Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- How Caulen Foster got started in entrepreneurship and what he learned from working with a consultant to grow Almond Pro Foods
- How Caulen started providing Amazon to Shopify services to Amazon sellers
- The benefits of Amazon sellers selling on multiple channels
- The steps involved in moving an Amazon seller to Shopify
- Why sellers need to build the right infrastructure when moving to Shopify
- Where to learn more and get in touch with Caulen Foster
In this episode…
Selling on multiple channels can help many Amazon sellers expand their market share and drive more sales. It’s not enough anymore to sell on a single platform — because shoppers have different preferences and may choose to buy through one and not the other. For this reason, Amazon sellers should think about expanding to other e-commerce platforms like Shopify.
However, for this process to be effective and achieve its goals, it’s important to have the right commercially viable product that’s ideal for selling on Shopify. They also need to have a strong and unique selling proposition, build the right infrastructure to attract and capture new customers, and have the right strategies in place for retaining returning, long-term customers.
In this episode of the Innovations and Breakthroughs Podcast, Rich Goldstein interviews Caulen Foster, the Co-founder and President of BrainPower, about how he helps Amazon sellers expand their online market reach by moving to Shopify. He talks about the benefits of selling on multiple channels, the value of having the right infrastructure in place, and how he guides sellers through the Amazon to Shopify transition.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Goldstein Patent Law
- Rich Goldstein’s book: The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent
- Almond Pro Foods
- BrainPower
- Caulen Foster on LinkedIn
- Caulen Foster’s email: caulen@brainpower.agency
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Goldstein Patent Law, a firm that helps protect inventors’ ideas and products. They have advised and obtained patents for thousands of companies over the past 25 years. So if you’re a company that has a software, product, or design you want protected, you can go to https://goldsteinpatentlaw.com/. They have amazing free resources for learning more about the patent process.
You can email their team at welcome@goldsteinpc.com to explore if it’s a match to work together. Rich Goldstein has also written a book for the American Bar Association that explains in plain English how patents work, which is called ‘The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent.’
Show Transcript
Intro (00:09):
Welcome to innovations and breakthroughs with your host Rich Goldstein, talking about the evolutionary, the revolutionary, the inspiration and the perspiration and those aha moments that change everything. And now here’s your host Rich Goldstein
Rich (00:33):
Rich Goldstein here, host of the innovations and breakthroughs podcast, where I feature top leaders in the path they took to create change past guests include Roland Frasier, Ryan Deiss, and Joe Polish. This episode is brought to you by my company, Goldstein patent law, where we help you to protect your ideas and products we’ve advised and obtained patents for thousands of companies over the past 27 years. So if you’re a company that has software product or a designing, one protected go to Goldstein patent law.com, where there are amazing free resources for learning about the patent process. And you could email my team@welcomeatgoldsteinpc.com to explore it’s a match to work together. You could also check out the book I wrote for the American bar association that explains in plain English, how patents work it’s called the ABA consumer guide to obtaining a patent. I have with me here today, Colin foster Colin is deeply involved in the e-commerce field. He’s the founder of Alman pro foods, which essentially invented the almond protein industry in 2016. Notice that I pronounced almond in two different ways. They had one sentence. He’s also the vice president of DNV pro cleaning services that provide cleaning, exhaust, cleaning, and fire protection in seven States. He’s also president and co-founder of brainpower, which helps brand owners to expand from Amazon into Shopify. It’s my pleasure to welcome here today. Colin for us to welcome Colin.
Caulen (01:52):
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I heard your intro and I’m like, man, I got big shoes to fill here.
Rich (01:58):
Well, your own, right? Your own other big shoes
Caulen (02:02):
To fill.
Rich (02:04):
So yeah, let’s talk about how you got started. Like, what was your first experience with entrepreneurship of being in business?
Caulen (02:10):
Uh, well, it was so my, my actual, my first, ironically enough, my first venture into entrepreneurship was, uh, when I was in law school. Um, and I was, uh, about a year and a half in and, um, one, it was right before spring break of law school and I had just kind of gotten this, I don’t know where it came from. I was, I was looking for an apartment long story. I was in for an apartment, um, at the time and I couldn’t find anything. And, um, I wanted to find a move in an apartment with moving specials and I couldn’t find anything. So I said, you know what, I’m going to start a website that specializes in moving specials. And, uh, there was, there was tons of search volume for it. I did what little I knew, uh, to find, you know, where traffic was going for it.
Caulen (02:50):
And long story short, I, I did some research. I said, Hey, I’m going to start a business. I started, it was called my first month free.com. And, uh, it failed absolutely terribly. I mean, it was really, really bad. Um, but it was my first venture into understanding traffic. E-commerce how people mobilize, you know, through the internet. And it really kind of groomed me for what I would later do in the future. Um, you know, as I kind of started to get more comfortable with building sites, you know, kind of building things from the ground up digitally, you know, this is 2000 and 2010, 2011, these were a lot different back then, right. You know, there wasn’t these page builders and things you could scale up real quickly, you had to build things from scratch. So, um, I ended up starting Allmand pro. Um, there that’s a whole nother story about how it got started, but I built it from scratch sourced, everything got, everything started.
Caulen (03:40):
And then approximately two years in, you know, I I’ve gotten some really great traction when we started the site. We started the website started growing pretty quickly because we got a lot of organic traffic. We got, you know, we invented the almond protein space. It didn’t, it, it didn’t exist before us. So I got a lot of really good press from PETA and, you know, some other organic sources and it just kept feeding us. And then eventually that just kind of, you know, just like when you don’t have any way to capture and monetize your data on a consistent basis or your, your, your, um, you know, your customers on a consistent basis started to dip long story short. You know, I kinda got into this rut where we weren’t growing. We weren’t seeing a lot of growth whatsoever. And I ended up meeting one of my good friends, you know, him, Mike, um, Mike Sierra, who, uh, ended up becoming my consultant.
Caulen (04:25):
He said, Hey, listen, I’ve built a couple of seven figure businesses. I think I can help you. Um, we got connected through a mutual friend and I kid you not, it was probably maybe 15 minutes into our conversation when he started breaking things down to me and showing me what he does and how things work. I was like, I’m going to, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. Like, there’s no question that I’m going to go heavy into digital marketing for the rest of my life. And the proposition that he gave me was I have an agency and you can either pay my agency to do the work for you, or I can do consulting for you, whichever one you want. And we’ll, I’ll do the first session for I’m going to do it for free. I’m not gonna charge anything just to see which one you want to go, which direction I want you to go.
Caulen (05:01):
And 15 minutes in the ambulance, I mean, we were, we were consulting. I was doing consulting with him five days a week. I mean, we were, I was, I was spending a lot of money doing it, but the knowledge I gained has propelled me to where I’m at today. And I, you know, I’ve worked very closely with him since, and, you know, I’ve just been super involved with e-commerce, I’ve, I’ve done a lot of performance-based stuff. And then a bunch, I ended up getting into the agency space with brainpower. So that’s, that’s the, that’s the very abridged version of everything I could go on for an hour on, on all the roads that led there. But that’s, that’s the kind of the base.
Rich (05:35):
So that’s so interesting because it seems like what you did is like, you know, rather than the offer done for you, which a lot of people do, it’s like, you know, like, Hey, just get this done from a, you opted to, to do the consulting, which basically you, you were able to learn, um, you know, like you did the work, but you were able to kind of get the high level guidance and like essentially use it as a learning. Yeah,
Caulen (05:58):
Yeah. A hundred percent. That, that was, that was literally what took, cause you know, if I, it was one of those pivots in life, honestly, that I didn’t know it was going to be a life changing decision when I made it. And you know, that’s why I’m very careful with these days about like the opportunities I take, because that opportunity literally changed the course of my life. Like it really did. Like Mike is still one of my best friends. You know, I love him dearly because he, he literally changed the director. I don’t know what I would be doing if I never made that decision to learn it. As opposed to just here, here’s some money, we have some capital do it for me, you know?
Rich (06:31):
Yeah. So see, that’s why you’re, you’re careful with opportunities. Cause it’s kind of like be careful what you wish for. Like, you might just find your support.
Caulen (06:38):
It’s more, it’s more like, you never know. You never know which you never know which decision you’re going to make is going to bring you down a path that you never even imagined you would be on. I never would have known you my whole life. Everybody told me I should be an attorney. You know, from the time I was in fifth grade, everybody’s like, you should be, this color needs to be an attorney. And you know, I just, that one, that one decision, you know, just not opting into, to pay for the services, just doing it myself. I would’ve never seen what I saw in those 15 minutes. I mean, what they just clicked. I was like to make sense, this is what I wanted to do. And I know this is where the market’s going.
Rich (07:08):
That’s amazing. So what did become of that attorney career?
Caulen (07:12):
Not much, uh, a little bit of debt debt. Yeah, I left. I, like I said, I left, I left it from one week to the next man. I like, I had no intentions of quitting law school the week before I was already a year. I’m already into halfway into two L or L two, whatever it’s called. I don’t even remember anymore, but my second year, but you know, I was, I was already there. I was already doing it. I just,
Rich (07:39):
And then you decided to create a website and then that sent you down the whole path. And if you didn’t need housing, if like someone had said like, Hey dude, you can just come, stay with me. I’ve got this great place with an extra bedroom. Remember ended up.
Caulen (07:52):
I never thought of it like that. Actually I’ve, you’re the first person that’s put it in perspective. I got, but that’s true. That that’s that’s yet another pivot I got that’s so very true because I had no money. I had nothing at that time, you know, we had mostly parents house.
Rich (08:07):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s incredible. But, but yeah. So then that kind of brought you into this space of, uh, of working with clients essentially, because you were like you were working with and, um, an agency essentially. And, um, he was kind of, you were the client, but he was kind of training you how to, how to work with clients by, by consulting with you like that.
Caulen (08:28):
Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, is, you know, on top of that, once him and I, I mean, it gets, it gets really deep, you know, with how our relationship developed, but we ended up getting involved in business ventures together and stuff. We started, we got really close because, you know, I absorbed it so quick. Like, like, you know, for the amount of time that I was involved in it, I would, I don’t like to say like, I, I, I was significantly faster than the average person, but like the flow of traffic maybe, cause I had been involved in it for a couple years or something like that. I don’t know what it was, but just understanding how it mobilized, monetize, how the, how the infrastructure was built. It just made a lot of sense. So I took to it very quick and just the writing, I was always a very strong writer.
Caulen (09:08):
So, you know, the, the whole part of the digital and the e-commerce stuff works. So I would end up actually doing work for Mike for his agency. So I started doing like intern work. Like I would build out emails. I would do work for them essentially almost for free at some points because I just wanted to get involved in the space. I knew I wanted to, I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. So whatever I could do to, to nurture that craft, I would do it. And then I got involved on consulting and then like I started teaching people what I had learned and it just like kind of snowballed, you know?
Rich (09:40):
Yeah, absolutely. And, and like, how did you get involved in the whole Amazon Shopify journey? So did you have your own Amazon to Shopify journey?
Caulen (09:48):
No. So it’s kind of funny because I’ve kind of opted out of going too heavy on Amazon. Like we sell my, my personal, my CPG brands on Amazon, but I don’t particularly take a lot of, I don’t wanna say I don’t take a lot of interest in it, but it’s not, I I’m significantly more invested time and money-wise into our internal infrastructure. Right. Um, because I like that control of, you know, having my customer access to my customers, you know, a lot of the good stuff that comes with having your own, um, external traffic outside of Amazon. So that’s kind of an interesting story. We get, it gets really in-depth, but I ended up partnering up with, um, a good friend of mine. Um, and we were talking and uh, you know, you’ve been involved in an agency and we were talking about kind of what we wanted to start.
Caulen (10:35):
Cause I had a client that needed some work. He was on Amazon. He actually owns one of the largest organic supplement companies on Amazon. And, uh, he had been working with somebody on, um, on Upwork for a while and he just got creamed. They, they took him for a bunch of money and they just, the work was terrible. And he had been asking me for a while, Hey, why don’t you, why don’t you take this on as a project? I mean, I really don’t want to do it. I, I really don’t want to, you know, I’m doing my own thing right now. I’m doing performance projects. I don’t know if I really want to do an agency. And I’m very particular about the people I work with. And then finally he just, he asked me for like a favor, you know, he’s like, dude, could you just please do this for me?
Caulen (11:09):
Like, I really need this favor. I’ve gotten taken by this guy. I got another agency that’s trying to sell me for this, just do it. And I said, all right. I said, if one person comes with me to help me out. So I called my buddy and I said, Hey, he had just exited his agency. I said, Hey, do you want to take on this project with me? Want to help me out? And he’s like, yeah, I’ll do it. I liked the project. I liked, I liked the proposition behind it as we were, we realized how good we were working together. Right. When I met, we’re doing a really great job on this. We built some really amazing infrastructure, very quickly. We had a time crunch and we, and we executed very well. And he’s like, you know, we should do an agency together. And I was like, yeah, we should say, but I don’t want to just sell anything.
Caulen (11:42):
I don’t want to just sell. I don’t, you know, when I was doing, when I was working at my last place, I was, I was selling this one day and I was selling something else. Another day, I had no niche. We didn’t have a very specified space that we would be in. So let’s figure that out. And I said, well, why don’t we just sell everything on Shopify? He’s like, nah, that’s not going to work. We need to focus on something. And then one day he says to me, Hey, why don’t we look at who we’re working with now? And he, and many proposals. He says, why don’t we specialize in working with people who are on Amazon and looking to expand to Shopify. And I happened to have my friend. He owns a pretty sizable Amazon agency. And he was the one who gave me the Amazon, uh, contact that I had.
Caulen (12:18):
So I called and I said, Hey, what do you think about this? This is what we’re going to do. And he said, I love it was there. I got a client for you tomorrow closing the next time, the next day. And before he knew we’re getting people that are like, kind of coming on board, you know, and that’s how we fell into it. And we was really just looking at where the market is going. Right. People tend to, like, I would say, people tend to diverged, Amazon and Shopify. Like they’re two separate. They are from an infrastructure standpoint, they’re two entirely different entities. But in reality, after where, where e-commerce is going, you know, post COVID huge surge in e-commerce demand, especially on Amazon, Amazon stock price quadrupled over the matter of like, you know, 16 months [inaudible] I know that shareholder driven, but you know what I mean?
Caulen (13:02):
Like it, it, it’s indicative of a very strong market that that business is not going anywhere. And even though they have their, their quirks, you know, there are sellers that don’t like a lot of things about Amazon, the traffic exists, they have the power, they have the number one drug in the world, which is traffic, right. And they have loads of it. And if you look at where the natural flow of traffic is going, there’s no reason to separate the two. You know, we should be bringing them together for multichannel. Domination is what we would call it. Right? You want to be on every facet. Look, I look at an iPad and iPad. Doesn’t only sell in an Apple store. It sells a T-Mobile. You can buy them at Walmart at anywhere, but people still go to the Apple store. You won’t buy an Apple store. It’s jam packed. You know? So our, our goal is really to bring people kind of together with all the platforms, as opposed to like taking one from the Island.
Rich (13:50):
Got it. Well, you’re, you’re looking to help them expand their reach too. Like it’s
Caulen (13:55):
Multi channel Omni channel,
Rich (13:58):
Omni channel, multi channel. And like, so essentially kind of what, what work though is like, you, you, um, like rolling it back a bit. So you, um, um, you, you and your partner looked at like what, what is a good niche for your, your, um, your agency? And then like, you, you essentially came up with this idea, Amazon Shopify, you had a contact, you closed a new client. And so then you, by closing that client, you saw that it works it’s, this is something that we can do. This is some, this is a value proposition that people want, and then you’re able to duplicate it on and on from there, because essentially you had found a client, right. That wanted something. And then now you’re able to duplicate it to people just like that over and over and over,
Caulen (14:41):
Oh, a hundred percent. And then we built the processes around it. We’re still building them, you know? Um, but yeah, that’s essentially what we did. And then, you know, we just developed kind of all the infrastructure. We would, we would understand that people who we knew, he wasn’t the only person that needed this infrastructure because Shopify people who were only on Shopify need this infrastructure, let alone people who are also on Amazon selling and you know, they’re two separate languages, you know, I’ve never personally met somebody. Who’s an expert on Amazon, like a high level expert. Who’s also a really high level expert on Shopify. It’s not common. I don’t, I wouldn’t say they don’t exist, but the aides they’re very few and far in between. You don’t.
Rich (15:18):
I can think of, I could think of, um, Amazon experts on this hand. I could think of Shopify experts on this one, but I, yeah, I can’t think of anyone in particular. That’s
Caulen (15:28):
Yeah, it it’s, it’s just not there both, you know, Amazon has its own internal infrastructure that has its own language, you know, literally they, they have their own advertising language, their own metrics, you know, when you’re on, you know, more external e-commerce right. Shopify woo commerce. You’re dealing with external traffic sources. You’re dealing with external metrics across various traffic sources, media channels. You don’t really have all that so much with Amazon. You’ve got their internal media channel where they broker 50%, 57% of all the traffic, you know, all the search queries that are coming into, uh, you know, product searches.
Rich (16:05):
Yeah. No like this, this is a lot of jargon, a lot of terminology, even like, if you’re not in the Amazon space and some said, FBA is like never no idea to, I mean like FBA is like, like, Oh, that’s like saying like, you know, you mentioned the law school, like, Oh, I’m a two. Well, yeah, you have no idea what a,
Caulen (16:23):
Yeah. I wouldn’t have never know that a contract is spelled with a K in law school. You know what I mean? I would have never known that. So yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s a great point. Yeah. A hundred percent. So, um,
Rich (16:38):
I mean, I know there’s a lot to the journey of like, of, of taking an Amazon seller and bringing them into Shopify. But if you had a nutshell, what does that journey look like? What does it start?
Caulen (16:48):
Great question. So the number one thing that I would say is the right product. Um, that is probably without a question, the number one thing, because, so we actually invented something called the toothbrush test. Um, and it basically applies to the nature of the products that we sell. Right? If you have a regular toothbrush, right. And that toothbrush has just the generic item, that would probably be something that somebody full sales on Amazon, um, it doesn’t improve or replace the way a problem is solved, right? Like it’s just the generic toothbrush that is not a direct response, kind of unique and intriguing product to sell on Shopify. Those are typically the products that work on Shopify. So let’s say as opposed to just like a plain toothbrush, you have an electric toothbrush with a Waterpik and a stand that’s something that would be on both platforms.
Caulen (17:39):
Right. But now there’s, there’s a third aspect of that. So you’ve got the first one, which was a generic toothbrush, probably not going to sell on Shopify. That’s an Amazon product, you’ve got a improvement or an improvement to a improvement, to the problem, which is electric with a water pick. And then you’ve got a third one, which would be like a hands-free toothbrush, which they do exist. I didn’t know this until we created this test, but there’s like a hands-free dealer that you put in your mouth and it bubbles, and it cleans your mouth. And that’s, that’s a replacement to how a problem is solved. Right. And that product right there is actually probably too innovative for Amazon. It should be on Shopify more than likely first because people aren’t going to search for hands-free toothbrush. Right. Right. So the number one thing is the product.
Caulen (18:19):
We were very selective about the products we take. Um, they have to have a very strong, unique selling proposition in order for us to even entertain the idea. And that, that test, by the way, funny story came from somebody who came to us with a toothbrush, the guy was doing like 200 K a month on toothbrushes. He came from my friend’s agency and we tried to explain this to me. He just couldn’t grasp it. He couldn’t grasp why we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t sell this project or his product for, you know, on his project. And that’s where we, you know, my business partner. And I, we said, Hey, you know, like we’re going to create something called the two because we lined it up. Just like I said, listen, this is what you have. This is what we would need. Right. We would need like an electric toothbrush or here’s a hands-free toothbrush and he just couldn’t process it. And then we said, you know what, we’re going to use this thing called the two first test from now.
Rich (19:06):
Oh, that’s cool. So, I mean, I guess basically as I see it, it’s like, if a product is unique, then it’s not really good for Amazon because people aren’t searching for it. Right. But what’s that two unique, like if it’s got a really like, exactly like a unique product, like the hands-free toothbrush that people might not know exists, then, then that’s not necessarily good for Amazon, but on Shopify, it’s like, um, you can, like, you can drive traffic, you can drive traffic of a certain audience toys, your website, like you can run Instagram ads and videos and generate some type of viral content to get someone interested in like, wow, this hands-free toothbrush. But on the other hand, if something is generic, like just a plain old toothbrush and selling it on your sacrifice site, it’s like you have to drive all the people, all the ads to it, to a generic product. Whereas if you on Amazon, you just, you just get the people that are already searching for toothbrushes.
Caulen (20:12):
You’re a hunt. That’s exactly what it is. Yeah. And the thing is, is one thing we found interestingly enough to add to that is we find that even the most interesting products, what happens is they end up in a very competitive space. I’ll give you an example. There was a company that I’ve found, um, we didn’t end up working with them, but they had a spice grinder and it was a very innovative spice grinder was super cool. Like I had like 30 something patents on it. It was, it was insane. And had these individual pods and it was a super unique product. And ironically, the, the, the guy who he wasn’t making as much money as he should have on, um, hello, my dog in the background. Um, he, wasn’t making as much money as you should have on Amazon, but I’ll tell you why.
Caulen (20:52):
He wasn’t. She had a really unique product, but he was in a field of spice grinders and all these things that was very saturated by the big names, the kitchen AIDS, the, you know, the craft, whatever those companies are, you know, the ones that are really, really big that are doing billions they’re in they’re in distribution and major retail stores, you would, you would see his ads and you would see his product. And it would be like, it would probably be 10 seconds worth of scrolling before you would even see his product. Cause that that space was so dominated from major brand players. If you’re in a toothbrush space. Right. Think about all the major brands you’re competing with in the toothbrush space, right. In the toothpaste space, in the dental space in general. So we’re finding that a lot of them they’re getting, they’re getting, even though they have a very innovative product that people would probably like, even when people are searching for it, they can’t compete with the big guys. They can’t, they don’t have that ability. Whereas with external media, you know, when you’re running traffic through Facebook or Instagram or wherever, you know, YouTube, even, even though you’re competing, you still, your impressions are you’re getting eyes. And if you have really great direct response, content, people are gonna, people are gonna respond to that, you know? Cause it’s in their face, they can’t miss it.
Rich (22:02):
Yeah, absolutely. So then other than like picking the right product, like where else would you start with, um, with, um, bringing some along that journey from, from Amazon to Shopify?
Caulen (22:13):
Yeah. So the second thing I would probably start doing is you have to start building the right infrastructure. You know, one of the things that a lot of people want to do, not just on, not just on Amazon, but even, you know, shop people who want to sell stuff on Shopify, they typically want to send traffic to a page or to their business in general. Right. And the page or business is not equipped to handle that traffic. Right. It doesn’t, it doesn’t have the ability to capture data, emails, phone numbers, all that good stuff. It doesn’t have the proper, uh, you know, the proper offer, you know, use acquisition pages first like a website, right? A website. You just, a lot of people will send people directly to a website. We build pages that are kind of like direct response pages, kind of like think of, you know, direct mailers. But now it’s just more modern day. You know, you’re talking an individual landing page that it’s only purpose is to bring people into the business. So you want to have that kind of infrastructure built. So when people come, they want to buy your product. And when they do buy your product, you’re capturing their data. And you could leverage that data to turn that person into a recurring customer, you know, starting a customer one-time customer to a customer for life.
Rich (23:19):
Right. And so then there’s also like email campaigns and things like that, that to be built like with Amazon, you don’t have access to your customer data. So now Shopify, you do, now you can start running it like you would run a lot of other, um, eco the wall, a lot of other internet based businesses where you can, you know, you develop a customer list, you cultivate the customer list, you can re retarget people. There’s all kinds things that you could do.
Caulen (23:46):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that infrastructure is critical because if you don’t do it, you’re, you’re, you know, you’re just, I call it an in and out problem. You have traffic that comes in and then it goes out and then you never see it again. And I, and I know firsthand what that does to business. Cause it happens.
Rich (24:00):
Yeah. And you’re leaving money on the table for one. And even beyond the sales side of things, it’s like the customer service side of it. Um, and, um, uh, means, you know, maintaining customer relations. And it’s kind of like all the stuff that Amazon spelt at Amazon spent billions of dollars on creating, which kind of, you know, like as an FBA seller, you’re like you’re providing products to them. You’re doing things to generate sales, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff that they do, um, that now as a Shopify seller, you need to do also, you have to duplicate some of those, um, those, um, some of that infrastructure.
Caulen (24:41):
Yeah. And what’s cool about it is, is you get, you get to, you know, you, you have the opportunity to, you know, when I, whenever we get customer service that just personally like, like with my own brand, I really leveraged that opportunity to have conversations with my customer because you get a lot of information besides just like returns and, you know, people tend to think like even just from a customer service standpoint, right. I like having that control because I use it not only for feedback, but I use it for an opportunity to actually build a longterm relationship with the customer returns. I found it’s really funny. I know a lot of people think that when a product is getting returned and they think, Oh, you know, the product is being returned. This person probably doesn’t want to buy from my company again. And that’s just, it’s just not true.
Caulen (25:21):
That just means they don’t want to buy that product. But if you make the return process simple, if you say, Hey, you know, would you be interested in possibly trying this product? We’ll ship it out to you free of charge, try this, let us know I’ve retained so many customers literally by having a customer service team, just sending people a different variation of the product or even an entirely new product. Even if the cost differential is a little bit above or below, because at the end of the day, uh, you know, sending out that product does not cost to me as much as losing a customer. And when you, when you make the process easy, when you really care about what people, what their emotions are in, in the customer service process, like, Hey, I completely, we’re not robots. We have personality behind our customer service that really builds a long-term customer. I mean, that is the kind of customer that says, Hey, listen, I didn’t like that product, but I didn’t like that product. But this customer, this, this team, this company made it so easy for me to return it and try something else that I’d be willing to try something else. They sell me on email three, four months down the line. We see it. It’s definitely not like hardwood happens all the time.
Rich (26:29):
Yeah, no, that’s amazing. And I think it’s a really cool niche to be in, uh, to help people with that journey and to Shopify, people want to learn more about you get in touch with you, how do they go about doing so sure. Yeah. They can visit,
Caulen (26:44):
Uh, all our, obviously our website is brain power, WW dot brain power.agency. Uh, you can also contact me via email. And my email is Collins, spelled a C a U L E n@brainpower.agency. And you can also look me up on LinkedIn. If you look me up on LinkedIn, I’m pretty sure I’m the only, call-in spelled C a U L E M. So I’m always available there as well.
Rich (27:09):
Absolutely. Well, you are my only Caulen friend, Nate spelled C a U L E N. You
Caulen (27:15):
Will probably be able to say that for the rest of your life.
Rich (27:19):
So-Caulen, I really appreciate you taking the time. Appreciate you being here now. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to innovations and breakthroughs with your host, Rich Goldstein. Be sure to click, subscribe, check us out on the web at nnovationsandbreakthroughs.com and we’ll see you next time.