Michael Bowen is co-founder and COO of Speakeasy, the platform that's revolutionizing the world of online alcohol and e-commerce. He shares his journey, from working with digital first companies to e-commerce startups, and how his passion birthed Speakeasy. Learn about how his move to Shopify entirely transformed their business, allowing them to manage a staggering 300+ brands more effectively and enable these brands to tell their own story.
We unravel how challenging the 'old guard' can create opportunities in the digital world. Michael unpacks the power of Shopify's network effect and how it aids alcohol merchants in customer acquisition.
Michael shares insights on the power of collaboration, the importance of execution, and the benefits of sharing your playbook. He also gives us a glimpse into his experience of working with large agencies and the impact it had on customer experience as he scaled his business.
So, pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and prepare for the blueprint on disrupting business of online alcohol.
Michael Bowen is co-founder and COO of Speakeasy, the platform that's revolutionizing the world of online alcohol and e-commerce. He shares his journey, from working with digital first companies to e-commerce startups, and how his passion birthed Speakeasy. Learn about how his move to Shopify entirely transformed their business, allowing them to manage a staggering 300+ brands more effectively and enable these brands to tell their own story.
We unravel how challenging the 'old guard' can create opportunities in the digital world. Michael unpacks the power of Shopify's network effect and how it aids alcohol merchants in customer acquisition.
Michael shares insights on the power of collaboration, the importance of execution, and the benefits of sharing your playbook. He also gives us a glimpse into his experience of working with large agencies and the impact it had on customer experience as he scaled his business.
So, pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and prepare for the blueprint on disrupting business of online alcohol.
Hey everyone, thank you for listening to the drinkscom podcast, the business of online alcohol. I'm your host, brandon Amoroso, and today I'm talking with Michael Bowen, the co-founder and CEO of Speak Easy actually a very close partner of Drinks. Thank you for coming on the show, michael, really excited to have you here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, likewise, brandon. Thanks for having me. I know it's been a work in progress, but we finally made it work, huh.
Speaker 1:You know, scheduling is always the biggest issue with these things and I've got the whole like podcast and studio set up back in Miami. But when you're only there 40% of the time because you're traveling for work and not what not, it makes things difficult. But I appreciate your flexibility.
Speaker 2:So at some point we're going to have to get you down to San Diego. It's part of some of that percentage.
Speaker 1:I need to come back. I definitely miss it, and I miss some of my favorite restaurants too. So we jump into things, though. Can you give everybody just background on yourself and Speak Easy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. So you know Michael Bowen, col co-founder, and my background has really been digital first, everything from car parts in the automobile days of the first fast and the furious I'm sure that probably predates some of the people watching this podcast right now and listening to it to the digital ad space and ad age through San Diego. From there I committed to a few e-commerce startups and a lot of people said that alcohol was tough to ship and I didn't believe them because one of my e-commerce startups was actually in flooring. So that was a wake up call in the LTL and FTL world. But yeah, I've been working with Speak Easy now with my business partner, for close to seven years.
Speaker 2:And that quick elevator pitch on who and what Speak Easy is. We're really a technology and logistics platform and we help work with all three tiers at the end of the day and our goal is to really help be a differentiator in the space to offer centralized fulfillment. So every brand that we work with, we help them go beyond the bottle, whether it be limited releases, open box pieces, things that are unique to an experience of telling their own story At the end of the day, anything we can do to help empower brands and get them to take back the storytelling. That's kind of been our focus, so very excited about it. We're over 300 brands now and looking to bring on more.
Speaker 1:And I know you made a decision I can't remember the timing on that, but you've got all of these brands platformed on Shopify. Now, what made you? What did it look like to start? And then how did you sort of end up here where you're like, yeah, we're going to go all in on Shopify as the platform to manage for our brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, this could be a bad word these days, but we started off with Magento as a massive storefront and it's interesting. We felt that we needed the flexibility to just build everything for ourselves on the ground up, and we had our own Magento developers and we got probably a good 160, 170 stores and it just got to the point where it was very difficult to manage. You're doing a multi-store implementation and you have eight different servers running Magento instances and it just didn't become scalable. And then, all of a sudden, server maintenance is on who it's on us, right. And so there came an opportunity to really leverage Shopify, which a lot of people would consider best in class, and being able to take things like server redundancy and support it, take that off of our plate and really focus on design, conversion, marketing and getting our brands off the ground really became key to that decision. So at the end of the day, it was a no-brainer, but on a different podcast we can talk about some of the battle wounds from the Magento piece.
Speaker 1:Yes, I can imagine that your day-to-day is probably significantly more streamlined now that you're on Shopify 100%.
Speaker 2:I will say the biggest thing that's helped my day-to-day has been us growing and being able to hire people. I was originally helping design, build out QA, get test orders in. Now I get to work with a great team internally and externally to get all that stuff off the ground.
Speaker 1:Yeah, have you seen, and remind me, when did Speakeasy get founded or was founded?
Speaker 2:Do I have a second for a quick story on that, because I think people will be blown away.
Speaker 2:So we've been around for a while now I want to say eight or nine years. My business partner, josh, hates the fact that I don't remember dates. Say with my girlfriend. I can't remember dates to save my life. So that is a check on the not-good side of Michael.
Speaker 2:Speakeasy started as a craft cocktail box. Think of a blue apron back in the day. I'm not sure how many people still use blue apron, but the idea was to send cocktail boxes. You had ingredients. You had everything you need to make drinks, something to share with your friends. Create like a community. Right, I'd order it and you'd come over, brandon, and we'd hang out and we'd make these awesome craft cocktails.
Speaker 2:Well, I had interviewed with Josh and his previous business partner to be a CMO of that company and went through the whole process. I got ghosted for three months before I got a call back say hey, all right, we decided to keep going forward, but shipping fruit sucks. I don't know how anybody deals with produce. That was one of the worst experiences ever, but our brands at the time loved it because it was a great marketing vehicle for them. Right, they were able to know who was getting the boxes. They could put cool little cards and inserts and could really speak to these customers moving forward. We said, okay, great, let's help them build another vehicle.
Speaker 2:We started off with a very small marketplace. Then they said your marketplace is the same as everybody else's. This isn't what we want. We're not getting. I'm paying to send people to your site where they can go buy other products. We're working very closely with one of our early partners. And then in a moment hit where they said why don't you just build us a website? You own it, you manage it. And then that's where the light bulb turned on. At that point we quickly pivoted my e-commerce background previously from building things from the ground up, including the technology and fulfillment, for flooring really helped us triple charge all of that. And so going through that that's how we kind of got to where we are today was we started one place, somebody had a need, they came up with an idea and we were just quick enough to work through it.
Speaker 1:I feel like that is a I mean it's not just for this industry, but I think in this industry, more so than most a lot of the companies I talked to, they started off doing one thing and then they ended up down another path, and it might have been they tried two or three different paths before they finally got to their current iteration because of, I think, all the nuances and complexities that come with Beverdahlgall.
Speaker 2:So when I started this company, or when I was eventually made founder with Josh, I didn't have gray hair to give you the idea of the complexities and how difficult it's been, and so it's been a learning experience, and I would say this for anybody that's in digital or an entrepreneur, and I'm sure you could speak to this as well don't get so hung up on making something perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. It's always gonna grow, it's gonna build and it's gonna mold itself, and I think a lot of people try and get the perfect product out there as opposed to saying, okay, here's where we're at right now, let's get feedback, let's create iterations right For those that went to college your MVP, your minimally viable product, getting that out there and running and moving to get feedback. I think a lot of people are like, no, it needs to be perfect, and that was something we actually argued about initially early on, and then finally, we put it out there and got feedback and really helped us get to where we are today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that helps a lot with product market fit. And if you're just building in a vacuum and then you bring something to market, you have no idea whether or not people are actually not like it. You know, would they have done this or that? And that's why I think you have so much access to data now in today's age with all the technology Even for us, as an example from more of a B2B standpoint, with the drinks app, you can install in optimizely or something onto your app so that you can see. You know, it's one thing to hear from the merchants, it's another thing to actually watch recorded sessions or heat maps of how they're actually leveraging and using the solution. And you're like even little things. Oh my God, they've clicked this area like I don't know 50% of the time, but it's not actually hyperlinked to something Like let's fix that.
Speaker 1:It's not even a button. Yeah, like the little minutia of that is all the way to. You know more broader, general things that can be implemented and updated, but you can't get any of that no one can by just creating something in a vacuum.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know you, bringing up data is a very interesting piece because even today, I think so many brands within alcohol and things of that nature they're behind on data. What to do with data, how to aggregate it. Once I have it, what am I supposed to do with it? It's like great, I have this Facebook pixel. How does this help me? And that's been a really interesting side to see how far behind alcohol really is on leveraging that right. Coming from the digital ad space, everything that a lot of brands are executing now had been key to business strategy plans 10 years ago. If you were to look at the automotive space or lead generation and some of the more out there, digital executions that existed.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, coming into the alcohol industry as an outsider, as am I, what would have been your biggest gotchas or things that?
Speaker 2:Everything.
Speaker 2:Everything has been a gotcha because both my business partner and I we have no alcohol experience, right, we jumped into this thinking, oh, this is easy, let's just build it and just go, and we always joke.
Speaker 2:If we were to know all the hoops that we had to jump to just get to this point today, would we have done this back in the day or would it have been ingenious enough? But I think that's what made us unique, and you've probably dealt with this, brandon, where you have the old guard out there, you have a lot of the old people not old people, but people that have been in the industry long enough, the seasoned professionals and they just say no, you can't do it this way, you can't do it this way. And our job is to say we're gonna try this. Okay, we can't do it this way, let's think about it this way. How about this way or this way? And we constantly challenge it because I don't think we have the hard-coded roadmaps that some of these grizzled veterans have out there, right, and I think that makes us unique. It makes everything you guys are doing and drinks unique as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we can ask questions and I think it holds true in any industry even not alcohol like an outsider's coming in testing assumptions, and alcohol is unique in that there's quite literally like rules and regulations, whereas in a lot of other industries it's more such assumptions that you're testing. But I think that's what makes it fun. But what are you most excited about within the alcohol industry this year, going into next year? It feels like there's a lot of movements and acceleration around what you're trying to do with helping brands generate more of a direct relationship with the customer, especially spirit brands that historically have been boxed out of doing so, unlike wineries. And what are some of the things that you're seeing in the market and what are you most excited for?
Speaker 2:I would say this I think the market is interesting.
Speaker 2:I think right now you could see a lot of collaboration with people that are doing this.
Speaker 2:A lot of our brands are now starting to open up their roll of decks in their book to say, hey, for example, we worked on a collaboration with Whistlepick and Pit Viper, right, and they did a really awesome box, a cool story behind the product.
Speaker 2:You got a bottle and you got the sunglasses. And I think seeing more of that out there and that opportunity for people to say, okay, now we can cross-pollinate our brands, we can integrate each other's product and really push something out there that's unique from the consumer standpoint. Our they're used to the liquor store experience right, I go into Bob's liquor, I go buy something and I take it home, as opposed to, oh, I can go find this limited release, I can actually get access to it now, and there's a cool poker chip or a scratch off or some other type of experience that allows these brands to communicate and tell their story better. I can see more and more brands getting comfortable with doing that. I think initially, when brands kind of got into e-commerce, everything was just like, okay, our site's up, people can buy product and that's it. What do you mean? We can advertise.
Speaker 1:We don't wanna do that.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're too young for this. You ever watched that movie Field of Dreams.
Speaker 1:I mean I've heard of it. I don't think I've watched it. I'm gonna look it up right now though that's fair.
Speaker 2:there's a famous line.
Speaker 1:Oh, 89. Yeah, that was a little bit.
Speaker 2:What year were you born? Do I even wanna know?
Speaker 1:It depends on what year you were born, but I was born in 97.
Speaker 2:Shit. I don't know if I'm allowed to say bad words, but I'm an 81 baby and so I remember seeing this movie and their famous line is if you build it, they will come. It's talking about building this baseball stadium. A lot of people in the alcohol space had that perception. Hey, if we build it, our brand by itself is gonna be strong enough and people are gonna come. They forget there's other people that are saying the same exact thing. And when you have that e-commerce, e-co-spirit, like you're not differentiating yourself, you're not giving yourself a reason to stand out from the crowd or just stand out with the consumer, with your regular product. And that's something I think it's gonna be a big change this coming year is I think brands are really gonna start differentiating their offerings and what they're putting out in the digital world to drive customers to their sites and to purchase their product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not enough to just throw up a website. I mean, that's what most have done up until this point. If you look at most winery websites as an example, they're just there for the sake of being there. It's not a concentrated effort around. How are we pushing visitors to the website? How are we converting customers? How are we nurturing relationships? But I think that's part of the thing that I'm most excited about with Shopify is how much they're investing into helping their brands with customer acquisition and the shop sort of ecosystem and the network effects that you get, whether it's the shop app, the shop cash offers, like the ability for brands to say you know what, I'm willing to pay $10 for a new customer and then Shopify goes out and figures out how to acquire customers within that Shopify audiences. Pushing the audiences back to Facebook for them. I mean the whole thing is. It's important to them because of the fact that more GMV means more you know process.
Speaker 2:They can take their cut Exactly exactly.
Speaker 1:It's in their best interest to help their brands acquire customers. And that's, like my biggest thing when talking to these alcohol merchants, like which platforms out there right now, aside from Shopify, are gonna help you do that? It's not Magento, it's not Salesforce, it's not big commerce, it's definitely not the point solutions that are currently servicing the alcohol industry. It is Shopify.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, agree to 100%, and that was in full transparency. I don't think we understood how big of a partner Shopify was gonna become for us. You know, when you come on board. For us it was originally just all right, we get the tech stack, that's all we really need, that's all we really care about. But they've actually been extremely encouraging with regards to app recommendations, us helping figure out how to do certain implementations and solves and things of that nature, and I will say they probably turned out to be a bigger partner than we anticipated and we're super stoked about that. And you don't get that from anyone, I mean, unless like Magento, and you're gonna spend a shitload all the time all over the place and hire your own developers, maybe, but then it's on you and again the gray hairs started somewhere and I think it goes back to that. But I would agree that Shopify is definitely the platform everybody looks up to and it's easy. And I'm not gonna say it's perfect Nothing's ever perfect out there but it's got the biggest upside for a lot of our partners.
Speaker 1:Even just the other day we had a winery that's my reading over to the drinks app and they had a question that they needed to update on their product page and two years ago that would have taken a couple of hours of development time Right.
Speaker 1:But with Metafields that they just recently released, I was able to help them and do it for them in like in five minutes and I have no development skills whatsoever and I thought that was just pretty cool to see like that quick of an evolution. Like this product continues to get better and better and more user friendly and I think it's significantly easier to build products for SMBs and work your way upmarket than to go the other way. Like I don't think I've seen at least not in commerce. Like you don't see Magento going downmarket, you don't see Salesforce going downmarket, but you have companies like Shopify who built very user friendly solutions and now they're adding on the extra bells and whistles and the extra flexibility and like checkout, composability and things like that that services the enterprise merchants. But then the enterprise merchants are like wow, this is so much easier than you know the solutions that I'm used to having to deal with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I agree, and I think that's probably something that surprised us this year, because we've been able to take advantage of a lot of those additional upgrades. Right, it's all, right, we're gonna make it. Here's the everyday Joe like cup of coffee, and then here's your espresso, and then here's your cappuccino. I'm sure there's some coffee people that are like dude, you got it wrong. It's the other way around. It's always cappuccino then espresso, but you can get what I'm saying, and I'm looking forward to that, also for this coming year, as it relates to Shopify and some of the cool stuff we're gonna be able to do.
Speaker 1:So let's say, I'm a naysayer, like I'm a brand who's like. No, I just sell through, you know, my standard retail channel, and I don't want an online presence. What's your rebuttal? What's your, what's your, what's your-.
Speaker 2:Oh see, that's this is when you wanna interview Josh. So really quick, between my business partner and I, we always call you. Know, josh, I always refer to as the shiny dress shoes. You know he's a salesman. He understands everything that we're doing. He's the front end. He handles outside communication on purpose. You know I'm the dirty work boots, I'm typically behind the scenes and I don't normally get to talk to a ton of people, brandon, so I'm very excited just that I get let out today.
Speaker 2:But what I would say is this you know, as we've worked with brands, it's we're not for everybody. Digital isn't for everybody. You know already. By that response I would say that you're not necessarily ready to take the jump right, because ultimately, we wanna work with brands that say look, we wanna differentiate ourselves, we wanna be the premier insert alcohol brand in the space. We know that digital can be a strategy for telling our story, getting content out there and helping us grow Boots on the ground, in store and online right. I think a lot of people forget that you can leverage digital to drive in store sales 100% right from the neck tags that are used to drive a show proof of purchase and get a sticker pack or something of that nature to drive, leverage, digital advertising to put people on the ground for special events that you're doing on top of getting people in those events and then use QR codes and ultimately, hopefully, buy online at some point. And so for me, somebody, that's a naysayer and they're like, oh, I'm just stuck in my ways, I'm like cool.
Speaker 2:Well, when you're no longer stuck in your ways, you know, feel free to get the call, because that's you're gonna get passed up at that stage and we deal with that on a regular basis You'd be surprised, yeah, that's always, it's always refreshing to see you know somebody who you spoke with.
Speaker 1:They sort of have to come back around and they learned it the hard way. And yeah, and you know it's not ideal, but the it's Not in the it's not a perfect example, but I mean there's. There's companies I've reached, I reached out to back in like 2018. Well, still in school, I was like you know, put them in and put them in, putting them into my cold outreach email sequences. You know, not a, not a single, not a single response from them and then, three or four years later, like there they are in the inbox.
Speaker 1:You know we want to work with electric and you know it's not like a I told you so type of thing. It's it's more so, just never gratifying to see that. You know, over the course of that time, now it's all come full circle and you know they they sort of led themselves to that decision. So I think is that's the best place to be, like not having to do like a hard sell. Like you know, yeah, like we'll talk to you like a year or two. We're gonna go focus on everybody else who understands that this is an opportunity and and you know, maybe we're wrong? I don't think we are, but you know, you can never, you never, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's. There's a terrible Well, it's not a terrible sentence. I guess a lot of people use this sentence right, and I guess you could use this in that sales pitch for anybody that comes back right. It's like the best time to plan a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is to do it now. It's like cool. We talked about it a while ago. Now you're ready to do it, let's go, let's hit the ground running. And you know good news for you we're even better at what we're doing now than we were back then, so we can help supercharge what you're trying to activate. But yeah, it's. It's always gratifying when they come back.
Speaker 1:Speaking of that, I know you, you raised your your seed around earlier this year. How has that helped you Accelerate all the work that you're you're currently doing, and what was that decision process like? Because you obviously are a bootstrap for For many years and you know raising money comes with its own host of you know fun things to deal with so I have the beard here.
Speaker 2:The reason I'm balled up the raise no, I have to give my best partner a ton of credit on that. Josh really led a lot of the the raise with the seed round and Getting those funds in and what I? What I would say is, especially earlier on the, the money that you bring on, you want to make sure it's coming from people that you trust and that are strategic to help you grow. One of our earliest investors goat rodeo they're still involved now have been a fantastic resource for us as we've worked through everything you know from there. You bring in trog holly, you know rise of the rest and best bev and what you find early on. If you bring in the right resources and the right investor, they all jump to help you.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, they have money involved and they want to see their their money work out, but they've genuinely been awesome to work with because they're we say, hey, we're struggling with this or we have these ideas. You know Josh and I like we're not getting along, we can't solve this thing, and then you know they're very good at saying, hey, have you thought about this? If you thought about this, here's an external resource we can recommend that can help you work through that, and I think that's kind of been the the biggest win through all of this Is that they've helped us identify where and how to scale and the proper priorities where again, josh and I come not from the industry and there's a lot of things we don't know. We'll be the first to tell you that, and that's kind of been the big learning through all of that as well. Now how have we used those funds?
Speaker 1:teams scaling technology, working through building out warehouses and then getting things off the ground to help support our brands and partners as best as we can the thing that I enjoy the most from you know, the companies that I've invested in is the, you know, either monthly or quarterly sort of investor updates. And I think, like, if you have a solid group of strategic advisors, investors or whatever, and they see that and you just know you're open, they're all there to jump in and help you out. But then there's like the flip side of the coin where you have some companies who don't do that at all and then maybe they're having a Big issue and then they come at like the absolute last possible second to get that support and it's like, well, this is too late, like this should have been. There's been three months before that there's. There's nothing wrong with being transparent and, you know, leveraging the resources that you have and Never surprise your investors with anything good news or bad news.
Speaker 2:Keep them in the loop and keep them stoked about stuff, because Typically if it's a surprise, it's a bad thing and it's not gonna go over well. So for anybody that's building something right now, better to over communicate than to under communicate.
Speaker 1:Well, can I think that would apply to relationships, everything outside, as well? Well, in terms of one thing that I wanted to Know, really dig in on, is actually how, if somebody listening is a, an alcohol brand, like, how do they actually, you know, start working with speak easy, what does it actually look like for them Outside of you know? Now they get the Shopify storefront, what is, what do they actually have to do to be enabled?
Speaker 2:They need to be all in man. Like the one thing Brandon, I'm sure you've worked with these brands. You know winery spirits, you know wherever it may be, you you can't Play with the system like this. Like you have to be ready for a roadmap, you need to put the time in, you know it's gonna be, it's gonna cost. Like you have to invest in your business it doesn't just grow and you have to be ready to create the content that's needed.
Speaker 2:You know, and I think a lot of brands that come on board with speak easy. We're very upfront. It's like look, we're cool to get our fees, but if you're not willing to invest a minimum of thirty, five hundred dollars a month in advertising, you're not gonna win. You're not gonna gain the traction or the sales that validate working with us in the first place. And those are kind of the big I Don't call them slaps in the face with the, the big wake-up moments for a lot of brands. And we've actually gone as far as to now really implement that very early on in our sales process to say, hey, but this is what you need to expect. Your costs are not just speak easy in the platform and having our account management team. It's you need to invest in advertising or you're not gonna go far. If you don't invest in telling your story, your mezcal brand is gonna be the same as their mezcal brand and You're gonna lose because no one no one has a story to follow and then they'll end up just churning anyways.
Speaker 1:So I think you know, yep, it's fascinating digging into that and really knowing your, your like ideal client profile, because you could get carried away with just trying to onboard as many merchants as possible to like show that growth. But then you got a leaky bucket because none of them were the right ones to come on board to begin with, and and the most and the Worst is you're servicing the wrong brands, right?
Speaker 2:We've all done that. I'm sure you guys have done that through Everything you've done to learn and get where you are, where you realize, well shit, I've been working on Johnny whiskey over here. We've been investing tons of hours, yet they don't sell more than 10 bottles a month. It's not worth our effort to do that. And that's where the importance and the value of that proper partner coming on board. And that's why I mentioned earlier when you talk to a brand, if they don't say that digital is part of their bigger strategy, they're probably not going to be the right partner or succeed with us, because it's key to success with speaking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. One thing I want to cover as well is this upcoming opportunity, as we talked about customer acquisition with Shopify a little bit, and then we have the merging of two things here. You have what Drinks has done historically, which has turned any merchant into an alcohol merchant, and then you have Speakeasy, who's able to enable all these brands, especially on distilled side, with their own direct-to-consumer presence. I'm looking forward to the day where let's say what's one of your top whiskey brands?
Speaker 2:Oh, we can put Whistle Pig out there.
Speaker 1:Great. So Whistle Pig, when Whistle Pig can be like and you, as well as the other, actually hold on, let me take a quick step backwards.
Speaker 2:I'm going to love Whistle Pig. They're great. I'm actually drinking uh product promo for a ranch, one of our partners. So I would love to switch to ProRange because they're up and coming and they're kicking a lot of ass and so I want to give them some screen trade right now.
Speaker 1:I see you have your dog in the background there as well. I have mine currently. They're cruising around somewhere.
Speaker 2:If they weren't so big, I'd pick both of them up to give them some screen time, but they're too heavy for this old man. They're 65 pounds each. I'm like, yeah, I can do it the.
Speaker 1:uh, what kind of dogs do you have?
Speaker 2:Australian shepherds.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome. Well, you're in Cinebio, which is the best place ever, I feel like for a dog.
Speaker 2:They're a little furry, uh, but quick little story. Uh, my oldest pup is named Mia. My youngest pup is named Wallace. I'm a big Pulp Fiction fan, so Mia Wallace is Uma Thurman's character. Took me a while to put it together, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, well, back to your product placement. I mean it'll be really interesting to see when those stores are able to start selling their products on other Shopify stores, which isn't a novel concept. The ability to, you know, do like cross-store selling or whatever, but there's a lot of complications when you try to do it with alcohol for all the aforementioned reasons around. You know rules and regulations and whatnot, but I see that as being an absolutely ginormous driver of growth and also a huge selling point for brands who are looking, you know, or actually it's almost an entirely new channel for them to sell their as opposed to direct to consumer, as opposed to going through retail, you can now go through, you know, other online storefronts and give visibility for, for your company.
Speaker 2:So really quick. I think you jinxed me, because now that you mentioned the pups, now Wallace is over here. He's like, okay, I need some attention. But to get back to that, to that point, I think this is where a partnership and continued growth between Drinks and Speakeasy and other partners out there is key, because what happens is when you get, when you get people playing nice together, all of a sudden we can say, hey, Drinks, you have a lot of implementations, we have a significant amount of inventory and we have the connections of product to say, great, somebody plugs in, they install this app, they can build their own online marketplace and maybe they're great at digital marketing and they can create an online retailer and we're able to do the fulfillment, provide the product and do some of those instant things that a lot of I mean, let's be honest, go back years.
Speaker 2:Affiliate marketers that's what they did. Right, they created their arbitrage sites, they did everything they could to duplicate and replicate and if you could make that easier, I think a lot of these craft brands Frey Ranch, for example could take advantage of. Okay, great, there's a ton of people out there that think they're great at advertising. They'll sell our product and you make a commission on something based on the site, or you just price it outrageous and if you can get it to convert, you get it to convert and I think everybody wins at that stage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the playing nice is something that I benefited a lot from in building and scaling the agency, but I think it's a newer concept to the alcohol industry, playing nice Very much, so it feels like coming in and it's like we don't talk to anybody else except ourselves. We're in our own organization and I don't want to live that way. I feel like it's better, just in general, if you're collaborative and, at the end of the day, if you need to be that guarded over your company is it really that great of a company or a product offering that you have? So that's sort of my thought on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I agree, and I think that everyone thinks there's such a unique secret sauce to everything and I honestly think it comes back to execution at the end of the day. Now, I'm not going to say so. Remember the Titans? I think it was. Remember the Titans. Wait, is that movie too old for you as well?
Speaker 1:That was 2000.
Speaker 2:You're Googling it right now, aren't you? I did. You're Googling it right now.
Speaker 1:I watched it when I was three. No, I haven't seen that one. No, I haven't seen that one.
Speaker 2:Well, there's that scene. I think Denzel Washington's character says look, I'll give them our playbook. I don't care if they know what we're going to do, because we're going to execute better, and I think that's how a lot of people should build their companies. I'm not saying definitely give your playbook out there, but there's a lot of ways to get to the finish line and I think everyone thinks they do it better than everyone else, which is fair, and I guess that's kind of what I'm hitting at by saying we can execute better. But I'm not going to say that it's significantly different, and it's one of those things where the plain-nice mentality of hey, there's billions and billions of dollars out there as it relates to e-commerce, especially from the spirit side that there's a lot that we can tap into, and both my business partner I, josh, we're firm believers that all ships can rise with the tide and we don't need to worry about sinking anybody at the moment. I really think it's about bending together and creating a better experience for these consumers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's a rapidly growing category and just one that has lagged behind general e-commerce adoption. You see, it's like 10 years behind, but it's growing just as quickly as E-com was 10 years ago for other types of products. So the writing is on the wall and those that get out ahead of it are going to benefit. Last question I have for you before. I have two fun ones, like what has the? And not to make this a completely ridiculous self-promotional plug, but what has your experience been like leveraging the drinks app within Shopify? What are some of the headaches and pain points? All right, we're going to cut this in post-production.
Speaker 2:No, no, I will tell you this. Have there been a couple bumps? Sure, everybody within a new partnership. I think what a lot of people don't know is that we were exploring a new path and a new route to market with what we were offering as a combined solution, especially on the speakeasy side. But your team, the drinks team, has been amazing to work with, because any issue we've had, anything we've worked through integration, everyone's been like cool, we can solve for it. This way, we can do this, we can do this. And the collaboration bit, I think, has been extremely encouraging and positive for both of our teams and I'm looking forward to identifying those additional hidden landmines of opportunity. You step on it all of a sudden it explodes and I'm like, oh crap, it cost me a leg. But I think there's a ton of opportunity here and we can learn from a couple of things, and I think that's probably where we're going to get to here really soon and we're super stoked on the partnership overall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's invaluable as a software provider to have those partners who are willing to dig in and also have the volume where we're able to iterate across all of your storefronts, which allows us to test and learn a lot faster than if you're doing on a one-to-one basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely agreed. Question for you when are you going to grow a beard?
Speaker 1:Whenever I can transplant the hair on in my face I don't have the ability to do so, unfortunately I just look very scraggly. There's a spot right here that it just doesn't even come in.
Speaker 2:It's still hair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm only going to be able to lose the hair on the top of my head from the beverage alcohol industry, not the gray beard you got me on that one. Before I ask my two fun questions for you, do you have any questions for me? Let's turn the tables.
Speaker 2:Why alcohol? What got you here? I fell into it on accident, so that was my excuse. But what got you this deep into the bed of the Alk Space?
Speaker 1:So I started electric. It was just Shopify, whatever other matter, category, anything, and we did everything, like a website, seo, content, ads, you name it. We did everything. Over time I continued to become more and more refined and then eventually got to the point where it's just purely customer experience and retention marketing for Shopify plus brands, and we were at about 40, 45 people at the time and there's sort of like a decision to make Do I want to continue to try and grow and scale this? Do I want to look at potential mergers or roll up opportunities to become an even larger agency? But I felt like that was sort of the number where you were big enough to be dangerous but you weren't so big where your quality was just really poor.
Speaker 1:Because one of the main reasons we grew to that point outside of tech partnerships and just taking a little bit of a different approach to things is because the agencies that were the 200, the 300, the 500 person shops they were, you know, churning through clients left and right, because you know, let's use an example like maybe one of them was paying one of the big guys like 20 grand a month For them. That's probably, like you know, your C list client. For us that was the A client, so they got our A team or is there getting the C team from the large agency? And so I had to make a decision around whether we wanted to you know, turn into that or not. And we had opportunities in early 2022 to do those things do a roll up, get acquired by another agency or a couple of aggregators, but the drinks opportunity with Shopify and then also the ability to come over onto the software side, sort of take all the learnings from working as a top partner with Klaviyo and recharge and Shopify and then get to build out our own sort of go to market with a Shopify app With the past 10 years of drinks work with, I mean, like Fortune 20 businesses. I mean they have, like the stamp of approval from Walmart. I can't even imagine you know the grind that it took to get to that point.
Speaker 1:And so we're coming in. We get to do all the fun stuff, like now that you know it's in market and we've put it into the Shopify ecosystem. It's sort of the best of both worlds, because I've always been really passionate about wine and software and now I get to take all the experience from Shopify and merge those two together and that's really the point of this podcast as well, too is to, you know, bring these two divergent, you know, I'd say industries together. You have a lot of like commerce experts, you have a lot of alcohol experts, but you don't really have anybody sitting in the middle to help bridge the gap.
Speaker 1:And so that's where I saw the opportunity for Electric is to act as that conduit, that educator, that enablement arm for an entire industry and do something that's never been done before, which is no knock to you know, the agency, but there's a lot of marketing agencies. There's only one, drinkscom. And so that was really what excited me and, you know, dragged me into this, and now I'm getting to learn a lot. I mean, it's I catch myself sometimes because people ask me you know, describe the drinks app or describe this, and like I just start rambling on and on and I'm like they have no idea what you're talking about, like you need to reign yourself in. Just alcohol is complicated. There's a lot of rules, all the way down to the zip code.
Speaker 2:Like let's just end it there and we solve it. That's it and we solve it. There you go.
Speaker 1:Yep, you don't need to know anything else. Yeah, that's sort of how I fell into it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. No, appreciate that. I actually never knew any of that stuff, so that's cool to hear that background.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, fun question for you what's your favorite wine memory? Or could be alcohol memory?
Speaker 2:I'll say I don't have a wine memory. If it comes to wine I'm a big pin on the war fan, but I think that's like a default for a lot of people as well, just like dirty and earthiness. But one of my favorite alcohol memories, I wanna say it was probably 11 or 12, and it was the first time I drank with my dad and it was. I don't think I have it anymore. I'm not sure how many people remember St Pauli's girl. I think St Pauli's girl is still out there.
Speaker 2:It's the bottle and it's got a little white goat and that was the first beer I ever had with my dad and I carried that white goat with me all the way through high school and it was just on my key chains and went everywhere. And then you know, as one does too many parties and you lose it, he's gone. But that's probably my favorite story because, as much as I was a troublemaker, growing up like drinking was always with my dad because I always got to drink cool shit. I always got to hang out with him and he would tell me stories about being a kid and making me feel not as bad about my Troublemaker issues, and so that was always cool.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's been the common theme amongst you know most on this podcast is their favorite memory is around. You know the people or the person that they were with not necessarily know the actual, the actual product. Yeah, I can really if you could share a bottle of anyone, who would it be and what would you drink?
Speaker 2:It would be with my grandmother, but in her 30s, so I think this was probably before. So my grandmother's from Nicaragua, half of my family's from Nicaragua, and I think this is before she she crossed over and came over to the States and I would have loved to. Just my grandmother is just a little spitfire and I feel like the trouble that she probably got into and all the stories especially some of the stories I've heard about her sisters and what not have always been entertaining and it would have been cool to be there. Being from Nicaragua. Rum would be the drink that my grandmother and I would probably share and it more than likely would be Florida decana, which is the, the Nicaraguan rum that that comes from there.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I know that's cool. I didn't know that about you, yeah most.
Speaker 2:Most people don't, most people don't, and so that's always a fun one to share and like oh, your Nicaragua, like well, half and half the car ago, and half German, if anyone's really interested to know so.
Speaker 1:You have an interesting 23 and me.
Speaker 2:Very much to you know. It's funny. You mentioned that I've been getting yelled at by my girlfriend because I have two boxes of 23 and me sitting on the dining table and they've been there for like six months because we just haven't done the like. Spit in the thing. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like probably does it want to go after we get off here.
Speaker 2:No, I want to be a mystery, brandon I want to be the man of mystery.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining me today and Before we hop off, can you let everybody use listening know where they? Can, you know, get in contact with you or find you all online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. I mean, speak easy code calm is the easiest way to find us. We're throughout LinkedIn, instagram and whatnot. The handles change. I'm not sure which handles is which anymore, but also feel free to email me directly if anyone's got questions or wants to chat. Business Just Michael at speak easy code calm. Brandon, any spam I get I am gonna forward to you, buddy.
Speaker 1:I I've already put it out onto the I don't know the clickbait websites. You're gonna be like thousands.
Speaker 2:Fair, fair, at least I'll feel important now, exactly.
Speaker 1:We'll hear everybody listening. Thanks, as always, for listening. This is Brandon Murrow, so you can find us at drinkscom. Don't email me, I won't give you my email. I won't give you my email, but it's very easy to guess. So you know, I guess I'm probably gonna get some spam too, but we will. We will see you next time.