> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley speaks with entrepreneur Ben Leonard, who built Beast Gear into a seven-figure brand before selling it to aggregator Thrasio. Then buying it back after mismanagement caused revenue to collapse. Ben reveals how Thrasio abandoned the brand-building strategies that drove Beast Gear’s success, mishandled inventory, and neglected intellectual property protection. He shares lessons on diversifying beyond Amazon, maintaining product quality, and building genuine customer communities. Ben also discusses his new dad-focused baby carrier brand, Tuco, and offers actionable advice on scaling e-commerce businesses sustainably.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Timestamps:

00:00:34 Introduction to the Episode
The host introduces the guest, Ben Leonard, and the topic: buying back his brand after selling it to an aggregator.

00:02:14 The Brand’s Decline Under New Ownership
Ben confirms his brand crashed after he sold it to the aggregator Thrasio due to mismanagement and operational failures.

00:05:41 The “Magic” Thrasio Ignored
Ben explains his original success came from building a true brand with customer relationships, which the new owners dismantled.

00:09:27 The Financial Fallout
Ben reveals the brand’s revenue plummeted from $6 million to about half a million dollars under Thrasio’s ownership.

00:13:13 Three Key Mistakes by the Aggregator
The host summarizes Thrasio’s critical errors: inventory mismanagement, ignoring off-Amazon branding, and failing to protect intellectual property.

00:19:51 Why You Must Diversify Beyond Amazon
Ben stresses the need for Amazon sellers to act like real brands and diversify channels to build a sustainable business.

00:22:23 The Revival Playbook for Beast Gear
Ben outlines his bootstrapped strategy to revive the brand, focusing on TikTok Shop and rebuilding community goodwill on a budget.

00:27:08 Launching a New Brand: Tuco
The conversation shifts to Ben’s new venture, Tuco, a baby carrier startup designed specifically for dads.

00:32:22 When to Implement Brand Awareness Strategies
Ben and Josh discuss when a brand should start investing in top-of-funnel marketing and diversifying beyond its primary channel.

00:37:40 Three Actionable Takeaways for Brand Owners
The host summarizes key lessons: diversify with solid processes, avoid inventory leverage, and work with creators for brand awareness.

00:42:13 Ben’s Final Three Questions
Ben shares his most influential book (The E-Myth), favorite AI tool (Claude), and an e-commerce professional to follow.

00:45:51 How to Connect with Ben
Ben shares the best places for listeners to find him online, primarily LinkedIn and his personal email address.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Tools and Websites
“Shopify“: “00:03:03”
“Amazon“: “00:03:03”
“TikTok“: “00:09:54”
“YouTube“: “00:19:51”
“TikTok Shop“: “00:23:10”
“Meta Ads“: “00:24:07”
“WordPress“: “00:35:58”
“Email Marketing”: “00:36:33”
“Claude (AI Tool)“: “00:43:03”
“LinkedIn“: “00:45:09”
“Ecomm Breakthrough Website“: “00:46:24″Books
“Quit Stalling and Build Your Own Brand by Ben Leonard“: “00:01:01”
“Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller“: “00:21:31”
“The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber“: “00:42:25″Videos
“Brand Rescue Mission“: “00:08:17”
“Escaping the Amazon Goldfish Bowl“: “00:19:51”

Podcasts
“Operators Podcast“: “00:09:54”

Other Mentions
“Forbes”: “00:01:01”
“Peregrine Commerce“: “00:25:41”
“Sean Cowie“: “00:44:09”

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Transcript:

Ben Leonard 00:00:00  So right before my partners and I got our bought our brand back, Thrasio liquidated tons of our inventory. And indeed when we got it back, we also had to do the same. We had eye watering amounts of inventory and we had no choice, unfortunately.

Josh Hadley 00:00:13  How many, how many years worth of inventory or month’s worth of inventory? Did you have.

Ben Leonard 00:00:17  I mean, years I mean years of inventory, right? I mean, we we so we liquidated something like £800,000 pounds, as in like the currency, not the weight of product.

MC 00:00:34  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:48  Do you want to know what would make someone sell their million dollar brand to Thrasio, only to buy it back later? Well, today we have Ben Leonard on the podcast, and he’s going to be sharing exactly what he’s doing to revive his once thriving brand that he sold to thoracica.

Josh Hadley 00:01:01  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Adley. I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales, and now my mission is to scale it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures, I bring you unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael Gerber, author of The Myth. Today, I’m excited to welcome back to the show Ben Leonard. Ben built best gear from a $4,000 first order to a seven figure exit in just three years. Working from a cupboard in his spare time, he has since re-acquired the brand and now runs three businesses Ecom Brokers, a sell side e-commerce M&A advisory, Peregrine Commerce, a growth marketing agency, and Tuco, a dad’s baby carrier startup launching later this year. He’s also the author of Quit Stalling and Build Your Own Brand, and has been featured in Forbes, and his products have been used by international athletes and A-list Hollywood actors. Ben is the antidote to gurus. In today’s episode, we’re going to dive into the fascinating twist on the e-commerce journey of what happens when you buy back that very brand that you once sold.

Josh Hadley 00:02:04  Ben’s going to share his lessons, the emotions and the strategic insights behind the exit and then re-entering your own business. Welcome back to the show, Ben.

Ben Leonard 00:02:12  Good to be here, George. Thanks for having me, Ben.

Josh Hadley 00:02:14  I love the first conversation that we had. And obviously you’re acquiring your own brand. That doesn’t happen very often, but I’m starting to hear a few other people that have done that from thoracic or other aggregators that they since exited to in this story is the exact same. Hey, I sold my once thriving brand to Casio. I had so many cool things that were doing to keep that thing alive. They acquired it. The operation just completely fell apart, and everything that I once was doing to support that brand went to the wayside. And then it just crashed and burned and sales began to tank. Is that basically a synopsis of your journey? Is that kind of what happened from your perspective as well?

Ben Leonard 00:02:52  Pretty much. Yep. I started the brand as a complete e-commerce novice with without a Clue.

Ben Leonard 00:02:59  In fact, I started the brand without even understanding e-commerce or intending to sell online. I was going to sell two gyms and I got strength conditioning brand right, and I got laughed out of a few gyms before I realized I could sell online. And then I discovered that I could sell on Amazon. And then I discovered that I could have a website built on this funny new platform called Shopify. Three years later, it was going really well. I sold it, and unfortunately the guys I sold it to didn’t quite keep up what I was doing.

Josh Hadley 00:03:25  Yeah, I mean, we we hear that time and time again. I think that one of the biggest challenges of the aggregators is they didn’t know everything that went into making a lot of these brands successful on Amazon. So, I mean, we have we’ve all heard the story of thoracica. So we’re not going to beat that like a dead horse. But what I do want to talk about that I think is more interesting then is okay, great, you sold beast gear, now you’ve got it back.

Josh Hadley 00:03:48  Tell me, like what happened to sales between now, between when you sold it, between when you just acquired it And now, most importantly, I want to hear what are the things that you are going to do and strategies you’re going to implement to scale that brand back up. And are you just as optimistic as you once were when you first built it in 2016?

Ben Leonard 00:04:06  So I sold it on Halloween 2019, and I had it’s funny now that I’m in M&A as well, right? So we called them burnouts, but I like to think of it more as a pray out because you’re just praying that the guys you sell it to actually continue to do a good job. And I advise people all the time to just ask yourself, are you comfortable with only getting the cash at closing and not not getting any of those earn out targets? Because I had a two year burnout and I also negotiated a deal alongside it, whereby I was paid as a consultant to assist with developing and launching new products. And the team looking after vSphere were good.

Ben Leonard 00:04:40  People aren’t really nice to deal with. However, they were swimming upstream against the tide of bureaucracy and a tide of misunderstanding and corporate arrogance, You see ratios business model was let’s acquire all these small e-commerce businesses. They will be worth more than the sum of their parts and immediately be worth more to us. The moment we buy them immediately at a higher multiple, we will scale them both in and of themselves. We will grow their revenue and profit, but also we will benefit from scale, economies of scale and synergies across these brands to realize huge cost savings. And later we will go public or sell off large tranches of our portfolio for tons of money. And on paper, that’s a wonderful idea. But they failed to understand what made the businesses successful in the first place, or in many cases, they chose to ignore. And that’s where the corporate arrogance came in. So basically, for two years, I was trying to teach them for free to do all the things that made my business a success in the first place, which is why they bought it, whilst they systematically turned all those things off on purpose.

Josh Hadley 00:05:41  And then I want to interject in there because I know the answer to this, but like, what were those things that were making you successful on Amazon? Because it wasn’t just like PPC tactics, right? Because like most people look at Amazon and it’s like, oh, well, you just need to put up your listing and have some good PPC strategies. But like, I know your story and I know there was a lot working behind the scenes and this is what it means to actually build a true brand that where you’re doing stuff off of Amazon, but it just has a halo effect over onto Amazon itself. So, Ben, why don’t you describe to the audience like, what was the magic that was sitting behind your brand that like, even your competitors couldn’t like, replicate because they didn’t understand everything that you had going on?

Ben Leonard 00:06:21  Well, you nailed it with the word brand. We were, you remember? I didn’t know what I didn’t know you could sell on Amazon when I started the business. You know, I thought when you bought something on Amazon, you were buying it from Jeff.

Ben Leonard 00:06:31  And so I always approached it from a brand point of view. We were building a legit consumer product brand that looked and felt and behaved like my own favorite brands, which meant that we had a relationship with our customers on social media. We had a great website, we were DMing our customers on Instagram. We we had people using our products at CrossFit and strength training and boxing events. We were we had an email marketing strategy. We were regularly posting on social. We were nimble, hustling, street fighter, entrepreneurial spirit through our brand. And that is what grew up on Amazon. Whereas many of our competitors were just generic, poor quality products with no no customer service, no experience to speak of, no attempt to build a tribe of raving fans who would buy any product that you launched and that didn’t fit with the Thrasher thesis, although they spoke a good game before they acquired it, of course. And so when you stop doing all that, it’s actually even it doesn’t suddenly just bring you back down level with everybody else.

Ben Leonard 00:07:25  It actually takes you even lower, because everything has been set up such that your customers are expecting a good experience, like all of our product packaging and inserts with driving people to pages where they were supposed to see videos and instruction guides, they’re supposed to land on social or in chatbots and have interactions with us and get something in return and get value. And suddenly nothing worked. So negative reviews started to pour in, product development fell by the wayside. Product quality was actually reduced because they tried to go cheap on product, which meant that if you have a let’s just say you have a weightlifting belt, and one of the key features is that you have higher quality buckles and rivets than all your competitors. If you change those for cheaper components, it’s not just the same product, but worse. It’s a different product now, and you haven’t even updated your listings or your images on Amazon, let alone your website. The whole thing was a complete shambles, and I’ve detailed this on a YouTube kind of series, which was on a small hiatus right now, but it’s called Brand Rescue Mission.

Ben Leonard 00:08:17  So if people want to learn, like all the terrible stuff that happened, they can actually go watch it. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but to cut a long story short, they stopped acting like a real brand, and that’s what caused the wheels to fall off.

Josh Hadley 00:08:28  Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And again, I think that that’s the way a lot of people still kind of approach Amazon is that they think that it’s just this like race to the bottom pricing. And again, that’s that’s where things are going on the e-commerce platform of Amazon. You have a ton of overseas competitors where it is just about like, hey, have a good experience up front, but then like, can you kind of like bait and switch people? Let’s lower the manufacturing costs. Let’s kind of like drive the price to the bottom. Let’s just like we’re going to gain market share just by being like the cheapest guy in the market, which is like, you weren’t that you were a premium option.

Josh Hadley 00:09:03  You had quality behind it, and it’s almost as though they took it over and began like executing that overseas playbook. Right? Which is like, oh, we don’t care about the product. It’s just cheap. We want to save money. Let’s just try to like, ride this thing out. So I think that that is like a point really well taken. So tell me, like, what revenue were you doing before you sold and then what were you like? At what point did you pick it back up and acquire it?

Ben Leonard 00:09:27  Sure. When we sold, we were doing four and a half. We were doing £4.5 million a year, which is about $6 million. And when we got it back, it was about probably half $1 million. So call that 350 to £400,000. So a a huge reduction in both revenue and profit. And so if people look up the brand now on Amazon or indeed our website or TikTok, you’ll see very, very much lower prices. And those prices have to be low.

Ben Leonard 00:09:54  And we’re kind of constrained for a variety of reasons. One is. And so, Michael. Hector. Sorry, John. Hector, I beg your pardon. John Hector from formerly of D’Orazio, did an interview on the operators podcast not long ago where he spoke about this at length. So I’m not I’m not speaking out of turn here. This is from the horse’s mouth. They are overleveraged on inventory to the tune of billions of dollars across their brands, and our brand was no exception. And actually they didn’t. Not only did they over leverage on inventory, they overleveraged on inventory in in ridiculously amateur ways. So one example John gave was if you had an umbrella and your your black variant was selling 80% of your sales and your pink variant was selling 20% of your sales. Not only would they place a huge order for far too much inventory, but they would order just as many pink ones as black ones. So right before my partners and I got our bought our brand back. Thrasher liquidated tons of our inventory and indeed when we got it back, we also had to do the same.

Ben Leonard 00:10:48  We had eye watering amounts of inventory and we had no choice, unfortunately.

Josh Hadley 00:10:52  How many, how many years worth of inventory or month’s worth of inventory did you have?

Ben Leonard 00:10:56  How many years? I mean, years of inventory, right? I mean, we we so we liquidated something like £800,000 pounds, as in like the currency, not the weight of products. So actually, we’d already done more than that before we got it back. Right. And and so to begin with, it was fine. But then what’s happened is we’re actually now competing on our own listings on Amazon against resellers who bought that liquidated inventory. So we have a reasonable price on our own products. Plus we have a race to the bottom on price on the general marketplace anyway because and it used to be that it didn’t matter on that because we could have a higher price point because we were busier. However, because product quality and customer service was eroded so badly, our review ratings on Amazon have tanked across several of our products, so we don’t have that moat anymore.

Ben Leonard 00:11:44  Plus, the reputation that we built on social media and whatnot was completely, almost completely eradicated in that time. So we didn’t have that buzz going around the strength and conditioning, CrossFit, etc. world about Beast gear, because we weren’t just an Amazon brand, we were a brand. And then the third part is that Thrasio completely failed to protect BSkyB’s intellectual property position. So I’ve got the receipts. I can prove this, but I was frequently telling their lawyers, hey, look, these guys are ripping itself. These guys are myself. These guys were gonna solve and they did nothing about it. Which means that now, even if I wanted to do something about it, or rather, we can’t. We’re not in a position to do anything about it now because the business isn’t profitable. And even if we wanted, we could we actually would get nowhere because so much time has passed that the counterargument is, well, these guys have done nothing about this regardless of who’s owned it. So like, these brands are now can now coexist.

Ben Leonard 00:12:34  So there are brands who are ripping off our logo, our name, even both in the US and the UK and Europe, which again doesn’t allow us to have our premium positioning. So where the brand is now is not only are we doing less revenue, we are at a very much lower price point, which makes the whole turnaround project quite interesting. And by the way, I’m not complaining about any of this. Like, I knew what I was getting into when I decided to come back in to this. You know, this is a fun project. And look, if somebody came to me, if one of my clients came to me and said, should I buy this? I’d be like, no, like, I like, you know, this is very much a personal choice, right?

Josh Hadley 00:13:13  Yeah. Then as you talk, like I really want to dive into like, okay, so now what? You’ve kind of got this dumpster fire of the business at this point. Like, so now what are what’s the playbook going to look like? But before we get to that, I want to like basically share my synopsis with the listeners of here are the things that thoracica did wrong that you need to make sure that you avoid as a brand owner.

Josh Hadley 00:13:36  There’s really three key things that you just talked about here, Ben. Number one is inventory, right. And this can be the death of any e-commerce brand if you over forecast on your inventory or if that is a place in your business where supply chain, there’s not great SOPs or your forecasting isn’t good. Like if you go, here’s one thing you will never go out of business by under forecasting, but you can certainly go out of business by over forecasting because when you under forecast, great. Okay. You may not have the inventory you would like. You might be missing out on some sales. That’s okay. But good news is you can ratchet up the price and increase your profit margin when your inventory is short. Now, we do know if you’re going to go out of stock for like three months at a time on Amazon, that’s going to severely hurt your organic ranking positions. However, all things being aside, I’d rather deal with that rather than having three, four, five plus years worth of Inventory, because that’s truly a place where, like all of your cash in the business is tied up in inventory.

Josh Hadley 00:14:40  And then you just heard what happens. It’s like, okay, well, I can go liquidate it. Great. Let’s assume you can get ten, 20, 25% of the dollar back from what you originally spent, but then you exacerbate the issue, because now you’ve got all these resellers that are going to go flip that product because they just bought the product for even cheaper than you bought the product to begin with. And so now it’s this like it’s the spiral downward spiral. And so I think like the big lesson and takeaway here for listeners is make sure your inventory and forecasting and supply chain is extremely buttoned up. And it’s amazing to me that thoracica as big as they were like overlooked. The fact of like inventory is the lifeblood of any e-commerce brand, and it’s where people go to die. To be honest with you, if you do it wrong. It’s amazing to me that they had such faulty SOPs with how big they were and what what plans that they had in place to begin with. But that’s takeaway number one.

Josh Hadley 00:15:33  The second thing is that there is more to Amazon than just PPC and A-plus content and keyword optimization. Like that. Truly. Like that’s only going to get you so far in the early 2016 to 2017. You could win with very basic strategies, and then you are well ahead of your time with everything you were doing from social content, email list and things like that. But like in today’s day and age, like thoracica just tried to execute the PPC A+ images and Listing update playbook and it failed miserably. So if you listening to this in today’s day and age on Amazon are saying, oh, I’m just focused exclusively on Amazon, A-plus content, PPC, etc. like you’re going to get smoked by the competition because like those tactics only get you so far, and it’s the brand’s keynote brands that are actually building something outside of Amazon that are going to be winning and dominating over the next 5 to 10 years on Amazon. And my final takeaway here is the IP protection. This is so, so important. Number one, try to get IP for your products up front if you can, whether it’s design patterns or utility patterns, that obviously is helpful.

Josh Hadley 00:16:40  But whether it’s a copyright or a trademark, it is only as helpful as the defense you put up around it. Because like, just having the trademark doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to actively protect it, monitor it. And here’s the good news, right? There is a group of these overseas sellers that look to exploit a lot of people that have these, you know, that they’re using their trademark, they’re using their design pen. It doesn’t matter what it is. They’re going to push the envelope because for them the penalty is very, very low. However, the good news is the fact that like if you just go after them enough times in their web of their kind of fishy network, so to speak, like word slips around, that’s like, hey, there’s easier brands to go after, like this brand, you know, be scared. They’re always on top of it. Like it’s the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Let’s go after somebody else. Like a Thrasio brand where they don’t even care.

Josh Hadley 00:17:33  Like nobody’s actively monitoring the IP defense. And so let’s just go sit there and camp out, because it’s much easier. I don’t have to worry about Amazon violations or anything like that because everybody’s sleeping on it. So you don’t have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. And we’ve done this for our own brand. But you do have to take it seriously. And when they come up, you got it’s like playing whack a mole, but you’ve got to play the game of whack a mole, and I know it never ends. But if you do that, you will see like the numbers subside a little bit. Whereas if you don’t play the game of whack a mole, it exponentially compounds and it makes your issue even worse. So then those are like my three things that I think, like any listener should like, actively take away and apply to their own Amazon based brands right now. Like anything else you would add to that?

Ben Leonard 00:18:17  Yeah, when you were speaking there and yeah, by the way, great, great summary of the whole situation.

Ben Leonard 00:18:22  a few kind of light bulbs went off in my head. One was this to cut a bit of slack, I would say that the the situation that they were operating in, especially when the wheels really started to fall off, which was Covid times was bonkers. Like, e-commerce went insane. Our sales went insane, especially because we were most of the products that we sold were the type of thing you could use for training at home. And nobody, nobody was going out, especially in the UK, where lockdown was more severe than in the States. So, you know, you had insane stuff going on from the source of Covid in China, where the factories were for many of their brands. I had some factories in China, some in the Middle East, supply chains and shipping was crazy and the situation at home was crazy and demand was insane. So it was difficult for them operationally anyway, let alone the fact that they were unable to hire the talent because the talents didn’t want to work for an aggregator, the talent wanted to build their own brand.

Ben Leonard 00:19:13  And so they were operating at an unprecedented scale. They grew too big, too fast. They could still be themselves, could still be successful. They still have a handful of brands. And I believe that that is a much more sustainable way to do it. They could be all right, and I hope that they are. Just to be clear, I have no beef with the Rocio. In fact, I love you. They changed my life for the better. And you know, I guess the way I phrased this in the past is that I sort of. I kind of look at them with a sort of an exasperated sigh, the way that a parent does with a teenager who’s just done the exact opposite of what you’ve been asking them to do. so just to make that clear. But yeah, you nailed it when you said, like, you know, if anyone’s still just selling on Amazon now, you cannot do that. Like, if you value being able to sleep at night, you need to diversify.

Ben Leonard 00:19:51  I put together a video a long time ago now, and it hasn’t dated. I don’t think I mentioned things like TikTok shop in the video, but the principles apply. It’s called escaping the Amazon goldfish bowl. So if you just go on YouTube and search Ben Leonard Amazon Goldfish bowl, something like that, you’ll find it. And that is like a really good summary of the halo effect. And, you know, it’s not just a summary. I get into some specific tactics and the types of things that people can do to be, you know, I call it speedboat marketing. You need to be a nimble speedboat, which can turn on a sixpence, which can decide, actually, we’re going to go shark fishing. No, we’re going to go land on the beach and have a barbecue. No, we’re going to go snorkel with dolphins. Whereas your corporate competitors are cruise ships, they take half a day to turn around. They have set itinerary. They’re lumbering and slow. You can completely outmaneuver them, which is why back in the aggregator peak, if an aggregator bought one of your competitors, you should have been rubbing your hands with glee, because now you can absolutely run rings around them and completely clean up, and then probably get bought by an aggregator yourself for some ridiculous multiple if it was like 2021 or something.

Ben Leonard 00:20:49  so yeah, those are basically my thoughts. I think, you know, the whole thing needs to hang together. Look at your own favorite brands, whether that’s related to your hobbies or your profession, or even the food products in your cupboard, like how do they look and feel and behave? What are they doing? Where are they showing up there? They’re showing up everywhere. They’re in your email inbox. They’re on your Instagram feed. They’re on your TikTok feed. They have a TikTok shop. You’re seeing their ads from TikTok. They’re meta ads. They’re sponsoring your favorite podcasts. They’re sponsoring your favorite YouTube channels. They’ve got a YouTube channel. They’ve got blog content. They give themselves permission to act like a real brand. And a lot of people, they don’t even think. It doesn’t even enter this. It’s not like they make a conscious decision not to do this. They just don’t think about it at all because they just think I’m an Amazon seller and I’m not a brand. But your business can be a brand.

Ben Leonard 00:21:31  Just decide to make it a brand. Like Once Upon a Time, Nike was an idea and then it was like one pair of sneakers that were made. But even then, when it was only one pair of sneakers, even after they had only made ten sales, they were acting like a brand because they gave themselves permission to act like a brand. So just act like a brand. And that doesn’t mean to suddenly be like, boring and business like it means to show up where your customers are. Make them know, like, and trust you get them to relate to you and show them that they are part of your tribe and you’re all moving in the same direction together and possibly. And Donald Miller wrote a great book called Building a Story Brand, and he makes his point in that book, possibly have an enemy that you stand against. Like if your brand stands against something, a lot of people will come with you.

Josh Hadley 00:22:12  Yeah, I love that. Really, really well said. Now, Ben, let’s dive into, like, tell me the specific playbook that you’re trying to execute with best gear.

Josh Hadley 00:22:20  Now that you’re going to try to revive it.

Ben Leonard 00:22:23  Well, we basically can’t because we’re not profitable. And at this point, I’m not willing to throw tons of money at it. It’s too big of a risk, frankly. And my wife would kill me. We’ve just built a house and I’m pretty invested in my new brand, my baby carrier. So this is a very bootstrapped project, and that’s okay. It’s great. And if it doesn’t work out, doesn’t matter, right? So here’s what we’re trying to do. I still believe despite everything, and despite the fact that I said before, I wouldn’t tell somebody else to to to buy it back. I still believe there’s enough goodwill out there in the community in the UK to turn it around. Now, whether we’ll get all the way where we were before or further, I don’t know. Previously we were selling, you know, about 45% of our sales were in mainland Europe. We’re basically pulled out of mainland Europe now. We’re pretty much just in the UK.

Ben Leonard 00:23:10  so don’t know whether we’ll we’ll achieve that, but we are still. Even even though I didn’t post an Instagram for like six years and TikTok didn’t exist before, but even when we inherited, we got the brand back. People were tagging the brand every day on Instagram, and so we have a head start. Like we’re able to resurrect relationships, get things going again. Now, of course, TikTok exists now, so we have an opportunity there. We don’t have an unlimited budget, but we are now on TikTok, so we’re on TikTok shop. We are ceding product to creators. Creators are creating content which creates top of funnel brand awareness. The price point for our products is low enough and lower than I’d like it to be, where it can be an instant purchase. Now, we’re not going to do as well as supplement brands on TikTok for obvious reasons, but we’re slowly starting to get traction and the whole thing is a flywheel. More and more customers get it. They want to post it on Instagram, they want to post it on TikTok, and so on and so forth.

Ben Leonard 00:24:07  And the thing starts to spiral. We can take the best performing content and run it as TikTok shop ads. That’s typically GMV max ads, which I won’t get into all the boring details. We can also run those TikTok ads to our website. Now we could run those meta ads, but we’re not. The reason being, it’s not 2015 anymore. Meta ads are expensive, and frankly, our AOV is too high, is too low. Now, could we have done that back in the day when we had our products for higher priced? Maybe. But even with bundling and really clever offers, we can’t make it work. Now. Somebody’s watching this or listening to this might say, but hold on, you don’t have to be first order profitable. We’re not a supplement brand, so like, you buy a very high weight lifting, high quality weight lifting belt from us. Yes, you might buy other stuff from us in the future, but it doesn’t quite work like that because our products are designed to last for a long time because they’re very good.

Ben Leonard 00:24:48  So it’s tricky, right? Amazon has been a very interesting situation that we inherited. So many of our Amazon listings still suck to an embarrassing level. And if people want to look at the detail on that, it’s on on my YouTube channel. And the reason we haven’t been able to fix them is because of technical issues relating to Amazon. So brand registry has been actually for some of our listings or not, brand registry, rather editing rights, has been sitting with third party Thrasher old accounts that they once used to try to launch our products in the States, and so we’ve been unable to fix up many of our listings. And of course, reviews tanked for a variety of products and throughout your marriage to different listings. So there’s a lot of like just shambles there to like, try to unpack. And of course, we’ve pulled out of Europe and we have resellers on our listings who buy the letter of the law are actually allowed to be there. Like they bought the stuff and it’s real stuff. But what happens is, if a customer has a bad experience that doesn’t come to us, it goes to them.

Ben Leonard 00:25:41  Or if they do, use the contact details on the packaging and the inserts, that does come to us. But we didn’t. It’s not our order. So it’s very tricky. And so I end up typically just sending them free stuff to try and like and then say go leave a review. Because even if they leave a review, but they bought it from somebody else, that’s still my asset. I still want that review. Right. So it’s not like exactly the ideal playbook that I’d be doing with a client. So as a side note, you mentioned Peregrine Commerce there at the top we’re a growth and retention marketing agency and we work with any brand. But we specialize in helping Amazon businesses become real brands. And so the playbook that I would implement with with a client is not exactly what we would implement here, because we’re dealing with a basket case, but it’s fun. It’s like it’s fun to deal with a basket case in many ways. And I got over like, although part of the reason I brought it back was emotion, because it’s my baby.

Ben Leonard 00:26:29  I got over the sadness of seeing what happened to it, you know, what year is this? 26, like four years ago. Five years ago maybe. and so I’m okay with it. Like, it can not work out and it’s fine and it can work out and it’s great. It’s it’s it’s it’s fine. And it gives me a I learn stuff. Right? I’m in the weeds on TikTok shop learning stuff I’m not doing as much as I would love to. I’m not like going live and whatnot because I’m busy. I’m busy with my new baby carrier startup. I’m busy helping clients in the agency and helping clients with the brokerage. So I’m not like, you know, some scrappy entrepreneur who’s who’s going live like several hours a day. And that’s okay. I’m comfortable with that.

Josh Hadley 00:27:08  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And you’ve definitely got a ball of wax there to pick through with your brand. Well, let’s let’s transition over to tuco then, which is a dad’s baby carrier.

Josh Hadley 00:27:18  And I’m more interested to hear about your playbook over here. And you’ve got to experience. Here’s the good news that I love to hear from your perspective. You work with other clients from a growth marketing agency perspective. So you see what’s actually working and driving sales and growth and other brands. So what are some of those learnings and takeaways that you’re applying into your own new baby carrier brand?

Ben Leonard 00:27:40  Yeah. So I’ll just give you a bit of background on tuco. Tuco is a baby cry for dads. I have three kids, didn’t like any of the baby carriers I tried when our daughter was born. Inevitably, my wife would get annoyed at me as well because I would change the position of the straps and whatnot. And so I ended up settling for, like, the least worst one, which didn’t fit me properly. And so I thought maybe I could design one for dads, did a bit of homework, spoke with baby carrier consultants and also consultants in the backpack and hiking and outdoor world. Turns out that the big baby carrier brands are lying to us, so they will feature dads in their marketing material, photos and videos and whatnot.

Ben Leonard 00:28:12  But what they fail to reveal is that the carriers are designed for the female anatomy, because mostly it’s moms who are carrying, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Absolutely fine. Like, of course a carrier should fit the mums, but you know, average guys, five foot ten, an average woman is five foot two with hips and boobs. So we have different frames. That’s why you go into a serious hiking store and you buy a serious hiking backpack. They have the same model. They have a women’s version and a man’s version because we are different shapes. So why is that not applying to baby carriers? Well, it’s because back in the day when they first started making baby carriers, well, so people have been carrying babies for, you know, millennia using just like a cloth sling. But back in the day, when they started making the modern buckled carriers, they were made for mums obvious reasons. You know, different times dads were not really doing that much parenting and so that was fine.

Ben Leonard 00:28:55  Nothing wrong with that. Dads started to carry a bit and so the brands were like, oh, dads are using them too. Well, we’ll put them in some of the marketing material. But they didn’t think that they, they didn’t think to make one for dads. And so then they sort of accidentally sleep walked into this position where they can’t launch a deaf baby carrier now, because then they’ll have to admit that their existing range is mediocre for 50% of parents. So we have a structural competitive advantage there. And so we can we can kind of get in there. And that’s kind of what we’re doing. So we have designed a baby carrier around the male frame with probably the world’s best outdoor product developer. And then we’ve worked with baby carrier consultants who work with the big guns in baby in the baby carrier world to ensure that we’re getting everything right from the baby’s perspective. And we’ve also been working with the author of the UK Baby Carrier Safety Standards. So we’re this is we’re we’re we’re doing this right.

Ben Leonard 00:29:46  You know, so that’s kind of where the whole thing came from. So to answer your question, what are we doing. Right. So this is not four bucks on Alibaba. Stick a label on a job. This is a properly developed product which costs significantly more for us to make, which as a startup means we don’t have a ton of inventory for product seating, for creative marketing, TikTok shop, All that kind of stuff. So we have to be very picky with how we get our product out in the world in terms of getting it to influencers, well-known people who are going to give us the best bang for our buck. So that’s part one, right? Is identifying the right people to give our product to its paying PR agencies to get us in the right places and the right publications. Oh, I should mention so we’ve just closed an investment round for half $1 million, and I don’t think you can launch a brand like this without at least half $1 million. Hence, we’re able to go and do stuff like that.

Ben Leonard 00:30:35  We’re going to go to baby shops. So I’m sure this is a thing in the US. But across the UK, several times a year at large exhibition centres, there’s baby shows where parents and parents to be will rock up to look for the latest baby and parenting gear. Not just them though, also buyers for big retailers. So going to them, we have contacts of various retailers. We’ve already got handshake deals with some independent retailers to stock our stuff. But the rest of the strategy is very, very much marketing. So we’re not going to be profitable until year three. So we’re actually basically it’s not rocket science. It’s make a ton of great content and throw a ton of money at it, and show ads to a ton of people on Instagram and on TikTok and on Facebook and on Google and on big and so on and so forth. that’s that’s the strategy. And it’s to position our brand differently. So we’re positioning differently first because we’re a baby carrier for dads, which has been done before, which we can touch on in a minute if you want, but it has been done well.

Ben Leonard 00:31:27  And second, because we have a patent pending on the technology in our hip belt, which properly puts the weight on the dads hips and not its back, and also because it doesn’t look like a typical generic baby carrier, it looks like a rugged, outdoorsy product, something the dad actually wants to buy. And so all of that positioning is important. And then this is probably the most important part, actually. It’s understanding your customer because our customer is not dads. Some of our customers will be dense. Most of our customers are mums and grandmothers and aunties and some grandfathers and uncles and brothers. But mostly it’s people buying for a dad, and it’s understanding those customers and getting our marketing right for them, which is important. And so I’m building this thing in public. I’m taking a risk. This all could go horribly wrong if it goes horribly wrong. It’s an interesting case study, I guess so, you know, and it’s cheaper than an MBA. So either way, I’m going to learn a lot.

Josh Hadley 00:32:22  Yeah, I love that. Well, I think the strategy of going top of the funnel brand awareness content, I think is so important today. And that’s exactly what TikTok shop does. That’s exactly what meta ads do, is they create awareness. And then what we’re finding is like 30 to 50% of orders are going to just naturally fall over to Amazon. And here’s the good news. It turns into search. Fine by but this is toes compliant Amazon condoned. This is okay. Totally white hat. Just like search finding by campaigns. They see your product. They go search for your product. They find it. They buy it. What do you think happens to your rankings on Amazon? They go up. And so that definitely is kind of the next playbook in the e-commerce space. But then I’m curious to hear, like at what size of brand do you think this is appropriate if somebody is trying to bootstrap? Like, do you see that? Hey, you need to be doing like a few million on Amazon first, or I mean, I know in your brand like you’re starting from, you know, day one, but you also are taking out a half $1 million investment to be able to go execute a lot of those strategies, because they do they take a lot of money up front to hopefully have a big payoff down the road.

Josh Hadley 00:33:30  So like, what advice or recommendation do you have for brand owners that are already successful on Amazon? Maybe they they’re making a few million dollars. They’re like, when’s the right time to begin shifting attention away from Amazon? Because that’s a slippery slope, as we know. Just like SEO, you can’t just set it and forget it on Amazon. What’s your recommendation?

Ben Leonard 00:33:49  Yeah, I used to tell people I wanted them doing at least a million on Amazon, and now I don’t. People come to me both just as a consultant with my Ben hat on or to our agency in a variety of different positions. If you’re a complete startup, you need to make sure you have enough cash to actually fund this thing. and then depending on what your product is and what your brand is and what your price point is, you can decide where to start. And I would I would very much caution against spreading yourself too thin across too many channels because you’re going to run out of cash. I would say 1 to 2.

Ben Leonard 00:34:24  It’s okay to be on other channels for an awareness point of view, but not necessarily spending money on marketing or whatever. for those who exist already, let’s say you’re you are, you know, your typical Amazon goldfish bowl seller. The sooner you can get off, the better start diversify the better, provided it’s not going to kill your cash flow. So as a rule of thumb, I like people to be doing at least half a million. if they’re doing less, fine. But I would want to be looking at their ROI, their, their, their cash flow situation. And also, frankly, do you have extra cash to throw it? but if you’re if you’re doing 50 K a month, say a bit less, perhaps, and you’re stuck on Amazon, or you’re trying to expand elsewhere. Having your own website, running ads, organic traffic, email marketing, TikTok shop, ceding to creators on Instagram, all of that stuff that real brands do. you need to be doing it. Otherwise your business is on very shaky ground.

Ben Leonard 00:35:15  I don’t know how you sleep at night, and ultimately, the most you’re ever going to get paid for your business is what you get paid when you sell it. And, you know, people listening to this might be in their 20s, 30s, 40s and be like, well, I’m not going to retire for years, so why does it matter? Well, it matters because if you don’t, if you if you one day you’re going to want to stop and you’re going to need to sell it. And if it’s not sellable, you can’t sell it. You can’t force somebody to buy it. Right? So the best way to make it sellable is grow it so that it’s big enough and ugly enough. The bigger the business, the easier it is to sell and diversify it so that it’s not risky because a buyer doesn’t want to buy something that’s risky. And it depends what you’re what you’re selling. The best place to diversify might be straight to a website. Might be TikTok shot might be a combo.

Ben Leonard 00:35:58  You know, people come to me with different situations. I have like people who are like stuck in the Amazon goldfish bowl, but they’re doing eight figures and they come to me and they just throw a ton of money at it, and they brute force their way into doing everything all at once. Nothing wrong with that. But some people come to us and they’re like, well, I’m on Amazon and I have like this terrible WordPress site I made five years ago. And it’s like, okay, well, let’s develop a good Shopify site now. We’ve got people coming to it cause they found your brand on Amazon. Now let’s run some ads. Now let’s start doing actual effort on your your Instagram and social media. Great. This is working. Now we retarget those people with actual email marketing. Okay, I think TikTok shop could be a good fit for you. Let’s try it. It could be an iterative process. That was a very long ramble.

Josh Hadley 00:36:33  No, I love it. Ben. This has been a great episode.

Josh Hadley 00:36:36  I’ve got a lot of takeaways from all of this. Is there anything that you feel like the audience needs to hear that we haven’t yet touched on?

Ben Leonard 00:36:44  I mean, I could go on for ages. So I think this one thing we spoke about this off camera, that sort of I think summarizes it quite nicely, which is quality. You have to have a quality product. You can’t out market a crap product. You have to have quality supply chain. You have to have a quality intellectual property position. You have to have quality customer service. You have to have quality. Social media, website, email marketing. You basically have to imagine all your the people you respect and care about the most in the world are at your house, your family and your friends and your colleagues and your kids. And then imagine somebody puts up a big projector screen and starts showing everyone all the little details of your business in your brand. If there’s stuff on there that you would cringe or you’re embarrassed for those people to see, you need to fix it and make it quality.

Ben Leonard 00:37:30  You need to be able to stand there and be able to puff your chest out and be proud of every single thing that you’re doing and your business is doing. And if you do that, everything will be all right.

Josh Hadley 00:37:40  Great words of wisdom. Ben, as we wrap things up today, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. And Ben, let me know if you think I’m missing something. But number one, you talked about diversifying. And I do think that diversifying is a really important like action item that people can’t implement. However, here would be my caveat, and I think it is less about how much revenue you are doing, whether if you started your brand on Amazon, I think it’s less about how much revenue you’re doing, but it’s all about the processes that you have in place. We talked about thoracica and some of their shortcomings. And guess what? Most of it was just like SOP related. They did not have the proper systems and processes to go execute from an IP defensive standpoint, from a supply chain and forecasting execution standpoint.

Josh Hadley 00:38:31  So likewise, if you’re going to divert your attention away from whatever platform you got started on to generate your initial success, if you divert that attention and you do not have existing team members to go execute your current playbooks, you will fail, because as soon as you divert your attention to another platform. It’s got a bunch of nuances, complexities, and you’re going to have to invest just as much time as you took to stand up. Amazon. Most likely you’re going to stand those other sales channels up from scratch. And if you if you just leave Amazon and think you’re going to coast on Amazon, you’re sorely wrong on that standpoint and your business will slowly erode over time. And so that’s my first action item is if you’ve experienced success, whether you started on Shopify, TikTok shop or Amazon, before you move to the next one, make sure you have your ducks in a row. Make sure you have SOPs for supply chain. Make sure you have SOPs for listing optimization, for images for your titles and bullets and PPC.

Josh Hadley 00:39:30  Like there’s a lot that goes into it, but if you do that and you have that foundation, then you can approach channel by channel and go in, stand it up, bring in the team, give them the playbook, have them continue to refine the playbook, and then you continue to move on to that next sales channel. That’s the way that I see the next brands growing and succeeding. Action item number two goes back to the whole supply chain mistake that D’Orazio made. If there is one key failure point in anybody’s business, it is leverage and inventory. And those are a very wicked combination. If you then leverage yourself with debt to go take on way too much inventory, you have virtually created your death spiral for your business. Charlie Munger said it best where he said, there’s three vices in life ladies, liquor, and leverage. And so if you’re ever leveraging yourself and taking out debt to fund any supply chain or Po that you’re initiating, you better have an immense degree of confidence that you will sell through that inventory in the next six months.

Josh Hadley 00:40:32  If you don’t, you are putting yourself in a really precarious circumstance. Action item number three working with creators and influencers. It doesn’t even have to be TikTok shop. It could be PR agencies, it could be YouTubers, it could be influencers and affiliates that are on social media, on Instagram, Facebook, etc. it doesn’t matter. But the the threat is the same, which is just brand awareness and it’s getting your name out there because all of that will naturally have a halo effect. And what happens? You stop looking at your financial statements and saying, what are my tacos? What’s my ACOs that gets removed completely from the equation? And you’re now looking at, hey, what is my murr or my marketing efficiency ratio? And that’s where you’re looking at all those samples that I put in all or the cost for those samples, the cost for the PR, the cost for the affiliate postings, etc. add that to your advertising balance and that line item as a whole becomes like what you’re spending for your marketing.

Josh Hadley 00:41:31  And now your tacos effectively become all of your influencer marketing campaigns, your PR campaigns, etc. that’s what the big brands are doing because they’re no longer just looking at what’s my ACOs and tacos, if that’s what you’re living and dying by right now. Your days are numbered. So, Ben, those are my three action items for our listeners. Anything else you would add there?

Ben Leonard 00:41:51  You nailed it. I think it’s come across those three items. I think what underpins it is what I said before. It’s it’s quality and being happy to stand by what you’re doing and what it says about you and your brand. If at any point something within those three isn’t something you’re proud of, then fix it. Well that’s important.

Josh Hadley 00:42:13  Well sad Ben, final three questions. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Ben Leonard 00:42:18  Yeah, it’s I give the same answer all the time. I think I’ve given the same answer on your show before, but it hasn’t changed. Despite all the books that have come out since this book did.

Ben Leonard 00:42:25  It’s The Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, who of course, you’ve had on your show. It’s an absolute classic. My copy is an absolute mess because I go through it several times a year. I probably I read it cover to cover, like once a year, and I flick through it multiple times to go go back to certain things. It doesn’t matter how big your business is, the principles apply. And I don’t think there’s, you know, there’ll be entrepreneur entrepreneurs out there who think they’ve outgrown that book. And that’s that’s the wrong attitude. Like that book is gold.

Josh Hadley 00:42:51  100% as a great foundational book about swapping yourself out, right, and creating a team and how to scale up. So great. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using and why?

Ben Leonard 00:43:03  it’s the same one that everyone’s going insane for right now. It’s Claude. It’s absolutely mind blowing. I’m using it for so many things, and it surprises me all the time when it’s just. Would you like me to make it like this? And I’m like, oh, my God, I never even thought of that.

Ben Leonard 00:43:18  That’s insane. So I’m using it for so much across all, all of my businesses right now. I’m using it a lot with my baby carrier brand to analyze all of the safety regulations and ensure that we are not just meeting the regulations, but exceeding them, whether that’s in terms of, you know, our instruction manuals and our labeling, but also the actual components that we’re using. Being able to take pretty hefty, quite boring documentation and work through it that way and then build out really, really nice dashboards and tracking sheets and whatnot to make sure that we’re on top of what we need to be on top of is super useful for direct to consumer brand.

Josh Hadley 00:43:56  Yeah, I think it’s the ideas are endless and continues to change day over day, week after week. So all right, final question for you, Ben, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Ben Leonard 00:44:09  Yeah, sure. There’s so many people. And I was going to give a couple people here, but those people are already so well respected they don’t need the limelight.

Ben Leonard 00:44:17  And so I’m actually going to shout out to my co-founder of my agency, Sean, and here’s why. So Sean is Sean Cowie. Look him up on LinkedIn c o w e Sean Isbell se a n I have so much respect for this guy. So we when we met back in about 2019 or 20, we were competitors. Well, I sold I sold best gear in 2019. He messaged me while I still owned it on Facebook Messenger, and he explained that he owned a competitor brand to me and I thought all my competitors were all over the world. This guy was ten miles away and he was like, how are you doing the numbers that you’re doing? Shortly after I sold it, he actually came to me for consulting, and I was supporting him with a brand that he owned. And he is the most hungry entrepreneur and tenacious entrepreneur I’ve ever met. And in the end, he ended up closing down that brand. We partnered on another brand, which didn’t work out, but we we learned a lot and he learned a lot.

Ben Leonard 00:45:10  And then in my consulting with my clients, I brought him in to to support me and my consultant. And over time, that ended up pivoting into our agency. And despite having a full time job, actually as a business advisor with the local council here, which supports of local businesses, he worked ridiculous hours on the ops of our agency and recently more not recently, a while ago now took that completely full time. And he has is just one of those entrepreneurs who just will not stop. He knows what he wants. He learns non-stop and he provides, you know, awesome service to his clients. And so, yeah, a ton of respect for him. He’s not really well known in the e-commerce space yet. He should be go look him up on LinkedIn. So that’s that’s who I think people should follow with Sean Cowie.

Josh Hadley 00:45:51  Great. Love it Ben. Well, thanks again for your time today Ben. If people want to learn more about you, follow your journey. Where’s the best place for people to reach out?

Ben Leonard 00:45:58  Sure.

Ben Leonard 00:45:59  I’m active on LinkedIn. Just look me up there. That’s probably the best one. I’m sporadic on other places like X and Instagram. I should do more, but I’m busy actually building brands, so I LinkedIn. Probably the best place to search. My name is Ben Leonard. But if anyone wants, you know, any help with something or, you know, do I know someone who could help with XYZ? Just email me Ben at Ben Pro. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:46:19  Ben, it’s been a pleasure having you back on the show. Thanks for sharing your journey.

Ben Leonard 00:46:22  Cheers. Thanks for having me.

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