How Skullcandy Used a Competitor to Win New Customers

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. We've got a regular guest here, you. This man is officially a regular, it's usually a biannual appearance when he is doing something cool and awesome. I'm joined today by Brian Garafalo, the CEO of Skull Candy. BG, What's up man?

[00:00:16] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: How's it going? Do we get a regular appearance club going or something?

[00:00:20] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, like the five-timers jacket for SNL or something. Should I get you another green sweater? You just wouldn't wear it. You only wear one thing. So I couldn't, I wouldn't buy you clothes.

[00:00:29] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Maybe I would be wearing the new one. You couldn't

[00:00:30] Taylor Holiday: I. Well, something you are wearing is what we are here to talk about. How's that? For a transition? Like we, like we scripted it.

Yeah, we both got 'em. We both got 'em rocking. The new method, a NC 360 from Skullcandy. That's what we're here to chat about today. This has been a long time coming. Um, I get the benefit of being in the office with you here. And I had gotten a little teaser of this many moons ago. I know you have been working really hard on bringing this partnership to life.

But tell us a little bit about this product, what makes it so special? And then we're gonna talk about sort of the, the business strategy and thought work that went into this launch for you guys. I.

[00:01:07] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: well first off, I gotta say, you sound great.

[00:01:12] Taylor Holiday: Well, it's funny 'cause the internet is actually in an uproar against my, my audio because I move, normally I talk like this on the podcast and so the audio gets bad. So I have my gaming headset here, but I broke it and so I, now I'm gonna try and stay real close to the mic.

[00:01:27] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: There we go. Well, I, I really meant just because the sound quality of

[00:01:31] Taylor Holiday: Oh,

[00:01:31] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: is so fantastic.

[00:01:32] Taylor Holiday: what you're saying. I see what you did there.

[00:01:34] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: didn't work so hot there. all right. Well, let's, let's talk about it. This is the Skull Candy Method 360 A and C with sound by bows. So an interesting partnership that we have with a brand that most people would consider a competitor. we consider them to be a a tangential competitor, but when we think about distribution channels and when we think about price points and especially consumers, not a ton of overlap, and we both uh entered into a conversation and felt that we can very much mutually benefit from a partnership with each other, introduction into new audiences providing our strengths to each other. The Skull Candy brand with our audience which tends to be a little younger, a little more active, and you can't deny the, the quality of the audio and acoustic engineering that Bose brings to the table. That quite frankly, skull Candy's had a bit of a perception issue with over oversight of the past five to seven years. And by putting the stamp of that brand just on our packaging, it gets people to turn their heads and say, Ooh, there must be something good inside there. And there definitely is because our product teams worked together for a long, long time, making sure this was tuned to meet the expectations of what was provided to us.

So, that's where we're today in market for two weeks now.

[00:03:04] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Super cool. So there's a lot to unpack here. One of the things I try and highlight on this show. Is the unique approaches that our consumer partners are taking to driving growth for their business. And the playbook of going to a competitor, or as you described, maybe a tangential competitor, and seeing that as a pathway to potential opportunity is abnormal.

It's not something I see a ton of people doing. So where did this inspiration come from? How did this idea. Get put in play because even when I posted this on Twitter, the immediate reaction was, why would they both do this? How does this happen? Like, how does that come to life for you guys?

[00:03:41] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: No, it's a, it is a great question. So, look, we are both in the same category. We've been around for 21 years. They've been around for a whole lot longer than that. So just by nature of being in the same business, we know each other we know strengths and weaknesses. We show up at the same trade events.

We usually have a little insight into what each other is gonna be bringing to market before it lands in market. Not just us, but everybody in the industry. And we know what we're really great at. They know what they're really great at, and there is a, a phenomenal amount of crossover in what we would like to do better and what they have to offer. We also know just, you know, definitive math doesn't lie. The data tells us that consumer buys in these distribution channels and at these price points, and not a lot of skull candy. Consumers are buying a. four, $500 pair of headphones for their everyday wear. not every not every school can be consumer is somebody who is the audio file first. They're usually somebody who loves the brand they wanna be a part of the community they want a product that works to their expectations and value. So when we can provide a. Much superior listening experience with technology for Bose, still give our consumer everything else that they come to expect, including that phenomenal value. It really turns heads and it's really, really interesting for the consumer. Now, the huge benefit for Skull Candy is, you know, I, I think I've used the term with you before, it is just marketing arbitrage. So how. How long and how expensive will it be for Skullcandy to change perception of audio quality or when a, you know, a million new eyeballs in the snap of finger. Now let's compare that to if we start with product as marketing we make something so interesting that third parties are going to acknowledge this, and you know what? I'm the YouTube consumer electronics reviewer. That is so cool that I'm gonna talk about, it's my audience of 1 million people and the editor of So and So, highly respected media outlet. Wow, that's really interesting. I'm gonna cover it in my media outlet. The the Redditer. Who runs the skull candy community? Wow, this is so interesting. We need to make it the pinned post. All of those types of things, and that is a, it's a phenomenal benefit for us.

[00:06:21] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, there's so much there that I think is, is really important as a takeaway and rooted in it is this idea that like word of mouth marketing, which is this like sort of holy grail resource that you want, has to be derived from a story that's actually compelling and interesting. Like you don't, you can't manufacture that in a fake way.

And so there is something here that just the, the juxta, the like. Brain sort of boggling of why, what are, what are they doing? Like, it, it creates intrigue. It creates a, a, a wondering, um,

How much now Go

[00:06:52] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: I mean, sorry to interrupt, but I always gotta hammer home. Like this is just one of those of the things I like to say, the Mable Laws of marketing in, my mind, if you can make the product the marketing, you're gonna win.

[00:07:07] Taylor Holiday: The job becomes a thousand times easier, right? Yeah,

[00:07:10] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Exactly.

[00:07:11] Taylor Holiday: yeah. You.

[00:07:11] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: just have to do something interesting enough to get everybody to turn their head a, just a little bit.

[00:07:16] Taylor Holiday: That's right. I if you, if you are down to the point of like the ad creative, being responsible for generating interest, you're in trouble. Like you are now in a place where you're asking to derive interest out of something that is by definition not interesting. And that is a much harder place to be than just sort of saying like, look at this and that being sufficient for, for intrigue.

[00:07:35] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:37] Taylor Holiday: the interesting thing is that there actually is a. In your specific industry of a similar collaboration between Apple and Beats, that like was obviously pretty successful for both parties in a way. Like how much did that play into your thinking about the space, if at all? Um, is that, like, has that been contributed to this thought process at all?

[00:07:57] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: It, it hasn and it hasn't so I, I think it's, it's very common knowledge in the, consumer's mind that Apple owns beats. that is the reason why when you when you put on a pair of Beats headphones for the first time, you have that beautiful, seamless pairing experience to your Apple devices. I think that's just known and it's, it's table stakes. I think there's also a negative connotation to be that, to that, to be quite honest of, of Bose, or, sorry, beats is a different brand as of recent times than it was when Beats came to be because of Apple's ownership. So, you know, I, I think like, like all good, brand stewards, we know that we want all the good parts and none of the bad parts. So did it have anything to do with with us building this this partnership and this product? No, but I think it gave us some good watch outs. Also it, we, we have the, the added benefit of the, the surprise to the industry, right? Bose does not own Skull candy. We are an independent business. And so that's another piece of the intrigue of, oh wow.

Like these are real competitors on paper working together. Why?

[00:09:14] Taylor Holiday: As you think about like the potential business impact for these kinds of efforts, like this is obviously something that's been going on for a long time towards it. It's not a, it's not the thing you're trying to do to sell a few units on a weekend. It's not a, this is obviously intended to be a, a meaningful, impactful program.

What do you do to begin to think about the potential value of something like this to your business? Is it, do you enlist retail partners in a potential, like an understanding of their interest in the product category and where it would sit in the mix? Do you, how far do you go in assessing the potential before you decide to do something like this?

[00:09:48] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: It's a, it's a great question. So, very early on in our conversation and we, we dive into analysis of distribution channels and price bands. we know we want to bring the best of skull candy to a product that could potentially have both technology in it. We needed it to be first and foremost, skull Candy a bit of an assist for Bose from Bose.

So when we do this, okay, what price band are we gonna play in? How do we make this interesting for First Skull candy? And to us that was, we think we can go raise ASPs. Also understanding the white space. What is our average A SP? What is theirs and where can we play in the middle that's not gonna get too close to them. Then absolutely. When we go look at distribution, this was early on having conversations with our bigger retail partners. we think there's a phenomenal opportunity here. Do you see it as well? And if we do, can we come to market in a very special way? Because you clearly saw how this came to market.

We invested pretty significantly in creation. The creative media partners, influencers. People in, in one room with with real attention that we're gonna go share our story with audiences. The very next day when I was flying home from east Coast to West Coast, it's in the airports and product was on peg with signage in front of stores talking about this, this product so people could literally see something happen on. Social media the night of April 15th. Go on and watch a YouTube video and buy the product the very next day with a display in a retail store, and then obviously on skull.com as well.

[00:11:37] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so that connection to distribution obviously gives you sort of a floor opportunity that will sort of, versus if it's e-com specific, it feels like it's a, you have more guesswork into the potential value that has to be done. So you guys have those relationships that allow you to connect that those dots in a way.

That's really interesting. Another thing we've talked about, and this is. Probably more dynamic and it didn't exist in the same way when started, but like the macro environment around consumer, both on the supply chain side and on the sentiment side has changed a ton since you probably started with this partnership and you, you, you've made the comment to me that in some ways it could be, it's like.

The best thing that could have happened because your price point offers a qu a value product that is disproportionate to anything in the market. But then obviously the complexities on the supply chain side. So how, as this partnership's developing and you see that sort of taking shape, how did that affect your thinking and did it, and did it ever put it at risk?

Like how have you guys handled that in the midst of this partnership?

[00:12:36] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Topic, right? So the the idea of. New cost structure was just an idea until about the 11th hour before we were launching this product. So that was very, very scary and, and created a lot of, a lot of late nights for a lot of smart people inside our building of, what are we gonna do and how are we gonna price this?

The price of the product could have been a lot of different things. was very important to us and we know we wanted to really play into the value of the product, which we already knew was going to be an incredible story. But kind of hierarchy of stories. We were saying three things. This was an amazing Skull candy brand product with sound by Bose number two, and incredible value number three, and the order of those was certainly changed with consumer preference. When we launched it and it was, oh my gosh, this is an incredible value. Or What is this? Skullcandy product was sound by those, so 3 1 2 instead of 1, 2, 3. now the, the reality of operating the business when we started building the product entering into mass production in of this year, we've. 482 different landed costs of, of the product over over six months.

Right. 

[00:14:03] Taylor Holiday: It's crazy. Yeah.

[00:14:04] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: product on the water that we had no idea if it was going to be tariffed or not, and if so, by how much when it landed. so all things that we have to, have to have contingency plans for, we have to be able to act on very quickly. And then if it's in a wholesale relationship, hold hands with the partners, understanding that, hey, cost of this product is different. and I think, look, we're, we're all in this together in the consumer goods business, so everybody knows very fluid situation. We're gonna fight as hard as we can to get through it. And then hopefully we normalize, we've got a. Very healthy supply chain with more talented operators.

[00:14:46] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Yeah. When I saw the, like, so for those people that don't know, the price point right now is $99, which in this category, at this quality is crazy. Like in some ways I was like, holy cow, man. That's like, that's an aggressive, incredible offer at the price point. I don't, are you guys planning to hold that for 30 days or what's the timeline on the 99 versus 1 29?

It's like a introductory price, right.

[00:15:07] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Introductory price, All I wanna say about that in on, on this forum is it's fluid.

[00:15:15] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:15] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: So, we wanna do the best we possibly can to give the consumer the best value for the

[00:15:21] Taylor Holiday: That's right,

[00:15:21] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: of time.

[00:15:22] Taylor Holiday: and you guys aren't gonna be subject to anything that anyone else isn't. So it still is gonna hold its capacity in that, in that spread of price too. But it, it's, it's really amazing. I can imagine like that in particular story as something like this is unfolding, has gotta be like, in particularly anxiety inducing, right?

That the, the value proposition is sits in that value conversation when your underlying cost structure changes so dramatically.

[00:15:45] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Mm-hmm. It was funny I, I know you've had a a hundred of these conversations, but everybody wants to talk about their horror stories of immediate post covid and how these are similar, and I think we, we saw this quickly got very, very different. So, we'll be learning from this and telling our grandkids about it.

[00:16:02] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, no doubt about it. I wanna focus now on a little bit of the, like the distribution and marketing story. 'cause I think this is another thing you guys do so well. So Tony Hawk, it's the face of the campaign. Talk a little bit about how that came to life. Why Tony? How did he fit into this story for you?

[00:16:16] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: I love that one. Love talking about Tony. So, this was this is a conversation that started with Justin Regan, our head of marketing and myself of, look, we, we know we want to over index our resource allocation of this specific project. We think it has the opportunity to lift the entire brand, not just sell this product.

We think it has the opportunity to create an inflection point of growth for our brand that could last years and years and years. And we had a phenomenal piece of creative that we were bought in on. From our, our partners at those, which we thought was a long shot, you know, Hey, we got a great idea.

We're gonna have people break into your headquarters and steal, open a safe and steal your technology and put it in county product. And they're like, we love it. We're like, okay, we we're gonna get along great. now Justin and I are having a conversation of, okay, there is a character that plays the boss, that sets the ball rolling, saying, okay, we, we need to go get premium sound for the people and make it happen.

And whoever that person is is. This he's gonna be this, he or she is gonna be this authority figure. They need to be recognizable. They need to clearly position the Skull candy brand, but they also need to be big enough that people way outside the general Skull candy audience are gonna go, oh my gosh, that's that person. so we look, always, look, our heritage, the authenticity of, of our brand, and that's board sports. And then we, you know, put the very, very short list together and, you know, you, you know, the short list of names, it's, it's gonna be people like you know, Kelly Slater and Ryan Sheckler, and Sean White and Lisa Anderson. And then way above everybody else is Tony Hall. So he, you know, he was number one by far on our list. And then how did it come about? Well, we got a lot of people in our business that know Tony Hawk, so it's an easy, easy call. And when we funny, when we were talking to him about it, he's like, you know, I bought dozens and dozens of your products over the years and every time I lose a pair of headphones in the airport, I'm buying skull candy.

And appreciate what you guys do for the, the board sports community. Now to get paid to use him. He is still like a, you know, 16 year like oh.

[00:18:31] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. That's super cool. I wanna, I wanna read something that Justin wrote and shared on social the other day. 'cause I think it's, it's such a cool lesson that I think is underappreciated in my world, where a lot of the D two C consumer brand, all the marketing cycles are so short and so, immediate. Um, so this is something Justin Regan, so Global Vice President of Marketing at Skull Candy wrote about the content piece that came out in.

Partnership with this campaign launch, it says most people won't watch the Full Operation Sound Heist, which was the sort of name of the commercial film featuring Tony Hawk and our skull candy skate crew, and that's by design. It's more than just a video. It's the anchor. It sets the tone, ignites a vibe, and gives our brand and product a fearless narrative foundation.

From that single story, we build an entire ecosystem, short form cutdowns for paid and organic shoulder content for social and creator seating. Stills for retail, email and web behind the scenes for deep brand connection. This is what it looks like when you challenge creative expectations in a sea of predictable consumer audio marketing.

We chose storylines over safeness, ridiculousness over safety, hoping my network here is among the few who will see it all. The hero film is the spark. The campaign lives in how we spread the fire. So I just thought that was such a cool sort of thoughtful understanding of every role that every asset has to play in this story.

[00:19:46] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Justin is a pretty eloquent fellow.

[00:19:49] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. And, and what what I think is interesting is that like there's this, this real temptation. To take every asset and place it in this assessment of the direct merit merits of its individual return. But what I hear him saying here is that like, no, no, no. This asset actually gives structure to everything.

So independent of its individual return it, it is the source material and the root for all the paid ads that we're gonna run and take and distribute. Um, and without that structure, the rest of it doesn't make sense and it's gonna be incongruent for the customer between what happens at retail and what shows up on the website and how it shows up in paid and organic.

And it's that through thread that allows it all to pull at the same end of the rope and have every channel work to go together as a touch point. And what I can say is it shows up in. Better efficiency in the ad account, better conversion on the website in ways that like that asset, although maybe the direct attribution of the purchase isn't associated with it,

[00:20:43] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:44] Taylor Holiday: the factor that sets it all up.

And I think that's the piece that you've always done really well, that some people would call brand marketing, but I actually think it's, it's, it's more thoughtful and structured than that in a way that I thought was really cool in the way that he, he thought through that.

[00:20:58] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: I love that that Justin shared that in a, in a very again, a very eloquent way. Appreciate the compliment, especially coming from you. But like that's, one of those things that I've hung my hat on the whole career is brand marketing, but understanding the, the idea of holistic marketing operations, like how do we take a story and a idea and turn this into money? Well, it's gonna take a thousand things that we all have to, we have to check every single one of the boxes and we've gotta get most of them right. And

[00:21:29] Taylor Holiday: right.

[00:21:30] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: we've, we've done that well with this project. And it's, you know, pretty well already.

[00:21:37] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. E. E, exactly. And I think that that's how it all manifests. And even, even little things like the color prints of all four, right? There's this like, you need your standard core colors. You need black and white, right? Those are gonna be your core staples, but then there's the leopard print, right? That gives you a little bit of, and which one sold out first on the website?

That one, right? Like, yeah. And so like every one of these things creates these little mechanisms that even from at the bottom of the funnel, after I've seen that ad, guess what the click-through rate's gonna be best on? It's the cheetah break. Like, so there's just these different elements that I think all came together really well.

When you're putting this all, all in place.

[00:22:13] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: No, again, thank you. But this was you know, it's, it's a lot of smart people in the room. You know, there's, there's a hundred people that touch this throughout Skullcandy, and every single person has a job and they know what to be, to be successful with what I'm doing. These are 12 things that I have to do and we have to get right.

[00:22:29] Taylor Holiday: Yeah.

[00:22:30] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: when you saw the the briefing book for the content shoot, it's a little bit ridiculous. But you know that, somebody might see one static ad on Instagram, you know, there's, there's three days of content production with a 30 person crew making tons and tons of content that all shared the same story, same strategy, running in the same direction. and all of this boiled down to this is premium sound for the people.

[00:23:01] Taylor Holiday: What made you, one of the other things I thought was interesting is you held an event. Like an actual launch party. You got Bima out there so that you guys don't know one of the grandfathers, um, out there to host. Got you. And the people from Bose invited a bunch of press. Like how did that piece of it, because that's another thing that I thought of, like, man, that's not a, people don't do that enough.

Like this idea that these are moments that you're creating an actual thing to attend. So how did that idea fit into this for you?

[00:23:25] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: So two, two big reasons. One is it's pretty quiet out there. This stuff doesn't happen very often anymore. So, you know, it's always, there's always opportunity to zig when everybody else is zagging. And it proved to be very successful, like a whole lot more people than we expected showed up. A whole lot more people or those people that showed up shared a whole lot more content than we expected to. They talked about the events, not just the product and how great it was to be at a fun event like that. And wow, this is what happened at the event and all, all this super cool stuff. So was just to stand out. Right? And then number two was, I, I think this is. Fairly specific to consumer electronics and, and the consumer audio industry is when we're talking about selling products online.

There is a very big gate in front of through affiliate and referral programs and not. if you are if you are a brand and a product that does really, really great things enough so that publishers of sites and, the creators behind YouTube accounts, et cetera. If you're doing stuff interesting enough that they are covering you and then fast follow behind that, including you in affiliate programs or referral networks, et cetera, et cetera you win traffic lots and lots and lots of traffic.

Like there again, there is a, there's a big front. Those people, but incredible amount of traffic because. Consumers are just trained when they want a pair of headphones, they're going to the internet and they're they're searching for my specific use case and a price point. And what's coming up is something that's going to refer you to a place to go buy it, whether it be a brand site or Amazon or walmart.com or Best Buy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So number two was make sure we got of those very important people in the room. Or aware of the event with embargoed content if they couldn't attend sure it was exciting enough that they went, wow, I need to cover this. And then, hey, I'm gonna bring my affiliate team in now and say I'm writing about this incredible product.

And go take care of your, your linking situation.

[00:25:51] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. There's something, again, this is another experience I have of you. There's something very old school about the way that you can build people's experience of a product that is very human like that the idea that the way that they would first hear about it would be in that setting. Absolutely affects their perception of the thing. And it's just, it's just the reality of it. And so I think you, to put your best foot forward in the best place, um, is, I think it's, it's, it's an underappreciated mechanism for introducing a product that our space can grab onto and do more of. For sure.

So what, what do you do? Like, is there more, do you guys build more things with Bose? Like what, what do you do with it? Like how long more. Variations and colors. Keep this going for a long time. Like it feels like consumer electronics are cyclical. Like you always gotta have the next thing. There's like a very rapid expectation of that.

Right? So what does this partnership have in store for you guys?

[00:26:45] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: So just specifically this product literally it's two weeks old, so it has a very long life ahead of it. You're gonna see a whole lot more things happen with with all of our wholesale partners, you're gonna see more marketing, more promotion, more content come out over the next several months. You'll, you'll see big displays and big retail stores, et cetera, et cetera. What the future holds outside of that, we're gonna have to wait and see.

[00:27:15] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. Well, I thought I might be able to draw more outta you, but, all right. I appreciate it. I got, I guess we gotta wait and see, but yeah, I.

[00:27:21] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: The, the, people are telling us that they like this and they may, may want more.

[00:27:26] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. I, I think it's, it's such a novel again, approach. One of the things I'd be curious is like. Right now with a lot of parties, let take your, take your big business hat off, or I don't even know if you consider yourself an enterprise business and where you guys are at, but it's all relative depending on the the framework, but talk to somebody at $20 million.

Okay? That's thinking about product development partnership as an alternative to. Plugging another million dollars into the meta machine over the next four months. And I was trying to say, what, how do I get out of this sort of local maximum band of performance that I'm on and really do something that breaks it?

Like how would you think about approaching this kind of thinking and applying it to a business maybe at a smaller scale? I.

[00:28:08] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Yeah, no, that's, that's a, a phenomenal question. So I think there's a million ways to answer that. But here, here's one very specific thing. You mentioned bma so BMA Williams. If, if any of the listeners aren't familiar, my answer to your question would be, go pay attention to bma. I am a, a firm believer as evidenced by this product, that you can do an incredible amount of marketing when a ton of awareness, a ton of appreciation. By building a great product, you don't have to have $10 million to go advertise and bring this thing to market. Okay, so now lessons that BMA are gonna teach you or BMA is going to teach you, you know, how can I, as the brand owner bring value to another brand, and how can that other brand bring value to me? What can we create that is special for the consumer when we go to market together? And what is the, the one plus one equals three formula? no, nobody needs another sneaker in you know. A little different shade of blue when you already have the blue one. But they do need another story that is going to emotionally connect them to a product and talk about it to all their friends and share it on social media, et cetera, et cetera. So, the, the $20 million brand, oh, I can't help myself. Here's another great example. Taylor, could you hold up your wrist real quick? That's another collaboration with

[00:29:43] Taylor Holiday: That's a good, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah.

[00:29:46] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: and swatch their competitors. Why on earth are they putting out a product together? And one sells a $5,000 watch and one sells a $50 watch.

[00:29:55] Taylor Holiday: That's a great example. Yeah.

[00:29:57] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Yeah. So, and, and it's very similar to Skullcandy and Bose. So if you're the $20 million brand, is there something that you can go build and bring to market? Maybe it's by yourself, maybe it is with a partner. But it's gotta have just enough of a story to make new consumers turn their head, to make the media turn their head, to make the influencers and, and YouTubers turn their head and look at you and say, is more interesting than everything else that's out there.

You've won my attention and I wanna go talk about it.

[00:30:31] Taylor Holiday: And, and this is the thing when I think about. Brands who are on this hamster wheel of trying to make the next ad that's better than the 10,000 ads they made before it, but the product root underlying ingredients haven't changed, and they're hoping that they unlock some new creative format or a headline or whatever.

This is where I would just encourage people to spend go spend some time in this mental space, whether you get anything out of it or not, and ask this question, how could I make this way more interesting on its own? What would need to be true? Um, so the Omega thing, so. What's cool about this? So I got this straight from bg.

I steal a lot of my cool things from him, but, um, the Omega Speedmaster was the watch that the astronauts wore on the moon, right? And like you said, it's a very expensive watch, but that right there is as cool of a story as you could ever imagine, right? And, but it's very expensive. I'm not gonna spend 5,000 bucks on a watch.

But when they collab with Swatch, they came up with a version that was. Way more accessible as a price point. The story remained, they created different versions for every planet. They were limited edition, they were kind of scarce. They only had them in certain places. I think they only sold them in their physical stores.

I don't even, at first or something. And then they got on eBay and everywhere else. But it became a little bit of a thing and, and it just, I swatch was not on my radar. I was not in the customer pool. For Swatch before that, like I just, I just wasn't, I never not, 'cause I didn't thought anything negative necessarily, but it just wasn't on my radar at all.

But that accessed and broadened the approachable market for them and for Omega too. Like I, like I similarly wasn't buying an Omega because it was the opposite problem. It was too expensive. But it, all of a sudden now both brands have me and that. I think that's a really cool illustration.

[00:32:02] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: One. 100%. So here, here's one thing I want to add to that is, oftentimes in this case people are gonna think like they do with Bose and our product. What does Omega get outta that watch? there are a ton of consumers that are gonna be a little bit younger and a little more fashion conscious that are purchasing Swatch, and they don't know who Omega is. And Omega may be a little bit of you know, a brand for an older consumer that's having trouble winning new consumers. And now the younger consumer, you know, one out of a hundred of them is going, you know, data tells us they are going to become a millionaire and they're gonna want a really nice watch.

And by the time they get into that you know, that consumer set, do they want a Rolex? Well, maybe they want an Omega now.

[00:32:53] Taylor Holiday: That's a yeah.

[00:32:54] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: a certain way when they were 25.

[00:32:56] Taylor Holiday: That's right. You met me before. Right? Like in a way that made me feel a connection and be a part of it before. Absolutely. Um, yeah, there, there's something and that kind of horizon thinking too, it, there's something about the brands that have been around for a long period of time that affords them the kind of thought process that would be about that kinds of effects that is just really hard to get to mentally when you're so worried about.

Next month's revenue. You know, like and, and there's something about finding that mental space to get to thinking about broader impact. That actually does also tend to elevate present perception amongst your existing customer base too. Like in a way that will have the immediacy effect as well.

[00:33:34] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Yeah, I, I have to share this 'cause this is something that it, it's a quote that I heard in the last five years and it's totally stuck with me. But even if you are a $20 million brand manager and you're thinking about immediacy and sales tomorrow, and, you know, customer acquisition, on and on and on, brand marketing. Is putting you in the head space of I am here to plant the seed that will turn into the tree, that will provide shade that I will never get to enjoy, but somebody else will. And if I want my brand to be that tree, I've gotta work on that now or 20, 30, 50 years from now.

[00:34:16] Taylor Holiday: Yep, there you go. Do things that take root, get stories that spread. You could, you could stick with the seed metaphor, whether it's the, the sneezer metaphor. You gotta give people a thing to spread and tell. And Jordan, who's a mutual friend of our, my co-founder, used to talk to, to, used to say that when we do advertise, when we think about kalo, we want to, we wanna make it so when they take it off their finger, they just.

They can't, they have so much to say they that they can't even hold. They, they, we've given them so many phrases that they just can't help but talk about it. Right. And so I think that's the, that's what you're looking to give people is just so much material that the story's so deep. It's not, oh, here's a cool headphone.

It's like, oh, lemme talk about this collaboration between Bose and they've got Tony Hawk and then. There's all, look at this price point and the battery life is 40 hours. That's better than everything else. And like, and it's just, you've given them so much material to spread the story and someone might grab onto one of those and someone else might grab onto the other.

But there's so much source material for it to go and spread out into the world. So, um, really cool stuff. Hopefully with this podcast we conti continue to highlight that the growth that's gonna come from the dotcom channel from Skullcandy isn't gonna be a function of Taylor driving NCTC, doing all this cool paid media.

It's a partnership where we get to distribute a story that really matters in a way that's disciplined and effective, but the source material comes out of brands doing awesome, incredible stuff. So always an inspiration. Sir, thank you again for, for killing it and appreciate it.

[00:35:36] Brian Garofalow, Skullcandy: Hey, you're the fertilizer for our tree.

[00:35:40] Taylor Holiday: There you go. I'll take that one. Corey snippet. We're out.