Latest / Field Notes: Creator-led Growth Podcast / $4.5M in 70 Days: How k2o Builds at the Speed of Culture with Jay Hunter, CEO of k2o by Sprinter

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$4.5M in 70 Days: How k2o Builds at the Speed of Culture with Jay Hunter, CEO of k2o by Sprinter · Field Notes: Creator-led Growth Podcast

• speaker-0: Welcome to Field Notes, the operator's playbook for brand, creator, and growth. This is the influencer marketing podcast for people actually doing the work. Real strategies, real examples, and the parts the other shows leave out. speaker-1: Today we're talking with Jay Hunter, CEO of K2O by Sprinter, about building brands that move as fast as consumers do. We get into creators, affiliate versus Flat Fee, how you actually measure this stuff, listening to your customers, and what smaller brands can learn from companies that have some pretty massive names behind them. But enough, enough from us. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Jay, would you like to begin? Obviously Sarah and I know why you're here. ⁓ and we've done plenty of marketing, so the people who are attending know why you're here. ⁓ but would you would you care to give give the people a bit of an introduction? I feel like you're such a fascinating guest for us, so let's have you do it in your own words. speaker-2: Yeah, sure. ⁓ you know, Jay Hunter, I I'm I'm CEO ⁓ of K two O by Kylie Jenner, ⁓ which is ⁓ hydration beauty brand. ⁓ we just launched about seventy days ago, so still very early. ⁓ crazy. It's it's going well. I think ⁓ some people were cheating a little bit because we've got Kylie Jenner and she's amazing. And yeah, you know, I I've been in the sort of e com space a long time now. It's been seven years at Mary Roosevelt's ⁓ great VMS brand. speaker-1: We'll talk about that. speaker-2: And then you know, spent some years before that just sort of in the Amazon game. So speaker-1: Yeah. Seventy days? speaker-2: Seventy days we've we've been live seventy days, yes. speaker-0: I was about to speaker-2: ⁓ a few days before. We launched April So like there's a couple days before the Coachella activation and we sort of timed those two things together. ⁓ but we're yeah, we're on day seventy, we've done about ⁓ four point five million in sales, so it's it's going pretty good so far. ⁓ so it's it's just it's moving it's moving fast, you know, it's moving fast. speaker-1: Change. speaker-0: What? speaker-1: ⁓ okay. Well that honestly is the I you could you couldn't have set me up even more perfectly for that, Jay. Because 70 days, millions of dollars, multiple, multiple, dozens of millions of dollars in revenue within 70 days, a huge Coachella activation. Obviously, you didn't just pull that out of your hat. I mean, maybe you did. You make it seem a little bit ⁓ But Mary Ruth's obviously is a huge legacy brand at this point. It's it's a household name that's I think every aspiring company wants to become a household name, and Mary Ruth's is one of them. ⁓ so from Mary Ruth to now K2O by Sprinter, what are some of those like core growth principles that you're bringing from Mary Ruth to a new brand like Sprinter? speaker-2: Sure, yeah. I mean I think, you know, for me that the Mary Roosevelt incredibly special one. Like I started there just as Amazon and like I got to learn like so many things. I think I l I said this recently somewhere else, but I think like what I learned most is like it's better to be a hundred percent like done or taking action and seventy percent perfect than it is to be a hundred percent perfect, you know. So I think at Mary Roosevelt I just learned like we were very good at just like doing things and taking action. I think yeah, same thing here is like You can think about like what the perfect marketing, you know, strategy is or campaign is. It's better just to do something today than wait for tomorrow. Yeah. ⁓ and then just try to make it one percent better every day after that. I think we're doing the same thing here. ⁓ I've got a great team, ⁓ at K two O and like you know, we're moving fast, so this is going well. speaker-1: How do you move fast while maintaining quality? Because I think a lot of brands kind of stress out. They're like they want I think there is the cultural, the culture that we live in right now puts perfectionism on a pedestal. So how can you kind of embody that 70% perfect? And you know, people don't see that on the externally people don't see that. So how can you move quickly while maintaining quality? Because 70 days to do what you've done so far, my God. speaker-2: I I think I think on the professional part, like I I think I slightly disagree. Like think most people want to see authentic, you know. So I think if you're just honest and like transparent with your customers and your partners, like I think most people will would give you some grace on like a hey guys, ⁓ you know, example might be like we launched this product and like you know, this is the packaging, just a heads up, like we're we're improving the packaging over time, or like you might give feedback on a flavor that you launch, like we launched our strawberry lychee flavor. ⁓ which people are loving, but like people had feedback on watermelon line that maybe it like a little bit like too sh, you know, line for them. And so like we can improve that over time. Like those are small changes you can make ⁓ to make the product better and like make your customers happy. I think if you're just honest about what you're doing and how you're solving some of those problems, like customers will give you a lot more grace than people give them credit for. ⁓ they just want to know what's happening and like be a part of the journey. And I think that makes them feel great. I think the main thing like you can never sacrifice on is like Safety and you know the other important aspects, especially when you're selling like a vitamin or or supplement product. And so those things like, you know, we're moving on. But I think for the other pieces where like you can't improve every day, it's like you just want to get it out there and get real time feedback, right? Like we could talk about what a great marketing campaign is like and then launch it and it you know, it might flop. You don't truly know what the customer's gonna think until you show it to ⁓ right? So I think for us we'd like to get it out there, get like real true feedback from customers and then improve stuff from there. speaker-1: I love that. I think that's so important and I think it's something that brands really underutilize. Sarah, go ahead. speaker-0: No, I was gonna say too, I mean, I feel like we talk about this all the time with listening to your influencers. Your influencers are usually your best customers. And I feel like to hear a CEO say they're listening to their customers and creators is huge, especially at the beginning. speaker-1: What about the Coachella? ⁓ like in hindsight. how did that come together? Obviously, you launched like day the the brand itself, K2O, launched days before Coach before Coachella. So this kind of my mindset or this mentality behind just getting it out there, getting it done, kind of how did that manifest with with the Coachella activation? Because that was a lot of people, whether you were at Coachella or just watching it from afar, like Sarah and I, that was our first experience with K two O by Sprinter. So speaker-0: Yeah, I thought it was just vodka. I was like speaker-1: Whoa, what's happening? We thought Sprint we thought Sprint it was just bugger. speaker-2: ⁓ I mean look, I think ⁓ you know sort of a blessing of being part of like the you know Kardashian Jenner Network is like all the brands ⁓ you know sort of act as family as well, right? So like that outpost event at Coachella was hosted by 818, which is Kendall Jenner's ⁓ tequila brand. And so, you know, they sort of let us tag along, right? They were like, Hey, we have an open booth, love to have you there, we know you have the new product and like you know, they've been great. So have a lot of the other sister brands have been really amazing in in showing us support. And so that's sort of how we got a slot. So we sort of got to sneak in where it might otherwise be hard to do. Right. ⁓ and that was a huge help for us to like get a a like a good splashy early moment. ⁓ so you know, we're very we're very grateful for them for for letting us tag along. So speaker-1: And also just like so well done too. So well done. speaker-2: Yeah, I mean like even there, like they had great like booth partners that we got to work with or like merch partners. Like you know, like we did, we had the product sort of like on tap there so like people could try the product pretty easily and like they helped us with the vendor for that and like how to get the mixing right and like they had some like really great additional partners that they let us tap into that helped a lot. So speaker-1: Totally. ⁓ we have some questions about you mentioned obviously the sisters being the Kardashian Denner squad. the sisters being like, let's not name them, but it's it's literally the original influencers. ⁓ we have some questions about Kylie. ⁓ but because this is a podcast about influencer marketing and I know that like ⁓ my gosh, I think you got with your s experience with super fill like you had creators as one of your core growth principles from day one, it seemed like so Kind of what have you learned from the influencer marketing channel that you're applying now to your growth strategy at at K2O by Sprinter? speaker-2: ⁓ yeah, I mean it was always a big part of our strategy at Mary Roos. I think like the best performing content is still, you know, creator or influencer content for sure. and look I think like right now if you were gonna go pull like every person who's graduating high school, like what's their number one dream profession, I think it's be a creator, you know. And so like I just think like you want to convert a lot of your regular customers into creators and I just think there's like a there's more creators now than there ever has been and there's still like the main marketing lever to Even if you're gonna run paid ads, you would probably run it on creator content, right? So for me, I knew early it was gonna be big. And I do think like Kylie sort of helped us unlock like the excitement for creators very early. It was like sort of the special effect there. like we had a huge wait list. They were up and running with Superaffiliate in like the first two weeks of launch, and we had a list of like a thousand people that wanted to be an ambassador for the brand, like so quickly. Wow. ⁓ and so like you know, ⁓ I'm not ⁓ Unhumble that like, you we got that mainly because Kylie's involved and people very interested in that. ⁓ but I do think like after that, you know, you wanna take care of the creators, build a program that's good for them. Like I'm a firm believer in any partnership I have, whether that's like with my co manufacturer or creators, it's like what a partnership that's like win win. You wanna create a great product that customers like, you wanna give a good offer that the creators can sort of share with those that audience, and then like you wanna help the creator make money also, right? So like that they are excited about promoting your product. So speaker-0: Are you guys kind of you're hitting on all of questions that we already have written? So this is both awesome, but also I'm yeah, it's great. ⁓ I'm curious though. I'm curious though with having someone like Kylie, ⁓ the Kardashians, the Jenners in general, like to be honest, they're probably some of like the OG influencers we all think of. Are you integrating Kylie into the same kind of like influencer type campaigns or is she just kind of like out on her own doing her thing and then you guys are just like, this is totally separate. speaker-2: Yeah, I mean she's very involved, right? Like she's very big on like, is the product good? Does it taste great? Like, does it actually work? Like she's like, you know, she gives a lot of feedback around that. And then she's very in touch with the marketing, right? Especially what we're doing around Meta and IG specifically. ⁓ I think she's like very in touch there. And so she likes to weigh in. I think like her ability to understand like what creators could be famous next is like uncanny, like like nothing I've ever seen. But I do think like for most brands, and even for this brand, like the the the sales and the conversion still lies with the everyday creator. You know? And like if you wanna have scale, you really gotta tap in there. So I think we're doing a little bit of both, right? We're mixing Kylie into the marketing, but we're also just tapping into the everyday creator as well. And we're spending a lot of time there, especially on TikTok shops. ⁓ it's just a little bit of a mix, I would say, right now. speaker-1: Yeah. When you meant you mentioned TikTok shop and ⁓ like how are you thinking about creators as part of the commerce engine, specifically with TikTok shop, D to C, Amazon, retail, iHerb, you're everywhere. So how are you thinking about how are you integrating creators kind of into the broader ⁓ almost like retail strategy? speaker-2: Yeah, I mean I think r right now we haven't quite finalized it, but we we want to create like the greatest influencer program that anyone could be a part of, right? So we want you to be like, you know, if you're a creator, you probably have a TikTok account. You probably also have an Instagram account. Like we want you to be able to post on either about the product. We want it to be natural, right? Like we sort of treat creators the same way we would treat Kylie. It's like we made a product that she would love and she wants to use every day so that when she makes content, it just feels natural. Like sometimes she just posts an Instagram story that's like Hey, I'm drinking my sprinter in the morning in my hydro jug, you like that's pretty authentic and honest, which people like. Yeah. But we also want to make that like what creators make. And then we want to make a program where, like, if they're part of our TikTok shop ⁓ you know, Discord group, they can still earn commission if they post a TikTok shop video and they can make money there. But if they want to make an IG, they could be a part of our super affiliate brain ambassador program and they can make money there. We sort of want to like give them something where like they can make money everywhere, and we wanna make that as like low lift as possible. So like today. ⁓ you know, we use a new tool called Try where we can like take people's TikTok content and then easily whitelist it ⁓ on meta. ⁓ and that's been helping a lot. And that way creators can earn like sort of commission from driving sales on on our website as well, which is very similar to like the TikTok shops. Yeah, and so we're just trying to make more and more things like that. Like what's like through super affiliate, if you're an ambassador and you got three sales, like what's kind of free gift can we incentivize you at three sales or five sales or ten sales to like help you? speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-2: be excited about promoting the brand and the products more but also to like make money and like get stuff you would actually like like, you know. speaker-1: This is, I think, the true embodiment of being relationship first in your influencer program. Like truly, because you are thinking about not only the benefit of creator to K2O by Sprinter, but you're thinking about the financial benefit and the partnership that's to that's evolving and developing with these creators that are sometimes microcreators, nano creators that aren't even getting a second, second glance at some of these other brands. And this is really how you build. relationships and you build a community around a brand, which like that's ⁓ no notes. speaker-2: I do think today, like, you know, in the early days of TikTok shops, even for us Mary Roosevelt, it was very like try to work with every creator, work with as many microcreators as possible. I think that strategy is like a bit harder today. Like far more of the traditional white love creator approach, right? Like you have to meet creators where they're at. Like some creators are gonna want to text you, some creators like email, some creators will join your Discord group, some wanna communicate through IGDM. And I think like as a brand, like you have to do the extra work to like. speaker-1: More expensive than that. speaker-2: Talk to them where they want to talk to you. Yeah. And then you also have to like go out of your way to like make the relationship personal, right? Like you gotta host dinners in in cities where some of your creators are. Or like you have to know when your creators, you know, wedding you know, anniversary is and like what are the kids' names, and like can you send them stuff like you know, you gotta treat you know, I'm everyone knows I'm big on family, but you gotta treat the creators like family too, or like it's just you know, it's not authentic. Or it'll just cost you a lot of money and then it's difficult for the partnership to like make sense for both sides, you know. That's true. speaker-0: kind of come back full circle in that I feel like around the time when probably like the three of us started an influencer, it was very hands-on like this. And then it went to scale really quickly. And now it's kind of coming back full circle to that moment of like how do we connect and stand out with some of these creators because they're getting hundreds of offers a day sometimes. I guess to kind of tie in a lot of what you're saying, Jay, is answering some of the chats that like the QA that's coming up. ⁓ but one of the things you were talking about was being able to have that pipeline from affiliate partners or creators all the way through whitelisting. ⁓ and the follow-up that this person had was, are you thinking about your affiliates and your flat fee creator separately when you're doing that? Or are you just kind of like testing across the board and seeing what works? speaker-2: I think usually we're thinking about them a little bit separately, right? Like ⁓ for us, the ideal creator is is commission based, right? Like that way the partnership always makes sense, right? They post, they drive sales, ⁓ you know, and we pay X dollars, right? Like, I do think for some it's hard, right? Because they don't know if they're gonna drive sales and you might have to do some flat fees. I just like to keep it reasonable, right? Like we're pretty honest. Like a hey, we can only afford X if it's gonna be flat fee and we're not sure what your ROI is gonna be yet. Otherwise, you know, we can offer this commission rate and you you sort of sky's limited as you grow and get more sales, we can work on a a better commission rate. Like I'm very big on the partnership making sense for both sides and making money. I think for us, like we just explained that to the creators. Like, hey, we can't afford, you know, let's just say it's five hundred dollars videos, like a little outside our price range. And if it flops, that would be tough. It would be hard for us to, you know, do another partnership with you. Like we're just pretty honest about that, which I think some brands are like very scared to say. But it's just it's better to not work with the creator if you can't afford their rate and they're not willing to budge if you don't think it's gonna be successful. Because the like one and done partnerships are not beneficial to either party. One, the brand will have wasted some money. And then for the creator, like they're also trying to build an audience that like follows them around. And if they're just doing all these one and done deals, like this actually won't be great for them long term. It's like you just wanna be like sometimes we just tell partnerships like, hey, we don't think it's gonna work. It's amazing. We still wanna send you some product. We'd love for you to just have the product if you like it. Totally. Don't have to post and like Keep your relationship open later in case you're like, ⁓ I love this. I would love to promote it. You know, it works out. But I think you just have to be honest about it. speaker-0: For sure. Go ahead. I was gonna go into a new question, so go ahead. speaker-1: I was just gonna I was yeah, you hold that question. ⁓ I was just gonna say it's it's this mindset that you know the field notes is all about kind of getting rid of the gatekeeping that is happening within our industry. And I think brands are also withholding a lot of information from creators. And so this idea that it's like we're gonna we're gonna tell you what engagement what what engagement rate we're seeing on your profile, we're gonna predict or predict or forecast the type of revenue you're gonna drive, and this is how we're able to anchor your rate. Like those types of communications a lot of brands are not having with creators, but it is so mutually beneficial. And so I've always admired that about that was this a very much a strategy that you had at Mary Roots. And it's refreshing that you're also bringing it to K2O. You're kind of like maintaining that level of integrity within your program, which I think so many brands forget about. So I love it. speaker-2: Sure. At Mary Roos, we like one of the strategies that really worked well for us is like we just ultimately, after we had enough data, we just figured out there was like a cap, which for us at Mary Roosevelt was like three grand to work with a creator for like you know a certain number of videos. And what we found with that strategy is like we would work with 10 creators and sometimes six of them would not do very well and ROI was not good. But if you kept the rates low under three grand, it's possible that four that did well could make enough money to pay for the ten, right? But if you paid all those ten creators ten grand. four could not pay for the ten, the amount of sales they needed to generate was too great, you know? And so like understanding what your version of that is as a brand is I think is very important. That way you can take some swings on creators you're not sure that are gonna be like maybe feel like a fit, but you don't know for sure. That way you can still test them without, you know, essentially, you know, running out of budget or having to shut down your program because you overspent, you know. speaker-1: Right. And the only way to know that that's your limit is to experiment and to have a culture within your influencer team where yeah, you're gonna experiment we're gonna experiment. We may fail, but we also are gonna find those diamonds in the rough and we're just gonna lean into what's working. So another really good mindset to kind of happen. Go ahead, Sarah. speaker-0: This point too, Jay, you've kind of like danced around this question like a little bit in what you just said, but ⁓ we have a question from the audience too. When working with high flat fee creators or just I would say flat fee creators in general, ⁓ are you optimizing for GMV ⁓ GMV goals or awareness to attract more commission focused creators? Like how are you thinking about reporting on those flat fee creators? Are they getting links and codes still? speaker-2: Yeah, I mean I think I almost always like to provide a code, right? 'Cause I want some semblance of attribution for most creators. But I do think you have to make a judgment call. Like I think there are some creators that build awareness and in my opinion, like they help make your brand cooler. And then there's some creators you're working with specifically to drive sales. I do think you need a appropriate mix, right? For me, that's like a little easier to distinguish, right? Like I have Kylie. And other macro creators like that. And those are the ones that are like did a partnership with Aisha P Potter recently and like she makes the product cool for sure. Did that exact post drive more sales than maybe a smaller creator that is more conversion focused? Maybe not. But it drives a lot of awareness that will tell people all the time, right? Yeah, it's like speaker-1: Like a hay. speaker-2: It's the same as like you know, running ads to the site, right? Like you, you know, let's say you run some meta ads, people visit your site, later they get an email from you, maybe they go to Amazon, see your Amazon ad, they clean the product, they buy it. You know, what part of the funnel did you need? The answer is all of those things, otherwise you wouldn't have got the sale. The same thing is true as like the influencer space, right? Like people see like a really, you know, cool or popular creator and they're like, ⁓ wow, they take this, and then later, an everyday creator tells them, like, ⁓ I bought it and I actually loved it, and then they're convinced to buy it, and you sort of need both those things for sure. I think like It's a little bit of art figuring out like how much of each. I would always lean conversion first. But I do think you gotta work in some awareness or just you won't have enough people that like know about the brand or think it's cool to like really ⁓ speaker-1: So yeah, I it's a it's such a balance of art and science. I think that's like it's left brain, right brain. That's my favorite part about influencer marketing. It's it's always a dance and an oscillation between the two. ⁓ when it comes to kind of goals, this is a big thing that I'm hyper fixated on at the moment. Goals should evolve. That's just kind of my stance. And I feel like how are your goals for creator evolving or how do you plan for them to evolve ⁓ since launch? speaker-2: Ooh, ⁓ that's a good question. I mean look for I think the the g the ultimate goal is always more sales. I do but I do think like for us, ⁓ yeah speaker-1: Failed. So Launch. Have your goal even 70 days ago, like what were your goals for creators almost at launch versus what they are now versus where you think they may be around holiday? speaker-2: Mm. Yeah, I mean they're definitely gonna evolve later this year to be a little bit more retail focused. We've got two of the largest retailers in the country launching. I can't disclose just yet, but like both those launching are those gonna be really big nationwide launches. ⁓ and so I will wanna drive like a lot of the creators to talk about retail because you know retail is just a great channel. ⁓ I think we at launch it was very TikTok focused. So it's like very cool performance drive sales on TikTok. We have a little bit of inventory challenges this month just because sales has been a bit better than I thought. But like next month is when we're gonna spin up our sort of meta or like ex outside of regular TikTok or TikTok shops strategy. And I think when we do that, it'll be a bit more awareness focused, I would say. And then some of it will be persona focused, right? So like we built some personas around like one is like ⁓ you know, the avatar that really cares about skin and like what are all the benefits of aerosol that we have in the product and help your skin. One avatar may be like ⁓ you know, electrolyte focused, like they take a different electrolyte. Can we convince them to take ours? You know, some of those things like that. And we're gonna have creators speaking about those like s sort of specific things that fit those personas that will take customers to there may be a landing page that has the same messaging. And then a CRM flow that has the same messaging, right? And so I think it's gonna evolve a little bit to be like persona focused in the middle here. And then gonna lead a bit of retail later in the year for sure. speaker-1: Are you using those personas to identify the types of creators you want to work with? Or is it the type of like brief that they're getting? Is it a mix of both? Like how are the like how are you actually act at how are you how are you actually actioning in those personas? speaker-2: Yeah, I think it's a it's a mix. ⁓ big thing is like we're trying to look for like which creators talk to that persona audience, right? So maybe that creator's not exactly that persona, but they it feels like they speak to that person, right? Ideally, so those things are aligned. ⁓ so I think like that's the that's like the most important thing for us. ⁓ speaker-1: That takes a lot of due diligence and and watching speaker-2: On the brief side, I think we're like big we want creators to always make the content they feel is authentic to them and speaks to their audience. So when we create briefs, it's always like, hey, make whatever video you want to make. We trust you. You know, we're in vitamins, so it's usually like, hey, love if you mention these things. Right. Here's a couple things our lawyers say you can't say. And then usually it's like, hey, here's a bunch of resources. So we have like these three briefs. We think these would be really great if you want to use them. Here's what we think like are some of the pain points that this persona might have, you know, that we know you speak to. Here's some other videos from other creators that have done well. You know, we never recommend like copying another creator's, you know, work word for word, but just for inspiration, here's some ideas that have done really well for us. And we just provide that as like a hey, here's some extra, but please make like what you feel is is authentic to you. I think you just all you have to do that. Like great creators will never want to follow an exact script. They're just not gonna be interested in that. And you know, it's not gonna work, honestly. So yeah. speaker-1: Clocked it. Yeah. Ben, I think I'm doing it right. Well, so Sprinter, as like we were joking about earlier, Sprinter we knew for vodka. ⁓ well it's actually funny. I didn't know Sprinter made vodka until they made K2O, and then I went into ⁓ like a liquor store and I was like, ⁓ Sprinter. Sure. But Sprinter already had kind of like a strong cultural identity. So what made Beauty led Hydration feel like the right expansion for the brand brand? Like we're not even speaking about Creator right now. It's like, why did they launch K2O with Kylie Jenner? Like how can brands learn from that? How can brands learn from this expansion? Because it's quite speaker-2: For us, yeah. I think you know the the the vodka sellers still available, right? So for us it's like that that was the party moment and we want to own in you know the moments around the party as well. So that's we also felt like the expansion was just very natural, right? Like Kylie's just like in a different era. She takes a hydration product every day. She was taking one before we launched this. ⁓ you know, but now she she has her own brand that she takes every day. Like just a little more authentic to where she's at and who she is, you know, and I think You know, beauty sort of at the core of everything she does. So that was like a a natural addition to the electrolyte product that we felt. I think just in general for product expansion and what we're thinking next, like, you know, this is ⁓ a category where you know it's not like vitamins where maybe it's like gummies or liquid where like you take it and it's pretty quick, like you know, you drink like a sixteen ounce bottle of this flavor is very important, right? It's like can we expand to some additional flavors? I think we're gonna launch a lemon lime here maybe in September. And then maybe have like a cran apple for the fall that will that will stay around as like a long term flavor. And then we're gonna launch some additional products like hydration plus, a couple other benefits that we think will come out. Maybe the first one in October, and then another in January. ⁓ I think for us we're trying to make additional products that are closely adjacent and like can build the cart, but are also like natural extensions. You know, people can take that plus this, ⁓ and both together. So I do think in this in this They like you don't want to overlaunch products, but I do think like the attention span of like the algorithms and the customers are pretty short. So like you do need some fresh and new quite frequently, I would say at least once a quarter. Especially for creators to like be excited and have something new to talk about. You know, it's sort of tough for creators to talk about the same thing month after month. So speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: For sure. I'd love, I know we're at time. I'd love to wrap things up with this last question that we came in because I think it's something that I have to address all the time. As someone that's ⁓ consulted, especially with like the Skims Good Americans of the Kardashian brands, it's always the like, well, what's Skims doing? And I'm like, Well, Skims has Kim? Like, what do you mean? What is Skims doing? ⁓ and so this last question is when you're at a smaller startup, maybe you don't have someone like Kylie or Kim behind the brand. And you have a more limited budget. Like do you have any advice for some of those programs of like a way to test creator partnerships, what maybe they should do first, all of those kind of things? speaker-2: Yeah, I mean I think you wanna lean to commission focused partnerships early on if you can, or smaller flat rate creators. And I think the thing is like if you're small, like every dollar counts, and you just you have to do a lot of work, right? Like you should do extra research on what creators are gonna be a good fit. It it's a little bit of a sales job, like you gotta hunt the creators down, you gotta try to reach out to them, and you gotta sell them a little bit of the dream. Like, why should they work with your brand? Like what what is sort of old school sales in that way, I would say now. And then as soon as you get a little bit of traction with a creator, then you have to go really deep with them, right? Like let's just say you start with a creator on TFS and they do really well. Like, you gotta hunt that creator down and find their phone number or their email and you gotta call and it's like, Hey, you did amazing. Like what we're gonna send you a bunch of products, like we'd love to take care of you. Can we send your sister some product? Like you have to like really make them feel great so that they go a little bit harder. And then as you build those initial core relationships, you can expand and explore like a little bit bigger budget. ⁓ I do think though, like Creators are core to it all. So if I was gonna spend any marketing dollars, it would be on creators first and then, you know, ads second. I think you can spend a ton of money on paid ads and get nowhere. But with creators, like you can at least generate some content. I think the biggest thing if you're an early brand is like trying to negotiate some content ownership at least for a short amount amount of time so that you can do more with it, even if the core initial post didn't generate a lot of sales. ⁓ and then, you know, again, as creators do good, you just want to go really deep. So speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah. Jay Hunter, everyone. That was speaker-1: Brand of a thought. Connie came back, said amazing work, loved this talk, so we got mom's stamp of approval. speaker-0: ⁓ CEO said spend money on creators, so that's all we heard. speaker-1: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you to everyone who joined. I know everyone's hopping to their meetings that they're now three minutes late for, so thank you for for hanging with us. But I appreciate the time, Jay. As always. Bye everyone. speaker-2: Yeah. speaker-0: Thank you.