to shoot every safe in our studio. And also, how do you then tell that story in an inspirational way to the customer so they can see it in their space? Yes, we we are gonna implement an AR tool, but there still needs to be that inspiration aspirational moment on the product detail page. And so I’m using AI to build those images where I can p take a real room and I can take a real safe and I can put them together and the output is becoming it’s we’ve trained it enough that it’s it’s working pretty well. Like, nope, the colors can’t be too warm, they can’t be it needs to be more natural, not cool, not brown tones, not yellow tones, like And we’re using those a lot for a lot of our content now, not just on the product detail pages. We are using it for like performance marketing in ads or lifecycle marketing and emails and SMX and stuff like that. So we are trying to fill our content coffers because they are light and that is one way we can do it when we have a product that isn’t, you know, movable, if you will, easily. And to get into someone’s house, right? Like doing an actual in home product shoot is really hard, you know, and so we have to line those up and make sure we have photographers that understand the brand, et cetera, et cetera. So using AI for us to get that kind of content has been super helpful.

speaker-1: Also, I think just something that’s against your brand is I’m not gonna show you a picture of where my safe is in my house, right? UGC is kind of like an extreme like it’s just not an ask. You’re not asking people to to do that.

speaker-0: No. No. We actually had a a conversation once of like we have a social media partner that works with us for organic and what if we said well show us what’s in your safe and we’re like, Yeah, hard hard hard stop. That’s not gonna happen with our audience. They’re not gonna show us where is and they’re not gonna show us what’s in it either, you know? And we are it was really more of like a we wanna see like what how you’re organizing your safe because we just launched a new product, but Great questions, but again, this is why it’s important to have that human element in understanding your audience and knowing that there’s that line.

speaker-1: Here’s the truth, and nobody says out loud during Black Friday week: the real scoreboard for Black Friday Saber Monday doesn’t come out in December. It comes out in March. December just tells you how many people bought. March tells you whether you’ve actually built something with them, whether they come back, whether they’re worth more than the ad spend it took you to get them in the door. That’s the number that decides if it was a good Black Friday Saber Monday or just a busy one. If you want that March number to look good, The retention system needs to be built now, before the traffic hits, not after. That’s what Flovium does. They’re a lifecycle marketing agency for Shopify brands, Clavio Elite Master Partners, and they build the infrastructure that turns a first purchase into a habit, a habit into an advocate. So every dollar you’re about to spend on Black Friday, Saber Monday ads actually pays off. Get your free retention diagnosis this week, three weeks out, this last window before it’s too late to implement anything. Head to Flovium.com for more information. That’s flo-w-i-u-m.com, floweum.com. I am having fun watching AI get better at imagery. only in the like kind of where I can see it helping me in my workflows. Outside of it, I’m terrified about, you know, weaponization of di that type of stuff. Yes. But but like you know, oftentimes on when we’re dealing with clients and stuff, they’ll they’ll just they’ll be honest with you like, Hey, we just don’t have good, you know, content right now. Like What how can you help us? How can AI help us? And it’s slowly getting there. But that’s a conversation I find we’re having quite often is like, how can AI help us to make the design of this website and the content on this website better without us going out and hiring a photographer or a videographer to help create that content? And I and I’ve talked to a bunch of partners that we have in the space that are kind of at the forefront of that and they’re What I have heard is like you gotta put in a lot of work to get one specific type of thing. and at the end of the day, currently, and now we’re recording this right before Q four twenty twenty six, just to put a timestamp on this because I’m sure it will be a mute point when they release the next the next version of whatever AI is, but you know, it it just like it almost takes as much time to like prompt the AI to give you the good output as it would to be kind of to go do it the right way or the traditional way. and also just then depending on what the product is, yours, your use case is if this product’s huge and we don’t even carry it in stock half the time, there are reasons to go about it th this way.

speaker-0: We have a mix though, like right? Like we have we just did this great couple of pr shoots in Wisconsin. one for John Deere with some safes, like one of my our marketing coordinators, she w lives on a farm, like a rant. Like her family’s like seventh generation Wisconsin cattle farm, right? Like great content. And then they did like a couple other shoots in a house there with like a pool. Like we do mix it, but when you do that, it has to align, right? You can’t make this look one way and your your AI images look another way. So that’s been the the trick. And I and we actually have a a partner that we use. I’m not dumping this into a Claude or Ma you know or Manus or Chat GPT. This is through a partner that we that we use. they do a lot of stuff for like furniture like article or our house or stuff like that. So we’re we’re training it and it’s learning. But it to your point, yeah, it took a while for me to get it to where it wasn’t funky or you know, or it would change like under our locks it says made in the USA and it would change it to make it look almost like it’s in made in the USSR and I was like, This is weird. So we can still but we take we take every single output that we like and we send it to the photo team and they make sure the locks look right, they make sure the logos and the artwork look right and they will refresh that if needed, right? So but yeah, this again is like you still got you Jobs are safe for now ’cause it’s never gonna get it right.

speaker-1: Absolutely. And obviously your job is safe, but let’s pretend like it wasn’t and you had to start at a new company tomorrow, right? What is your playbook for the next ninety days? You’re coming in and you, you know, you’re probably hired to solve a s a problem, but you know, what are you looking to do over that first ninety days?

speaker-0: Yeah, my first thing is always path to purchase. Like where are the hiccups, where are the sticky points? I’m gonna dissect that funnel from all the way through. And I’m gonna not only that, I’m gonna look at where you’re dri what’s driving to those funnels, right? Like, you know, I think there’s this huge thing about like, okay, well, does your ad are are your ads dropping people to the right place? And that’s a very big thing. Is there a disconnect, right? So I’m always gonna start with the funnel. Because that’s gonna tell me where people are dropping off and then diagnose from there. and it could be where, you know, it could land back in a hey, we need to redesign the website or nope, we can do these quick things and this is a quick fix. But you know, in six to eight months we might want to start to kind of budget something else in to to address this. But I’m always gonna start at the funnel because that’s where your growth, you know, that’s where your growth comes from, especially if it’s gonna be revenue. And then on top of that is like who is in the funnel. and what are we showing them? What’s that intent? And are they seeing the right content at the right time? And again, I think this goes back to what I said earlier. AI is you know, the LLMs, that’s what they’re looking for is content. And so we know people are changing how they search. they’re having conversations with Google instead of just saying something near me or whatever, this is what I need. They’re having those conversations. So I think you have to make sure that content is answering those questions for those people or you’re not gonna be there. And so kind of that full funnel diagnosis is where I always start.

speaker-1: Absolutely. I I think that we do it on our end. Well, obvious obviously because we’re under the gun as an agency. It’s like you have to do good work quickly or we don’t trust you. So anyways, we we all we do it kind of like I always try to say like closest to the money. So we start at checkout and then like reverse from there. and just to give it to everyone that’s listening. So it’s checkout, and then we actually do post purchase and the sidecart and in checkout. Like those are all kind of we’re looking at those. Then we’re rolling back to like your main product page, templates, and PDPs, then collection page, then like home page, about page, and any page that’s getting some absorbent amount of traffic for some reason, maybe a high performing blog page or other kind of onzillary kind of page around I don’t know, content, like you said, right? Yeah. we do that. And then that’s kind of where our specialty ends. We’re not really super getting into funnels. We are doing a lot of landing page stuff, but like to take it a step further is like we would love to talk to the marketing teams. Like, all right, what ads are you what do these ads look like and where they, you know, you’re sending, you know, a a super branded ad with like a celebrity influencer to just like a basic landing like a basic product page that has no connection between that celebrity and like the offer that in the and it’s like, whoa, like this you can easily make this better. Just build a landing page that features that same content, right? Like there’s there’s some like low hanging fruit that just It’s obvious to us, but it’s also these brands are moving so fast and oftentimes these teams are so disconnected. it’s hard for them to like be like, You’re right, that is the b the best way to do this. It just wasn’t, you know there’s so much going on.

speaker-0: There’s so much going on. And I think too, when you so going back to that 90 days, what does that internal process look like too? Where do you sit within the team? Where do I sit within the team? Where is the marketing team? You know, who owns what? And understanding process too. Because I think even in the companies with the best process in in place, there’s still gaps, right? And I think even when I was at Orvis, you know, we would have those conversations about Where are you landing this? So like when we would do creative playbacks where we’d see everything the creative team had put together for a season launch, really cool, but where do you plan on landing customers for that? Like, you know, and so from the e com side, we were really in tune with that to be like, that doesn’t make sense now though. If you’re gonna drop them here, here, and here, or they would assume something existed when it really didn’t. we don’t have a landing page for that and be like, No, we don’t, because A, that’s not what we need or whatever, you know, some some sort of answer. So I think it’s really and yes, you’re right. Like start where the money is. And that’s that is where like why are people not checking out is where why aren’t they completion is like kinda where I start with that funnel. But yeah, definitely gonna always look at that first because that’s how you you’re gonna you you can find that low hanging fruit really fast or you can find a very big leaky bucket.

speaker-1: Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven’t. We’re releasing interviews like this every week. So don’t miss out. Now back to the interview. You just gave me an idea talking about like you you the team would build out this like awesome content for like a drop or you know the the next iteration of the product line. And it’s like where well, where are we dropping the customer and like how are we using that stuff? It’s like that goes to like instead of Solving once, like think about it in a way to solve forever, in a sense. So like when we come in and start working with Rand, sometimes we’re like, hey, like, we don’t need a landing page for this one time. It’s like, let’s have a landing page strategy for every time. Like, what are the common ways you’re trying to market on the calendar? you’re usually launching a collection and like let’s build out a landing page collection. Here are the common elements about these. And so then now you’re building a template once that. Now, like you don’t need to hire us to to do it for the next version of it. You can just clone it and change the content out and it just makes everything a little bit faster and a little bit more efficient. And with doing things more than once, you find the ways to optimize it and it just gets better and better and better.

speaker-0: Hundred percent. And I think what that comes down to is prioritization though too, right? So when you have leadership being like coming to you in mid mid season and being like, why aren’t these selling? And it’s like, well, because marketing didn’t prioritize us for that to be cont that content to be billed or whatever, right? And so I think there is this instance of not everything gets a landing page, and that is a sometimes very big friction point between e com and marketing. You know, they want to tell these like big fluffy stories. And I’m like, that’s cool, but I have goals I have to meet. So we can do some of this or we have to prioritize what gets a landing page experience versus what just drops to a normal collection. Yeah. You know, it you have to kind of start to draw some lines in the sand or we’re just gonna have websites built with landing pages. So

speaker-1: Yeah, that’s that’s very much inside inside baseball of working at a big company. It’s everyone has unfortunately you know, everyone has the vision and they should be on board with the vision of the company. That’s why you’re hired, that’s why you’re there, that’s why you’re giving them your their your the time and the energy. But also it’s like, Yeah, but my job is measured by this KPI and yours is measured by that and they are not aligned right now.

speaker-0: No, they are not aligned. And while I love enthusiasm, can we like compromise here? And you know, so sometimes there’s that instance where you might have two ad sets, right? But the message is different. Like this is a learn more versus a shop now, right? And you’re dropping them to two different places and both get to both can take the customer to either place, right? So if you’re dropping them to a PDP, you can send them via an internal link to the landing page and vice versa, right? So

speaker-1: Casey, is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience before I let you go today?

speaker-0: No, I think that was really fun conversation. It definitely you know, I think AI is just such a huge topic these days and I just think the one thing that everybody is just I always say is control what you can control, you know? And like sometimes with AI you wanna be like, this makes it so much easier, but just make sure that you’re still in control.

speaker-1: Absolutely. I mean, I still at the end of the day it it’s it’s human conversations, it’s iteration and it’s just trying to be one percent better every day. And that’s what we’re seeing, the brands that we’re working with that are actually making imp impactful improvements now heading into Q four. AI has only made the roadmap longer, but we’re still sitting down, picking one thing, doing it right, and moving on.

speaker-0: Yep, exactly. Exactly.

speaker-1: Awesome. Casey, if I am listening to this podcast and I want to check out Liberty States or potentially add you on LinkedIn, where should I go? What should I

speaker-0: LibertySafe.com. and one quick note on that, we are a US manufacturer, so very keen on supporting American workers, which is awesome. LinkedIn, Casey Wees.

speaker-1: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

speaker-0: Thanks, Chase. It was great to be here. We’ll chat soon.