Afolabi Oyerokun 4:05
Oh, thank you. I would say my story really started in 2001. I, you know, got out of college. And I you know, I’m a very creative person. I like to design products. So I had designed some really cool shoes, you know, very colorful sneakers. And I’ve been looking, you know, I was looking for who can help me manufacture or over two can help with these, you know, develop these shoes. And, you know, eventually I was looking on the internet, you know, those were days of dial up internet. There was no broadband, there was nothing, you know, so I was looking all over. And finally some guy random guy just, you know, replied me and say, Hey, we like your shoes, we can help you design it and he’s from Taiwan. And I’m like, Whoa, why really? He says but you have to come down here. Like okay, all right. I can do that.
So I flew to, I flew to Taiwan to go meet him. Very, very nice guy, Mr. Johnson. And he looked at my designs, it’s like, yeah, we can help you, you know, do these and do that. Just explain to us what it is. You know what, you know, how many sizes you want to make? Are you making men’s and women’s? So I’m like, Yeah, so I want to make men’s and women’s, you know, so he’s told me, I was going to need like, some molds. I’m like, what is that? It’s like, well, mold, and then he showed me the molds. Like, wow, okay. And then he broke it. To me, it’s like, for this mold, each size is $2,000. I was
Josh Hadley 5:42
just starting out out of college, right?
Afolabi Oyerokun 5:48
Like, wait, what am I gonna get that? I said, Well, I can cut the number of sizes, I want to make it out. Because it’s a size six is $2,000. So I seven is $2,000.08. And I wanted to go to size 14, because I wear a size 13. So it’s like, yeah, we got to make mold for both. So all my designs, I had to condense them into one of like, I need to do only one kind of soul. Because the mode is for the bottom part of the shoes. So I said okay, all right. Instead of making like gazillion number of modes, let me just concentrate on just one type of mode and just change the upper part. But anyway, so eventually, we got the mold done, we got the prototype, and it was time to manufacture. Remember, I don’t I didn’t have any marketing experience. I didn’t know where I was going to sell the issues. I don’t know, I didn’t know nothing. I was just so driven. Because, you know, I just, I was just so passionate about my designs. And he says, Okay, well, the minimum order quantity is 1500 pairs per color. Like, geez, we’re making six colors or something beside Yeah, at the end of the day, to make 7512 pairs of shoes, stuffed into a 745 foot container, ship it all the way in Ohio to California to stop the store at a warehouse. And now the journey began, how am I going to sell these shoes?
Josh Hadley 7:21
You didn’t know? So you just you loved I guess designing products, then you had this wild idea that, hey, I’m going to sell my own sneakers. And then you still didn’t have a plan of how you’re going to sell these sneakers and corretto nothing, no plan. Okay, keep going.
Afolabi Oyerokun 7:42
So I was like, okay, my wife was helping me to do research. And, you know, now these are friends money, I have to bankroll you know, finance these, purchase these manufacturing with friends money. You know, so I was, you know, I was able to get some trade shows in New York and everyday. So I went to trade shows, you know, showed not a single order, you know, I went everywhere. And it got to a point, you know, Amazon reached out to us and say, hey, you know, this looks like a really cool shoe. You know, do you want to come on our platform to start selling. I mean, those were times those were the days they were trying to transition from just selling books into selling other products. And I’m like, I don’t have anywhere else to sell these, you know, I might as well try you out. And lo and behold, we started selling, but there was no FBA. So we had to fulfill by ourselves. I had to trust some guy in California to actually ship my goods out. Who always took like, two, three days before I even look into his email or into his computer to see. He was disastrous. But, you know, we were selling, we were selling and it got to a point we started noticing that the return rate was higher, was getting high. And we’re like, why people returning the shoes, we found out that we’re returning them to get a bigger size because those shoes run really small. Yeah, they run really small. It was a big problem. You know, we still had some 7000 PS left. And I was like, What am I gonna what are we gonna do? Okay, can we put in the description of the listing that whole shoe run small ticket higher size or whatever? Yeah, we did that actually. But still, I just couldn’t take the pain of people just returning and returning and returning them for a bigger size because he was costing us money every time we ship it to them. So I’m like, You know what, I have to cut my losses and just liquidate this inventory. So unfortunately, I had to liquidate it to some guy in Florida who went down and sold everything in Mexico somewhere interesting. Yeah, yeah, it was a tough time. But, you know, I’m happy I had to go through it, you know, to learn and to just to be better.
Josh Hadley 10:10
And so you ended up then placing a new order than with the correct sizes?
Afolabi Oyerokun 10:16
Oh, no, you just, you just kind of closed their business. I just closed the that was the end. That was 2002. Okay. In 2014, you know, my, you know, my best friend here in New York, I was living in New York, then he was like, Well, I follow up with your with your skills, you know, you have a source, you have some good sourcing skills, you know, other suppliers, you have product development skills, why don’t you let us go and sell on Amazon? I’m like, Are you kidding me? I just got out of Amazon several years ago, I’m not going back there again. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s different. Now, they now have FBA to fulfill your product of like, really? is like, yeah, what do you have to lose? Let’s do it. So 2014 December, we go back into it. And we started listing some products, and January one 2015, we made our first sale, and like, that’s a good sign. That’s a good sign. So we, before you know it, we started introducing new product, we started designing new products, he would design some how to design, so we’ll put it out there, we started crushing it, we were growing so fast, whether we could handle and that’s the next disaster. You know, now we were experiencing success that we didn’t prepare for when it meshed ourselves really, really bad, because we just couldn’t cope with so many times, we will order products, the product will be sitting in our warehouse, we just didn’t realize we had those products in there. We don’t even remember, we didn’t even remember to launch the product. We all really, it was sitting in the warehouse, because we’re so bogged down with all the little little things, the logistics that these did that, that we couldn’t really focus on the business to really grow and to really do very well. So success could be a bad thing, if you’re not prepared for it, or you don’t know how to handle it. That’s the lesson I learned in that part as well. So we you know, we started new brands, we, you know, until last year, we got an offer, from, you know, from a buyer who I believe, you know, is an aggregator. You know, we saw the first one and you know, this the process was smooth and, you know, good. And then you know, we offered them this, you know, two more brands? And they say, yeah, we’ll take them, you know, so we you know, we sold them very well, profitably, we were happy. But we learned a lot of things through in the process of 2014 to 2022. We learned a lot. And I’m very happy I went through the whole process to get to where I have now. Yeah,
Josh Hadley 13:02
well, I love that you kind of initially cut your teeth at the very beginning the early stages of Amazon. And it didn’t go over well at all right, I think that was probably a very negative experience for you. And it was kind of ran away from Amazon, obviously for the next decade, until your friend kind of convinced you to come back on. So I think what would be most interesting for our listeners to hear is if you can go back to 2015. And with all of your experience now, you know, if you were to restart on Amazon, which I think that’s what you’re doing now is you’re creating some new brands and launching them on Amazon. What are some of those lessons, actionable takeaways that you can give to other sellers to say, hey, here are the challenges that we faced at different points in the business that I’m going to make sure that we don’t go through the same challenges again, in the future, if you wouldn’t mind breaking some of those lessons learned for us break. I’m going
Afolabi Oyerokun 14:03
to if I were to start all over again, I’m also going to weave some stories and past experiences into it. So when somebody goes into e-comm, you’re starting your E commerce or you’re starting your Amazon business. Sometimes we forget the reason why we started in the first place. We forget the reason why we quit our jobs and we went into E commerce. For me. My main driver was freedom. I wanted freedom I wanted to be I wanted to be able to control my time. I wanted to be able to be there for my family any day anytime I wanted to be able to take off if I want to take off I want to take off you know Yeah. So you start this e-comm business and you’re married to it, you know, you’re you’re waking up 3am In the morning you’re in or you’re sleeping late at night. So eventually defeats the purpose of why you started in the first place. So We’ve found ourselves caught up in all those things, you know, me and my business partner, we will fight each other. You know, why? Why, you know, why are we running out of stock, I’m like, I didn’t know that product was going to run out of stock, I mean, have good system in place. And we didn’t have the freedom or anything. So going back now, looking back to where we came from, to now, there are three things I am going to do differently this time. First, I’m going to innovate. Second, I’m going to automate. Third, I’m going to have a lot of free time to think. Because for me, I believe that thinking time is a very creative time. I believe that your rest time is very important. People ask me, you know, you know, jokingly, maybe I’m speaking to No, I’m a non for my business partner on, you know, he picks, you know, he picks up on me a lot. He’s like, Hey, I forgot, what did you do this weekend? I’m like, No, I did nothing. I just sat on my couch. And I was watching soccer all day. And I was not doing nothing. Sometimes he calls me, I said, I want to stop disturbing me. I’m on the field with my son. We’re playing soccer here, please.
Josh Hadley 16:19
Yeah, so
Afolabi Oyerokun 16:20
freedom, time to spend time with your loved one is very important. So I’ll make sure that this time I automate, so that I can free up myself to do whatever I want. Whenever I want it to do it. I don’t want anything just pressure me down all the time. Because when I’m thinking I’m creating things that are so valuable, in my rest time, be sitting on a lounge on a recliner, and you, you know, you when you’re relaxed when your mind is at rest you so many creative ideas come to you and you can look into your business and actually spot all the things you were doing wrong when you’re in a relaxed mode, though.
Josh Hadley 17:05
Yeah. So your your kind of three takeaways, then right? If you were to restart would be to innovate, automate, and then have more time for thinking and just downtime in general. Right? So off the lobby, why don’t you expand on each of those three things that you would do differently? Let’s start with innovate first, what do you mean by innovating? And why is that an important lesson learned that you’re going to make sure to implement going forward?
Afolabi Oyerokun 17:36
Great. So when we started back in 2014, and Amazon, we, I will say we started on a very good note, because myself and my partner we were, we are creative people. We love graphics, we love to design stuff. So we so many, so many categories, about two or three categories on Amazon, now, we actually ruled those categories, we almost like invented those categories. And everybody started copying us after two or three years, but we had made, we’ve made enough so we didn’t care. But it was innovation that made us different. You know, because our product was so unique, we designed it from scratch, we didn’t copy anybody, we created them, we look at what was in the market, and we’re like, we can do better than this. With some two, three hour worth of work, we’ll create products that will sell like, you know, $50,000 a month, you know, we you know, we were so confident in our creative abilities. So going back again, we will create more and we’ll even go so unique. And we will niche down to what we’re what’s the easiest for us to do. So we’ll niche down and we will go deep and then wide. So what do I mean by that? So you let’s say you we started with guiding signs right? So we will create this guiding sign and come up with like one SKU into guiding sign, okay, and it takes off and it’s selling like crazy. And we’re reading reviews and people are saying oh I love your size. I wish it was double sided and italic has to double sided we do double sided that means we’re going deeper. We do double sided and then we read reviews like yeah I put the sign on my lawn and just looks so small. I wish it was bigger I have big lungs and thinking let’s make a bigger two sided bigger version. Right? Well I’m not and then I know I wish I don’t like that color. You know I wish it comes about that the color then we’re getting wider now. Like now. Now let’s break into so many colors. Let’s give people what they want is probably SEO of life. People are already giving you they’re already telling you what they will by. So we will give it to them, we will do a lot of research. And we will, you know, we will create more. So going back now to start all over again, we would really, really consciously niche down, create some really jaw dropping designs. And as the designs take off, we’ll keep going deeper into that niche instead of getting distracted by other things like, Oh, everybody else is making money off of this one, no, we will, we will completely, you know, prevent ourselves from being distracted. And just keep focusing on what’s working, and just outdoing ourselves and outdoing ourselves by going deeper and giving the customer experience and then broadening out. So that’s what I mean by innovation. And one more thing in the innovation is one failure. One thing we forgot to do was we forgot to patent ideas. When we started this time, I’m never going to make that mistake again. Once you innovate a product, you have to protect it with everything you’ve got. So this time we create a product, we protect it before we even launch it.
Josh Hadley 21:09
What kind of patents are you talking about? Are you talking about utility patents or design patents? copyrights?
Afolabi Oyerokun 21:16
It would be so we use three types. So we will use design patterns. If it’s a completely creative thing that doesn’t exist that or we would we add utility patent to it. But many people don’t realize that copyrights are very strong. So when you talk about copyrights, everybody thinks, oh, I can copyright my listing, I can copyright my text. I’m like, no, no, that’s not what I’m talking about, you can actually copyright the design of your product, you can do it to the copyright, or you can do a 3d sculpture copyright. And that will protect you that Amazon respect that as much as patent. And copyright costs, like 50 bucks to do. Yeah, as opposed to patents that could lead you into, you know, 510 1000 or even more. So we will use copyrights for 2d and 3d sculpture. That means we will, you know, we will do a 3d rendering of that product. And we’ll copyright the 3d rendering, we’ll do a 2d version, which is the flat version design of our product, we will copyright that as well. And then we go into patents if it is if it is worthy enough for utility patent with the utility, but in most cases, it will be design patents.
Josh Hadley 22:31
Okay, yeah, that we previously had rich Goldstein on the show, and he works him and I work together a lot on creating a lot of the design patents and copyrights for our own business. So yes, I completely agree with you, that is so important. We’ve started doing that in the last couple of years. And it makes all the difference. Because as you know, as soon as you come up with a unique design, it’s only a few months later that you’ll have overseas competitors that are mimicking your exact same day. Exactly. They have no creativity whatsoever, and it’s easy to shut them down. Only if you have a copyright or a design patent to protect it.
Afolabi Oyerokun 23:12
Correct. Correct. We had a product, a very simple product was a bumper sticker that we had in those days, and we were selling like 75 units a day. And then everybody every factory was copying us they just flooded the market with our design. And it dropped to like 10 or 20 a day we’re gonna what’s going on so we did a resale we saw that there were about 50 or 60 people were copying us and the sale or sale could have been 100 or 150 a day if we didn’t have all those people so we filed a complaint Tango we had copyrighted the design so we filed a complaint to Amazon we said this this this this this we put in all the async of everyone copying us waiting 24 hours Amazon shut them down guess what we went back from 10 a day to 200 units a day.
Josh Hadley 24:09
Wow. That’s a big difference and great case study.
Afolabi Oyerokun 24:13
Yeah, it’s a big difference so please anybody you’re creating or you want to create something number one you should be creating something new don’t don’t try to do me to product I’m very biased I don’t like me to product because you just don’t have longevity in me to product and you know why are you selling what everybody else is selling? Why can’t you just create something new you know, if you have an idea you can you know direct message me or you know we have brainstorm ideas together create something that can you can really really sell you don’t have any asset selling you know, mutual product, you know, like you said, you know, Josh, you your business is in your in your IP. If you don’t have any IP, you don’t have a business that’s what I learned the hard way.
Josh Hadley 24:57
Yeah. So when you exited your brands, I’m wondering like, did they care? Did you have IP that you’re giving them? And how important was that?
Afolabi Oyerokun 25:08
It was big. So there were two big things that made our brand. So that made it made us sell at almost 5x. It was our copyright, our IP protection, and our some of most some of our products in one of our brands, some of our most of our products, our best selling products was made in the US. And the buyer loved it. Like, I place an order in a week it ships out. and it ships for free direct to FDA. So they love that they’re like, No, this is a slam dunk for us, you know. So those two things, we had to transfer. So at closing, you have a reassignment of IP. So we had to, you know, reassign our trademarks or patents, our copyrights and everything, we had to reassign it to the new owner. Okay.
Josh Hadley 25:57
Interesting. But that was something that was very interesting and appealing to them then Right? Very, very easily, like you got extra, you know, an extra multiple, because of the intellectual belief.
Afolabi Oyerokun 26:10
So, yes, I believe so. Because they they have, they have a very strong brand presence, they have a, you know, the some of these products, the next seller to us is probably doing 20% of what we’re doing. So, and it was because, you know, we have this IP that if anybody tries to copy anything, we just shut them down, you know, so that they knew what’s a good investment for them. And it’s going to deliver on their, you know, on their books, you know, to their shareholders.
Josh Hadley 26:41
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Going back to, you know, innovating products. I mean, that’s, that’s what you say, is so, so important. And it’s the same for our business as well. I’m curious, where do you get your design inspiration? Where you aren’t copying other people? So where do you see, you know, how do you come up with designs that are trending, or get ahead of the trends to make sure that you create something that customers actually want?
Afolabi Oyerokun 27:09
Awesome. So we have a very simple rule, we would research, you know, you know, we use data die. My, you know, my business partner does that, do we use that Brenda Young’s data drive or EDM chain and stuff? You know, it will find out what niches and what categories are doing so well. And we will look at all the designs were like, No, we could do better than this one. You know, and then we could we could, we could look at into patterns, as well as the oh, what patterns are doing so good. So we will take the patterns that are doing good, and their products that are doing good, and will marry the two together? Right? So we know these products are doing so good, but they’re boring, you know, they could, they could take more they could they could use more life, you know, both in the product and in the packaging design, because we want to put the packaging, you know, in our listings, so that some people see they’re like, Wow, that packaging alone is like buying an Apple product, you know, you’re the experience you you see where you’re opening the box of your iMac or whatever, you know, we would design the packaging to be completely, completely unique. That you know, so we get our inspiration from that we look at what selling was doing so well. We go back to the drawing board and say, we could do a lot better than these because we’re creative people. So we’re going with go and design in a different, you know, different variations of things. And we’ll launch them and see which one does better. And we’re like, oh, I look like people like this ones most, or keep them with scale those up and the ones that are not doing so well. We keep them for a few months. And if they still never pick up, we just cancel them. Okay, whatever. interests that are doing good.
Josh Hadley 28:59
Do you add them as variations to your listing? Or do you leave them as standalone ASINs to occupy more real estate on the search results page,
Afolabi Oyerokun 29:08
we keep them separate? We keep them separate? Because when we’re doing product display ads and stuff like that we want to spread, you know, because some people don’t really look at variation sometimes. You know, it’s not a variations are not good. But some people don’t look at it that well, you know, they don’t look at, you know how Amazon displays them. So we would like to, especially if it’s a design that is very unique. We don’t want to put them together as under each other each one of them. Maybe by size, we can put we can do variation by size. But when it comes to call or aesthetic or whatever, we like to keep them separate to take up more realistic.
Josh Hadley 29:49
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Then kind of leads into the complexity of PPC management though, right? When you’re advertising or yeah, when you have A product design where there are unique aspects to every single one, right? You’re targeting the exact same keywords, right? If you’re doing bumper stickers, you might have 10 different skews of bumper stickers with very different designs on correct. So when you’re doing that, how did you manage, you know, the PPC campaigns where you’re trying to promote 10 of the exact same product ran at different designs, but for the exact same keyword?
Afolabi Oyerokun 30:30
I wish I can answer that question. But that would be more of a question for my business partner, because I have no clue how the PPC thing work. I learned it I watched so many training, I’m like, this is such a hard thing. So you know, following through all this thing, I know the concept because, you know, when we’re when we’re having meetings, I, you know, tells me what they do and everything, but I’m like this, just automate this, outsource all these things. You know, I, you know, I don’t want a body vote, you know, you know, burning my head with all the complexities because it keeps changing every time. So yeah, I wish I can answer that question, Josh. But I have no clue how we did it.
Josh Hadley 31:11
Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, it looks like we’ll have to have your business partner on the on the on the podcast. So awful lobby. I’m also curious, like, what type of products are you talking about here? Because you talked about a lot of like design innovation and like product packaging. Obviously, you started in shoes a long, long time ago. But you know, it sounds like you were doing some stickers. What other types of products were they more like stationery paper based or were they apparel based, give us if you could get give us a little insight on those and maybe some examples of the packaging that you changed.
Afolabi Oyerokun 31:52
So we did. We did a lot of crafts, one of our brands was specifically crafts, and everyone in the craft space. At that time, they were selling almost the same product we’re selling, but they will put a white and black sticker and just stick it, stick it on the on the product. And that’s it. Well, we went and designed a very, very elegant, like a big emblem. It was gold for within spinny experience. You know, it was like a gold foil. The difference between the white and black sticker that everybody was putting on and our own sticker that we put on because the product was shrink wrapped. Okay? The difference between the two is like 12 cents. Now it’s not a significant amount, but it created a huge value. Interesting. In I have the shoppers they’re like, oh, this product has white and black label looks like somebody just slapped it on it. This one looks like like a premium product. Whereas we’re getting money from the same supplier. Right? Yeah, it was like a premium product package. You look at gold and silver foil around it. So we outsell everyone by almost three to one, just because of that 12 cents.
Josh Hadley 33:15
And were you featuring that on your Amazon listing then is that what made the difference?
Afolabi Oyerokun 33:20
It made a difference. Yeah. And then we discovered that everyone I used this product would also buy another accessory. But like, let’s just give this accessory for free. So we created that accessory, and we put it into the product, and it’s for free. And that really went big that sale goes so high. The accessory cost us 15 things, right that we put into this product and everybody for that people just thought it was genius. Like, what is that that copied us after that, but we are really, really gone far before people would realize what was going
Josh Hadley 33:57
Interesting. Those are those are some great examples. Thanks for sharing that with us. Now, let’s move into automating things you talked about how that’s one thing that you would change. What do you mean by automating things moving forward and give us some examples?
Afolabi Oyerokun 34:13
So another thing I discovered as an e-comm brand owner is many brand owners don’t really know who they are. They don’t know what type of e-comm What type of business person are you? Are you the manager, leader kind of person? Or are you the inventor, innovator, or creative person? Or are you the data driven financial person? I see you know, I have you know, so many brands that we will take care of, and it’s so different or the brand owners are so different. It’s so unique. They have different personalities and different characters, different everything, right? One of them. Some of them will be like I just want to make money. I could care less if I’m selling toasters. I just want to make money. That is the data driven financial seller, right? But then I have this sellers like myself that I just want to create something new. I don’t like managing people, I don’t like managing anything, I just want to all day I want to learn something, and hand it over. So that’s why I always call myself, you know, no one calls me the idea midwife. I like to, I like to listen to how people, I enjoy listening to people’s ideas, like people’s creative ideas, like innovations, I’m like, wow, let’s help bring it to, let’s bring it out together, you know, so I’ll say, let me help you give birth to that idea. That’s the kind of person I am. Right. So I’m more of a creative intrapreneur I’m not a manager person. I’m not data driven. I don’t look at data. You know, my business partner is all data and is both data and innovative. And then we have the manager, leader kind of person who would enjoy having a team that, you know, he can lead and everything like that. So if you know who you are, just focus on your strengths, and outsource the rest. That’s what that’s my definition of automation. So now starting all over again, we wouldn’t touch PPC, we wouldn’t touch listing optimization, we wouldn’t touch ranking, we wouldn’t touch all those things. We just want to create stuff. Create, and we’ll continue to create, we have time to think and create because for me create creating products is more of like a, I see my Amazon business more as a royalty kind of deal. whereby I walk once and I get paid continuously. My work is in creating something different, something unique, something fun, and after I’m done creating it, I don’t want to see it again, I want to hand it off to a management product, you know, a business developer kind of person, who would take it on and say, Oh, wow, we will sell a ton of this thing. I don’t want to be involved in the marketing or the ranking Strategy. I don’t want to be involved in that. I just want to create it. I love logistics side, I love the logistics side as well. So that’s why we have a three PL center. I enjoy that. Like I designed the whole three PL center. Because of my creative side, I’m more architecture. So our three PL center that we’re building now we’re constructing now, I designed it for three pl You know, all the Threepio in a warehouse, as you see they’re really they’re really a warehouse design did not optimize, you know, some shopping for robots. I’m shopping for automation technology to you know, from the time your product comes to our dog till it gets to the rack, how can I automate it? How can I save you money, even before your product leaves China or India, wherever it is, I want to be able to start the automation from there, I want to be able to start saving you money from the time your product leaves, your suppliers were asked to come to my warehouse, I wanted to fully automate it. That’s the kind of person I am. So PPC, automate, outsource, listing, outsource everyday and outsource I’ll only keep what I enjoy my time.
Josh Hadley 38:16
Yeah, so based on that, would you go to a completely outsourced like brand management, you know, agency where they do PPC in house and they manage your listings and all of that, would you just choose one person and just work with that one agency? Or would you try to say, hey, this guy is the best at PPC. So I’m gonna bring him in as our agency for PPC, this guy’s really good at optimization strategies. So I’m going to bring in this agency, or would you just try to simplify things and go with the, you know, an all in one type of agency? And do you have any in mind that you would share with this, our listeners?
Afolabi Oyerokun 38:57
I will, I would prefer to pick teams that are that are, you know, that only know how to do one thing very well. So for PPC, I’ll pick a PPC team like, you know, I went to I discovered recently trellis Do you know trellis? I don’t think I’ve heard of that one. Tr e LL is their PPC software and they also have managed services. You know, Nam introduced me to them. So I’ll probably pick trellis to do all the PPC work. And then I’ll look for somebody that is really good in ranking strategies. And when I go to trade, when I go to events, I meet all these companies and I’ll just take their card and take their card and take the card and then we you know, talk to them interview them to see how they do and then nonfat also has a company called Dragon Fish. You know, he likes branding and packaging and stuff like that. So for branding and packaging, you know, he will probably do that. And then I’ll go to somebody else that really knows how to do Whoo, you know, like, Vanessa, you know, so that ties into all the, you know, tips and tricks in, you know, solving problems or, you know, Excel sheets and stuff like that we use that for inventory management, I’ll pick so stocked, you know, by Chelsea, because it’s very of all the software that I tried on inventory management, we had a lot of problems, we’ve lost billions due to inventory management. So I take inventory management really seriously. Yeah, so eventually management, I’ll probably pixel stock. I’ve been using it for a while I love it, we actually have a stock management agency, we approved by so stock to manage, you know, in other brands inventory. So because we know it so well. So we mastered it, we we went to a building, when Chelsea and Dan were building that software, I was able to they asked me a lot of questions, contributions and stuff like so I was able to look into the system to see how they were doing it, which was really super cool. So I would pick the best of everything and just outsource it like that. And just so I can have my free time to think to do what I love doing best, which is creation, creating things that logistics side,
Josh Hadley 41:23
would you hire somebody as like a general manager to then kind of be the person that’s working with and manage everyone, all of those different core agencies?
Afolabi Oyerokun 41:32
Correct as an operations manager? So we’ll have an operations manager that will work with all these teams. Okay, so we’ll make to make sure everything is flowing on very well, we could, you know, we could do it at first until we find the perfect person that we can have it.
Josh Hadley 41:47
Yeah, awesome. Makes a lot of sense. Great insight. All right. Last thing, I know, we’re running up on time here, but that kind of coincides with what we want to talk about, which is time to think so. You know, tell us about, you know, why that is so important that why that’s something that you’re going to change with your new business?
Afolabi Oyerokun 42:07
Well, because all my ideas come to me when I’m relaxed, when I’m at rest, you know, when I’m running in the morning, you know, people wonder why I like to run like, you know, five miles, you know, that’s my meet I, that’s when I, that’s when I’m thinking. So anytime I’m running, I get an idea, I stop and I put a memo on my phone, and I record the ideas on my phone, and I continue to run, or anytime. So I have this massage chair at home, I just sit on it for 20 minutes. When I’m doing that I’m just just thinking of things. One idea that you that comes to you whether you’re running or you’re at a restaurant or whatever, that one single idea, I’ve found that can change the whole landscape of your business. And is so it’s so simple. But when you’re so busy with so many things, you don’t even have time to think you don’t have time to do anything, you don’t realize that you’re here, doing a $20 an hour job where you could have been sitting, relax, be composed, or you come up with a billion dollar idea. Now your $20 tasks preventing you from thinking about the million dollar product, or the million dollar service or the million dollar idea seeks I see many of us are so buddy now, I’m going to do by myself because I want to save money, I’m going to do this. And at the end of the day, you’re really not saving money, you’re losing money, you just don’t know what you just don’t know, yet how much money you’re losing by not having your free time to think spend time with your family. Like, you know, a friend of mine came to my house. And you know, he saw that I was cooking and said you love cooking say yeah, you know, cooking is my me time. Anytime I’m cooking. I’m doing stuff, you know, in the house. It’s just, you know, my way of just thinking, just thinking freeing up my mind to just let my let my mind just run random. Just let him do this. Let him run. Yeah, by the way he wants to run. Because at the end of the day, you could come up with some really, really cool stuff that you never know.
Josh Hadley 44:23
You know, I completely agree with how important it is to set aside like strategic thinking time. And to just have space because I find myself as well as our business has grown, getting busier and busier and more meetings and more meetings and needing to work with this team member or this agency or whatever it is. And I can find that at the end of the day. All I’ve done is just sit on multiple meetings, and then I just do that day in and day out. But what I have found that is when I block off time on my calendars and for me it’s Fridays. I’d love to have that space on Fridays, where I can go through and read industry newsletters, or, you know, listen to podcasts or just be inspired by different ideas, or I learned about a new conference. And it’s always been little changes or little shifts like that, that have been big mindset shifts that then change the trajectory of the business, or it’s a relationship or it’s something new that I’ve learned. So I completely echo exactly what you said, how important it is to set aside strategic thinking time to allow those creative ideas to come to you without, you know, forcing it upon yourself. So awful lobby, this has been a lot of fun. Before we kind of wrap things up with our final three questions, I love to leave our audience with three takeaways from each episode. So here are the three kinds of takeaways that I’ve jotted down from this episode, let me know if you think I’m missing something off, Afolabi. So number one, is don’t create me to products, the way that you are going to succeed on Amazon and E commerce in general, in the future, and today is by innovating, looking at what is not currently on those platforms, and bringing something new to the market. So let’s say you’re a business owner, and you’re not the creative person. For myself, I am not a graphic designer, my wife is she’s very creative. But what I can do is I can go partner with those people that are very creative, because there are starving creative people out there that just like yourself, they just love the thrill of creating things. So it’s partnering with them, and saying, Hey, create something brand new, wild, even outlandish. And we found a good market opportunity. Let’s just see what sticks. And I think typically, you’ve probably have a lot of experience, some designs take off where you don’t expect them to another design, though. And like you said, you just kind of retire the ones that that never get legs underneath them. But if you’re not constantly innovating and bringing new ideas and new products to the table, your business will slowly just start to you know, disintegrate over time.
Afolabi Oyerokun 47:27
Yep, actually 100%.
Josh Hadley 47:30
Good. Action Item number two is automating your business. And this is going to look different for every different type of business owner. And I think you said that very eloquently, where you first have to understand like, what are the strengths that you’re bringing to the table, if you are the person that loves data, and digging in and optimizing PPC and optimizing your listings, then go create a team, right where you’re training them. And you’ve created processes for your own internal team to go and do that. If you’re not, and you’re the product guy, then you go find partners that are experts in those particular fields, and bring them in, put together a general manager or an operations manager that can then manage those agencies that you’re working with. But most importantly, like you do have to think through the operations of the business. And even as a creative, you have to spend time upfront in establishing those relationships, establishing those partnerships with agencies, or with team members that you’re going to bring in. But that that is so vital. And then last but not least, is setting that time aside to have strategic thinking. I think any entrepreneur, no matter what stage you’re in, if you want to take your business to the next level, you want to go to eight figures and beyond. It’s not about how much you are working in a day, right? I think many of us are guilty of doing $20 An hour tasks that we just keep doing because we’re too lazy to create the SOPs and give it over to a virtual assistant, or we are, you know, claim that we are too busy to, you know, document the process in general. And so that is something that every entrepreneur and every stage of entrepreneurship, right, you might be working on $20 An hour tasks. Eventually you may be working on $200 An hour tasks. And you may be saying, Wow, if I hired this type of I need like a CMO chief marketing officer, okay, they’re 200 bucks an hour. If that’s the case, then you need to understand that you’re probably bringing 1000 $2,000 an hour to the table. And so when you learn how much value you’re bringing to the business, then it becomes easier to say, oh, you know what, my time is out Probably at 1000 $2,000 an hour, maybe I should be justifying spending $100 an hour, it is expensive, right? And that is a big salary to pay somebody. But that’s freeing you up to do more 1000 $10,000 An hour work, alright, you would otherwise not be doing. And this isn’t something that you change overnight, but it’s something that you slowly scale into. And as your business grows, you’ll get more experience doing that and feel more comfortable saying, Okay, right, I think all of us now very comfortable with like, I can go hire a VA, I understand that process, that mindset shifts when you’re like, I need to go hire a six figure salary person to take over like, Ooh, that’s a lot of money. But at the end of the day, you have more to give than that. So that’s kind of my takeaways and action items for our audience. Would you agree? Do you think I missed anything here?
Afolabi Oyerokun 50:56
No, you said it perfectly. Perfectly. That was good.
Josh Hadley 51:01
Awesome. All right, Afolabi. Well, let’s dive into our final three questions here. So tell me about a what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why I would
Afolabi Oyerokun 51:12
say the one book that really changed my way of thinking, I was in college, and the book came out, it was Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and a friend gave it to me, and I just couldn’t stop reading. I was like, what? Am I reading this? Right? You know, who are you know, the, you know, the lessons, the rich, you know, teach their kids that the poor and the middle class, people don’t? How, especially with how it says that, you have to create passive income, you have to let your money make the money for you. Instead of, you know, trying to make money with your own strength or with your limited hours and strange. Why don’t you put money on steroids, let the money do the job for you. That was like, wow, you know, I was in college, I was like, I wanted to almost stop everything I was doing to find something that I could do to to have passive income. So that would be my number one, he’s still my number one, I’ve probably bought 2030 copies and giving it away to a lot of people. So I will say that will be number one.
Josh Hadley 52:20
Awesome. I love that I highly recommend that book as well to good mindset. If you haven’t read that before in the way that you approach, you know, what is an A true asset? That’s producing money for you. Second question, what is your favorite software tool that you’ve been using in your business? Or maybe it’s a new software tool that you’ve discovered, that you think other people should be utilizing?
Afolabi Oyerokun 52:46
Well, I will say two software’s would tie into that. Because now we over the past year, I’ve been compiling all my experiences into a course, people have been asking me, when are you going to really, really teach people how you get the best deals out of suppliers in China all over the world? How do you find your suppliers? So I created a sourcing course it’s called sourcing mastery is going to be coming out in January. And I, you know, I found Kajabi, it was very simple to use. Again, I really like it. I really, really like it. So it’s my favorite software now because of simplicity. And what you could do, how you could create one, one product and you go, you can reach a lot of people from that single platform. And it ties in with Click Funnels, because, you know, click funnels, almost like Kajabi, but on steroids, you know. I’ll tie both of them together as two of my favorite software, they do the same thing, but click funnel just takes a little step further.
Josh Hadley 54:00
Awesome. I love that great software’s. All right. Last question is, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the E commerce space that other people should be following? And why
Afolabi Oyerokun 54:13
I think I like Russell Brunson a lot because of how he was able to narrow down and niche down to just the idea of funnels, like, where did that come from? Like, it’s been out there, but he was able to make it popular, he was able to make people see what you could do with one product. You know, in the Amazon world, the e-comm was everybody wants to sell many skews, but in the funnel world, they want to teach you how to sell one, you know, can you maximize one thing so I really like I listened to him a lot. I really like how he is so persistent in marketing. Do everything it can to just make you buy stuff. I think he’s, it’s a really cool dude, I enjoy listening to him.
Josh Hadley 55:05
Awesome. Yeah, Russell Brunson is very good have a follow up question I do have is, have you implemented Click Funnels with any of your Amazon businesses or the products that you’ve sold there?
Afolabi Oyerokun 55:18
No, no, we tried. They there was a funnel template they built for, I believe, for e commerce back in the day, I think we tried it. At that time, I wasn’t so sure if it worked, I think it was a review generating or something that they built a template for. We didn’t use it extensively. So I’m not sure if we, I can say we really tried it. Because we really didn’t use it extensively. We were so busy killing fires, that we couldn’t even stop and really, really look into other really cool tools that we could use to push a button and keep generating passive income, we were too busy.
Josh Hadley 56:05
Fair enough. Well, Afolabi. Thank you so much for all of your great knowledge, you have a lot of exciting stuff going on, I think you have a gift for our listeners as well. Why don’t you tell us about, you know, your three PL business that you have. And your offer for that to our listeners, as well as I think that sourcing mastery course is very interesting. So tell us about all the things that people should be paying attention to and where you want them to follow you.
Afolabi Oyerokun 56:34
Awesome. So we we have about almost 100 customers that we do, end to end Supply Chain Management for supply chain is the two words that most Amazon sellers don’t understand. Even any ecommerce sellers, they just don’t understand the word supply chain, they know inventory. They know logistics a little bit. But supply chain just means from the very beginning of your journey of your product to the very end, when it gets to the customer’s hands. That is my definition of supply chain. So how can you save money and maximize profit across the whole supply chain. So that’s what we’re focusing on now at honu. To help brands look into their supply chain and say, well, you’re losing money here, here, here and here. And here, we could do it better this way, this way, this way, this way, if we do this, and this and this, you will be able to make more money. Another big part of it is the tariff Terminator, which I were going to give to the listeners. You know, a very good discount to that listeners is I do have a lot of maybe a recent story about to about a month ago, a friend of mine in in Mexico reached out to me it’s like, oh, we want to bring in some electronic products. And, you know, in our duties 30% I’d like Wait 30% what God says yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I fought us told us. I’m like saying me that product. Let me see. So he sent me the product. And like I sent it to my team in China said, Hey, Katelyn helped me take a look at this product. What is the tariff rate on this product? So Katelyn did the research. It’s a very complex, you have to know you have to be very good in Mandarin, and Cantonese and English at the same time to be able to reclassify to be able to be able to know the exact tariff code your product should have. So she looked at it. And she’s like, No, this is a 7% tariff product. So I sent it back to my firm like your product is not 30%. It’s 7%. That’s a huge savings. Oh, yeah, a one single order, you’re probably able to see like $20,000 in tariffs alone. So that those are the things we put into our supply chain. Management Service for brands, and now on our three pls location. So we have a location here in Pennsylvania. And we are going into ultra modern, I’m going to send you a photo of our rendering of the three PL center that is we’re going to move into q1 next year. It is amazing. So I designed the three data center because I found out that the flow the way a warehouse flows with determining if you’re you’re able to save your customers money in their supply chain or not. So the flow that most warehouse has, is not optimized. So therefore a lot of products either go missing or a lot of products just take a lot of time to prep and to send out out, and average repair could spend five to two weeks before they send your products out from the time you send in the request to the time they actually send it out. The problem is because their system that the warehouse is not optimized is not designed really for an Amazon business. So when we read when we redesigned the flow of things, now we’re able to get our products in like, sometimes less than 24 hours, sometimes in three hours, like three hours from the time we get a request to ship our products, they actually go out within three hours, some of them, if it’s a lot, you know, we can say, Oh, give us 24 hours, it will go out because of the flow of things. And the new building we’re going into that is super optimized. I’m so excited because we’re going to be using automatic conveyors, we’re going to be using automatic wrappers palletizers. And from of year is so cool. And we are looking at into robotic hands to palletize, and everything like that, so that we can pass on the savings to our customers. So those are the things we have going on. And then we can talk about the offers we have for all the listeners today.
Josh Hadley 1:01:09
Awesome. Let’s talk about let’s talk about the offer then because number one off the lobby. I think that we’re gonna need to bring you back on another episode. And we will talk all things supply chain three PL because we could spend another hour just talking about that. So I think that’s going to be my next request is let’s schedule another time because you have so much experience here. And this is such a pain point for most sellers, that it’s amazing. So you offer a lot of great services, I highly recommend you guys reach out to Afolabi. But why don’t you go ahead and share your offer with our listeners.
Afolabi Oyerokun 1:01:48
So the number one offer will be our Tariff Terminator service. We have a lot of success, which means we will help you look into your products, how much you’re paying for tariffs. Now, we will find ways to help you reclassify your HTS code so that we can bring your tariff rate lower. Let me give you an example of how that works. So let’s say you’re selling. So Josh, you’re selling a photo album, and you want to bring your photo album into the US and your china supplier gives you an HTS code. But in order to bring it into the US, you need an HTS code, right? China gives you HS code, but you need to interpret and convert it into an HTS code. So your supplier just do a does some, you know, quick conversion, say, Oh, this is your HTS code, you’re going to be paying 35% time. In most cases, nine out of 10 times they’re wrong. So we will take the HS code and look at your product listing, we’ll read every part of your product listing, we want to know what that product is what you’re going to use it for. So we take your photo album and say Josh product actually qualifies as a photo journal. And then it qualifies as baby book. And then it qualifies as a toy, because maybe it has a little song like a little, you know, singing voice or singing audio something today. So which HTS code are you going to pick? Are you going to pick the one for Jonelle photo album, toy education, you know, the all qualified product qualifies for all of them. So we look at all these things and say, okay, for photo album is 3% tariffs for a baby book a 17% tariff for you know, whatever else you’re calling it is 32%. Of course, we’ll go for the 3% one because we can defend it in customs when we’re bringing it into the country, we will defend it because that’s exactly what you you could argue that my product is actually that? Yeah, that’s one of the offers, we want to do it. We usually do that 397 for each product. But for your listeners for the first time, we will offer it at 197 product, these single service has been saving some people. I mean, in my own brands before I sold that brand. We were spending about maybe 1 million or more on inventory just to buy the inventory. Yeah. And we were able we were able to reduce our tariffs from 25% to maybe 12 or 7%. That’s a huge number, you know, $4 million, you’re spending a million dollar on inventory or you’re saving 12% in tariff that’s $120,000 in savings every single year. And it cost you $197 To do the reclassification. Right so that’s a big deal. offered that way. offering all the listeners today,
Josh Hadley 1:05:02
I love it! Afolabi, what a generous offer, and also something that people should be paying attention to and a great way for them to save money as well. So I definitely encourage you guys to reach out. So how did they take advantage? Where can they reach out to you to claim this offer?
Afolabi Oyerokun 1:05:20
So they should just, you know, send an email to Savings@HonuWorldwide and say, you know, they listen to, you know, you know, e-comm breakthrough, you know, podcast with the $197 offer, we will honor it, just simple like that.
Josh Hadley 1:05:35
Awesome. Well. Afolabi. Thank you so much for your time. And we look forward to having you back on the show to talk more about supply chain down the road. But thanks so much for your time today.
Afolabi Oyerokun 1:05:48
You’re welcome. Thank you so much, Josh. I really had a great time.
Outro 1:05:53
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