Hi Olivier, welcome along to the podcast. It's great to have you here. Before we get started, do you want to introduce your brand to the audience and tell us a little bit about your story and your product? Definitely. Yeah. So Exter was founded six years ago. We we asked ourselves the question why people were still using fat bifold wallets, even though the phone had evolved so much.

I was living in Hong Kong at the time, and I remember that people were already paying with QR codes, but Apple pay wasn't even a thing yet. So, you. We thought, you know, why don't we modernize the wallet and change the way that people carry their everyday items. And with that, we went on to create the next generation wallet in our eyes.

And ask ourselves a question. What, what are the biggest issues with wallets these days? Well, number one issue with a wallet data shows is that people lose them. So we invented the first trackable wallet and this we launched on Kickstarter. And that completely broke through it was a viral launch on Kickstarter.

And our first year was a big success. We were just 22 years old with no business experience. And we started building the business. So from there on, we did adjust our mission to create better gear for life on the go. Yeah. And we're currently expanding our portfolio to more travel goods. And we're a team of about 50 people at the moment.

That's amazing. And so the Kickstarter, like, did you kind of make that up as you got, went along, or did you get some outside help on how to make the Kickstarter a big success? So we were fans of Kickstarter at the time we were already buying stuff on Kickstarter. So we knew what it was like to be a customer.

But we also lived by benchmarking. So what we did is we looked at the top 10 best performing Kickstarter campaigns and just. Pretty much analyzed every little bit of their campaign and realized that there was a pattern between these campaigns of what they were all doing the same. So we just started noting down those trends and pretty much benchmarking our whole campaign based on the best performers.

Amazing. And what were, what would be like, without us going too deeply into a, like a tangent about Kickstarter, what would be the top two or three things that you noticed in that pattern analysis that you then tried to emulate for your launch? The first thing is definitely that your first 24 hours of your campaign are most important.

Which means that you need to have a large pre campaign where you do lead generation and you make sure that you have a big group of people that are waiting for the launch and are going to buy on the first day because this propels you onto the popular page and helps the Kickstarter algorithm push you to the top which is where the real revenue is at.

Secondly, I would say having very clear, simple and concise rewards. Rewards are the products that the customers buy. Those need to be as simple as possible so that people don't get lost and you know, end up ditching their purchase. And then lastly, I would say performance marketing with a good.

Agency that's specialized in Kickstarter ads. That's what gave us our exponential growth halfway through the campaign. But there's a lot more tips there. Yeah. That's awesome. So how much did you raise with that Kickstarter? The first Kickstarter was I believe 350 K in 40 days. Amazing. And so what has been your biggest achievement as a brand today in the six years?

I would say that looking back, we, we've revolutionized the way people are carrying their everyday items, especially their cards. If you look outside now, you know, five in 10 people are carrying a modern wallet while back when we started, everyone was carrying a leather fat bifold wallet. We are currently the biggest smart wallet brand in the world and we're just getting started.

So I think that is definitely our biggest achievement. That's awesome. So what sort of, if you don't mind sharing, what sort of numbers are you doing now compared to how you were when you first launched? So we, we are looking to do 15 million in revenue US this year. And our first year we did 1 million in revenue.

So we pretty much doubled each year until the recent years, the bigger you get, the harder it is to double, but yeah, we've definitely come a long way. That's amazing. That is really incredible. So you're, you're a mid eight figure brand already in the space of six years. And maybe you'll break through the break through the nine figure marks.

soon. When, when do you want to hit that? We have forecasted to hit that within the next two years. So amazing. We're, we're definitely growing fast. So, so what have been the secrets of your success then? What have you done? Do you think to make your business more successful than others that might've tried to plan the space, you know, and you guys started out so young, what do you think have been kind of the secrets of that success?

I would say the, the biggest thing that we always. Kind of come back to is that the people make the business. So we only realized much later that it's so like, it's, it's probably the most crucial thing for your business to hire a players. And in most cases it's worth it to pay more for a players.

Rather than get beat players and have to, you know get new people in the team later or have them leave. We also noticed that creating a nurturing environment where those people can personally grow and develop. Professionally has helped so much in, you know, the the culture of the company, but also the, the loyalty of these people to the brand.

So I think people's is number one. After that, for us, the biggest spike in growth came when we took our performance marketing in house. So we used to work in C's, but those agencies don't really have the time to manage your brand full time. And as soon as we took it in house, we were able to start testing hundreds of pieces of content per week.

Which really took it to the next level for us. Amazing. And then maybe lastly for e commerce brands mostly is that we started tracking third party data through Northbeam about three years ago, right before the iOS update. Yeah. And if we wouldn't have done that, we would have lost a lot of ground.

I would say we, we were definitely like two steps ahead by, by stepping into Northbeam right on time. Because that allowed us to stay close to our data and keep scaling. Awesome. Interesting plug there for Northbeam and we can maybe dig into that in a little bit. So I'm fascinated about the taking your media buying in house because as an agency owner, I have opinions on this and I definitely, I've also, before I was an agency owner, I worked brand side, right?

And so. I've had the experience of working with agencies of running it in house myself. And I have thoughts on this. So when you first launched, did you use an agency first of all, or was there a period where you were kind of testing yourself in house and then you went to an agency? If you can talk me through the progression, I'm really interested.

So we have always worked with agencies from day one because. Back when we started, we were two students. We had no business experience. We didn't know anything about performance marketing. We were even debating whether we should do ads for the campaign or not. We didn't know the impact that it would bring.

Yeah. And once we started working with our first Kickstarter marketing agency, we realized, okay, these ads. These are the big thing. Like this is where the money's at. Yeah. Then we became a web shop on Shopify and started looking for performance marketing agencies. And we worked with many that did not perform right to the point where we thought, you know, maybe it's just our product or maybe we can't scale this product at this price point.

And then we found one agency in LA structured social Nick Shackleford founded it. Yeah. And they showed us how to scale performance marketing and. The interesting part about their mentality, I find is that they know that they scale brands and that the brand is going to leave at some point, but they're, they're at peace with that.

So that's what they say at the beginning, like there's going to be a day when you guys are going to learn how to do this yourself and take it in house. And we're cool with that. They even helped us learn how to do it. So I would say agencies are amazing for maybe like the one to 10 million range, but once you go 15 plus, I think taking it in house just has a lot of value, a hundred percent for what it's worth for our listeners.

I will echo that and say, I tend to agree. I think the zero to 1 million, maybe you guys could have done that stage in house because I think it sounds like you maybe waste quite a bit of money. Going through these agencies that didn't understand your brand, that didn't care as much. And if you guys had maybe done a course or got a mentor to help you, you cared so much, you probably would have.

It's 5, 000. It's to get quicker success for that first million. Then once you're scaling and you're focusing on scaling the supply side and getting everything else working in your business and agency as an expert, they can come in. Then you get to a point when you're spending so much that it's going to be cheaper to have someone in house and you're going to have a subject matter expert, right?

So yeah, I totally think. Apart from maybe having given it a go yourself in house first, you've definitely done the right thing. So you have, what's the structure now with the in house media buying? Do you have one, like one Facebook media buyer, one Google media buyer? Is someone working across multi channel?

How does it work? So we have three media buyers for Facebook and we have one on Google. Yeah. And then we have six people in the content team that are just constantly bumping out new content for ads. Amazing. And when you were working with McShackleford's agency, were they doing the creative for you?

They did some creatives. Like we did a few runs with their agency, but it wasn't like a constant flow of content. We were doing most of the content ourselves. And then sometimes we would do like a package with them to get some raw footage and then we would edit it up pretty much. Yeah. Amazing. Usually we've kept the content in house throughout the years though.

So I would love to dig into talking about your, your ad creative process. Like how do you, so there's six people. I imagine there's a mixture of creative strategists, kind of graphic designers and producers. Is that about right? How, how's it structured and how are you constantly coming up with new ad creative?

Yeah. So we have one head of content. She leads a team of three graphic designers and three video editors, and we 30 freelance content creators that are constantly filming new angles completely new styles of content, just to see if we can find a new way to find a winning creative and that brings us a steady flow of raw footage that our team can edit.

We do in house high quality, like studio photography. So we do photo shoots, lifestyle content. If you look at our Instagram, that's a style that we shoot with our in house photographer. And then we also have one hire that's just making TikTok videos 24 seven. So he's literally just. Shooting viral videos every single day.

And those can be used for organic as well as paid. Wow. That's so impressive. So how's tech talk organic been for you guys? Are you by doing it every day? Or like, is he putting out like what, like five videos a day? Yeah, so that's what we did last year. We did about three to four posts a day. Then tick tock did get saturated.

The algorithm is kind of crashed for organic content, especially for brands. So I would say December last year is when most brands stopped growing on tick tock tick tock from what I've seen. So all the brands that we've been looking at have just been plateauing since then. I would say the year before that.

We would get a viral video every week with over a million views, which was great and our following is growing with quite a lot of traffic there as well. But that has completely plateaued in the past six months, which we're trying to crack it. But it's definitely tough. That's really interesting. Wow. A million views a week and a viral video a week.

That's pretty awesome. So what, I mean, I'm going to go look at your tech talk. Everyone should go and look at your tech talk to see how, how you guys did it. But like, is there anything in particular that you guys learned from that tech talk organic journey that you you'd want to share with the listeners?

The funny part is that the learnings are so extremely random that it's almost impossible to create. A guidebook for it because the videos that we least expected to go viral went viral, obviously using trending sounds and joining those trends on TikTok will help a little bit, but our most viral videos, the ones that got over 8 million views.

We're ones with just concepts that we made up in our backyard and super UGC style content that you'd never really expect to go viral. So I would say the sounds are a must always stick to the trending sounds, but when it comes to concepts, like just go super, super crazy. Yeah. Go raw, just be wild, be creative.

I guess it's about. Just investing, you're kind of investing in data really, aren't you? Like with any social platform, it's about test loads of things and see what things work and, and ultimately you'll have some either random success or you'll start to see a pattern. So, so interesting. I love that. It sounds like you guys just have really leaned into the content side of things.

Would you say that's that's been like an overarching theme throughout the six years, or is that something quite recent? So content has always been my thing. And we used to. Focus on studio quality content. So we would shoot like a Kickstarter video every year with a whole story behind it. But then everything became short form, everything became vertical.

And we just started pumping out a ton of, of UGC style quality content. And that's when we just started hiring big on content. So I would say definitely from the beginning, content has been our thing. Yeah, that's awesome. Love to hear that. Cool. So yeah, tell me about, you mentioned off air that you have recently become a B Corp. 

So off air, we were chatting about becoming a B Corp. It's something me and my agency are aiming to do soon as well. So I'd love to hear for our audiences you know, a little bit about that journey and how, how, how you found becoming a B Corp and whether it was difficult.

Yeah. So I would say this, this started at the very beginning when we founded the company, I remember we were picking out factories in China and in India. And we pretty much, we just looked for the best of the best from the very beginning. So it starts with the materials and it starts with the certificates.

This was six years ago. And back then we really thought, okay. We could either go for the cheap option, but that may bring us problems in the long, long term, or we can go for the more expensive option, but they're also working with Apple and with all the other big brands. So we know that they're, they've got their things in line.

And so we did go for the more expensive option, which in the long run was, you know, one of the best moves we've ever made. Ever since then we've prioritized sustainability throughout our operations. So we always employ. Low impact materials, sustainable manufacturing practices, and we've been working exclusively with the top quality manufacturers since then.

And we see this not only as something that's important for the environment, but it also makes sure that you prolong the lifetime of your product and you reduce the amount of replacements. So it's, it's a long term vision that we've had from the beginning. On top of that over the years. In the process of becoming a B Corp, which is an extremely, yeah, it's an extremely tough process to go through.

Like there's so many, there's a social, there's the environmental impact. There's so many different factors that are just ingrained in your company that you need to work on and improve. But we've been offsetting our CO2 emissions. We've been working with a hundred percent recycled packaging. We've significantly reduced our air freight.

And doing more sheet C shipments, which definitely affects the operations of your company. And also trying to innovate when it comes to sustainability. So we were the first solar powered tracker still are the only solar powered tracker out there. Which means that people don't need to replace batteries.

They don't need to buy a new tracker every year, which is great for, for battery waste. And we released products that were made with vegan leather, for example, recycling cars in China and using those windshields to create vegan leather. And there's, there's a big waste problem in China. There's a bunch of.

Wasted cars that are just in big piles. And we use that to create leather for new wallets. So yeah, there's many facets to it, but it's, it's ingrained in the, in the business. I love to hear that. That's so, so, so impressive. And by the time you actually got to the stage of becoming a B Corp, did it? Did it force you to do some more things that you hadn't expected beyond what you'd already been doing?

Or like, was that process something that made you more sustainable? Do you think, or were you already kind of heading in the right direction? We definitely improved our processes because of B Corp 100%. It forces you to, and we're super happy we did so. I think the social side of things was probably more.

Unexpected, like all the things that we were, all the processes that we had to put in place, even just like policies within the company, like adding a breastfeeding policy to your company, like stuff like that, you won't think of that all comes because of B Corp. And those are just details that really help.

Take your company to a more professional level. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. And, and the whole idea is to have a happier team, happier customers and a, and a better community. Right. And that's only going to build a good company. So that's, that's cool. I yeah, I'm really excited about. About heading down this path as well for our agency.

We're lucky. I think agencies were a fully remote agency. Like I think it's a little easier for us than product brands to actually get there. But yeah, super excited. 

 What surprised you in the early days most about about running a product band brand and running an e comm store. I would say just in general running a business, because like I said, we were completely inexperienced there. We thought that hiring more people would offload us. And save us time and help grow the business.

But I think hiring was one of the biggest issues we've seen over the years. We started out by hiring a bunch of interns, which made our life a living hell. And then after that, we started hiring more experienced people, but people that were more experienced than us in business, which also made it difficult.

Cause we weren't really on the same level and there was irritations there. And more people, it's just more issues and more hectic. That's what I've learned over the years. So that, that was surprising. Yeah. So you've got 50 people now, like, and I guess to keep growing, you will have to keep growing your team.

Is that something? You're looking to, you know, continue to keep hiring and growing, or will you try to get more lean in different ways by using, you know, systems, tools, AI. We have had this discussion this year and we're actually looking to stay lean or at least. So we're definitely looking at maybe switching from in house customer service to having a few agents that are part of an agency or hiring more VAs and people that are not on the workfloor because every extra person in the office just.

You know, adds a little bit of headache unless, I mean, it's, it's a lot of fun, but the more you grow the more issues you have with the people. So, yeah, I don't know if I asked, but are you guys fully remote business or are you hybrid or are you in person office? We are a hybrid. So we have an headquarters in Amsterdam.

We have about 20 people working here and then we have people working from five other countries too. So, and those people are fully remote. Interesting. Yeah. It's an interesting mix you've got there. So talking about marketing again, we've talked a little bit about your kind of the structure of your media buying team.

What's your, what's your biggest challenge in the marketing department or in, in sort of marketing to grow your business at the moment and take it to that next level up and how are you tackling it? Yeah. So I would say more recently, we've seen that it's harder and harder to trust your data, especially since the iOS update, we're moving to a cookie list world.

Even though we have that third party tracking set up and we see ourselves as quite advanced when it comes to data we did just come off the back of a huge e commerce boom with COVID and there is an economic downturn happening. So it's just tough to not be able to trust your data. 100%. Especially when you need to adjust your targets to less ambitious numbers.

But it's the reality that we're in right now and e commerce businesses just had such a great run over the past two years. And it's, it's the natural way the economy works. So I would say the toughest part is that data. Yeah, it's, it's definitely a challenging thing. And I don't think, you know, you gave a plug to North beam recently.

There's a lot of people using triple whale, even those really advanced platforms don't necessarily still tell you the answer. Do they have like. Exactly which channel is really driving the sales of which ad and which, which action, you know, which lever should I pull? Yeah. Sometimes it works super accurately and then sometimes you realize, okay, the MER is completely off based on what Nord Stream is telling us.

So.

Have you, in the six years of, of your growth, have you had any kind of interesting kind of marketing hacks or growth hacks that have been successful for you that might be interesting for the audience to hear about? Yeah, I definitely have a recent one that I would advise everyone to try out. When someone comes to your website Especially through ads.

In most cases, they're not fully nurtured yet or informed about what your brand does. They may have seen a cool video that caused them to click through, but they don't really know what they're coming for, especially when they see a collection page with hundreds of products and they don't know which one's perfect for them.

We recently installed a quiz, which is on a ribbon on the side of the website throughout the entire site, and it's also on the hero. And this quiz. takes people through an immersive experience of about seven questions, but it's not just like a type form, but it's super nice with photos and with interactive features, which really gives people the feeling that they're getting a custom experience of finding the perfect product for them.

This quiz has a conversion rate that's twice as high than the rest of the website. And. It's quite simple to set up, but we're sending a ton of traffic there now. So I would say that's, that's one of the more recent findings that I would recommend. That's awesome. Yeah. And that's on that theme of like data deprecation and like depreciation, sorry, and you know, like losing, not having as much data about customers where, where a quiz can step in and actually actively collect it from them.

What tool are you guys using for your quiz? It's called Crowbox. It's based in Amsterdam, actually. You met them at an event here. Cool. So crow like as in CRO. Yeah. And inbox. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I interviewed another quiz platform. Yeah. Quiz platform founder on the podcast a few months back. So I'll link that in the show notes as well.

If people want to like go back and have a think about quizzes. Yeah, I love that. , it's really interesting and I think as well, like you're probably getting some people who might have needed more nurturing to convert now, whereas they might have just gone and left and not come back to you if you hadn't kind of tried that tactic.

So one more final question for you. What has been the most precarious? We kind of almost died moment in your business and how did you get through it? Yeah, this one's a, we will never forget this one and we call it button gate.

So we had a batch of products, a huge batch of products from our factory. And for the years before that are the button of our wallet that ejects the button, the cards was just, you know, designed to be unbreakable. And in this batch specifically, the factory messed up something with the mold. So we started getting some complaints about buttons breaking off.

And then these complaints just shot through the roof. And we're like, okay, what is going on? Like, this is no longer. And then we realized that this entire batch was screwed. Like we had to literally recall everything. That was probably the biggest headache we've ever had because not only were we out of stock because of that, we had angry customers we had a huge delay in getting that production back.

You know,  in stock on time and. On top of that, we had Q4 coming up, so we needed to be ready to do the biggest season of the year. And we did find a proactive way to fix it. So we proactively reached out to our customers and just kind of told ourselves, you know, we're going to take this loss, but we want to stay.

We want to keep these customers loyal. So we're going to proactively reach out to everyone and offer them a replacement, take this loss in our margins and quickly produce the same products, but without this button issue but that definitely. And, and we definitely took a few steps back because of that issue.

Yeah, but it sounds like by taking the kind of, I guess, like ethical high road and making good on your promise to them as a customer, you, you saved your reputation and your brand. So it sounds like you did the right thing there. Yeah. So just a question kind of tangentially to that, then like there's, it's inevitable that there's tough times in business, you know, I've.

Been on, on a zoom with other entrepreneurs crying before many a time. And I'm, I'm so glad that I can offer that vulnerable space for people to like share with me. But what is, how do, how do you as an entrepreneur deal with those inevitable challenges that come along? And do you have any other advice, any advice for entrepreneurs who might be struggling or facing challenges at the moment?

So for us, we we've created this super transparent. Culture, especially you know, with the three founders and. We're four partners. So there's one, one guy that joined later but he's part of the management. And we've been leading this company with four, you know, four people for, for six years now, and we've always been super close and very open to each other about it, about our feelings and at least telling each other if, you know, if, if we're having a tough time and I would recommend.

First of all, anyone who starts a business to always do it with a business partner, because by yourself, you're going to have tough times. There's going to be rough patches that are super tough to, to, to manage by yourself, but I think keeping an open, transparent culture within leadership has helped me through a lot of these times.

And has helped me support my co founders as well. Yeah, that's really impressive. I mean, six years with that many business partners, you know, and the age you guys are like still kind of in a way, discovering yourselves and who you are in the world. It's really impressive that you've managed to keep it, you know, really tight like that.

So that's awesome. Hopefully there's many more years to come. We're all good friends as well. So we're lucky that.

That's awesome. Well, is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners before we sign off and how can we follow you and your brand? Yeah, I think you the best way to find us is either at our website. Ekster. com E K S T E R. com. And on Instagram, which is Ekster Wallets follow us and follow our journey.

Check it out. Awesome. Go take the quiz, find out which products for you. That's what I'm going to do after this call. I am, I think it's a, it's a product that I. Probably needed my life. Do you ship to New Zealand? Yes, we do. It does take a while though. It comes from the U S so. That's right. I'm, I'm, I'm used to waiting.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming along and and yeah, let's keep in touch. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.