Happy Sunday boys & girls!

I just got home from a 3 hour yoga class that I didn’t sign up for and that my wife paid $55 for so….I hope your evening is going much better than mine and that you enjoy this week’s version of CROSSED Commerce.

In all honesty, I love yoga, but three hours is kinda excessive.

Before we get into this week’s send, I wanted to give a massive shout out to my boy Jon Elder who has been crushing it with his newsletter. If you’re like me, you have your DTC presence down to a "T" but you've been neglecting Amazon. If that's you, stop what you're doing and subscribe to Jon's free newsletter, Amazon Insiders, and start receiving a weekly hack to help you dominate on Amazon and crush your competition. After signing up, you'll immediately receive his Top 5 Amazon Growth Hacks and join thousands of brand owners who are improving daily.

So let’s get into it!

I just back to Miami from Chicago after an exhausting three day tradeshow. We just started working with a new distributor called True Value which is a hardware chain across America that sells to thousands of buyers. This is new ground for us as we previously have specialized in conquering the specialty retailers like Dicks, Academy, and Scheels that prioritize backyard & pool games. Over the past two years, we’ve seen the narrative change at these stores and now they are looking for ways to entertain their customers & expand their cart size.

Close your eyes and take a second to think about where you are selling.

Are there other places outside of Shopify & Amazon where you could sell your product?

For us, we have so much undiscovered potential with hotel chains, camps, churches, vacation destinations, corporate gifting, and co-branded opportunities. In theory, we could bring on a full-time B2B rep whose entire job is to create these sales opportunities. Pay him $75,000 a year and bonus him/her on all the upside. I think we’d see really quickly in 6 months if he was able to bring in roughly $100k in sales to cover his $37,500 half-year salary.

Before we dive deeper into this newsletter I want to just take a second to thank the good homies at Minisocial for sponsoring the newsletter this week. They have been amazing to work with and are now responsible for helping us generate the #1 & #3 piece of top-performing ad creative that we have had in our library over the last 60 days. The process is super easy and has led to some amazing 20-30 second videos that our media buying team has been able to use in a handful of ways.

The nice thing about the content we’ve been getting is its users playing our games the right way and not some cringey 18 year old Tik Tok girl doing her best to create UGC content down at her vegan coffee shop. The content looks real, looks like it was shot by a parent watching their kids and feels authentic. The actors/influencers read the briefs, actually take instructions, and return photo & video assets quickly. If you’re needing some fresh, affordable content for the upcoming spring & summer I give Minisocial a big vouch as we’ve used them a handful of times over the past few years. It’s especially great when you’re dropping a new product and need to seed some out to get as much content as possible to throw into the Facebook grinder to see what sticks.

Doing the Math on Tradeshows

So this year we plan on attending 5 or so shows. This one’s target return is $20,000 in revenue. Not a massive ask from a three day show with thousands of attendees, but a realistic one. The show itself was $4000, mix in our flights, some Ubers and some food and we’ll call it $5000 all in. Anytime we spend company money we’re expecting at least a 4x ROI, knowing our all in product & shipping costs. However, unlike our Facebook customers, these individual stores have an LTV as they will need to replenish their stores and stock up for the spring & summer.

It’s still the craziest feeling to have random people come up to us and say that they are a CROSSNET fan. It makes this whole entire building in public, the long nights, and grind all worth it. This guy said he spent last summer in Lake Tahoe playing all night long with his family and friends. The adults went in at like 5PM and the kids played in the pitch-dark with a flashlight til midnight. Stories like that remind me of when I was a kid doing the same thing playing laser frisbee down at the football field or hiding in tree playing manhunt in the pitch dark. To make things even sweeter he manages 34 stores :)

First time order is roughly $1000… multiply that by 34 stores we’ll see our ROI back in just one conversation. Fingers crossed he comes through and orders after the show but I got a good feeling about it.

Have a question about elevating or starting your tradeshow experience? Send me an email back [email protected] and I’d love to help you out and answer your questions. They’ve become a huge part of our business.

Q&A

A few of my favorite questions from last week’s send:

How do you manage your work balance with all of the traveling?

As I’ve eluded to in my previous emails it’s very important to make your calendar as free as possible so you can focus on deep work when you do have time to actually sit down. If you’re stuck in relentless meetings all day, you’ll never actually have the time to do work that moves the needle. Slack chat or quick huddles for 5 minutes are way better than spending 4 hours a day talking about work that we all want to get done.

Finding a local coffee shop (I’m not a SoHo House or WeWork guy) is vital for any travel and I’m usually asking the Twitter community for the best recommendations so I can get an overpriced matcha and some good vibes for 2-3 hours at a time.

Creating a priority list of the 3-4 things I NEED to get done every day has also been great so I don’t burn myself out and feel like I’m actually making progress with my goals.

I’m thinking about working with family. How is working with your brother?

It’s great. There’s nothing better than grinding and building with your best friend. You have somebody to go through the ups & downs with and somebody that you can be unapologetically honest with, without having to sugarcoat things or hurt somebodys feelings. The nice thing about working with family is that you can just scream and shout and work things out really quickly, rather than trying to figure out what’s the best way to deliver a message to this person that you may or may not be that close with and how will it impact them long term. We can get down to the issues quick which is important for us.

The most difficult thing is being able to shut the work off and just be brothers. When it’s 5PM on a Friday sometimes you just want your brother and not want to talk about business or the acquisition costs on a Facebook ad. But I’d take that downside all day long, compared to the alternative of not building a brand new sport and a once in a lifetime business with my best friend.

If you could go back and tell your younger self something what would it be?

Pay yourself when you can. There was one time during COVID that CROSSNET was killing it. We went from 20-30 sales a day to 300+ for several, several months. Rather than reinvesting it all back into the business (which we thought was the right move at the time), all of us as founders should have slowed down paid ourselves out for our hard work, and enjoyed in the reward after grinding for the past three years. Instead we put the money into inventory, which forced us to get a bigger warehouse & more employees, and increase our overhead.

The morale of the story: When things are good, pay yourselves. You never know when it will be that good again.

Vendor of the Week:

minisocial - the greatest content creation sourcing platform for DTC brands

Need some fresh creative for the spring and summer without breaking the bank? Don’t we all.

At CROSSNET & Good Sport, we use minisocial whenever we drop a new product or need to refresh our digital ad library. They will match you with a handful of creatives who match your ideal creator (we’re looking for fit, athletic families…sorry the 55 year old overweight dad from Kansas doesn’t cut it) and then send them out a brief & project assessment. From there we pick our perfect people, send out product, and wait patiently for a few weeks for them to get filming.

Onboarding is super quick and its an easy to use tool thats perfect for small teams that just don’t have hours to DM creators, negotiate rates, and hope that they will actually send back footage after you just shipped them a care package.

Need some content? Click here to get 15% off your first minisocial order by simply mentioning CROSSED Commerce.

Pro Tips for Getting the Best Content:

1) Make an extremely detailed brief (how do you want the product used, what type of angle do you want them to use, what topics do you want them to cover and avoid)

2) Start slow. Need just 2-3 good pieces of content? Put your hopes into 5-10 creators to get you to your goal. There will always be more UGC creators out there and you always go back to minisocial for more

3) Make a content budget each month and stick with it. We allocate 1% of top line revenue to content creation (this includes influencers, product seeding, shipping, etc.)

Well that’s all she wrote! Back to another week of grinding and getting all of our big box retail customers their Spring orders in time. I’m in need of a good new movie or tv series, so if you have any recommendations please send them over!

I’m also heading up to New York on Thursday for a last miniute trip. If you’re in town and want to grab a matcha and catchup, shoot me a message back here or on Instagram at @chrismeade

Have a great week,

Chris