Growing Profitability featuring Josh Shapiro and Bill Rom of Baseball Lifestyle 101

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Welcome back to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. We have a really exciting episode. It overlaps my passions, baseball and ecommerce with a couple of legends who have just produced a massive marketing moment in the middle of the off peak season for ecommerce. How the heck did they do it?

We're going to find out right now. Thank you guys for joining. But first let's start with some intros. Josh, Bill, who are you guys? And what are you here to share with us today?

[00:00:29] Joshua Shapiro: Oh man. So this uh, I'm Josh. I started this when I was 15 years old, literally in high school, just for fun. Just a kid that was posting about baseball. And that's kind of where the story begins. And that's where I then met Bill who was my strength and conditioning, my he had owned a gym and I used to go there and worked out, but I'll let Bill introduce himself.

But that's just a small little snippet about myself and Bill.

[00:00:50] Bill Rom: Yeah. So, Josh and I met Josh was actually 12 years old. And I had gone to school for marketing and had kind of interviewed for some consulting jobs, but I had started this personal training, strength and conditioning business where I trained a few athletes. A couple of my guys ended up going to the NFL, MLB, things like that.

So I'm like, you know, I'm going to go out on my own, start this. And Josh was like, Hey, I want to start a business one day. How do we do it? And uh, came to me when he had about 1200 followers on an Instagram back in probably like 2013, 2014 we just started talking and then it's obviously accelerated into millions of followers and now millions of dollars in the company.

[00:01:27] Taylor Holiday: So what gave you guys the idea? The idea that the baseball lifestyle was a thing that people were going to adopt. So you sounds like you were training in a bunch of sports. Why baseball? Why did you guys think that that was going to be specifically the space you would focus on?

[00:01:40] Joshua Shapiro: I mean, that's just what I grew up playing. So like, that's, was my whole, that was my whole life. I played college baseball. Bye. You know, baseball is everything to me at the time. And that's when I met Bill and I was literally going to his gym just to be a better athlete is where I trained to also get my hitting lessons and fielding lessons and everything. So baseball was just the medium that I had interest in.

[00:02:02] Bill Rom: yeah. And then from my side that it was more just kind of leaning into Josh. We're an interesting co founder pair. Where we're very different in age. I'm 38, Josh is still 26. And that was part of it in the beginning. We didn't have an expectation. Josh was like around 5, 000 followers. He was like, Hey, I want to start selling clothes.

And I'm like, This is conversion rates and this is everything else. Like it's not enough people. Let's just focus on, you know, pulling all of the stuff in about, you know, how do you post about what a baseball lifestyle is? And then Josh posted every hour on the hour from noon to midnight. From pretty much the time he was for, what was it?

Six years straight.

[00:02:41] Joshua Shapiro: Yeah. When I was in high, like, yeah, sophomore year of high school throughout college.

[00:02:46] Taylor Holiday: So 12 posts a day, every day. Is that

what it was, Josh, 

[00:02:49] Joshua Shapiro: 12 posts a day, every day, and there, and again, this makes it sound old, but like, there was, there was no way to draft Instagram posts, there was also, I, when we started Instagram, it was just photo, and then video came out but like, I would sit in class, and I would have everything, like, ready to go on my phone, iPhone notes, and I would just drop content a lot of it was just curated stuff that I knew I would want to see if I was following, and I remember the days of getting yelled at by teachers and they'd be like, Hey, like, what are you doing?

And I'd be snarky and be like, I'm working. Which, you know, again, I've always been like a hustler. I've always like found ways to make money, whether it was flipping, you know, now people are flipping the backpack on eBay, but I used to sell people's video games on eBay. But like, that was really what I was doing was just posting.

Yeah. 12 hours on every single hour,

[00:03:29] Taylor Holiday: for how many straight years? So 12 posts a day on the hour for how many years?

[00:03:33] Joshua Shapiro: Six plus years. There's over 22, 000, there's always 22, 000 Instagram posts on the account. Up until recently, I was the one doing every single post. The only time I didn't post was a few different vacations where Melissa would, I would literally, I was always scared to bring my phone to outside the country.

So I have a separate phone that I would scare about the Instagram. So a couple of times Melissa, our CMO would post for me, but outside of that, it was all me.

[00:03:56] Taylor Holiday: It's amazing. So, so what I love about what we're going to get into today is we're going to talk about a moment at the tail end of this story, but the reality is, is like, that's the roots,

right? Like it's important for people to know we're about to tell a story that goes back 11 years that involves every day, 12 times a day. Posting for six plus years, probably in the beginning to not very many people and not big of a response to set up for what we're here to talk about today, which was about, what was it a week ago, two weeks ago, Bill, you guys kind of came out from behind the curtain. I think you guys have been on Twitter a long time, but you're generally you're sharing stuff, but I don't think people had any idea. Really what you guys were building and you guys shared that you did 1. 4 million in a single day for your back to school drop. And that's what we're here to break down today, but it's cool to hear the backstory. So can you give us a little bit about what just occurred? What was the drop? And we'll start to dive into how we got to where we are today for baseball.

[00:04:52] Bill Rom: Yeah. So to really pull everything together so that everybody can see the kind of broad scope of this, like Josh said, posting every hour on the hour for, you know, noon to midnight for years and years and years over 22, 000 posts our first full time person who wasn't like an agency, like Melissa was still in an agency for a while.

Our first full time hire was really. A videographer and we were making organic original content, you know, seven, eight years ago, leaning into content, all that production. And that got us to this point and Taylor, like you said, we've been active and talking to the different communities behind the scenes, talking to some different CMOs, you know, Dave Herman talking to Nate Legos and a few other people have talked to Andrew a few times.

And we were kind of talking about what was happening, but we never really brought it all the way out. We felt like this was also a unique time for us to kind of say something because as everybody's talking about, Oh, you know, Facebook's broken. This is this, this is that you know, us trailing 12 months we're sitting at a 4.

53 MER. We're profitable much lower than that. Our new customer ROAS last 12 months is a a two, four, eight, and we're profitable down to like a one, four. So, that kind of comes into this, this moment was content, collaboration, influencers, product development, listening to the market seeding this product product to the background.

And Josh right now is doing exactly that. He's sitting in a polo that we won't drop until February. While in the background, he also is just sneaking in the backpack that, you know, we just sold, you know, five figures worth of bags in about 75 minutes. And we did $1.65 million, 1.465 million dollars on Friday alone.

And there was a point in time where we were averaging $375 a second. So it was a lot and yeah, it comes down to content, content, content, content, making a community, making stuff that's originally yours. And just leaning into that as top funnel. And that's how we got here.

[00:06:51] Taylor Holiday: That's amazing. So I want to break this apart. You shared some cool insights, which was, it looked like it was about a million dollars in existing customer revenue. So important to know this, this doesn't happen without a rabid base of fans who love the things that you're making built over many years, right? And then that's about 460 or so in new customer revenue. Right. What you did at a 16. 5 new customer Ross at a 2 and 95 cent new customer CPA.

So blended CPA. Yeah. So not only are you able to take this rabbit existing customer tease demand out until this moment, but you're also able to leverage it. For new customer acquisition as well.

So I want to talk a little bit about the planning process for this and ask some questions. Like, do you guys think you actually underserved the opportunity? Do you think selling out is important? Talk to me about how you planned and thought about the product volume, the product, and maybe talk a little bit about what was the product and how you guys tease the release of it.

[00:07:46] Joshua Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, like underserved and we're laughing because like we didn't even raise spend that day. We kept everything literally what it's been at. You know, the hardest thing that's also going on behind the scenes that, you know, a part of just that day is we're up over 700 percent year over year. So this whole year from the start has just been like, Oh, what do we think this drop is going to do?

And then by the time we get to that drop, literally the man is 10 X that drop. And it's like, yeah. You know, so by the time you're able to correct for the inventory you know, you're already screwed in the moment because you're already there. So under serving that, I'm glad we did what we have like over 10, 000 bags.

We put some to the side but at the end of the day, you know, we, yeah, we could have done a lot more than 1. 4 million that day. I would assume honestly, probably if not double. That whole day. But the planning process starts like you saying Taylor from like years of product development where, you know, actually this time last year, we dropped yesterday, we dropped the ice cream shorts for the first time. We already had preexisting ice cream teas because we did them for a national holiday, national ice cream day. Then we developed the shorts and then it was like, okay, that's been our best seller one of our best selling SKUs. You know, planning that out. Cool. Easy W is just to do a backpack in that same thing.

Cause we already had the silhouette of the same bag and the black one that's behind me too, is the same exact silhouette, just in a black seams version. So the planning process is literally started almost a year ago in the sense that it was finding the winning skew of the ice cream. And then the planning of the inventory, we ordered those bags and I believe February or March. By the time the product was done, boated, on a container, getting to us, you know, we're up against the window. We were getting product that night for when we sold it earlier that day. Just because again, like, you know, we're dealing with all these new nuanced things of free forwarding and we're learning as we're going to.

So the process has been a long one and you know, that's kind of how it came to it from that side of things.

[00:09:35] Taylor Holiday: So have you guys always historically targeted back to school as a moment for you? Has that been on your marketing calendar as one of the peaks that you guys drive every year?

[00:09:44] Bill Rom: Absolutely. So, you know, you, you're, I think the person who kind of has preached the four peaks moment and when Josh and I, you know, have looked at your content and the things that you've done in the past, we kind of analyzed ourselves, like, where do we have these moments and do we already have them existing?

You know, for us the start of the baseball season slash the launch of MLB season kind of also corresponds with Easter. So we have this really nice, big, open opportunity where we can start selling earlier than others. So somewhere around February 15th, we start having, you know, baseball practices are starting around the country.

So that moment opens up more than traditional retail. We then have another moment because we go to a live event. I've preached that going to live events is super key to building audience and doing things there. So we have another one for the College World Series every year. And then back to school it has always been a target because of who we serve.

And then over the years, we've enhanced our product categories, you know, sizing down to youth, small we have toddler sizing coming soon because we already had built this really great base of, you know, 15 to 25 year olds, and then we started to open up more and more downstream and back to school just continues to make, you know, bigger and bigger tailwinds for us.

So it's absolutely something that we premium target for us also. This is our best cohort. When you analyze cohorts over the years, people, new customers that we acquire during this moment are more valuable than any other cohort, every single year stacking on top of themselves. So this is that moment.

And then this year, uniquely, because we have the election coming up we wanted to make sure that we overspiced getting new customers all summer, because if it's going to get more expensive now through, you know, early November with the, with the election, trying to go at auction with Facebook ads, et cetera.

Like, do we already have a client file that's big enough for that moment that we won't have to try to fill it in three weeks before it, so that's kind of big and broad, the whole strategy.

[00:11:33] Taylor Holiday: I want to hit a few things here. So one of the things I think people underappreciate about thinking about a brand or category to get into is are these, are there these natural interactions inside of the community culturally in which we can participate? So you described the start of baseball season, spring training, the energy around baseball practice, starting all of that as an obvious one, but then the live event thing, I think is so cool.

So will you talk a little bit about what do you guys do at the college world series and as somebody who played in the college world series, I can say that as the baseball community, like the enthusiasm and energy and just overall positivity of that space for everybody shows up, it feels like the Olympics to me, where

what's interesting about the space is that.

There's no competition because usually there's no home team. And so you get this very like collaborative, almost like party style environment there that the energy is just like so high and enthusiastic about there. But what do you guys do there? And what has been the impact on that space specifically for you?

[00:12:27] Joshua Shapiro: Yeah. You described it perfectly. And I didn't know you actually played in that. That's awesome. So for us, you know, we went back our first year, I believe, Bill, when it was 2018 that we went to the College World Series. And you know, we had done pop ups before. I've been setting up at our local facility here in Long Island called, it was Baseball Heaven since I was 16 years old with a tent. And I was like, all right, like we've seen some success, like, let's go to this event in the college road series and get the brand out there for the first time in person. Because we had such a big, massive social following at that time. And granted 2018 was our first million dollar year. We actually didn't even spend any advertising in 2018 on Facebook.

It was all organic. Like we didn't even know about ads until post then. So basically we go to the event and all of a sudden there's these huge lines. And like, people are like freaking out to take photos of me with me. And like, Billy, like had always told me to, you know, never just be a computer behind the screen, like be a person. So I'd always go on Instagram live. I'd put my face out there. Kids knew Josh as the influencer behind baseball lifestyle. So when we went there, you know, in a baseball world, I was like a B list celebrity at the event where I probably, I can go back to my camera. I took four or 500 photos of kids. And I remember calling my dad literally crying because I'm like, I've been trying to be this like amazing person to 500 kids and they're all want to take photos and they're all excited about the brand. And looking back on our setup, it's like a joke. Like the products trash, like the setups trash, like. But again, like Bill said, we had a videographer, we documented it. You could go back on our YouTube. You can go on our Instagram. You can see all of it. So we use it now as, you know, a place to showcase the products where people have seen our stuff on Facebook.

They've seen it all over and they want to be able to touch and feel it. Part of the drip process also goes there, tweet where that backpack was on the back of our mannequin. And everybody was walking by, where can I get that? Where can I get that? Oh, you can't get that right now. It's actually dropping, you know, during our back to 

[00:14:14] Taylor Holiday: so you teased it at the event.

[00:14:16] Joshua Shapiro: So it's a, it's a great way to tease products. It's, we have stuff that's dropping in the fall where people are able to touch and feel, and, oh, this is coming out. And you know, the top college guys are there. All these kids are running around in your gear already. So it's a way to showcase products. You can make a ton of money, obviously in that event, if you do it right. But really me and Bill look at it as a showcase for both content and future product.

[00:14:37] Bill Rom: And then from a marketing side, like Josh said, we always have had videographers with us. So we take a ton of content, but also you, you go through time. Like Josh Young has now been, you know, has a world series ring, everything else. The first time he met Josh, he was shaking and Josh, for people who don't know is, you know, six foot five, like two 20 Josh is five foot five, you know, 160 pounds and here's Josh Young shaking.

Cause he was somebody who bought the brand. Max Clark is a big name in the game. He's been wearing our stuff since he's 12, 13 years old. This year, Jack Caglione, like he's the name everybody's talking about at the event and he's hanging out in our booth. I'm talking to his mom and dad and like he's shopping and doing everything else.

All the teams come by and we do that marketing. We make sure that we do a piece there with that. We also capture so many new emails. We usually do stuff where if we give you, we give away posters, we give away koozies, we do things that are interactive, capture emails, capture different people, build the audience.

Cause it's our ideal customer. So we're where they are. They're also there to spend so we can get them to increase their average order value right out of the gate. They've set a marker in their head that this stuff is worth X amount of dollars. So by the time they come back in 90 days, it's back to school, right?

60 to 90 days later, we're in the back of school moment. They're shopping with us again, 60 to 90 days after that. We're back at you know, Q4 and we're in, you know, cyber Monday and black Friday, all that stuff. So it's perfectly sequenced in for us to continue to grow that, you know, Over, you know, a six month window and really, really build out, you know, perfect ideal clients.

[00:16:03] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, it's amazing. My first client at CTC was actually EvoShield, and that was right at the peak of their hysteria. And they did the same thing. They would go to the College World Series, custom fit all the players, put give them logos. Just the energy and enthusiasm around what is so ideally your customer base in that space was just immensely obvious.

And so I love that. I think live events are a massively underappreciated where you are trading on the spirit of the event with your brand in a way that's just, in a lot of ways, it's a co branding activity that when you can take an event that is so beloved and connected in that way and be present in it, that's The goodwill gets assigned to you as well.

And I think that's such an underappreciated opportunity. The other thing is, so we work closely. I've been friends with the crew over at Bruce bolt for a long time. And bear story is very similar to yours, Josh, in terms of the way you guys have kind of been out public facing developed a goodwill persona for that.

So I'm curious, does that ever feel weighty to you to play that character or do you still enjoy it, or how do you guys think about that as the brand continues to grow?

[00:17:05] Joshua Shapiro: I mean, it's now not me, which is good. Cause there was a point where we had to come to a decide of like, do I want to be a CEO of the company or do I want to be the face of the brand? And I, you know, I kind of passed the stakes over to the other, there's too many Josh's in this episode already, but past that past the stakes over to my best friend, Josh, who was our Chief of content.

And he's the one that you'll see all over Tik TOK. You'll see him all over YouTube. He was taken on the face, the brand and the personality side of it. So I could actually run the business with bill. So like, you know, I now come at it from more of a business perspective, honestly, than I do from an influencer side of things. Because that's honestly what I personally enjoy. I think this whole, everyone's asked me to think I'm this obsessed baseball kid, and to be honest with you, like not anymore, I have been to one MLB game this year. I went to the all star game, obviously on behalf with the MLB, which was dope. But like, other than that, like having these conversations, talking e com, doing that is like my actual love now and baseball is just the avenue.

So I pass it over to the other Josh and he's gotten the same thing where kids come up to him, take photos, want your autograph and we'll continue to pass the sticks. You know, Billy's always talked about almost building the barstool model at BL where everybody has their own personality. You should all be on camera.

Billy's on camera. Melissa's on camera. Everybody in the warehouse is on camera because that's important to us is to put a face to the brand and not just be one person in case I were to leave or he were to leave or whatever the case is, we have other people. Yeah,

[00:18:26] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I love that. That's awesome. So Bill, I'm going to. Let's talk about growth from here. So you guys just did a million dollars a day. You're raising the bar immensely. Where do you guys continue to develop? How much of it do you think is D to C? Are you thinking about broader distribution? Is it international?

Do you sort of follow the game of baseball into Japan? Like where, where do we go from here for baseball lifestyle?

[00:18:47] Bill Rom: Yeah, again, great, great question. And it's one that we've talked about, you know, a lot. I think for us, one of the biggest changes that's going to be happening we'll be going into Academy sports. Start moving into their stores next month.

[00:18:59] Taylor Holiday: I saw the shields display shields display. Looks great.

[00:19:02] Bill Rom: Chills is our best vendor by far. If you go around the country, like they've really leaned in and in store footprint, they're up over 500 percent year over year in our products in their category we're actually the fastest growing product in store. Bar none, like this is every category. We were growing faster than anybody else.

They're number one selling youth short out of, you know, under armor, Nike, et cetera. It's our ice cream short. So, it's been a lot there. Dick's sporting goods. We're going to be going on a Q1 Hibbett sports, another vendor, Dunham sports, another vendor. So wholesale is a huge expansion for us next year.

I know, you know, a lot of people who are going to listen to this, no kind of that side. 86 percent of all sales are still happening in person. I don't know if we're going to get to that point, you know, but if we're a mid eight figure business this year you know, next year we'll, we'll probably be about a nine figure business, but wholesale is going to be a massive side of that opportunity with a lot of runway to grow.

So that's where we want to go. Is continuing to lean into how do we provide a great experience for those vendors that then opens up, how are we doing offline marketing? You know, we're, we've got trucks driving around. We wrapped an ice cream truck and it rides around Long Island. And if kids find it, they take a picture of it.

He's got t shirts on the truck. He hands them to kids who know the brand. So we try to create these little micro moments. And then how do we create the opportunity to scale that nationwide? For either, you know, small things or continuously. So all of that is part of it. But as Josh said, you know, for the entire year, we were up 700 plus percent.

And really most of that is driven online. This year are our full footprint in store is going to be, you know, just cracking into the seven figures. Next year it'll be an eight figure business, but there's still a lot of runway that we're seeing from an e com standpoint, because while we thought we had a smaller TAM when we got started and we were in this niche as you kind of expand, we look at ourselves and say, you know, Supreme's a skateboard company that just sold for 1.

9 billion. There's a lot more people who play or are interested in baseball than are interested in skateboarding. So how do we continue to, you know, on Josh's side, develop great products, make sure that we're telling good stories and then continue to serve clients. And you had said something before, is it worth it to go out of stock?

Is it worth it for us to, you know, run out and not supply the demand? Absolutely. There is a, there's a benefit to the in and out. But it is a double edged sword to some degree, especially when you're dealing with parents who have children, because if kids constantly are disappointed around key moments.

You are going to get to the point that people can't rely on you, you know? So, last year, Q4, we actually ran out of most of the inventory to our VIP list before Black Friday even got started. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was our biggest day ever. And Thursday was bigger than that. Then Friday was actually smaller than Thursday because we started running out of inventory because we just hadn't planned demand appropriately.

This year we've done much better. But even with that, having a full time demand planner on our team, our CFO, having more people involved in that process we don't want to sell out in the holidays this year, right? Before the moment is done. We want to make sure that we can service what these people want to deliver a gift to their kid, because that's also important.

That's also part of the process. So it's worth it to do for a hundred percent. Having some, some exclusivity is important. And we can see it in mom's groups where that backpack right there behind Josh is currently selling for 400 on eBay. And we retailed it for 90. But we don't want to do it all the time.

There's a point where you might hurt your market depending on who your market is.

[00:22:29] Joshua Shapiro: it's hard. Cause like, again, speaking of a bill too you know, we're bootstrapped and, you know, my name is signed on the dotted line for every single time you, you buy inventory. Right. So like you're taking a calculated risk every time and each buy can put you out of business if you don't sell it. So like, you know, for me and Bill, you know, he's always tried to do that for me since I was younger, was never put me in a spot where I was going to be in a bad situation.

Obviously right now, like we're in a very good spot because of the, the smart decisions we've made where we haven't over leveraged ourselves. So it's the, it's the balance of like, yeah, we can buy 10, 000 bags, probably could have bought 50, 000 bags, but like, is that worth it? You know, do we scratch the itch of people or, or are we putting ourselves in a bad spot where we're going to be sitting on backpacks in the warehouse? And, you know, Josh Shapiro is liable for these bags at the end of the day, right? Cause personally guaranteed. So like, that's a hard thing for us to manage. And me and Bill still go back and forth about it. We were talking about, are we buying more inventory for the holidays? And I'm like the safe side of me says, dude, like we're good.

Just kick back. And like, you know, I don't want to take a risk, but the other part is the risk can be not, you know, selling it too fast and not scratching the edge for the demand. That's there. That's a tough balance to have.

[00:23:35] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, it is really hard. And so let's, let's talk about this for a second. Cause I think it's an interesting dialogue. I'd be curious how you guys are thinking about this because the other piece of this is you're talking about a, a bag right there. That's this ice cream style that began, I think if the story follows, it begins with jazz chisms, glove, maybe somewhere down the line.

I don't know exactly where that design initially comes from. Is it before that

do you? 

[00:24:00] Bill Rom: so if you want to know, really Aria before they were Aria, where it's actually called athletes brand and the guy who designs everything first made ever his original glove, we already had an ice cream t shirt and we were the biggest influencer in the sport. So he actually asked us to do a collab. We gave away.

The original, you know, what was it? Laser sports. 

We gave away the original glove that has now become Aria and jazz has gotten in. But now that the, the two of us synergized, I guess, around the same thing

and we've gone back and forth on who's the originator of what, but

[00:24:34] Taylor Holiday: Sure. but,

but my, the main point is that there, that there's a trend here that is that, and this is fashion generally and baseball right now, I am, it is like peak accessory hysteria in a way that I, like this goes back to the days. I mean, I, I worked at. Power balance for a long time, fighting power

balance.

It like baseball is the ultimate accessory game, but between the sliding mitts, the towels in the pocket, the chains, like, I don't know what's left to do here. And so there definitely is some like, it's the amount of enthusiasm and money and youth baseball in particular right now is like, it's hard to imagine. How it's sustainable in some way. So that I feel feels like the tension of the market demand that you want to satiate, but you also have to be careful that I think alternatively cool is somewhat tied to, I have it and you don't. And if everybody has it, is it the same level of cool or does it move on to the next thing that somebody else has that nobody else has?

Does, and that is always the tension in this accessory game is that the cool guys kind of want to have something that nobody else has. That's the early adopter principle. And so how do you balance satiating the totality of demand versus losing cool? How do you guys think about that

[00:25:47] Joshua Shapiro: Well, that's, that's why, you know, part of, we we've been dropping products every Friday for the last, since 2020. And what that allows us to do is find the next thing, like before ice cream, it was something else. And after we actually had our donut collection that we dropped in June, actually outsold ice cream collection number to number we just sold out of that one too fast.

You know, we had, we had that, that was an amazing day. That was our biggest day before July 4th and before the whole thing. So we're always dropping products to find the next thing because we don't want to be relying on ice cream. And we have those internal conversations and like, we're not, you know, like, yeah, that might be the outfacing hero product that might be your four hitter in the lineup, but we have the three guy right before, or the five guy that could slot right in if we had that thing goes under, you know?

So like, we have everything that we obviously protect and do our own thing, but we're always iterating on the next thing because that's the exact point. Taylor's like. If that's not there tomorrow, like we're not just held liable to one product.

[00:26:42] Bill Rom: And we also do a fair amount of skew analysis, right? So what we're doing is we're looking at, you know, are we overindexing in shorts? Are we overindexing in t shirts? What color scheme are we overindexed in so that we're not in a, in a situation where we don't have something to pivot into if the hot thing stopped becoming the hot thing additionally, you know, that's where we.

We have an agreement with Max Clark, right? All of his off field apparel, things like that. He's not signed with Adidas or Under Armour or any of those other brands, right? He signed with us. And we did that strategically because of the social carry that he has, how his clothing does, the fact that he leans into fashion, and that's actually helping us grow the audience that's a little bit older.

And with that, we're designing clothing. You'll see a drop. We'll send you one out. Our drop this Friday is very, very different than some of the other things. I think I sent you one of our performance shirts.

[00:27:29] Taylor Holiday: did. I love it. By the way, I've been wearing that thing nonstop. It's like a thicker material than what you get out of all of this stuff, which is really cool. It actually follows the kind of boxy tea trend that exists a little more. It's really

[00:27:41] Joshua Shapiro: And what's the other thing I laughed about that is what about that t shirt says anything about baseball? It has nothing that says the 

[00:27:47] Taylor Holiday: Right. Very subtle. Tiny. Yeah.

[00:27:49] Joshua Shapiro: right? So like, that's kind of the point of the polo that I'm wearing. Like, what does this have to do with baseball? And, and ice cream really has nothing to do with baseball.

Like we have lacrosse kids come in here, soccer, kids, girls, moms, whoever. It's, and the thing that I think that we also have that. Also puts the lifeline of the thing is the quality is actually really, really good. And if you were to go on any of our reviews that are all there, like every single mom or dad says, like, this is the only shirt my kid will wear.

This is the only short my kid will wear. Kids hate wearing polos. They're going to love wearing our polos. So like, and, and that's kind of like why, what we kind of diversify off that is because we actually make great quality product that's. You know, cheaper for what that is. Billy's always yelled at me for years about this.

It's like, focus on quality, focus on quality, focus on quality. And we've increasingly made it better and better. So that way, you know, the 50 pair of shorts that you get from us is better than the Eric Emanuel hundred and 90 pairs that you're going to get from him. And like, that's what we provide that for the parents.

[00:28:44] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, that's really cool there. It's funny. The, the root of CTC, I'm in office right now. We share an office with Skullcandy. Who's one of our longtime customers. It's because their CEO, Brian Garofalo and I are really close. And he's the reason CTC started is because he brought together me and my partner Jordan around a project that we almost started.

This was like 10 years ago called the Maple Union. And it was built to go after the exact market. You guys are going after a sort of baseball apparel lifestyle. And his vision was that like baseball hits football. Very close to Americana in a way that can extend beyond the sport itself into sort of this broader representation of what it means to be American in this very unique way.

And so there's these like very close ties that I do think that you can expand it very easily beyond just people who are passionate about baseball individually. Is this, there's something about what it represents that's bigger and broader in a way that I think you guys absolutely are tapping into.

[00:29:35] Bill Rom: And thank you because that's exactly what we're trying to do. You know, we want to just make, create clothing and then hint at the fact that it's baseball, but there's so much that's connected to what a baseball lifestyle is, right? People who are living a baseball lifestyle, go to the gym and work out.

Okay, cool. We have training clothes, you know, our shorts, like I'll put our newest version of our workout shorts up against anything Lululemon does. I just went shopping the other day. I'm wearing Patagonia shorts now. I bought another pair of, you know, another brands just to compare quality. I think ours matches up right there and we're cheaper, right?

We're going to be offered in the same store and that's who we're going to, you know, start to compete with as we get to nine figures, it's not just, you know, Hey, baseball clothing, it's, we're going to be competing with all clothing. So our quality has to live there, but how do we get people to understand the story of us?

Easier than maybe the story of somebody else

[00:30:24] Taylor Holiday: I love it. So a million dollar day, 10 years in the making, built through a ruthless commitment to every day, building a community where you're actually genuinely caring about people building product that actually matters that people are going to love and care about and being, you know, Absolutely diligent to the quality, having a marketing calendar that builds throughout the year that connects to live events and cultural tent poles in a way that your customer can be connected and caring about what you're doing. Teasing it throughout the year to build up demand ahead of the moment. That sounds like a hell of a strategy. Anything I'm missing guys that you would give to somebody who's trying to create a peak for themselves in terms of thinking about how they would do it.

[00:30:59] Bill Rom: don't rush. I think that, you know, I have opinions at large about everybody got into a scaling mindset. Hey, I scaled an account this fast, or I scaled a brand this quickly. And I think a lot, you cut a lot of corners when your whole purpose and emphasis is just that. You don't take into account how, you know, product development, time window, shipping, all those things impact the marketing calendar.

Right. So making sure that you do it the right way by taking your time. And it, it, it's not the sexy thing to say. If here's a big silver bullet that you guys can press play on tomorrow, but you know, making content, taking your time, making sure you're doing actions that are core to what your brand believes in and taking all action for the customer I think that, you know, we had an opportunity, we all talked about the backpack, we knew that we were going to sell out really quickly.

And we had a conversation about whether or not before we even launched it, do we raise the price? And we decided not to, we stayed true to it. We didn't make it a hundred plus dollar backpack because we wanted to make sure that when people got it, they still felt like, Oh, wow, this was worth more. And it was a client centric decision.

So even though, yeah, we sold out, we could have had more demand. We could have captured things. We made sure we were doing the right thing by the customer. So I think, you know, take your time, do the right thing by the customer. And if you're doing these other things, you know, success will come.

[00:32:15] Taylor Holiday: Love it. Josh, anything you'd throw in last, last bit of advice.

[00:32:18] Joshua Shapiro: I think it's the same thing that Bill's saying. I think our secret power is consistency. I mean, you know, for me playing baseball, it was, you know, I'm undersized. So it was, I had to outwork everybody and be consistent on everything. You know, taking the swings in the cages, showing up to Bill's gym. I mean, everything I do on my notebook, you know, five critical tasks each day and just keep chipping away at something every single day, consuming your content.

Everybody around me always searching for more and me and Bill, like, we're One thing that we always pride ourselves on is like having no ego. You know, like if, if I feel like Bill is right, he's right. If he feels like I'm right, we go with it and we work together really well. I think the one thing that's very, almost hard to replicate or impossible is like me and Bill's relationship of a 12 year old meets a 24 year old and builds, you know, an eight figure business, but at the same time, it's like, As you saw my tweet one time, Taylor was like, I'm a very anxious person.

I'm driven by anxiety. And that makes me like push forward each day and check for the little details and be on it and be consistent. Because if I don't feel like I'm doing that, I'm missing something where Bill's pushing the big strategy and I'm there executing it. So like, it's really just, it comes down to consistency and time.

We've never done this before, you know, so this is our first crack at it. So it just takes time and learnings.

[00:33:27] Taylor Holiday: Love it. Well, as is often the case, these are two absolutely killer operators. They have sub 2000 followers on Twitter. I think that's going to change a ton over the near future. Hopefully you guys keep sharing because I think. This story is so important in the lessons of exactly what you're describing, how you build a real consumer product.

That's connected to communities, patience, time, quality care of the customer being present in their spaces. And this story really matters. And so I'm proud to get to share it here. Where, where can people follow you? Where's the best place to keep in touch and follow baseball lifestyles, January.

[00:34:01] Joshua Shapiro: I mean, our website's BL101. com Instagram's Baseball Lifestyle 101. My personal Twitter is jchef09. Bill.

[00:34:08] Bill Rom: And mine's a at the Bill Rahm, just cause there's a lot, including my dad.

[00:34:14] Taylor Holiday: There are a few of them if you go looking. So, Hey guys, I appreciate it. I'll see you next week for lunch. And Great to jam. Congrats on the

success. 

[00:34:22] Joshua Shapiro: I'll see you soon.

[00:34:23] Bill Rom: Appreciate you.