How To Avoid Excessive Testing In Your Ad Accounts
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Trace Crawford, brand manager of Supply.co, shares insights on focusing on what works and how he avoids excessive testing in their account.
Trace discusses the strategy of running one campaign with multiple ad sets and using CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) to let the ads compete for spend. He also highlights the need to trust yourself as a marketer and focus on creating the best possible assets(even when we may feel imposter syndrome setting in). He then moves on to sharing a few of the breakthrough moments in growing an eight-figure shaving brand, including the success of their founder story ad, which didn't come without it's fair share of challenges.
Key takeaways:
The importance of focusing on what works and avoiding excessive testing
Why Brands need a clear message
How Supply will run one campaign with multiple ad sets as a CBO
The one thing every marketer should do to create the best possible assets
How focusing on these two internal things lead to successful strategies
Why these two offers worked best to manage Supply's inventory and in crease AOV
The landing page set-up that has helped Supply engage customers, capture leads, and provide personalized recommendations
To Learn more about Supply razors head here: https://supply.co
To Learn more about Trace you can follow him at https://x.com/BubbaDoesEcom
To learn more about the Foxwell Founders community or to join head here
Full Transcript
Tris Dyer (00:00.403)
So yeah, mean, what we can do is we can jump straight into it. Long story, can, do wanna give me like what you want your intro to be?
Trace Crawford (00:11.009)
for sure. Like, actually...
Tris Dyer (00:11.795)
So Trace Crawford, head of growth at Supply, is there any kind of, when you meet someone you're like, we do our supply, we do million raises a year.
Trace Crawford (00:23.682)
Man, you should just say we razors. We premium men's razors.
Tris Dyer (00:29.043)
Okay, and what kind of volume are you guys at? Like what kind of like give people kind of a context of like premium men's razors? Like are we talking like 50 million a year, 20 million a year, 10?
Trace Crawford (00:42.102)
We are low A figures.
Tris Dyer (00:43.975)
Low eight figure, okay. I'll call you an eight figure brand. Perfect. An eight figure razor brand. Internationally, by the way, I'll notice. I had an international eight figure razor brand. Brilliant. Love it. Okay, cool. I'll start us off and then Edwin will jump in and give us the, he'll give us the first question and then we'll go back and forward. We'll jam and then what we'll do in the end, we'll do an outro and we're all good. Any questions or anything that make you feel more comfortable?
Trace Crawford (00:47.31)
Do it
Trace Crawford (01:12.664)
don't think so. Everything looks good. I read through the questions. I feel good answering all of those. The only one I really have much on is the inventory question. I guess I can give general perspective on inventory and how we do it.
Tris Dyer (01:22.353)
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You're in a unique position in that, you say, eight figure brand running across multiple countries. Like not many people are doing that. So they're kind of the insights into that, into like what's going on, how that works, what you're thinking about. That kind of stuff is really what people will be looking for. Real quick, before we start, Edwin, it says you have it on open on a couple of different tabs. Do you want to knock one of the tabs off? I don't
Trace Crawford (01:41.049)
sure.
Edwin @ Snappic (01:42.059)
Edwin @ Snappic (01:48.241)
I I double checked that. I'm pretty sure it's...
Tris Dyer (01:53.359)
Everyone else is just checking on the backend is good to go.
Edwin @ Snappic (01:56.631)
I don't let me I'm gonna exit I'm gonna come back Quick a quick thing choice We're we're like we try to be animated when when we chat and so I might like You might say something and then we'll have a reaction like no or like get out of here Like what like don't get thrown off by it. Like just keep keep keep chatting
Tris Dyer (02:00.275)
tweet.
Tris Dyer (02:09.167)
Tris Dyer (02:12.999)
Hahaha.
Trace Crawford (02:16.91)
I love it.
Tris Dyer (02:17.777)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's super Yeah. Yeah, Trace is not like horns or anything. It's not like that. It's like actual like, my god, really, like, it's a bit more animated than than you would know. You can't actually get isn't hanging on this.
Trace Crawford (02:24.802)
Sounds good.
Trace Crawford (02:33.038)
I would like the horns, man, that would be way better if you just copped. Just know, next.
Tris Dyer (02:40.733)
So you can actually put the kind laughter and shoot it back. Can you hear
Trace Crawford (02:44.172)
I heard like a, it sounded like a, like a, like a wisp in here.
Tris Dyer (02:47.933)
Thank you.
Trace Crawford (02:55.854)
I got to have a really good
Tris Dyer (03:00.071)
Hang on. There's loads of ones. Hang on. There's this. So welcome. Welcome to Trace.
No, I haven't played with these yet. got to hang on. Let me see.
Trace Crawford (03:07.918)
thank you. I'm honored.
Tris Dyer (03:14.461)
So it's like how many, how many leaders do you need to screw in a light bulb?
Trace Crawford (03:14.606)
If you pull those out in the middle of this podcast, I'll just completely reset my entire brain.
Trace Crawford (03:25.25)
team.
Trace Crawford (03:29.966)
I'll it again.
Tris Dyer (03:30.985)
God, they're so bad. I'm not going to stop. Stop, stop, stop. It just keeps going. OK, let's get into it. Let's get into it.
Trace Crawford (03:37.738)
I do have a heater in the background right now. I don't know you all can hear that. I know you mentioned that in your messages.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:39.54)
to that.
Tris Dyer (03:45.42)
little bit, but I mean, if you're cold, don't like, don't let it kind of, you
Edwin @ Snappic (03:50.066)
Have a heater on? Why do you have a heater on?
Trace Crawford (03:52.686)
Hello.
My house gets so cold. I get really cold when I'm work, which is why I'm wearing a hoodie right now. I'm in Arkansas.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:58.65)
Where are you?
You're in Arkansas. Isn't it like super hot in the summer in Arkansas?
Trace Crawford (04:08.366)
Pretty hot it's not It's like 85 right now. It's actually pretty nice, but I get so cold when I'm inside my fiance loves the house like Freezing and I touched the heater. She'll come home and kill me. So Got like little yeah little little space heater life -changing
Tris Dyer (04:21.299)
Jesus.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:21.554)
Okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:25.626)
Okay, fair, okay.
Tris Dyer (04:25.819)
Interesting. I know. Okay, cool. Foxwell Founders, Trace, who's the head of growth of Supply. Okay, cool. Okay, super.
Trace Crawford (04:27.566)
That's
Edwin @ Snappic (04:30.356)
You get
Trace Crawford (04:35.074)
I was simply brand manager, not head of growth anymore. So that needs to be really accurate.
Tris Dyer (04:39.287)
okay. Brand manager. Perfect. Thank you for changing that. Okay. Apologies. I went off what you had on your Slack. was like, okay. Brand manager in, okay.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:41.0)
brain manager.
Trace Crawford (04:45.27)
Yeah, I'm to update it. Yeah, it's confusing title, I guess. Everyone always thinks I'm like the brand marketing manager, which I hate
Tris Dyer (04:55.731)
Brand manager. Okay, let's go for it. Hey guys, welcome to Foxwell Founders Forum. We are here with Trace Crawford, the brand manager of Supply .co. They are a eight figure international shaving brand around the world. They are selling like hotcakes. We are so proud to have you on the pod Trace and thank you for joining us. Edwin, do want to kick us off with your first question?
Edwin @ Snappic (05:18.93)
So Trace, I wanna set us up. Let's talk about letters to your younger self. When you were doing, now you are eight figures, right? But knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself back when you guys maybe were doing much less, maybe when you guys were doing 100K a month, and then when you guys were doing maybe like a quarter million dollar a month? What do know now that you wish you knew back
Trace Crawford (05:46.078)
Great question. First off, thanks for having me guys. I'm stoked to be here. Love the question, Going back to my younger self, how to give some advice that would be focus. That's advice I still give myself or give myself and the rest of our team now is focus. I know we're getting started and we're trying so many different things. mean, even if it's just in that account. Our business is largely driven by meta.
expanded now since we passed eight figures we've some more things but meta is still a core of our business and getting started meta was definitely the core of our business which in that case we are focused you know because we're only doing really one driver of acquisition but focus in terms like what we're doing inside of those channels just like a variety of campaigns overthinking things just trying to do so much different things for creative and just like not having
foundational understanding of the brand and what works. And this is something that I'm still learning and still kind of coming to terms with of like not testing everything to an extent.
Edwin @ Snappic (07:01.69)
not testing everything. you should
Trace Crawford (07:02.902)
Not testing everything. We test everything, but hiding behind like, we're going to test this. There's a lot of times where, like we still do this, but back in the day specifically where we would like, we're going test everything. And when you say that you enter the creative or the offer or the whatever you're testing with like, it's just a test. Like we're going to get data and learn. And so you don't really put your best foot forward. And so now that the shift has been like one,
going back to my core point of like focus, like, hey, we know what our core message needs to be. This is what we need to say, this is who we're talking to. This is what we're working on specifically right now. And this is what we need to execute on. But for testing it, like we're going to work on the base asset first, the core thing we're working on. We want to make that the best possible thing and then build the test off of that and not build the test. That would be one of the biggest pieces of advice. We just wasted so much time and money.
testing ads and landing pages and offers, everything that goes into Meta, just to test. we just like, that mindset, yeah, we were educated to
Tris Dyer (08:12.211)
too much. And so you were testing, you were saying you're just testing to test to test to test, but you weren't learning anything from these tests, you were getting a lot
Trace Crawford (08:19.042)
I mean, we learn things and a lot of times it's like, yeah, let's learn something from this test. But as time goes on and we're primarily a single skew brand, I mean, we recently have a new electric trimmers. Now we're technically really a two skew brand, at least for acquisition, which has been a new challenge. But for us, it's always been like our single blade razor, what we acquire customers for. And we have other products we sell in the back end, but that's all we advertise. And so it's like over time, we have learning.
Like, and we don't.
When we testing so much over time, get like the, the, the core learning from those things, not like, headline is better or a statement is better than question and headline, but like what messages work better? Like the backbone of those messages work better. Like we understand our customer better now. It's like, we, those are the messages. Those are the things that we learned that we don't want to go back against. Like we can always retest statement versus question if we really want to, but it's
Why do we need to test this every single time? We know this one thing works. Like, let's just double down on that one thing and make that one thing better. If we'll just test, we can build into that. Let's do that. But then the, the going back to, you know, when we started, it was like, Hey, we have this new creative idea. Like, how do we want to test this? And then be like, well, you know, let's kind of set it up. You know, we'll have three different creatives and we'll throw different hooks on them. And it's just like, let's not approach it with a test unless there's something we want to learn. You know what I mean? Unless you're
I want to know for sure that a statement works better than a headline. I want to know that this offer messaging works better than this offer messaging. But for face testing, I'm using ads as an example, could be for landing pages as well, or offers, or whatever else you want to test in the business. Let's do it as best as we can, and then let's try to build some learnings into that. Let's expand on that. Our testing is more so, if it's not intentional, we want to learn statement versus headline. If it's not intentional like that,
Trace Crawford (10:22.252)
We want to give our ad or whatever the thing we're testing is the best possible chance for success. And if it doesn't succeed, we want to try to get some learnings from that. So if it could be, we ran this one core ad and we threw four different hooks on there, all based off our winning learnings. And it's like, OK, this doesn't perform. At least we understand. We got new information on four new hooks, at the very least. And we can go deeper into the ad and kind of dissect why or why not that
Tris Dyer (10:31.347)
Gotcha.
Tris Dyer (10:43.517)
Why?
Tris Dyer (10:50.269)
Gotcha, but it's all based on the original one that worked really, really well. You're going kind of more iterative on what you're doing rather than go and test something completely new. Is that what you're kind of getting at?
Trace Crawford (10:59.148)
Yeah, absolutely. Like don't over test. guess if I could simplify, like don't over test, don't test a test, trust yourself, like be a marketer, own like, you know, if you're like, like a, like a, if you're making like large TV ads, like you have some data there, but like, for the most part, it's like you are creating one large final investment of an asset and you're just going to
You're not able to A -B test and you focus groups wherever you're doing to test, for the most part, you're just letting it fly. It's like we need to have that same level of confidence too. And our job, what we're creating is it's much easier to execute on than a Super Bowl ad. So let's have that confidence. We know what we're doing. Create the best possible ad. And if there's a test we want to build into that, let's make that test.
Tris Dyer (11:46.749)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (11:52.679)
The sexy thing to do is just to test, to test, test, but it's actually like that works, spend the money on what works. It's so funny. We see this all the time where people come in and be like, how many tests have you done? It's like, well, you know, our job is to make money, not test. Is that what I'm hearing from you, Thrice?
Edwin @ Snappic (11:56.454)
of it.
Edwin @ Snappic (12:04.168)
No! No!
Trace Crawford (12:09.1)
Yeah, absolutely. We test a ton of stuff. Everything is a test. it's like, all the tests are just like, we think this is a really good ad for X, Y, Z reasons, and we're going to test it. We'll see if it works. we're not. Unless we really want to know one thing over another, it's always like, we want to just see improved performance. Is this thing going to grow the ad accounts? Is it going to grow the business in one way or another?
Tris Dyer (12:37.543)
Yeah, makes a ton of sense, makes a ton of sense. when you started, you were like, okay, let's, if you're testing everything and then you had probably a point of epiphany, an inflection point that kind of said, right, we're stopping doing that and now we're gonna just focus on what's working. was it a stop doing that or just slow down the testing and actually just focus on what's working? You're saying you're the one, I say one skew, but like you've got your one main acquisition product. That's the kind of the strategy at the moment is going deep on that.
and testing those kind of things. do you have multiple types of people that buy that or do you have multiple, like how do you sell this in different markets? Because you sell all over the world, right? So you must have different types of people. Is it different cohorts of people that are buying this kind of stuff?
Trace Crawford (13:23.606)
Yeah, we really try to set up, I don't want to say by funnel type, but like kind of by funnel type. We don't run any dedicated retargeting. Everything we run is basically for the longest time we ran one campaign, essentially, where it was like testing and scaling campaign were one thing. And we'd have like an ASC or a separate campaign. have a cost cap campaign that we pull things out of and scale. But for the most part, the bulk of it was like one campaign and that was the bulk of the spend.
But we'll set things up kind of by funnel type.
Edwin @ Snappic (13:54.398)
Wait, how do you spend in that one? Like tell, just for shits and giggles. Tell me like how much is getting spent in that one campaign? Like just for shits and giggles.
Trace Crawford (14:03.534)
I mean, we'd spend five figures on that, like 10 to 15K a day.
Edwin @ Snappic (14:11.284)
per day. Hot shit. Just like what, guys, that's like in Facebook Business Manager, just like one line, one row is like 15K a day. That is fucking great. I love it. I love
Tris Dyer (14:12.679)
Okay, in one campaign.
Trace Crawford (14:14.902)
And
Trace Crawford (14:25.666)
I mean, it's kind of came down to, again, a focus thing of like, ad account would be a distraction from other things in the business. Like, we're going to micro -ad account. And like, it just works better. Like that was one of the unlocks in the business was like, when we went to this approach of like, like I was doing the media buying a lot of other things in the business. It's like, well, I could waste my
Tris Dyer (14:40.838)
One go.
Trace Crawford (14:48.544)
micromanaging the account, overthinking little things like, well, is interest working or lookalikes? I, is this audience good than this or is, you know, is the attribution wrong or, there's just so many little questions or I could say, hey, I know broad works. I know this campaign structure works. I'm going to focus on the inputs that go into this and I'm to leave this on autopilot. I'm going to touch it like twice a week. And then all my focus is going on making better creative, making better offers, better landing pages.
Edwin @ Snappic (15:12.19)
How many, like, so you got that one row, which is beautiful, and then is it like, I click it and then I go to the ad set level and it's just like carnage. Is it just like a ton of ad set? Or like, tell me how many ads was
Trace Crawford (15:25.514)
It is a lot. We actually had a sunset that campaign recently because it was it was such an was an old campaign that meta didn't support it anymore. It was a conversion campaign and they switched to sales or vice versa. It was one of the two. So recently I had to kill it but I would have to go in and delete old ad sets because there were too many ad sets in the campaign that meta would not allow me to add any more ad sets in it. So if you go into it's just like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ad sets.
And granted, there's only like, I'm gonna keep 10, 10 or so live at a time, depending. We usually try to keep like...
The general rule of thumb, we're not super strict by this, is like $500 per ad set. So like, first we're spending 10k a day, then we can have 20 ad sets in the account. We don't want go over that. that's very rare that we're going like 20 plus ad sets. It's usually like maybe five to 10.
Edwin @ Snappic (16:21.118)
and you're running ABO or CBO?
Trace Crawford (16:23.384)
CBO.
Edwin @ Snappic (16:25.314)
C .P .O. Fuck yeah.
Trace Crawford (16:28.386)
Just CBO one campaign launching everything in it and just have everything fight for spin if it didn't spin and it doesn't We'll look at soft metrics as well for ads. like if some ads like won't spin, but there might be some indicators on the soft metrics that might make us like, okay, let's put some more spin here, let's iterate. But for the most part, it's like, spin is our primary KPI to an extent, which added like, we worked with a new creative agency and they came to us and they were looking at meta ROAS and our meta ROAS is not.
Edwin @ Snappic (16:34.819)
Whoa.
Trace Crawford (16:58.318)
is way off. It looks really good. It's a lot of view through. And they're like, his ad's at $200 and has like a five row ass. Our target's like a one six. And I was like, that's, yeah, it's, yeah, it's not real. And I was like, it, but I was like, look at spend. I was like, look at our other ads. Like it's been, this thing spent $200 in seven day period. Like this is not a
Tris Dyer (17:09.555)
But it's not real. It's not real. You can turn it off and look at the same thing.
Tris Dyer (17:20.903)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you were focusing a lot more on other things in the business that were really kind of moving the needle a lot faster. Is that making new bundles? Is that making kind of better, more optimizations in terms of our shipping or like what kind of stuff you're focusing on the business that was moving the needle faster than micromanaging the app manager? Cause that's it. I've heard that before in terms of that doesn't really work where you sit there and you move budgets three or four times a day and
Trace Crawford (17:27.345)
Mm
Tris Dyer (17:46.961)
it gets really kind of heady. What kind of stuff were you focusing on that really moved the needle for you?
Trace Crawford (17:52.982)
Yeah, I mean, to take a step back, back when I started, so I originally started as the head of growth for supply where I was, came in, they were bringing everything internal. So I led the in -house marketing team. So my job then was like meta, you know, for the most part, like we did other things. It was like leading the marketing, but we were primarily meta. And so I was in the weeds every day. was like, how do we make meta work? Well, how do you make creative work? How do we make it better creative? How do we test these landing pages? How do we, how do we figure out offers?
So that was much more in the weeds. Nowadays, I'm the brand manager, is essentially I manage the brand. We got acquired by an aggregator a few years ago in 2022 called Foundry Brands. So that's the title they use all around as brand manager. But I still do a lot of the marketing for the brands, like kind of my core competency. nowadays I'll do more on the inventory planning, obviously managing the team, some more like managerial tasks.
You know, going back to the start when I was much more in the weeds, I mean, was really like Lany Pages offers emails and promotion planning, like making sure our flows are dialed in. We added a quiz, making sure that quiz is optimized, making sure we're testing that, make sure we're consistently testing the Lany page and the PDP. Lany pages was similar to Crate where they were
Tris Dyer (19:04.433)
Interesting.
Trace Crawford (19:20.098)
We had to test a of things to get to a breakthrough to really understand what worked best. Nowadays we have these learnings, so it's much easier for us. We know what the core of what works is, but that first six months to a year was a lot of like, that's what it was. was like every single day was like trying to grow and test all these little things to just unlock those things we needed to to scale and meta.
Tris Dyer (19:48.979)
Let's see.
Edwin @ Snappic (19:48.98)
Tell me some breakthroughs. Tell me some of those breakthrough moments that you had.
Trace Crawford (19:53.966)
Yeah, we had a few breakthroughs in the early days. The first real breakthrough was our founder story ad. That was like the biggest breakthrough. Like that was the thing. And it still is the thing that's been massive to the business. But it was, I started in August, 2021 and it was a grind because that was right after the iOS updates. So the business was struggling a bit. We weren't dying.
Edwin @ Snappic (20:11.56)
Okay.
Trace Crawford (20:22.52)
But it was rough. We definitely had scaled down. Efficiency wasn't great. mean, was just, we relied almost solely on meta. So it was rough. But, you so we were just doing a lot of, again, testing, trying to figure things out. And for me, I had never managed an eight figure brand. I never managed to spin before. I'd done my own, all my media buying experience before then had been on my own brand where I'd spent like maybe, I don't know if I'd ever even crossed in a thousand dollars a day of my own money.
So it was for me, honestly, it a great time to come in and relearn because everybody else was relearning at the same time. So it was a great learning process to come in and learn for myself and then learn for the brand. what do have to do? But it was a grind. Like we struggled like to just figure things out. We tried so much creative. We tried landing pages and we ended up having a decent Q4 that year, comparatively to what they had done the previous year, but it was still a struggle. And then we ended up launching two new razors in January, February.
that next year and they launched, they did really good and they just kind of fell off. Like they just like were bad and it was like, I remember looking at the data when I was, before we launched our newest electric trimmer and it's like first three weeks are like great, you know, over well over two, our target is like a one five, one six and then it like falls off a cliff and you can see all the soft metrics fall off a cliff. But it was like March, we ended up going with like a founder story ad, white listed through our founder.
Edwin @ Snappic (21:39.144)
Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (21:43.379)
Alright.
Trace Crawford (21:50.37)
And we had a Kickstarter video from the Kickstarter campaign for those razors. And the video was kind of a founder story, I guess. I mean, it was about the two razors, but it featured the founder. And so we took that, cut it up. it was still like two minutes long, which were like, that's so long. This is never going to work. and ran it from the founders page and it just took off. And I remember the same time I went to a geek out conference at that time. And I remember going and I was
This sucks. I was bummed because we're just like, we're gonna get our ass kicked. We had this new razor and we just things weren't working. And we were looking at the business at the conference, like they're in a speaker. And I was like, what the hell is going on? I was like, cause we'd never seen numbers like this. We were fighting, like, I remember the time, lot of the conversations were like, how do we scale? How do we get this level of scale? We just weren't hitting our targets. We're like a one, two, one, three. And it's like, what do we do?
How low can we be? Can we actually push spin? Like we were trying to do everything else to like make this work. And then we ran this new ad and it's like, shit, we're at two, like two, five or three at scale. Like we tripled, quadruple spin, like four X spin overnight. Like, and it consistently from this out, it, wasn't just like, one and done. Like we ended up selling out. We couldn't keep the product in stock like the entire year. We almost on pre -orders the entire year for these new products because we sold so many from this ad. And I think that first, that was
Tris Dyer (22:58.171)
That's incredible.
Trace Crawford (23:17.292)
biggest breakthrough. One creatively, because like we just hadn't got anything else to work. But it's it was an unlock because it kind of comes back to the original point of focus where it's like we tried so many things and we still even to this day we've kind of got away from like the idea we've kind of tested too much to this day even though we know that's still like the founder story for us that core ad.
is what works the best for us. And maybe it's not founder story, but like long form problem solution, validating our claims is what works. And we try to get away from that core, even if it's not founder story, if we try to go, hey, let's do a quick UGC or, hey, we'll just show an unboxing of the product. We won't say anything about it. Like maybe that'll work. It never works. And I understand there's like, it's an ecosystem and you want to give Meta more to work with and you want to mix things up, but like, they just don't work for
Edwin @ Snappic (23:55.796)
Whoa.
Trace Crawford (24:15.918)
from any level. CPA is obviously not good, but there's no outside value or halo effect from those ads for us. Getting a bit off topic, but yeah, that was a huge breakthrough for us, again, from a revenue perspective and also just a creative learning.
Edwin @ Snappic (24:30.1)
And even to this day, is still your, basically, that is your core that you work out of. Like, a founder story, a longer format, is it more polished or is it more UGC -style founder story?
Trace Crawford (24:42.722)
They are all just like mashups, different versions of Helm. I mean, to this day, have like, I think at this point we have like a roster of like six core ads, would say six net new individual assets that we'd shot of Patrick the founder and told different stories that had been massive winners. And we just kind of like, we just keep trying to expand that and try to do new things. like those are the base of the ad account that we'll try to iterate, put new hooks on, mix them
But like, mean, it's happened multiple times in the business. And I always remind myself, like, when these moments happen, I have remind myself like, shit, creative is
is still to this day, even as we've grown, is still a massive needle mover. mean, even last August, we had another massive win, like a new creative that literally almost doubled our business. We're trying to come up with, or about to have to come up with it right now, and people are like, what happened last year? I'm like, creative. Yeah, I mean, it's like, focus. Like, you we're doing all this other stuff on the business right now, getting ready for Q4. There's a lot more going on, but it's
Tris Dyer (25:41.853)
Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (25:42.206)
What? What?
Trace Crawford (25:52.982)
And we should make a good ad. And I'm
Edwin @ Snappic (25:54.772)
Wait, but, Trik, you're holding out on me. You 2X'd last year on the back of this one, you gotta tell me what it is.
Trace Crawford (26:01.132)
We literally, I don't know if we 2X, but it was a massive increase and it was like, I don't want to say saved us, June, the summer just sucks and we're kind of, we're a little rough right now, we're fine, but June and July summer days are not good. But it was another founder story. This was a huge unlock for us because it was a new angle within the founder story for our razors. The thing that really worked for us, was problem solution, but we sell premium single blade razors.
appeal that we found product market fit in and Facebook ads is leading into irritation caused by multi -blade razors and so that's mostly what we've spoken to. This ad was a huge unlocks, we spoke more towards the cost savings because when you're buying multi -blade razors, you're buying cartridges repeatedly, and those cartridges are much more expensive whereas our blades are a dollar per blade and so it's like 30 bucks a year, hundreds of bucks if you're buying more expensive cartridges and that was a huge, huge
for us because again it unlocked this whole new angle that we can expand outside of that core problem solution founder story.
Edwin @ Snappic (27:08.252)
And how did you figure that out? Like, did you just go on some platform and you asked a bunch of people and then that was the, was it a post -purchase survey? Like, how did you figure out that angle?
Tris Dyer (27:08.517)
Enjoy.
Trace Crawford (27:22.83)
I mean, for us, it's like, so we have an internal team, which I love having an internal team for this reason, because we are always in the weeds of everything. We're always discussing ideas. so a lot of it was just osmosis. It wasn't like a breakthrough of like, we should make an angle around cost. We've known that one of our main objections is cost. And so we pulled data points from comments. We looked at competitors.
Harry's, Gillette, Dollar Shave Club, those kind of brands. And just like, we've seen people comment like, these are so expensive or I hate having to buy all these razors all the time. And we knew the costs. Like we knew them from our perspective. And so we, like the idea came just from repetitive research and it being around our customers and knowing the product. And so, yeah, I think we had tested it before, but like this was the one that really worked. For this one, we really focused
Tris Dyer (28:13.863)
Wow,
Trace Crawford (28:23.096)
Like for our top of the funnel ads, like it's problem solution, but like the intro of the ad is always the most important for us. Like we know that when we, the latter half of the ad doesn't really matter. Like we can, like it's most important. Like that can be completely templatized. can say the same thing every single time, as long as that intro is good. And so like this ad was like very like expose. Like we focused on like, we didn't make it
too upfront about the problem. Like, you spending too much on razors? I mean, I think it's one of our hooks, but like, you spending too much on razors? Like stop doing that. It was more like, this is why you're spending too much on razors. And we focus on like the razor and blades business models and like, Hey, this is why other, this is why Gillette and other companies charge you so much. We had a really good line in there about like, we won't, we can't spend a billion dollars to convince you to buy our razor, but we can show you the facts. We have a little screenshot because Gillette sponsors a football stadium.
And so there's, we had a screenshot of their like Gillette Labs, like massive like loading render on the stadium. But like one that ad did performed well and still performs incredibly well. like my favorite part about that ad is I went, we went, when I went and looked at the comments, the number one comment on that ad was, this is a great ad. Which was like, that's insane. Even the trolls were like, this is a really good ad. like, I'm not going to buy this. You know,
Edwin @ Snappic (29:23.973)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (29:40.509)
Yeah. Nope, that's a marketer.
Trace Crawford (29:48.29)
I don't want this, but this is really good
Edwin @ Snappic (29:51.336)
Margarita's all around. That's like happy Friday.
Trace Crawford (29:53.026)
Yeah, we did something right. So, that was huge unlock.
Tris Dyer (29:59.067)
Love that, love that. so Trace, with that, mean, so you were talking about like new creatives that you're finding all the time, just back to your original kind of statement there around like you're focused down. So you obviously found that your your founder topic or your founder videos seem to be like the ones that are winning, the ones that changing. The Jolette ad, the comparison ad sounds like to be look at kind of a, you know, us versus them kind of approach seems to work very, very well for you.
When it comes to, I suppose, when it comes to like other things we're talking about there, you have new launches of new products. Is it the new bundles that you're putting out there? You're saying you're prepping for Black Friday now, and the Black Friday last year in 22 was better than previous. What drove that Black Friday to be better other than the ads? Was there a specific...
kind of model that you were running? there like, did you of, did you have a certain level of people having to buy a certain amount for free shipping? What was it that drove your Black Fridays?
Trace Crawford (30:59.222)
Yeah, so for us, we do for all of our offers, we're not a discount heavy brand. So we want to avoid discounts at all costs. And also we know that our LTV is a weakness of the business, but we know that the more products we can get people's hands, the higher LTV customers will have, as well as because the LTV is low, we want to push the AOV up as much as possible. So for our offers are always bundle focused, stuff
How can we get more products in and show a higher savings percentage but still have good margins? And so, at this point, we've tested a lot of offers and what really works for us is always a gift with purchase. And we've tested messaging on those offers. We've tested advertising a savings percentage. So if we add adding in the value of the gift with purchase into the overall savings.
So instead of saying like free razor stand, be like up to 35 % off bundles and just bundling in that savings from the stand. But for us, again, it's bundles that work well for us. We run our offer early. start like, started in November and that works really well. I think we had a kind of a breakthrough this past Father's Day where we ran that, our Father's Day sale much earlier and our Father's Day sale ended up doing incredibly well at the end. I strongly believe is because we were able to get learnings at the start.
and scale them up and kind of make my first original point of focus. Like we didn't do as much testing this year. was primarily because of the bandwidth. We were working on our new product launch. We didn't put as much focus on the Father's Day creative, but it worked out better because instead of wasting our time testing a lot of creative, we found out what worked and we scaled it up and it just worked. So we our ad, we run our sale much earlier. We're running pretty much all the way from like the first week in November, all the way to the end of the year. This past year, works really well.
Edwin @ Snappic (32:54.909)
Continuously. you didn't stop the tail in the middle, you ran it
Trace Crawford (32:56.226)
We won't continuously. We'll stop it at Christmas. So what we'll do is we'll do two sales, but it's essentially the same thing. We'll do a Black Friday sale and a holiday sale. Last year we ended up switching products because of inventory. It's still something I'm considering. I like the idea of having two separate sales
It's Black Friday and we still want to lean into holiday afterwards, it also adds a lot of complexity. Where does it need to be? Last year we were like, we'll switch offers. We need to. And it's like, shit, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this. Now we can't run any of the ads that originally worked. We have to get a new creator for this. And the original offer is actually better. So like, why are we switching? It's a switch. So, yeah, we'll run it through the whole year. Last year we did, we got, again, we got too complicated last year. Like, can I go back to the original message of focus? It's kind of
focus slash keep it simple. think that message keeps changing, but some are ethos there. We did too much last year, honestly. We've like, we tried to do, some new colors releasing and some other new products. We try to like, you know, do a release each week and like lead into that. And it just kind of became too complicated and like, it just didn't really work. So honestly, November last year was not great. I mean, it was good. It was better than the previous year, but it was like not as much as better as we'd hoped. The real unlock for us came
December and the holiday period and gift -giving that's where we got a huge unlock. We crushed December last year compared to the previous year For two reasons for one it was part of his planning And we didn't do as good a job last year planning as we could have but it was much better than the year before that Where we knew we wanted to do holiday sale we had assets ready We had planned for the holiday sale period where the previous year it was like all Black Friday and then we got a Black Friday and like shit we still have like You
Edwin @ Snappic (34:26.974)
Why?
Trace Crawford (34:48.77)
two and half weeks in December before we get our shipping cut off. And we're still zooming right now. Like, what do we do? Last year, we had that prepped. We weren't as, a lot of our focus last year was still like, okay, Black Friday. You know, what do we do? And then we'll do holiday sale. We didn't execute on gifting as well as I wish we had. But we did do some things that we didn't do the previous year that were huge for us. And so December was absolutely massive. It really made up for us in November. So, I mean, I guess like takeaways for us
Keep it simple. Start early, find out what works, scale what works.
Trace Crawford (35:25.666)
lean into gifting for us, like we're a male focused brand, like leaning into female gift givers, it's always something we have tried to do these periods and then for hit or miss, but we were able to really get some unlocks and lean into it last year, which gave us a huge lift.
Tris Dyer (35:42.119)
of that. And so when it comes to planning, obviously inventory and obviously the worst nightmare is you have an ad pop off and it's starting to scale and starting to push and then it's going fantastically but you run out of inventory.
Edwin @ Snappic (35:54.26)
your mic is there's something off there's something yeah yeah yeah go go yeah
Tris Dyer (35:58.039)
can you hear me now? OK, yeah, OK, let me go back. I'll start again. OK, so, you know, speaking of scaling and, know, we're planning inventory and stuff like that. One of the things that obviously the worst nightmare is, you know, where you're scaling and ad pops off and you're like, this is this is amazing and things are going fantastic. And then boom, you run out of product. The worst nightmare. So how are you planning for that stuff like that? Are you have you shortened your supply chain? Have you got have you you worked out kind
Trace Crawford (35:59.907)
Loud and clear.
Tris Dyer (36:26.193)
what you need for Black Friday Cyber Monday or even into Father's Day. Like how are you planning for that kind of stuff? What information are you giving to the supply team? Pardon me, pun. What information are you giving to that team to be able to plan for that?
Trace Crawford (36:40.46)
Yeah, absolutely. First off, we have an excellent supply chain manager who helps a ton with this. And I've experienced firsthand the pain of running out of inventory. Like I mentioned, we had that original unlock with the founder story. I like, could not keep product and stock. Granted then it was, we're doing everything internal. We didn't have a supply chain manager. We were kind of just like freestyling it. And we just like, could not keep up with the scale there.
But for us now, it's like planning well in advance. Like we had Q4 offers, won't say locked in, like drafted. Like, hey, here's what we're likely going to do, like end of Q1. And then we set our growth plan for the entire year. So we know what we're targeting for Q4. And for us, again, we do a lot of the same things. Like this Q4 is going to be very similar to the last Q4. This year we have a new product that's going to be.
We're adding in so that's gonna be the main new thing this year, but outside of that like you know our core razor Funnels are gonna be very similar, so we know how things are gonna perform Directionally and so it's like hey. Here's our growth plan for the quarter. We're gonna start at this period We know this pure. We're see this kind of increase on these products Here's here the Here the the tiers of expectations like here's the 20th 40th 60th 8th percentile like
Make sure we have inventory support this 80th percentile or the more than 80th percentile outcome here. And again, because we know how we're going to perform, I don't want say exactly, but like we're pretty dialed in on what the lift we're going to see from this offer is, what the split between the products is going to be. It's like, okay, I know how much to order and I just know I need to order to
extreme outcome, the best case scenario essentially. I would always prefer for us to just order unlimited inventory, which I've been told we can't do because of cash flow, is valid, valid objection. yeah, I'm always like, I'm like, why can we just order like double this? like, Chase, we can't do that. We don't have enough cash. We must be much easier if we could just order like a whole lot more just in case.
Edwin @ Snappic (38:47.324)
I'm not sure.
Tris Dyer (38:47.346)
I hear that.
Tris Dyer (38:56.775)
Yeah.
Trace Crawford (39:01.24)
But yeah, that's generally how we approach it. And again, we have an excellent supply chain manager who does a great job keeping an eye on these things and making sure we give her all the inputs that she needs and checks and balances on the way.
Tris Dyer (39:11.069)
Hmm. Makes sense. You can't just go and order the world and then hopefully it sells. It's going to make, it's just kind of balance on the way
Trace Crawford (39:19.106)
Yeah, and for us, on our razors, because we don't discount, if we ever get into a position where we're overstocked or need to liquidate any inventory, we can do that super easily with just a small discount. so I'm never overly concerned about, are we way too overstocked? Because it's just easy for us to liquidate those.
Tris Dyer (39:41.639)
Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (39:41.822)
So we've talked about a ton of stuff about like the inventory, about the breakthroughs. Give us some war stories. Like you guys now are at an eight figure brand. There have to be some bumps and bruises, some scenes where you're on the hill holding up the sword all bloody and victorious. Give us some war stories.
Trace Crawford (40:03.906)
Man, I think the...
I'd probably go back to that same time where we scaled that first ad and we're out of stock. That was a tough period because we kept going out of stock and we had to, we had to figure out how do pre -orders, which was a huge pain in ass at the time to make that work from an operations standpoint as well as like the marketing standpoint of it. As well as we had to keep just mixing up bundles. And one of the hardest things was like meta just kept breaking because we would run out of stock
the ads would react, would just break. So we had to basically rebuild our ad account multiple times because we, when we go out of stock and so Meta is like, shit, it's out of stock. This is a bad experience. Or we'd shift to pre -orders, which would also shift, which would break the ads because again, it's a different experience. So the estimated action rate would just change so much. And so we had to just reset those ads or like, like we had to basically rebuild a new ad or new campaign for the pre -orders, which was
up and down, up and down, we didn't scaling up with pre -orders and having success on pre -order, but that period was just like a nightmare, honestly. As well as just like, we had that core unlocked. were still so much we're trying to figure out of like, does this work? We had two new razors at the time. It's like figuring out like, how do we balance the messaging between these and like, how do we make these funnels work was super difficult. So maybe it didn't sound like too much of a war story, but at the time it was was headache after headache.
every single one.
Edwin @ Snappic (41:37.068)
And how did you make it? How did you end up making it work? Because you had these two things like it happens with a lot of a lot of brand owners, right? Like, they have this core unit that they came riding on the horse with and then eventually they they develop more, right? And they got a balance, like you said, how did you guys end up balancing?
Tris Dyer (41:37.203)
It sounded tough.
Trace Crawford (42:00.143)
balancing the actual inventory or the process of
Edwin @ Snappic (42:03.774)
like the messaging and stuff because you guys have the new SKUs and then you had to balance what was working and then the new stuff like what ended up happening.
Trace Crawford (42:14.604)
Yeah, this is another breakthrough for us. And so we had the two new products and was like, do we message these? How do we clarify? You know, do we advertise one at a time? Do we advertise both? What we ended up going with was sending everything to a quiz. And then so the core ads were like, both products did the same thing. Like I mentioned originally, the latter half of the ad doesn't really matter as soon as once we get them hooked. And so the core message of the ad, like they both did the same thing. They both serve the same purpose except for like one
is easier to use and one is for advanced users has a shave dial on it. And so we like, let's just double down that core message of single blade shaving is better for X reason. And then we'll send customers to a quiz. So that way we have one core message and then the customers can self -select through the quiz. As well as the quiz is a bunch of added benefits. Like we get great lead capture from it. We're able to, we don't have to sell them direct right there in that moment. You know, we get them on the email flow. So we have multiple touch points after that to sell them.
through email. As well as, it's a much easier ask as well. Like, hey, take this quiz. It's much easier than say, hey, buy my $70 razor.
Edwin @ Snappic (43:25.03)
Okay. And the after flows, were, they were raw as positive. the after, because you capture the email, they take the quiz. Some of them will immediately purchase, but a lot of them go into post and the numbers on the post flows were profitable. Is that correct?
Trace Crawford (43:37.323)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Trace Crawford (43:42.892)
Yes. Yeah, we would scale. I mean, on a look at ads every three or four days. And so we look at like the ad performance there and we're always profitable there. But then we, we'd always see a delayed attribution from those quiz flows. And then we did for a while that we got away from was we tried to scale off the back of cost per email sign up and triple whale, which it wouldn't be our leading indicator, but at times
When we were scaling heavily, like performance on the ROAS or CPA side would look a little bit worse, but we know that, okay, we're getting a $5 email sign up here. And I know that a five more email sign up in 28 days after going through this flow is going to be profitable. so like, if that break even emails, I have $7 at five. I feel confident that we can scale up profitably, even though like the day -to -day ROAS right now, maybe not be as, may not be as good as we
Edwin @ Snappic (44:42.726)
Okay, okay. That is, is helpful to know.
Tris Dyer (44:44.787)
Fair enough, fair enough. That's insightful, very insightful. thank you so much for that Trace, I really appreciate it. There's a ton of stuff that we're seeing from your side that, you know, so many agencies are like, you've got an ad, just scale it. Well, there's a lot more behind it. There's a lot more behind actually doing that. There's communication involved and, you know, as well, there's a lot of this narrative at the moment going around, test and test and test landing pages, test new ideas. And it's just sometimes you gotta focus on what's working.
Trace Crawford (45:12.29)
Yeah, absolutely. And just to clarify, I'm all for testing. Test everything, but don't hide behind your tests. Make the best possible thing. Be a good marketer and knock it out. Know your customer. Don't be like, well, we're going to test it. That's where testing goes wrong. We still test everything, but it's always like, how do we make the best base version of this? And then we'll test out of
Tris Dyer (45:41.821)
makes no sense. Makes no sense.
Edwin @ Snappic (45:44.624)
I'm good. I'm good on it, Tris. Do you have more questions or we?
Tris Dyer (45:48.881)
No, no, you probably saw me typing. I was typing some of the stuff that you were saying. I was like, Jesus, this stuff is, this is gold. Thank you very much, Trace. Well, what we do now, Trace, is we normally, we outro, so Edwin's gonna just kind of recap some of the stuff we said, say his name, I say my name, and then you say yours, and say goodbye.
Edwin @ Snappic (46:07.782)
Okay, cool.
Tris Dyer (46:15.197)
Give us two secs. We've cut all this stuff out. Showbiz, eh?
Edwin @ Snappic (46:16.504)
Okay, Yeah. All right. Guys, we just had a master class on just breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough with Chase or fuck. Guys, we just had a master class on breakthrough after breakthrough with Trace. He told us all the tea on growing an eight figure, eight figure shaving brand. All of the stuff that worked for them.
Trace Crawford (46:18.381)
No.
Love
Edwin @ Snappic (46:45.906)
the founder stories, the quizzes. It has been unbelievable guys. I'm Edwin.
Tris Dyer (46:51.549)
I'm Triss.
Trace Crawford (46:53.201)
Thank you guys.
Tris Dyer (46:54.707)
See you later, bye.
Edwin @ Snappic (46:56.168)
Guys.