12 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Brad from MuskOx

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All right, here we go. So could you give us a quick overview of what you're working on? What are you selling on the internet?

Sure. at the end of the day, we're a men's flannel brand at MuskOx.

So we want to get people outdoors and encourage them to appreciate the environment for so many reasons. And we sell flannels: We sell flannels that honor the longevity of the MuskOx, which is a prehistoric animal that's still around today. We have the softest flannels around. We believe we're probably a little biased. We believe it's the highest quality. But at the end of the day, we're selling flannels on the internet.

People are raving about your flannels and you talked about them being, the softest flannels around. and the most durable. Are those the two main, attributes that you've spent a lot of time developing at MuskOx and that's what people are recognizing now in the market, or is there something else on top of it?

Maybe it's the brand, maybe it's something else in addition to that?

Yeah, I think that's one of three key pillars for us at MuskOx. [00:01:00] So our three key pillars are quality, a commitment to the environment and a commitment to wildlife. So from a quality perspective, we do have extremely well built flannels that are meant to last a lifetime and they're very soft. One of our, one of our customer reviews was "buttery soft and built like a tank". We're like, wow, that's way better than anything that we've come up with, let's run with that. So yeah, listen to your customers and let your customers do the marketing for you as well.

Don't be afraid to lean into that. And then the environmental piece is something that's really important to us. I actually have a couple of degrees in environmental engineering, so it's near and dear to my heart. We're part of the 'better cotton' program, which in short means that, the cotton is sourced the right way. It's manufactured the right way. And the third thing: we're muskox, we are named after an animal. And so we believe strongly in putting your money where your mouth is. So we give $5 back to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center for every flannel that's purchased. Our friends in Alaska just do fantastic [00:02:00] work with wildlife conservation. So we want to encourage people to get outside and we want to make the outdoors a little bit better by supporting wildlife conservation, our partners are doing a great job of keeping the wildlife there. Because for me personally, that's one of the best parts about being outdoors is interacting with the small wildlife, birds, squirrels, whatever. And certainly, the massive beasts like the muskox or, The buffalo or the mountain lion or whomever

Now, surely there's been a bit of a boost in popularity for MuskOx following such huge, compliments from the likes of Dana White and Joe Rogan. I was reading up on that and I had seen something, maybe it was an ad from you guys talking about that. But like, whenever you get those two types of individuals talking about your product in such a high regard it's gotta, it's gotta give you a boost of some sort. So I guess a, two part question for you is One, how did that come about? And then two, have you felt the impact from that? Has that leveled you guys up? what came out of that?

Yeah, for sure. for us, we're always looking for [00:03:00] people who are a great fit for MuskOx to partner together with.

So I also run an influencer marketing agency. And so we've gotten a chance to spend a lot of time in the influencer world. and we're fortunate to have connections there and knowledge of creators who are a great fit. And, time after time repeatedly, like we've seen Joe Rogan just be a great partner for folks in the space.

And we knew he was a home run. We also knew he wasn't cheap. But we wanted to continue to invest in MuskOx and the brand. And, so we, we gave it a shot. We got product in front of him and it was something that he loved.

He's very particular about,who he'll advocate for. And at that point we decided to take the giant leap of faith and move forward with it. And so that was really exciting. And with Dana White to be honest with you, I don't know how he got our flannels, but I have a working theory.

And the working theory is pretty simple. Like him and Joe Rogan are buddies. And I know that Joe Rogan was at an MMA event. the weekend after he got the flannels from us. So I'm pretty confident he gave [00:04:00] one to Dana White and was like, dude, these are awesome. You gotta check these out. And that was what happened again. I don't know that to be the case, but that's my best guess in terms of how that happened.

So definitely really cool to see Dana White in the wild, wearing your product. And we definitely have seen an uptick from it, right? No, no doubt about it. There's the organic, bend to it which has continued to help us progress. And we can talk more about that, but certainly our organic search traffic is really strong and continue to get stronger. But we saw a lot of search terms for people looking up 'Joe Rogan flannel' and things along those lines. So we've seen it in really measurable ways and we've seen it in other ways that are going to help us build the brand in the longterm from a search and awareness and,a halo effect. perspective, because now people are associating us with what's already a very, very strong brand with Joe Rogan Experience and Dana White.

Yeah, it feels like such a perfect fit. Like you said, and I, yeah, I had done a bit of [00:05:00] research about your background and the influencer space. And I definitely want to go into that. Actually just a quick question on the influencer marketing side of things, cause you talked about, it wasn't cheap to partner with Joe Rogan.

So what do you mean by that? Because I thought like from an influencer marketing it's almost like PR where you're just getting access to contact information for folks like Joe Rogan, sending them product and hoping for the best in terms of them posting about itand it's really like a gifting strategy or is there an actual likespend component to basically have somebody be the advocate for you at the same time.

Yeah. there's no doubt that gifting or 'seeding' as it's often called in the industry where youplant the seed, give them the product and let it go. That is one component of influencer marketing. It's very unusual once you get to creators at scale, that they're going to do something or organically for a brand. These are massive independent media companies is the way to think about it. I like to say decentralized, media companies when it comes to these influencers.

And, so,for [00:06:00] creators, once you get to a certain scale, it's really a matter of understanding what their historical performance has been for other brands, and while that's no guarantee of future success, it gives you a pretty good sense in terms of where there's trust between the audience and the creator. And then that gives you a higher degree of confidence that this creator is going to work for your brand. So certainly this was a paid act activity for us. And it would be for really anyone. It can't hurt to try right. But generally if you're working with influencers and you're going with a gifting or a seeding strategy you're going to be doing that with small micro influencers and someone like Joe Rogan, it's practically speaking, there's always exceptions, but practically speaking, like it's just not going to happen, right? Assume you are not that exception in terms of your planning out your marketing strategy.

And you talked a little bit about the organic, impact, on the business. So people searching 'Joe Rogan flannel' et cetera. And was there anything else to, to that or anything else that you've done well to [00:07:00] prepare you, for that?

Yeah, for sure. I think I always think of it in terms of the technical and then the content perspective. I don't know if those are the right terms in terms of the way to look at it.

But first and foremost,you have to have your headers using the right terms: Your biggest text on your pages has to map to what you're actually selling, right? And you have to have things indexed the right way. So that's the technical side. And I think we've done a really good job of having that buttoned up all along the way.

And then on the content side,this has multiple angles, right? So when you're doing, Google search, you can experiment a little bit in terms of understanding where people are finding you, what they're likingfrom a paid perspective. And that can inform you a little bit in terms of what you want to do from an organic perspective.

And so for us we have rolled out a blog strategy. That's something we've done for a long time, making sure we're consistently putting out really good content. Andfor the most part, we're putting out content that we think our audience will want to read and [00:08:00] not trying to sell something right.

That is something we've been reasonably consistent with. And I'd say the last3 or 4 months we've gotten even better, But this is always something where we did something in 2022, and then that's really impacting how we're doing in 2023, right? It's not something that you're going to see success with measured in days and weeks. It's something that you're going to see success measured in months and in years. But we have had that success and continue to build up that success over time.

And it helps us too, where we've had some really nice awards, right? We were selected as 'Best overall flannel' by Gear Junkie. So we beat out the Patagonias and the North Face and the Filsons of the world.

'The Inertia' selected us as 'best all around flannel' another review site. And so these are really big wins for us and they absolutely help from a search perspective as well.

And then we'll lean into that, right? When we see those wins, we're going to make sure that's featured on our website and it's easy for the Googles of the world to see that and to verify it from a, from an organic search [00:09:00] perspective.

So I think, for us continuing to make sure you're buttoned up from a technical perspective and just being thoughtful about continuing to optimize the words on your page but still in a way that has to be readable where your audience wants it and being consistent with things.

It seems like you're very much in touch with what's happening on the website. What are some of those big wins that you've seen on the conversion rate front?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us over the course of the last year is we've increased the speed on our site. And so the way we've done that is basicallywe've eliminated some redundant Shopify features that existed and we just reduced redundancy on our site in general. We decreased the number of, in the amount of full size images to load. We've modernized search and discovery. Some of those things are things that Storetasker has done a great job of helping us with as as well but ultimately like we really focused on the mobile speed to load there.

Cause we're like everybody else, the majority of our traffic is on mobile (it's 2024) and we wanted to really optimize [00:10:00] for that. So we saw a nice uptick from simply making our site faster. So this was across the board and that helped people stick around longer or visit more pages and increase the conversion rate. So no one of those metrics shot up in a way that wasoff the charts. So in a way where it's like 'Oh, if you reduce the content by 50% on your homepage and reduce the number of clicks by, by 2, you're going to increase your conversion rate and you're gonna really see it' nothing like that.

But we did see across the board a really nice uptick. So again, Being here from my perspective this is more of a long term fix. Hey, we got to have a great experience on our site. And if there's the smallest lag, people are just going to get bored or frustrated or annoyed and move on. So I think that was a big win for us in terms of being able to optimize the speed on our site, particularly the mobile speed to load.

Yeah. And that's like very consistent with what you've been saying all along in terms of those foundational baby steps and I feel likemarking your website [00:11:00] with the right terms from an SEO standpoint, getting the mobile experience to be done properly and optimizing the speed, et cetera.

you can't skip past those basics. So it feels quite consistent with your approach at MuskOx. Cool maybe one final question just cause you did mention Storetasker and I'm so happy that we've been able to collaborate together on this. And I hope we get to do a lot more cool stuff down the line with whatever you need. But would love any thoughts on what's your experience been like on Storetasker: Has it been good? And, yeah, any thoughts there?

Yeah, for sure. So I'm not the one that's interacting with the store tasker team on a day to day basis.

So what I'm not going to be able to answer is the bits and bytes but what I can tell you is that my team's very particular about making sure everything's done the right way, and they've been really happy with Storetasker in terms of being able to communicate well, get things done in an effectivetime period and be there for us when we have questions or problems. So that's great to be able to feel like we have a partner that's going to shoot us straight with respect to what can [00:12:00] be done and what needs to be done to be able to solve different problems. So,we've definitely had a really good experience

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