S02E02 Creating a Category While Building a Compelling Strategic Asset | Steve Wasik

And, you know, I love this part of the story because you, you know, you, you grew up in, you know, consumer CPG brands that, you know, through the, you know, the advent of the mobile phone and everything else.

And, You know, it ends up that, you know, the direct to consumer and social media was the real engine that or the channel that really fueled this growth.

Tell us a little about, you know, how you kind of slayed that market.

I mean, tell us about that, because I know you, you know, you obviously have worked many channels and there's a retail channel on YouTube.

you know but this was the one that really caught fire tell us about that because you're you're kind of one of the pioneers of the dtc social media um you know uh brands

yeah yeah well it was um you know back in 2017 2018 when we started advertising you know facebook instagram that was a really effective way to reach people both through paid social as well as through organic social and it still is for us it's gotten a lot more competitive a lot more expensive but um For us, it was, again, another no-brainer that we really had to sell direct to consumer for this reason.

I'll show you this product here.

This is like a men's size 10 insole.

Well, this insole, we have 15 different varieties.

So if you're a men's size 10, there's 15 different products that could be right for you because we have three different top cover thicknesses.

That's depending on your sport.

For instance, a basketball sneaker has a lot more room than a football cleat, which is tighter fitting.

And a soccer shoe or boot definitely is even tighter fitting than the football cleat.

So you have to understand what sport the athlete is playing.

And these are some of the questions we ask when they go out of their order.

What sport are you playing? Of course, you ask the gender and the shoe size, which is common amongst most shoes and insole companies.

But we also ask the age and then we ask for the body weight and the age, gender and body weight are the key determinants for the spring strength.

Because a 300 pound nose tackle needs more spring action than a 100 pound cheerleader.

Because we're literally putting springs in their shoes.

So back to my comment, this one product, your size, men's size nine, there's 15 different, there's three times five, 15 different varieties.

Well, most retailers are not going to stock that.

And we could just pick the middle of that and pick three or four SKUs And sometimes, someday we will.

But for now, the direct-to-consumer model allows us to really personalize the product for consumers.

And we offer the product in 16 different sizes, too.

So that starts to get up there.