How D. Louise is Maximizing Growth in Global Accelerator

[00:00:00] Jack Zambakides: We, we, we really are believers in this business of, if we're not going to ask someone's opinion or take advice, if we're not fully gonna, gonna apply it. So we're, we're conscious of who we take advice from, not just in this area of the business, but in all areas.

 If we believe in what you guys do in your methodology, if you say we need to provide creative volume, we are going to give it a shot. So we, we really just trusted in your guys methodology, in putting our, our, in terms of creative output and, and all of the best practices. We went all in on it and it, and it works. . And we started to see results. instantaneously, I know that might not be the case for everyone, but we were very fortunate in the position that we had some sort of low hanging fruits, which were easily picked up.

[00:00:47] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks, welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today by a very special guest calling all the way from very old England. It's Mr. Jack Zambakides. He's the CEO of D.Louise, which is a jewelry brand one of our growth accelerator clients.

And what we wanted to bring Jack on to talk with us about today is essentially what it takes to grow from seven figures to eight figures as they're kind of on pace to do. After having joined a growth accelerator program. So before we get into that, Jack, how's it going, man?

[00:01:22] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, really well. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Richard. I'm a big believer in all the guys at CTC and what you guys talk about. So hopefully good. I can give you back some values for all the value you guys have given us.

[00:01:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, absolutely. So let's, let's start off then with you. Just tell me a little bit more about yourself and about the D Louise brand, kind of the story there.

[00:01:42] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, so we're, we turned for the brand time for in January. It was a A lockdown sort of the tail end of lockdown business. So we, we obviously didn't know too much about e commerce that we launched a business in January, particularly jewelry. But it was launched with myself and my fiance now Olivia.

So she's sort of the face of the brand. She's the one who's got the real passion for jewelry itself. My passion lies more in e commerce in business. So we work really well. We're, we're a total yin and yang if you met us. When she first said, Oh, I want to, I want to launch a business. I want to start start a jewelry business in her head.

She's thinking these beautiful designs she can make in my head. I'm thinking strong growth margins, easy to ship and knowing the power we can have with e commerce. So we do, we compliment each other really well. So we started it four years ago. first two years were just very much herself, maybe one or two employees, but we had a really strong Black Friday in, I think it was 2022. And I was like, you know what, this could be a proper business. So from that point, I went full time and really committed myself to it and trying to learn everything, everything e commerce. And fortunately managed to put one foot in front of each other this far.

[00:02:53] Richard Gaffin: So what, so talk to me about then, obviously it sounds like. Given the kind of like the way that you joined or decided that like, Hey, there's something here. We want to grow this. Where were you guys at immediately prior to joining our growth accelerator program? And also like what, about what timeframe was that?

[00:03:10] Jack Zambakides: Yeah. So I think we've been with the Accelerator since the start of it, of it joining. But I think in that sort of. The level of where we were business just feels like it's on stilts is the way I'd probably describe it in terms of

[00:03:22] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:03:23] Jack Zambakides: You're very much reliant on sort of a big product drop or you go into Black Friday and you're really trying to make moments.

And what we really needed is just sort of stability in the business. It allows you to sort of build the foundations, obviously build out the team. You can really start to, make educated decisions. And I think that's sort of what we. We craved and what we needed, I'd obviously been a follower of your guys content and understanding like the full quarter accounting and all the learning, all of those, the four peaks theory, things like that.

So we started to try adopt as much as we could, but we needed what would be, what would be the things which would then go take us from sort of that still to like, how can we turn it into more of a proper business? We're still on that journey today. We're definitely a small business in the grand scheme of things, but we're, we're, we're making progress, which is the main thing.

[00:04:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So, okay. So let's talk about that transition into stability. So, from my understanding from talking to joy, who heads up our, our growth accelerator program essentially, it sounds like you were running the account on. Highest volume, pretty much exclusively. And part of the transition over into the CDC, CTC methodology was switching that account over to cost gap.

So talk to me a little bit about that transition and kind of what happened once that was put in place.

[00:04:36] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, so that. I've always been I started off when we first started the brand. I had a few sort of, I discovered Facebook ads myself in lockdown. And I was like, what is this? Like,

[00:04:47] Richard Gaffin: Yeah,

[00:04:48] Jack Zambakides: the highs, but I, I couldn't get my head around that you could run businesses by putting, putting one pound into metal and getting three, four, five back.

[00:04:55] Richard Gaffin: no,

[00:04:55] Jack Zambakides: Obviously, as you continue to scale, like it starts getting a bit more complicated, complicated than that. But we needed to, I was spending a lot of my time sort of, I call it in the trenches, trying to figure out all these things. And I was by no means an expert and there's mixed opinions in the industry, but anyone who's had a conversation with Joy knows that his level of understanding which is obviously aided by all of the work you guys do. Second to none in terms of he knows everything there is to know. And he, I really put all of my faith into him. And I really trusted him. And I mentioned it just before starting the school, I actually flew all the way to India to give him my thanks and, and, and spend some time with him and really get to know him better on a personal level.

But his level of detail, which looks into things is. Far superior to what I was able to do just because I was trying to do so many different things in the business and try to make sure we can operate, operate smoothly in a fast growing company. It's not always the easiest.

[00:05:51] Richard Gaffin: no, no, no, that makes sense. So, and also a situation that I think a lot of entrepreneurs at that level find themselves in, of kind of having to juggle all of the balls and it's. Difficult to find somebody who can actually handle that for you. So, okay. So, so it sounds like. So again, the first step in the transition period was shifting over to general CTC best practices.

So talk to me then about like, what, what happened with the account once that was put into place?

[00:06:17] Jack Zambakides: Yeah. So things just started going pretty well, in all

[00:06:21] Richard Gaffin: Yeah 

[00:06:22] Jack Zambakides: we, we, we really are believers in this business of, if we're not going to ask someone's opinion or take advice, if we're not fully gonna, gonna apply it. So we're, we're conscious of who we take advice from, not just in this area of the business, but in all areas.

So we're not gonna. Go and have all these mixed opinions. If, if we, if we believe in what you guys do in your methodology, if you say we need to provide creative volume, if you say guys, we need to, like, we believe this would be best practice gets rolled, we are going to give it a shot. So we, we really just trusted in your guys methodology, in putting our, our, in terms of creative output and, and all of the best practices. We went all in on it and it, and it works. It's the, it's the long and short of it. And we started to see results. instantaneously, I know that might not be the case for everyone, but we were very fortunate in the position that we had some sort of low hanging fruits, which were easily picked up.

[00:07:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So actually, it's interesting you bring that up because part of what we, we say a lot on the podcast and just in our content generally is that scaling on meta is, or rather meta is a good solution for, Throwing fuel on a fire that's already exists rather than building it from the ground up. And so I think like a lot of the instantaneous success is probably due to the fact that you had a lot of things kind of handled before you actually switched over and kind of brought the meta account into a best practices situation.

So, and I think some of what's happened after kind of switching over the growth accelerator has borne that out. So talk to me a little bit about particularly like. Your approach to growing that basis of organic revenue, even prior to us coming aboard.

[00:07:57] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, so this was a big thing for us. And if you were inside the, these walls of our office, it's something we've been talking about sort of obsessively for the last 12 months. as like traditional, our business was built off performance marketing. It hasn't been. Doesn't come naturally to me and I'm like, want to push, push all these platforms as hard as I can.

So I had to sort of get my head around and, and it's, I describe it as more like trying to plant seeds for the future. We went through that period where we did sort of bite the bullet and we were like, right, let's try and invest into it. We've got an amazing story with the brand. The brand's named after Liv's mother, who she sadly lost in 2017.

So we've got an amazing story and, and the story of Liv. In our own is, is an incredible one and very inspiring. So a lot of it was just how we can try utilize that and use that. Not just to, just to try and inspire. And as soon as we started storytelling, as soon as we started like simple things, but gifting succeeding all, all the basics and really trying to apply it, we started, it's not almost instantaneous, but we're starting to reap those rewards now, I'm confident when we look at. How we budget each year, we are more dollars into that brand just to try to grow our organic presence. But that's been the biggest focus for us and also the biggest unlock.

[00:09:17] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So let's talk about how that maybe interacts with so putting some of the CTC best practices into place. So one of them is of course, like we always talk about the four peaks of the marketing calendar and that type of thing. So, so talk about how you incorporated or how you thought about your marketing calendar, building that out once you started with the accelerator program.

[00:09:36] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, there's a, there's a good story and an interesting one, but it was. So I think we joined the Accelerator, we had a good 2023, I think we joined the Accelerator early 2024 and we were, we knew organic was, was something we needed to do. We needed to get better at it. We need to start driving more awareness around the brand, not just being so reliant on paid. had this crazy idea of what are all the things we can do? You know, we're a small business, but our budgets aren't actually a massive. What are the things we can do? So, Liv, who, as I mentioned, she's sort of the face of the brand and the, and the co founder the hospice her mom was in. So sadly before she passed is in Wales, which is in Cardiff is the town. And it's about, it's a six or seven, or I think it was a seven day walk doing a marathon a

[00:10:15] Richard Gaffin: Oh, wow.

[00:10:16] Jack Zambakides: So we, we did we, we raised money for the charity, the hospice was in with a target of about 15, 000 pounds and she walked every single day and we got brand sponsors and it got picked up in all, obviously the newspapers and we had customers join the walk and they can tell their story if they've had been through some sort of loss, the walk is called walk and talk.

So people are talking about if they've had losses or been through something similar in their family, which is obviously happens to all of us. But it's something we're doing again. It actually starts on, on Monday next week, but this year it's bigger and better. Like Liv's been on the radio today talking about it.

We've got Lululemon as a sponsor. we've, we've been sort of use these like brand and storytelling to compliment and it hasn't required massive budgets and it hasn't

[00:10:58] Richard Gaffin: Mm hmm.

[00:10:59] Jack Zambakides: huge effort, but it's just trying to be creative. But that's an example of. The walk actually ends on Mother's Day. Mother's Day is a huge period for all jewelry businesses because it's a great giftable product, but it's how we try to tie that into our Q1 peak coming out of the November, December period.

So it's just trying to be really deliberate about what are the things we're going to do? What are they going to, are we going to go after these things? But they're not always going to work. So fortunately this one last year worked, and I'm very confident in this one. We've got a lot more traction, but. a new business, you have to take some, take some risks, but if you can land it, the upside's normally, normally worth it.

[00:11:36] Richard Gaffin: Right. Give me some examples then of attempts at that that didn't work.

[00:11:42] Jack Zambakides: Yeah. Oh, God. There's plenty. There's,

[00:11:44] Richard Gaffin: Sure.

[00:11:44] Jack Zambakides: I think we're, we're, we're still on this, this lesson of, of learning. We have something internally we called the golden circle and that golden circle is, it's if you imagine a Venn diagram, so it's. Three circles in one, you've got storytelling. So this is like live storytelling.

So it's a piece where we can storytell whether that's an emotional, whether it's around mother's day and like that, the second is with the product. So if we actually have like product markets fit, it's a product our customers generally want, whether that's in fashion or relates to them or in demand, and then last is if we just market that like brand market that in the right way in terms of the images, the content's great, if we can nail in the middle of that sweet spot Then, then that's where that's where the magic happens.

It's not always easy, and we've released products in the past, which maybe hasn't done as well as we originally thought, but equally, we've been pleasantly surprised with other things. But it's about the combination of all of those three things. Coming together where that's where we win.

[00:12:40] Richard Gaffin: So, so talk to me then about just to stay on the topic of peaks. So I noticed like clicking through your statless data. There's obviously there was a peak in March, which is around Mother's Day. But I noticed that you guys did really well in July and August. Which is for most e commerce brands.

That's kind of the down season. That's the summer doldrums. Talk to us about what happened in July, August to, to keep revenue up and not only up, it was, it was pretty much a spike as well there. Yeah.

[00:13:06] Jack Zambakides: Yeah. So for us, we have just bring it back to the market in Canada. We fortunately have the benefit of sort of mid throughout the summer. Our, our biggest USP with the product is that it is waterproof and it will never tarnish. So

[00:13:18] Richard Gaffin: Interesting.

[00:13:18] Jack Zambakides: into those and let's say the hotter months where people are going on holiday more.

Maybe people are more exercising more. They're trying to get in shape that we can lean into those angles. And then obviously, as we come back into sort of Q3, but particularly Q4, we'll then change the dynamic to more gifting because during particular November, December, a lot of our purchases are now male.

They might be influenced by female, but we are like with our marketing material. We have to be more conscious that we're talking to male. So it's sort of riding these. Waves throughout the year. But what we, we try to do is have almost themes for the quarters. So we know that this is sort of our overarching thing, whether that's gifting for Q4, whether that's summer, it's more of the, we call it never, you never have to take off.

So it's putting on the angles that you don't have to take your jewelry off as you sweat, as you shower, as you swim in the sea but really trying to then make sure that the product lines with that, that the branding events line with that, that the influencers work with the line with that each quarter.

[00:14:14] Richard Gaffin: So I think like one, one thing that's Well, actually before we, before we move on, I do want to ask us again, I had mentioned this before we hit record, but I noticed that your 2023 January and 2024 January were very different in that 2023 January. Revenue fell off a cliff as it does for many brands as of course, it's after black Friday.

It's sort of the post holiday funk. But in 2024, there wasn't as much of a fall off. And in fact, January was one of your bigger months of 2024 as well. So talk to me about like What was put in place there in terms of building the market calendar or whatever that allowed January 2024 to be stronger.

[00:14:51] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, it was definitely a few things that the main thing in those months was products. So we just had such an improved product selection between the years. One example is we weren't aware of this, but a lot of bridesmaids do their shopping. So a lot of

[00:15:05] Richard Gaffin: interesting.

[00:15:05] Jack Zambakides: summer months and they start bridesmaid shopping in January. We sort of got inklings from people who sell bridesmaid dresses that this is something we should go after it. We didn't have a collection around it. We weren't fishing on it at all. But it's something we gave a go and it, and it pulled off, but it's exactly that we're fortunate that our product we can send in by air, so our lead times aren't too much so we can try the. Reactive, but it's something we talk about internally on how we can try and move fast and have dynamics. But as the business grows, we are just taking these lessons on every year in terms of what's trying to keep our ears to the ground in terms of what does the customer actually want? Trying to stay really close to that customers, particularly as we're a small business, we can try and move fast, but when we do that, it's I don't know. all these things, sometimes you go in these circles as a business owner, as a CEO, then you understand that product is the most important thing. So

[00:15:54] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:15:54] Jack Zambakides: nailed that in those months.

[00:15:56] Richard Gaffin: So, so talk about some of those the, your methodology then, or just some of the tools that you use to, to keep your ear close to the ground in terms of what customers are thinking. Mm

[00:16:06] Jack Zambakides: to stay very close to our customers in terms of, we are a, 99 percent of our revenue is D2C, we do have one or two whole set accounts. But we do events all the time. We have sort of staff ambassadors. We work really closely with, and we're trying to understand from them what they want, but equally we're very lucky that Olivia and a lot of the team, they are the customer, so we're designing into what they want and they're spending days or hours every single day on social media.

They're understanding the trends and they're hopefully ahead of the curve. But then it's just putting that priority in terms of making from a supply chain point of view, we can be reactive. I don't know if you, if you under like the, some of the fast fashion brands ASOS is a big UK retailer and they can bring a product from sort of idea into the office and shot and on the site within two weeks. So the big, biggest players in the market are doing that. can't be that we're not that fast, unfortunately, but it's about trying to really try and understand and try just catch that wave. It's easier when there's, when there's wind in your sail, as opposed to really trying to shell stuff. People, people aren't interested in buying.

[00:17:12] Richard Gaffin: So, speaking of that, like sort of speed of execution, this, this will be my segue into the next part of the conversation here, which is one thing that was really impressive to me when I was chatting with joy a little bit about your brand is your ability to produce creative at scale. So if you as we mentioned, sort of CTC best practices and running your account on cost controls, one of the fundamental principles there is you have to have the creative volume to support the cost cap, otherwise your account isn't going to spend.

And of course it. Your your actual ad budget has like almost 10 X or something. Is that correct?

[00:17:42] Jack Zambakides: No, a hundred percent.

[00:17:44] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So, and part of it is your ability to make again, what sounds like thousands of creatives relatively quickly. So talk to us about what you're, how you produce creative. How do you pull it off? Right.

[00:18:02] Jack Zambakides: inside of a lot of brands where the process is constantly changing at one point, I always think, oh, we've nailed it. This is it. And then for some reason at scale, it breaks. but again, as you mentioned, it is a priority for us internally, and we're aware of sort of, you just have to look at our P& L and realize how big of a line item performance marketing is that we should probably spend some attention here and trying to give you guys what you need to get the best results or give the brand the best, best chance of succeeding. We, we use almost every tactic that is possible, whether that's seeding and then using that, that actual content when that's working with existing customers, using new GC, having a team of sort of video editors who are constantly making iterations of best performers. But I think the biggest unlock for us, we've only sort of staffed it in the last 12 months where Olivia, we've sort of been storytelling about her own personal brand and building that alongside the existing brand is need to shoot content with her, it can just be done. Here and now, and it's always the way that the best performing content is the one you don't think through it doesn't have the absolute perfect. It's recorded an iPhone on a selfie and you think that's never going to work and then it ends up crushing it. So we're not, we do try and make sort of, we do understand what works and make educated guesses, but we're probably more than other brands willing to test, test, test ads and we see performance as before.

Like exactly what it is performance. We're not too brand sensitive but it's been an, our benefit because if you're going to ask, or we run post purchase surveys, how did you hear of us normally the first touch point is some sort of mess around.

[00:19:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So what, what is the, what is like the creative team look like? That you have in house.

[00:19:43] Jack Zambakides: Good question. So. We currently sit down as sort of like a marketing team. We've got a marketing lead who leads the process and it's sort of just brain dumping all of the ideas. We have sort of a benchmark of how many concepts we want to produce each month and sort of brain dumping ideas, seeing what's worked for us, seeing if we've got any other crazy ideas and just trying to brief all of those out. We then have someone who will write all the briefs and gets, find the creators if we're not already existently working with them. So I suppose it's sort of like, like creative strategy and then someone else writing, writing the briefs based on what's existently worked, but we do give creators a lot of creative freedom. We're not massively particular on you have to say these words in this way. We want it to be as authentic as possible. From that insider, we've got a couple of video video editors we work with and a video videographer, but all of those guys are pretty much full time, but freelance. And then it's just the, just the delivery and equally graphic design.

We have full time just for, for statics. So it's a relatively small team, but we managed to get enough out there.

[00:20:45] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:20:46] Jack Zambakides: in my head all the time, I'm thinking, let's just scale this harder. But as you continue to scale, I can understand how it gets more and more complex.

[00:20:55] Richard Gaffin: No, it's, it's a difficult problem to solve. And I mean, it sounds like if you're creating, making creative at the volume, you are, you're, you're doing pretty well. So talk to me about your answer to that question has me curious a little bit about, so to go back to the product development side Obviously, you guys have the ability to pivot quickly, but this particular product, what is the product design from like conception to execution to distribution?

What does that look like for you?

[00:21:17] Jack Zambakides: Yeah. So we do plan, plan pretty far ahead just to trying to be ahead of the curve and making sure that we can give sort of. It's product, it's like time to breathe and time to settle, but it's equally just trying to balance that with being reactive and with understanding, okay, well, there is demand or particularly in jewelry.

If you can look at the biggest players in the market, like the, the Cartiers, the Tiffany's, they normally nail, they've got sort of three or four skews, which they absolutely nail. And, you know, for Cartier, it's the love bangle Tiffany, they've got these like little heart pendants. So it's just trying to understand. We are putting stuff out, but we do have a few SKUs, which sort of, or products which catch wind and we really try to push them and push them from a marketing perspective. And then, I don't know, a good example for us is engraving, which we brought out. So people can engrave messages onto necklaces or bracelets.

And I mean, if you can market that correctly around the mother's day a Valentine's day, you can normally win. But it's, yeah, it's, it's about everything aligning all at once.

[00:22:18] Richard Gaffin: So, man, there's a couple of things we could dig into here. Joy and mentioned to brand collapse that you guys, well, that's also part of your sort of organic. 

[00:22:27] Jack Zambakides: That out as well. Yeah,

[00:22:29] Richard Gaffin: yeah. Yeah. So how's that going? What's, yeah.

[00:22:31] Jack Zambakides: yeah,

[00:22:31] Richard Gaffin: What are you doing with that?

[00:22:32] Jack Zambakides: we've done a couple, I think fortunately because of all the like organic work we've done around the brand that people are more aware of us and other brands are more willing because they can see hopefully the level of content and what we can do for them, as it should be a, everyone should win out of them. We've, we've definitely done, I think we've done 2 1, 1 of which was in January this year, and the, the previous one to that was. December. Fortunately for jewelry is it's going to be easy to collab whether that's changing a box or whether that's producing a special special piece, but it's definitely. In my eyes, a great strategy because every party wins.

I think the customer loves it, particularly if you can add some urgency in terms of making it limited to a hundred pieces, or we released a piece in December, which is every piece of the one of a thousand. So it's sort of, once it's gone, it's gone. And it was in a special Christmas packaging box. So it was a great gift. it's just trying to be. Clever and open about it, but you're seeing it at the top of the market with, I don't know, some of the streetwear brands clubbing with Porsche or things like that. Things which have never really been done before the ones who, who are playing it well and executing it.

It's like, Whoa, it's powerful. So, It definitely is possible. It's on our horizon. We've got a few really cool ones lined up for later this year, some of which I can't talk too much about, but it's, it's definitely part of our strategy and I would encourage anyone if they can make it happen or if they have any other brands on the horizon, like give it a shot. Definitely.

[00:23:56] Richard Gaffin: Okay. So I want to move, move to this section of most pods. When I talk to Taylor, I usually like to end it with him giving pieces of advice or like really specific practical pieces of advice. And so I think there's a few of those that we can dig out of this conversation. One is like, what's the biggest lesson?

That you've learned, let's say, let's say since joining growth accelerator, since switching over the CTC methodology, what do you feel like the biggest lesson that you've learned has been?

[00:24:24] Jack Zambakides: I would say it's correctly positioning the marketing calendar in terms of if you are, if you, if you have a clear understanding of if you're running any particular promos, why you're running them, what the expected impact could be. We've had months where we'll chat and. Joy will sort of tell me we'll build it out in advance, but what our expected revenue would be and what our expected contribution margin would be, and I go, Oh, you feel confident.

We'll, we'll map out daily, our expectations and how we'll go on and achieve them and you start thinking and problem solving, and then you end up with than a 5 percent Delta and you're like, how did you know so,

[00:25:02] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:25:03] Jack Zambakides: so. So it's but it's all in, I give the example to my team and, and, and we talk about it with joy.

It's the same as if you're trying to lose weight, like if you're getting on those scales every single day and saying, okay, where are we down? Why are we down? Oh, well, conversion rate was, was lagging. Okay. Well, why was conversion rate lagging? What can we do to improve that? Or if we couldn't get the, the. spender on paid what was the reason can we send an extra email to compensate for it? It's really working collective collectively. I think that's one thing we have done What is joy is really part of the team everyone in the office knows of knows about him and how he contributes but it's all working together It's not just staring at paid media and going you need to do this It's not just staring at email and going you need to do this and it's not just staring at the product team and going You need to deliver this many products.

It's it's not that simple. It's it's teamwork coming together and When one's lacking, trying to help pull the other one up. So I think that's, that's, that's probably the one thing we've, we've done to, I would say it's a big unlock for a lot of brands.

[00:26:02] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, so, so what you're alluding to then, which we haven't really talked about yet is, is the way we approach forecasting and the way you guys are approaching forecasting now, which is 1 of the key parts of the, the CTC methodology is building out a 12 to 24 month new customer acquisition and retention forecast.

And the idea is to. Not only, I mean, so part of it is to hit that forecast or get as closely as possible to it, but then also to have some understanding of what's likely to happen and then give you the ability to say, if we want to do better than this, or we want to improve on this forecast, here are the things that we need to do.

So talk about your approach to when you receive a forecast about, let's say, what's likely to happen in April. What's your thought process? In thinking about breaking that, improving on it, and then how do you go about executing on attempting to say, beat that forecast?

[00:26:53] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, I think for me, those who follow joy, they know that he posts everything on Twitter. So I'm always the guy who's trying to break it

[00:27:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:01] Jack Zambakides: way in terms

[00:27:02] Richard Gaffin: Right?

[00:27:03] Jack Zambakides: trying to get the best results. Also, I know it's a amount of data goes into it, and I've spent a bit of time trying to understand it, but I definitely don't understand it to the depths of him.

But yeah, if you're not building out a forecast to that detail on that level, like. It is a total game changer for the business. Just in terms of clarity of understanding of these are the goals and these are actually how you'll go and hit it. But when we're trying to, again, from the, the impression of, to, to, to do what we've never done, we're going to have to, or to get where we've never been, we're going to have to do things we've never done, so. Our focus is just continuously and our growth has come from just doing things better. So I think better typically equals bigger. So whether that's improving our, our emails, whether that's improving how we launch in product, whether that's improving sort of the hype before promo period. Every year, fortunately, the business is just getting better at, say, all of those things and trading the business and that's leading to the growth. Obviously we do have a few big swings, which we really go for and try to unlock. Which some hit, some don't. So your forecasting can be difficult, but really just trying to incrementally get better sort of every single month. And every single year has been our, our sort of growth trajectory was has had some good spikes. It's been pretty steady which makes it easier to run the business.

[00:28:17] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So, so I'm curious then, like, what, what was your approach to forecasting prior to joining Growth Accelerator?

[00:28:24] Jack Zambakides: Good question, more like, just let's,

[00:28:27] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:28:27] Jack Zambakides: number do we want to hit? Okay I mean, I'm sure you guys have it all, all day long, but particularly with businesses who aren't maybe DTC first, where the CFO goes, okay, well, we need to, we need to double top line and then we need to spend less on paid. And they don't realize that's your biggest acquisition channel and that's not how paid works. so we, we were sort of taking educated guesses on what we thought, but they were exactly that they were guesses. There wasn't enough sort of numerical data. We're now four years in, so we don't have a huge amount of back data to go in. And we've probably only had two really successful years or relatively successful years. So we're starting to get better at understanding what the future looks like. But it, it just adds that clarity, whether that's. How you're building your fixed overheads where you can invest into key marketing outside of performance and how much inventory you need to purchase, like all of these things stem from that forecast.

Without that, you're, you're, you're flying blind.

[00:29:24] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So then let's let's kind of go back to that advice piece. So what would you tell somebody who's like in maybe the situation that you guys were in prior to joining Growth Accelerator, maybe at the beginning of the business let's say you're plateauing at seven figures, maybe early seven figures, and you're trying to kind of hit that growth spurt to get you to 10.

Like, what, what do you feel like is the one thing that you can do tactically? That you would suggest a person do in that situation.

[00:29:49] Jack Zambakides: Yeah, hopefully you won't cut into this too, but I think it is building out some, some form of forecast, which isn't just a total guess of this is what we would like to be, but it's based off. Exactly that predicting new customer revenue sort of, or return customer revenues, the foundation, and then looking at your, like, an A M E R model in terms of predicting new customer revenue. And then once you've got that, just. your marketing calendar with that to make sure that's actually achievable and making sure you are delivering upon that daily to hit it. And it's exactly like I said, losing weight, like if you keep taking a stepping on those scales and you keep you on that, you're not, you're not doing something you should be. So it is remarkable. I would say how accurate. the forecast you guys enjoy build. So it's scares you when you start getting used to it, but it's a good thing. It adds stability to the business. Obviously we can hopefully surpass it by doing things we've never done in the past, but it adds a lot of sort of that rocky like mid to low seven figures, those periods where one month you might blow up and the next it falls down, like the January we talked about, they become less frequent.

So business feels feels more steady.

[00:30:58] Richard Gaffin: Awesome. Cool. Well, wise words, Jack, thank you again for joining us. For, for those of you who want to check out the growth accelerator program just go ahead and go to commentary code. com. You can hit that high risk button. Let us know you're interested in chatting more about it. We would love to talk to you.

I just blank for a second. Oh, Jack, in anything that you like to plug, anything you want to mention.

[00:31:17] Jack Zambakides: No, I think, yeah, check us out if you're in the market for jewelry. We've got a U S warehouse as well. So we, we got half of our businesses out, out with you guys. And we're doing more events. We just did one in New York in February. So hopefully growing our presence there as well.

[00:31:31] Richard Gaffin: Awesome. Cool. All right. Appreciate the time, Jack. And for everybody listening, take care. We'll talk to you again next week. See ya.