Latest / Talk Commerce / Scooping Success: Building a Household Brand with Shane Kaszyca
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:26.485) Hey, welcome to Talk Commerce with Brent Peterson. I'm your... not your host, Scotty. but you will hear me on this episode as we interview Shane from Whiskers and Boy as a guy who's the scooper. He's the pooper scooper. He's the guy, the litter, litter guy. I'm telling you, Whiskers is something I'm in market for. Enjoy the show live from Shop... Toberfest presented by Shopware. Here's Brad. bub- Brent Peterson (01:04.141) the mess the kitty leaves behind. Whiskey's lit, a robot bottle is all mind. No more scots and no more fuss. A cleaner Brent Peterson (01:18.159) Whisk or makes it easy as can be The little robots pizza man's brainie Say goodbye to the clueless dress And hello from home that's so that it's fair Thanks for bonner Christmas Welcome to Emerged Podcasts Emerging? Emerged? Emerged. Emerged. Emerged. We are live here at Shoptoberfest. I almost in Brooklyn, New York over here, right? Get some water. We have literally we went into the hall. We're at Shoptoberfest brought to you by Shopware. We went to get pretzels. We went to get pretzels and beer and we ran into Shane. We came back with Shane. So just quickly, Scott Oshman, Brent Peterson, Talk Commerce, always off brand. This is a merged podcast here. We're come together for Shoptoberfest and we bumped into Shane and Brent usually trying to make some coy joke. said Whisker, it says on our name tag Shane Whiskers and I said is it for cats? absolutely. Shane you run Whiskers is what I'm gonna guess. I'm the VP of IT at Whiskers so everything having to do with e-commerce and our order fulfillment systems and customer service contact center rolls up through me. Fab, and tell us what is Whiskers even though you just told us five minutes ago? Yeah, absolutely. We are the makers of the Litter-Robot, which is an automated cat litter box. Been in business for over 20 years, but really in the last eight or nine years, you we hit our stride, started marketing heavily and in 2020, when a lot of companies were hurting, pretty much everyone bought a cat or adopted a Did that happen in COVID or is it mostly dogs or? Yeah, there was a huge influx of business during the COVID period because of adoption. I adopted a dog. I didn't work at Whisker yet, but had I, I probably would have adopted a cat we have since. Fantastic. So before, let's jump into the e-commerce stuff. Why? Hold on, can I test my sound effect, please? Can you hear that? Yeah. It's really Right here for me. Right here for you? What'd that sound like? Hallelujah. Yeah. OK, it's so faint in my... Brent Peterson (03:33.038) I just like that one. My other favorite one is this one. In your face, sucker! Okay, Shane. to the program. See, now you know what you're in for right now. What did you want to ask an e-commerce question? How rude. I don't want to do that. How rude, Brent. Let's talk about the need to scrape our sandboxes. Seriously? was trying to get the hallelujah because God bless you, I have... formerly, I've had cats my whole life. Usually two cats, now we're down to one blind Jack, he's the greatest cat we've ever had. I'm the scooper, I'm the scoopalicious guy. I get in there, I got all kinds of problems. We're on podcast row and he's banging the table. I feel like I'm at stomp. Yeah, anyway, we don't give a shit. Go ahead, Shane. No, the original, I mean, a lot of the original automatic cat litter boxes were a rake. sifting mechanism and Brad Baxter our founder he's an engineer and problem solver at heart yeah decided to use gravity when we have the rotational sifting system that drops the waste into the drawer the rotational sifting system I made that up did you exactly have an acronym I think rotational sifting system sounds great the RSS We had two cats and two dogs and we had a perfect sandbox cleaning system where the two dogs would eat all the crunchy, salty, not growable of the sandbox and we just have to worry about the clumpies and other stuff. I can't go there. can't do that. I'm not here for that. And I apologize to your family for having that. Anyway, Shane? So basically, you automated dog eating the cat shit. Let's just say what it was. Good lord. I've been there. I had a dog that would come lay by us at the couch and just look up and be like, yeah, pet me. And his tongue would hang out, and he'd look at his teeth and go, my god. Brent Peterson (05:41.902) No, not to get into an animal situation here. This is a dog podcast. By the way, we are on podcast row and I want to knock on the neighbor's door right now. The famous Rick Watson is doing a podcast. This gentleman who I like how he rolls. I'm not going to lie. I mean, he's passionate. He's talking, but he is banging. He is banging the table. Anywho, Shane. So this is your first podcast. How's it going so far? We're let's see. We're four minutes and 30 seconds in. You OK? Yeah, I'm doing great. I think you're fantastic. I think he's built for pods. I'm doing well. Okay, let's get into the e-commerce. Now we were at a shop where Sponsored event right but but the the head honcho Jason who's the reason we're here He's like, don't want to make this a shop where thing. This is a community community event, which is so badass I love that so why why'd you get here? Yeah Well, I was invited along with Jacob. Jacob's up, he's our CEO. where's Jacob? We got another mic. He was unable to make it. So I get to pinch hit and be a speaker. So I'm excited about that. be my first sort of Ted-style speaking. my god, you're a Ted speaker? And I should have known that. I mean, I'm probably going to bomb, but that'll be entertaining you're not, Shane. He's got a little Courage beer. We're all drinking beer doing pods. seen the movie Ted, too. So I know I've done all my research. So what do you, what Spill the beans, practice on us. Practice on you, alright. What is this about? What are we talking about? Well, for the most part, talking about household names, household brands, right? Q-tip, Ziploc, Tupperware, Roomba, Litter-Robot, right? People call their automatic cat litter box a litter robot, even if it's not a litter robot. Right. Which can be a challenge from a brand standpoint, but also good for the brand. Right. So how does Brent Peterson (07:32.624) a product become that household name brand, right? It's not just by being first. No, it's called money. It's called dollar bills, y'all. So Lycos and so you had Lycos and Alta Vista in 1994. Yeah. had Yahoo in 95 and it wasn't until 98 that Google came along. So they weren't first, but they solved the problem in a different way and they had a lot of market. behind it. it's not just being first but it's solving a problem in a new innovative way and having marketing and putting the product in front of people where they are going already. Which could be grocery store, be big box store. I'm so sorry. I'll be right back. Just when you hit the table we can hear. I love your passion though. I absolutely love your passion. I'll be the guy. I'm hoping you come over. When you hit the table, you know, we're not as fancy as Rick. We don't have the right stuff here. But anyway, I'm kidding. All right. Podcast row, this is fantastic. I'm leaving that all in by the way, Shane. If it's always on brand, we leave that in. You're more procured. My new podcast is always on brand by the way, I forgot to tell you. You little bitch. If you want to edit in some B-roll, I can be a lot angrier and you can cut that in. Okay, you were on such a good roll about brand and building a brand. feel terrible. We were at Google. Okay, but we're still rolling. We're rolling. Three, two, and go. Yeah, so Google wasn't first. Google came along in 98, but they are the household brand. They are a verb. In 2006, Google was added to the dictionary. And I will admit that I have said I need to Google the database and not query the database. % don't we all say that? And I'm a database developer. Brent Peterson (09:29.348) slash backend developers. So it's a little embarrassing that I would do that. It's okay. I get it. So yeah, mean Brad Baxter, he came along, he solved the problem in a different way. We started our marketing when Jacob joined in 2015 and really turned up the volume. We had hilarious commercial with our Don't Be a Scooper campaign, Lady in a Yellow Dress. If you haven't seen it on YouTube, just search Don't Be a Scooper. She's got chocolate cake, we'll just leave it there. Well I might cut in that drop, I might cut it in. cut in a YouTube Yeah, I can cut in YouTube video, yeah. sponsored by Whisker today's episode is brought to you by whiskers good. So we crank up the volume on marketing because really you got to expose a problem. can't just say our thing is the biggest, the best, the cheapest, the fastest. You have to show somebody that you have a problem and we have the thing that can solve that problem in a really great way. And with litter boxes we did that with Don't Be a Scooper. as funny as the commercial was, the point was you have cat poop on everything in your house because your cat has to step on poop to Yes, and then we the litter the different types of litter now, and thank God it's like buying a can of soup There's 17 different freaking litters drives me nuts. Yeah, it's a product that everybody needs. Yes You've really touched a nerve shame As the pooper scooper in my house, you've really touched the nerve. No, I think this is fabulous. I'm so interested We talk to the tooshie guy. I did that podcast for cats. We should my god a bidet for cats. Is that an R &D? Brent Peterson (11:11.984) But that is a problem too. I have had to cut that off my cat. This is natural for me because we talk about cat poop at work all bet, This just verbatim. Welcome to cat talk, ladies and gentlemen. But listen, I have lived my whole life with cats and none of these problems, these are serious problems you're solving. You know, I'm interested. I'm in the zone. I'm in market right now. Nobody wants to wash their dishes. The dishwasher, over 70 % of households have a dishwasher. It became a thing that you just expect to have when you move into a house. If it doesn't have one, you know you're going to need to buy one. Of course. You're going to get to a point where you're getting a cat, you need an automatic cat litter box because nobody wants to do that job. Especially, you know, with pregnancy, pregnant women, you're not supposed to go near it. that's right. I forgot about that. It's been a while. It's been a great ride. I've been with whisker for four years. We've been in business for over 20 and that's amazing Just really accelerating we launched in Target Costco PetSmart Chewy Best Buy it's been a busy year for IT this year. God I'll say jeez you got to put all that shit together You got to make it work, and you're doing direct Brian absolutely yeah D2C I mean we're built on magenta we're at a shop where conference No, see that's what I like about this. This is agnostic right? You're speaking which we didn't really finish. So you're speaking on how to build a brand that nobody knows? what is the... Tell us about your talk. Your tech talk. The prompt was talk about creating a new product category. Okay. Right? And that's where I got into the thinking around household brands. Yeah. Right? I have an automatic vacuum for my home. It's not a Roomba. I call it a Roomba just because that's what they all are, right? Right. It's like Coke. It's like Kleenex, right? Kleenex, it's a fun game. Q-tip, stopper wear, zip lock. can keep going. Yeah, right, exactly. Did you know Phillips? Like Phillips screwdrivers, Phillips screw heads? That is a trademark name. Is it really? I never thought of it. Phillips is a brand? Yeah. I didn't know. It's a crosshead screw. Just to age myself fully, as Johnny Carson used to say, I did not know that. I did not know that. I did not know that. Brent Peterson (13:35.446) Interesting. Okay, go ahead. We'll get into more impressions later. Well talking about how we get into a household brand name and Really the creation of a product category and how to lead and continue to lead that product category and giving away the ending is you have to keep putting yourself out of business. That's a great clip right there. I worked at a company building loyalty programs and one of the quotes on the wall was, somebody is going to come along one day and put us out of business. It might as well be us. You have to continue and innovate and put your company today out of business with the company you are going to be tomorrow. That is such an important note and a lot of the software startup techs and obviously I'm informed by living around on Amazon and that whole ecosystem, right? That's our whole schtick, day one, everything's day one, day one, and that's how they're built. Their DNA is built so that each organization, part of the team, right, has that mentality of... We're only here for five seconds. We cannot get lazy and complacent. 100%. Well, that's fantastic. So do you have more innovations coming down the pipe for not just cats, but other things? Yeah. Yeah. mean, nothing I could really get into. But I mean, we had the little robot, the little robot 2, little robot 3. We've launched a little robot 4. I wonder what's next. So how many cats are we talking about? Sorry. Can we get off of e-commerce for a second? got We have an office cat. an office cat that has lived at the office for 15 years. That's good, but so what if I have a two, three cat situation here? I mean, is this the size of, I gotta look it up, boys. But I mean, can you? Yeah, one little robot can support How much can you handle, Shane? Four cats. Four cats? Yeah. Now also, there's operators. Not at the same time. not. How do you coordinate that? Brent Peterson (15:29.122) That's a great thing actually. cats figure that out. Do they? You have three cats. I had two cats. You're right, I think they do kind of, but sometimes they get in there and then you need a bigger cat litter box. We have a whole, we built our house, like our whole laundry room is built around the goddamn cat litter. You have one of those outside little turtle shell things for No, but we have the mat thing and I'm constantly sweeping it up. That's the other problem I have. Does yours solve the litter everywhere problem? That's where an iRobot comes in. I don't have one of I got too many dogs to do have a shield that can attach to the front for kicking cats or kicking kitties. We have a shield that clips out in the front. Kicking. Interesting. It happens. Kicking. Hmm. I do feel as though there's a need for a dog cleanup system that would either go on the back of your mower or just ride around your lawn to pick up the poop. They're called teenagers. Yeah, there you go. Except when they leave. Now that is just me. You're not supposed to be speaking right. now. We kind of literally pulled you out of the room. Back to e-commerce. What's your biggest thing that like just drives you nuts? What's the, I don't care what platform you're on, whatever. I think that's the community, right? It shares the common therapy of what keeps you up at night. It doesn't drive me nuts. Well, keeps you up at night is always security, but the thing that kind of irks me I would say or is a difficult problem to solve is the balance of too many payment choices. Just having the right amount because every payment provider under the sun wants to be on your site as an option. But you also don't want it to look like a site from 1994 with 37 little tiny icons and like what do I do? know, analysis paralysis. So having a good balance to prevent the customer from going I don't know what to right now is important. Do most people use credit cards? What do they use? Is there some data on that? Like, consolidate? mean, credit cards as opposed to like Pay Later? Yeah, no. Like any of the buy now, pay But PayPal or any other Apple or whatever. Cards at the top. We did launch PayPal Fastlane this year, which speeds up checkout. This is not a sponsored thing, but we have seen faster checkout with PayPal Fastlane. Brent Peterson (17:53.792) lane okay and it integrates with the wall it's really cool I mean you get a text six digits enter your six digits and then you're on the purchase page it cuts 30 % off the checkouts Google pay the same thing where you even on my Mac I'll just push the I put my finger on the on my power button stopping in the table yeah they're gone now what are you doing my god. Hold on, I'm sorry, your mic just went dead. You said? You said you went to Magento in 2018 or 16? What were you on before Magento? Don't say OS Commerce. No, I wasn't there at that point. And the name escapes me. It wasn't that. If you said it, I would know it. Demandware? Nope. Nobody cares. And so you're on Adobe Commerce now? Yeah, Adobe Commerce now. Okay, that's great. That just killed the buzz. That did. God, I was on a roll there with Shane. Sorry, Adobe Commerce now. That changed my inflection. you go. Yeah, take two and take three. So what do you, when you look and you got everybody you were talking before when we just met you and pulled you into this thing. Everybody's coming after you, right? You're on Magento, Shopify wants you, I'm sure Shopware would love to have you. All these people are coming at you. What is interesting to you if they're not even a, just take the name out, what's interesting to you. Yeah, a headless solution that allows, number one, my marketing team to do what they want. Boom. That is one of the challenges that we have is putting forward a lot of development resources. And I'm doing my best not to hit the table. Yes! You're doing a great job. Yes! Development resources for simple landing pages, right? Once you have your brand guidelines and your style guides and your widgets, let marketing go nuts. Build whatever page you want to build. Brent Peterson (19:50.352) Yeah, right. We should be focused on bigger things, right? New checkout flows, new payment providers, whatever that might be. Not building simple landing pages. So number one is having a good content management system and promotion engine that the marketing team can use, period. Now you're also selling a lot of different channels. You have a lot of sales channels. You have high diversity, which I think is fantastic. I was going to ask a different question about what he was saying. go ahead. I was going to just ask, does it drive you absolutely that your marketing team has to get a developer to come in and help with a landing page right now? Or do you have it set up with Page Builder and things like No, we're not using Page Builder. aren't. You know, there's a balance between innovation and, you know, not doing too much. I'm putting this in a very bad way, but if you just have a set of, you know... call it 20 widgets that they can use and they can tweak, right? You're not ever putting forward anything brand new, right? Your homepage is really where we're experimenting a lot. And I would say that's probably where we spend the bulk of our time is new things on our homepage, trying out different types of promotional banners for whatever that sale might be. So yeah, it drives me a little bit nuts when it's maybe a simple lander, but not so much when it's like doing something innovative on the whole page. Right now we're testing three variations of our home page. So if you go to litrobot.com, you're going to see one of three different experiences that are all quite different. And what are you using for that? How are you doing that test? Yeah, we're using Bloomreach as our A-B testing. They also do our email marketing. Today's episode is brought to you by... Bloomreach. We don't do free ads here. just do all ads are free. Placement, product placement. Product placement. OK, that's good. You're going to ask about channels. I'm sorry I stepped all over that's Brent, this is new. You and I working together. We just met. You ask talk commerce questions. I'll ask always off-brand questions. And by the way, my new podcast is Always On Brand. That is so shitty of you to do that to me. Brent Peterson (22:11.672) But, hey now, we gotta get a new table. We're on the never ending table. Note to self next year bring padding. I don't know, should we get gymnast pads or wrestling pads to put over the tables? Those little springy microphones. You got a robot for that Shane? You got a robot to fix this? Yeah, robot pad. Side hustle. channels. love the channels because from an IT operation that's a lot of shit to deal with. mean to put it plainly. You got all kinds of different apps. You got APIs coming out. You got routing guides coming from major retailers. What does your back end look like? down. And guest looks down. Inserts, inquisitive, yeah. I want to get a beat going. I play the drums. The drums at least we can get a beat going. my good. Is Rick not hearing this? What is your, what are you using for an ERP? So ERP, we're using SAP but we we use that for finance really. where we have an in-house built water management system that does the whole in-house. That sounds expensive, Shane. It's infinitely customizable. Yes, infinite. wow. So is Magento. That's a big word. Wow. I went to Arizona State. I've only got small word back here. I'm half a I'm a beer in. Good Lord. are you regretting any of this invited to be on our podcast and this is the point has a bit more than the upper the top and i've definitely more laid back and i have to be sure it just go out there you know people remember three things that's it that's all we have grasp of his three big messages i should trip on way you should what what type of beer did you choose Brent Peterson (24:10.274) Beer Hall. The IPA that I can't pronounce. IPA? I don't think they do IPAs in Germany. Well then... They have one. It looks like a German word. There it is. Braufaktum. Braufaktum progusta. Braufaktum. Braufaktum progusta. I can't do that. Don't go into the German. that out. Do the Yiddish. I can do Yiddish. Let me tell you, I can do Yiddish. I grew up with it. Anyway... Okay Shane, so you got all these things, so the IT thing, that a challenge or is that just putting all the wires together or are running that all through Magento? What are you doing? Your inventory, sales, finance, marketing? Your PIMs, your DAMs, your this, your that? We do have a PIM. We use a Plitics for our PIM. Okay. So we have an internal system that we use for order management and fulfillment. We shipping lanes and inventory and everything. Magento obviously orders, but we're... Today's episode is brought to you by SPS commerce, which is who? They are they're up in many helpless over there you betcha sure uh-huh for sure Don't you know well, we're in Wisconsin. Do you know Wisconsin? So I do know Wisconsin I'm very familiar with the great state of Wisconsin Yeah, SPS commerce again. They're one of the actually biggest market share in EDI which nobody understands. Nobody does. It's an old, lazy, lethargic technology that should be put away, in my opinion. And keeps on living. It should be in an assisted living home. Thank you, Banks. Yeah, exactly. And big retailers still use it. And huge manufacturers still use it. All right, Shane, we have another episode here coming up. But anyway, you are such a, what a team player. Just coming in. coming out. Thank you for inviting me. appreciate it. This has been fun. I don't know when it'll be out. We'll tell you. We gotta share information. You know what? I'll connect with you on the linky. On the linky. On the linky. That's my new name for it, What do you I call it the slinky. Do you? The slinky linky. Brent Peterson (26:24.906) We need to edit that out please. many edits. Good lord. Good we have a large production staff. Yeah, we need to one final question. What is your thoughts about this final quarter? Like going into Black Friday, what's your thing? That's a relevant question. 72 days, 49 business days to T5, Thanksgiving 5. You guys heard of T5? yeah, they got all the names. Yeah, they renamed it last year and I was like, what? But really only 28 business days to our code freeze. It's a short window this year. So we, at the third week October, we code freeze. So we're doing a ton of testing. I think we're going to have a really good customer journey that's going to put through a ton of business. I think it'll be record breaking like it has been every year. knock on wood I won't because of the look of the mics. I'll do it. What's wrong with you? Just the way it is. You guys just met. Yeah. No, we've met before. God. He's annoying though, isn't he? He seems like a liar. Okay, Shane? It's been fantastic, Way to go. from Whiskers. Do you have a last name or is it Whiskers? It's Polish. Kassica. Yeah, Shane Kassica. All right. Well, hey, thanks for listening. We have more from Shoptoberfest coming up and for everybody here, including Brent Peterson. Shoptoberfest brought to you by Shopware. We'll see you later. Bye bye.