LIVE CLIPS
Episode 11-28-2025
You know, Female It's. That's not what it is. It's. Are we the customer? Can. Is our audience going to resonate with this product? And it's that simple? Yeah. Taste, smart. Makes no sense. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining on such a busy day. Really, really fun to have you on. We'll have to have Aaron on sometime soon. And congrats to the whole team on all the progress. It's incredibly impressive. We'll talk to you soon. And congrats to you guys. Congrats. Everybody loves your show. All right. Having a lot of fun. Cheers. Bye. Bye.
Next guest is Sarah from Favorite Daughter. We might have to change hats. I have a favorite sun hat here. There she is. Thank you for joining the stream. Thank you for sending these beautiful hats. How are you doing? Hi guys. I gotta, I gotta tell you, a lot of tech bros. Yes. Text. Texting me up this morning being like, this is so cool. Well, our, our wives, our wives said the same thing. They're, they, they listen, they listen to the podcast. They're fans. So everybody's excited. Yeah, we're super, we're super excited to have you on. I love it. Harley wrote me, he was like, you know, he's the, he's the E Comm king. So when he asks, we show up. You know what I mean? We show up. Yes. My co founder is probably watching. By the way. My, my other known is my, my, my little sister. Little sister. She's moving so she's not joining. Moving on Black Friday. Well, for the tech people that don't know, can you introduce the brand? Can you introduce the. I don't know yourself. How do you actually think about yourself? Do you use the term slash? I guess like we really give like a multi hyphenate a run for its money. We were speaking at a Bloomberg conference the other day and they're like, how do you actually describe yourself? It's weird. You know, we talk about our business as an ecosystem. We have all these things that feed each other. The same girl or guy who's buying Favorite daughter is listening to our podcast. She is probably following us on socials. She's listening to the pod she, you know, Erin created, you know, a global phenomenon and nobody wants this on Netflix. So we got that girl. Now it's, it all, it all feeds each other the flywheel. And then, and then from a product perspective, specifically with, with baby daughter, how are you thinking about the shape of the business today? Where do you want to take it over the next few years? How big are the ambitions? I mean, look, we're growing fast. If you had told me that, that we'd be where we are right now. I mean, I said it at Bloomberg, I can say it now. We're going to do like 150 million in retail sales next year. We were profitable. We were. Woo. Whoa. Congratulations. I don't know. Is that tacky to give numbers? Whatever. No, that's what the people. Why do you think we have a gong? The people want numbers. We have the gong for numbers. Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Yeah. So basically you're saying you made $150 million last year in your bank account. It's in my account right now as we speak. No, I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined. Of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer for my sister and I. We were like, we're not fashion girls who want clothes from us. I could have never fathomed that. This is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool, is our customer. She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencer celebrity brands. Maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear Favorite Daughter. We're wearing Favorite Daughter out in the world. Yeah. It's authentic. Talk about this year. We live in la. It's been, you know, it was obviously super wild, stressful start to the year. You guys have had a store, right, in the Palisades. Is that correct? Yeah. And then moving in a few months later, you're dealing with tariffs. I mean, it's been really stressful year. But how have you guys navigated it? The tariff thing is. The tariff thing is interesting. I mean, when it hit out of the blue, we were like, I'm sorry. And we kind of knew it was coming, but you don't really think it's gonna actually happen, you know, and it really is us, the business, paying these tariffs, so we had to mitigate real fast. We're looking at, you know, India. We're looking at Turkey. We're looking to move from Mexico. But then it's, It's. It's changing in real time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been a real challenge, and I can't take credit for it. We have an unbelievable team. Jennifer Stender Hawkins, who is like our president, she does everything. She's like, the way that our team came together in that moment was. Was iconic. I mean, it was elite. It was elite. The way that the team came together and did what they did, and our profit, you know, our EBIT is looking a lot better today than it about four months ago. What categories are you most excited about in the future? Started out with an apparel focus, but I imagine you guys can, in the fullness of time, do everything for your customer, or at least everything within reason. Yeah. I mean, look, our customer wants it all from us. She does. And we're learning that, you know, we didn't know Everything's been sort of. We didn't anticipate growing as fast as we did, and we didn't try to. We started sort of testing, like, would she want to spend over $1,000 for outwear? Would she? And we sort of dipped into it and. And now we know she does. We just launched shoes, a license with Caleris, because our thing is, like, let's partner with the people who do it best. They do it best. Accessories is huge for us. Obviously, like, logo. It's a different girl. The girl buying the logo is not always buying the denim. And we always said the logo is. Is going to pay for the women for the Ready to wear. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. How are you thinking about AI Specifically in AI generated content? I feel like you're going to hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI generated imagery and marketing materials at the same time. Sometimes people want to see how it looks on them and so they might want to see an AI image do something. Yeah. Not all created equally. Totally. I feel like consumers are going to have a massive aversion to AI generated ads, specifically of clothing. Because if you buy something and then it fits terribly and you're like, I've been, like, lied to. But then at the same time, AI try on has been really cool. Amazing. I mean, look, the thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is something that we are talking about all day. So I will. We will embrace the right AI in certain. But, like, when it comes to E Comm Models, I don't know. I mean, I think that's where it's going. Of course it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on E. Com because we're perfectionists and we want it to look great. But I'm not gonna lie, it's expensive and it's time consuming. And if all of a sudden they're introducing ways to. To change that. But I don't know, what do you guys think the customer is gonna. We're nervous about it. I think that customers will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. I don't think customers are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm looking. I'm considering buying this item and it's on a robot and it's completely. Yeah. It's not real. Yeah. At the same time, like, the line of AI is getting very, very blurry. There's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platforms, Steam has a tag. Was this game made with AI? But the question is, like, what does that mean if one of the software developers on the game used AI to write a little bit of code? That's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said, like, make a video game, or like, the entire characters are AI generated. Like, there's this huge continuum. And I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah, if you're on a photo shoot and there's a light stand in the background and you want to remove it, like you go into Photoshop today, you do content aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill. You technically used AI, does the consumer care about that? There's going to be this, like, back and forth around trust. And as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the trust of the individual, of the consumer, I think you'll be okay. But you have to be more open about it. And I think that's probably where you have an advantage, because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly, essentially, and then set a very clear boundary, as opposed to, like, some of the faceless corporations that will, you know, have to issue, like, PR releases when they make mistakes. I know, listen, it's so tempting, right? Because at the end of the day, your customers trust in you, your customers loyalty to you. It's all you have. So we've, we've. Before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know, because it speeds up that a lot of brands do it, Moda does it, and they do beautiful, you know, everything they do. I'm like, I want it, I want it. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less, but it's tough. I mean, product, obviously, number one, at the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good. So that is, like, first and foremost, that is our focus. How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality? How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like our customer doesn't always even want to see the clothes on me, you know, and that's the thing. Like, of course, when I post something or when I push something, it sells. But it sells just as well on girls that work in our office who are different shapes, different sizes, different ages. And that's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video is crushing for us. Interesting. It is crushing. Like video on the page, you're saying, like on the page. Video on the page and in paid. Yeah, sure, yeah. All of it. I mean, video is. Video is crushing. I have. Is that the marketing strategy that you think worked best for you in 2025, or is there another sort of growth initiative that, as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of so many things, but I do think that we hit this sort of this wide open white space for the working woman. You know, like the biggest compliment, the most. The people that come up to me the most are career women. They're women who go, oh, my gosh, my whole law firm. All we wear is favorite daughter. Because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality. But that's not, you know, $1,500. You don't have to spend $1,500 on a Blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good. You don't have to spend that. Yeah, yeah. So how. How do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably extra sensitive to this, given that you guys are creators and personalities yourself. And you're probably like, you know that, like, you guys represent the brand. So if you're working with another creator, they are representing the brand. And I feel like in apparel, it can be way more sensitive than a supplement brand that just says, like, hey, if you, like, share our values at all, like, we'll work with you. Yeah, I mean, you know, we've really leaned into Shop My, which is a fantastic company, which I actually looked at as an investment, which I. Big mistake on my part from. I was talking with my wife, and she was telling me about Shop My, and I was like. I was like, I haven't heard of it. And we've interviewed a thousand companies this year, and I looked it up and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then the next week, they announced, like, I think a billion dollar round. Uh, so it wasn't on. Wasn't on my radar. But they're ripping. It's genius. And it's like, it's made the whole process so much more seamless, to be honest with you. And it gives, you know, moms at home an opportunity to move product, to make a little cash, to build some sort of audience. I mean, the celebrities with millions and millions and millions of fans have or followers have not sold as much for us as like a Dallas mom who has like the micro influencer. Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. How much are you, like, how much time are you spending on the investing side? And you guys have a fund that you run. What's kind of the focus of the fund and what kind of companies are you really looking to meet? Yeah, I mean, we're a consumer focused fund. It's me, my sister Erin and Phil Schwartz is our partner. It's kind of a different kind of model. He. Well, I could go into the weeds, but we probably don't have time. We're looking at companies that we are the customer for. That's it. It's very simple. That's the thesis. It's not only female founders or only, you know, female. It's. That's not what it is. It's. Are we the customer? Can. Is our audience going to resonate with this product and it's that simple? Yeah. Taste, smart. Makes no sense. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining on such a busy day. Really, really fun to have you on. We'll have to have Aaron on sometime soon. And congrats to the whole team on all the progress. It's incredibly impressive. We'll talk to you soon. And congrats to you guys. Congrats. Everybody loves your show. Having a lot of fun. Cheers. Bye.
Next guest is Sarah from Favorite Daughter. We might have to change hats. I have a favorite sun hat here. There she is. Thank you for joining the stream. Thank you for sending these beautiful hats. How are you doing? Hi guys. I gotta, I gotta tell you, a lot of tech bros. Yes. Text. Texting me up this morning being like, this is so cool. Well, our, our wives, our wives said the same thing. They're, they, they listen, they listen to the podcast. They're fans. So everybody's excited. Yeah, we're super, we're super excited to have you on. I love it. Harley wrote me, he was like, you know, he's the, he's the E Comm king. So when he asks, we show up. You know what I mean? We show up. Yes. My co founder is probably watching. By the way. My, my other known is my, my, my little sister. Little sister. She's moving so she's not joining. Moving on Black Friday. Well, for the tech people that don't know, can you introduce the brand? Can you introduce the. I don't know yourself. How do you actually think about yourself? Do you use the term slash? I guess like we really give like a multi hyphenate a run for its money. We were speaking at a Bloomberg conference the other day and they're like, how do you actually describe yourself? It's weird. You know, we talk about our business as an ecosystem. We have all these things that feed each other. The same girl or guy who's buying Favorite daughter is listening to our podcast. She is probably following us on socials. She's listening to the pod she, you know, Erin created, you know, a global phenomenon and nobody wants this on Netflix. So we got that girl. Now it's, it all, it all feeds each other the flywheel. And then, and then from a product perspective, specifically with, with baby daughter, how are you thinking about the shape of the business today? Where do you want to take it over the next few years? How big are the ambitions? I mean, look, we're growing fast. If you had told me that, that we'd be where we are right now. I mean, I said it at Bloomberg, I can say it now. We're going to do like 150 million in retail sales next year. We were profitable. We were. Woo. Whoa. Congratulations. I don't know. Is that tacky to give numbers? Whatever. No, that's what the people. Why do you think we have a gong? The people want numbers. We have the gong for numbers. Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Yeah. So basically you're saying you made $150 million last year in your bank account. It's in my account right now as we speak. No, I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined. Of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer for my sister and I. We were like, we're not fashion girls who want clothes from us. I could have never fathomed that. This is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool, is our customer. She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencer celebrity brands. Maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear Favorite Daughter. We're wearing Favorite Daughter out in the world. Yeah. It's authentic. Talk about this year. We live in la. It's been, you know, it was obviously super wild, stressful start to the year. You guys have had a store, right, in the Palisades. Is that correct? Yeah. And then moving in a few months later, you're dealing with tariffs. I mean, it's been really stressful year. But how have you guys navigated it? The tariff thing is. The tariff thing is interesting. I mean, when it hit out of the blue, we were like, I'm sorry. And we kind of knew it was coming, but you don't really think it's gonna actually happen, you know, and it really is us, the business, paying these tariffs, so we had to mitigate real fast. We're looking at, you know, India. We're looking at Turkey. We're looking to move from Mexico. But then it's, It's. It's changing in real time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been a real challenge, and I can't take credit for it. We have an unbelievable team. Jennifer Stender Hawkins, who is like our president, she does everything. She's like, the way that our team came together in that moment was. Was iconic. I mean, it was elite. It was elite. The way that the team came together and did what they did, and our profit, you know, our EBIT is looking a lot better today than it about four months ago. What categories are you most excited about in the future? Started out with an apparel focus, but I imagine you guys can, in the fullness of time, do everything for your customer, or at least everything within reason. Yeah. I mean, look, our customer wants it all from us. She does. And we're learning that, you know, we didn't know Everything's been sort of. We didn't anticipate growing as fast as we did, and we didn't try to. We started sort of testing, like, would she want to spend over $1,000 for outwear? Would she? And we sort of dipped into it and. And now we know she does. We just launched shoes, a license with Caleris, because our thing is, like, let's partner with the people who do it best. They do it best. Accessories is huge for us. Obviously, like, logo. It's a different girl. The girl buying the logo is not always buying the denim. And we always said the logo is. Is going to pay for the women for the Ready to wear. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. How are you thinking about AI Specifically in AI generated content? I feel like you're going to hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI generated imagery and marketing materials at the same time. Sometimes people want to see how it looks on them and so they might want to see an AI image do something. Yeah. Not all created equally. Totally. I feel like consumers are going to have a massive aversion to AI generated ads, specifically of clothing. Because if you buy something and then it fits terribly and you're like, I've been, like, lied to. But then at the same time, AI try on has been really cool. Amazing. I mean, look, the thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is something that we are talking about all day. So I will. We will embrace the right AI in certain. But, like, when it comes to E Comm Models, I don't know. I mean, I think that's where it's going. Of course it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on E. Com because we're perfectionists and we want it to look great. But I'm not gonna lie, it's expensive and it's time consuming. And if all of a sudden they're introducing ways to. To change that. But I don't know, what do you guys think the customer is gonna. We're nervous about it. I think that customers will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. I don't think customers are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm looking. I'm considering buying this item and it's on a robot and it's completely. Yeah. It's not real. Yeah. At the same time, like, the line of AI is getting very, very blurry. There's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platforms, Steam has a tag. Was this game made with AI? But the question is, like, what does that mean if one of the software developers on the game used AI to write a little bit of code? That's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said, like, make a video game, or like, the entire characters are AI generated. Like, there's this huge continuum. And I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah, if you're on a photo shoot and there's a light stand in the background and you want to remove it, like you go into Photoshop today, you do content aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill. You technically used AI, does the consumer care about that? There's going to be this, like, back and forth around trust. And as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the trust of the individual, of the consumer, I think you'll be okay. But you have to be more open about it. And I think that's probably where you have an advantage, because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly, essentially, and then set a very clear boundary, as opposed to, like, some of the faceless corporations that will, you know, have to issue, like, PR releases when they make mistakes. I know, listen, it's so tempting, right? Because at the end of the day, your customers trust in you, your customers loyalty to you. It's all you have. So we've, we've. Before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know, because it speeds up that a lot of brands do it, Moda does it, and they do beautiful, you know, everything they do. I'm like, I want it, I want it. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less, but it's tough. I mean, product, obviously, number one, at the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good. So that is, like, first and foremost, that is our focus. How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality? How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like our customer doesn't always even want to see the clothes on me, you know, and that's the thing. Like, of course, when I post something or when I push something, it sells. But it sells just as well on girls that work in our office who are different shapes, different sizes, different ages. And that's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video is crushing for us. Interesting. It is crushing. Like video on the page, you're saying, like on the page. Video on the page and in paid. Yeah, sure, yeah. All of it. I mean, video is. Video is crushing. I have. Is that the marketing strategy that you think worked best for you in 2025, or is there another sort of growth initiative that, as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of so many things, but I do think that we hit this sort of this wide open white space for the working woman. You know, like the biggest compliment, the most. The people that come up to me the most are career women. They're women who go, oh, my gosh, my whole law firm. All we wear is favorite daughter. Because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality. But that's not, you know, $1,500. You don't have to spend $1,500 on a Blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good. You don't have to spend that. Yeah, yeah. So how. How do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably extra sensitive to this, given that you guys are creators and personalities yourself. And you're probably like, you know that, like, you guys represent the brand. So if you're working with another creator, they are representing the brand. And I feel like in apparel, it can be way more sensitive than a supplement brand that just says, like, hey, if you, like, share our values at all, like, we'll work with you. Yeah, I mean, you know, we've really leaned into Shop My, which is a fantastic company, which I actually looked at as an investment, which I. Big mistake on my part from. I was talking with my wife, and she was telling me about Shop My, and I was like. I was like, I haven't heard of it. And we've interviewed a thousand companies this year, and I looked it up and I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then the next week, they announced, like, I think a billion dollar round. Uh, so it wasn't on. Wasn't on my radar. But they're ripping. It's genius. And it's like, it's made the whole process so much more seamless, to be honest with you. And it gives, you know, moms at home an opportunity to move product, to make a little cash, to build some sort of audience. I mean, the celebrities with millions and millions and millions of fans have or followers have not sold as much for us as like a Dallas mom who has like the micro influencer. Yeah. Interesting. Very cool. How much are you, like, how much time are you spending on the investing side? And you guys have a fund that you run. What's kind of the focus of the fund and what kind of companies are you really looking to meet? Yeah, I mean, we're a consumer focused fund. It's me, my sister Erin and Phil Schwartz is our partner. It's kind of a different kind of model. He. Well, I could go into the weeds, but we probably don't have time. We're looking at companies that we are the customer for. That's it. It's very simple. That's the thesis. It's not only female founders or only, you know, female. It's. That's not what it is. It's. Are we the customer? Can. Is our audience going to resonate with this product and it's that simple? Yeah. Taste, smart. Makes no sense. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining on such a busy day. Really, really fun to have you on. We'll have to have Aaron on sometime soon. And congrats to the whole team on all the progress. It's incredibly impressive. We'll talk to you soon. And congrats to you guys. Congrats. Everybody loves your show. Having a lot of fun. Cheers. Bye.
Cha ching. You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, November 28, 2025. We are live from the Commerce Corral. The Commerce Corral. You might be wondering. It's good to be back. This show, of course, is sponsored by Ramp Time is Money Save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, a whole lot more. But we're doing a crazy Black Friday stream with none other than Shopify. That's right. That's right. We're in the green suits. We got tons of guests who are on Shopify. A guest host today. Guest host Carly Finkelstein from Shopify. He's gonna be calling in throughout the show at multiple periods of time to let us know what's happening in the world of E Commerce.
Want numbers. We have the gong for numbers. Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Yeah. So, so basically you're saying you made $150 million last year in your bank account? It's. It's in my account right now as. As we speak. No, I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined. Of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer for my sister and I. We were like, we're not fashion girls who. Who want clothes from us. I could have never fathomed that this is where we'd be sitting now. And it turns out the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool, is our customer. She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencer celebrity brands. Maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear favorite daughter. We're wearing favorite daughter out in the world. Yeah. It's authentic. Talk about this year. We live in la. It's been.
The people. Why do you think we have a gong? Yeah, the. People want numbers. We have the gong for numbers. Yeah. Okay, that's cool. Yeah. So, so basically you're saying you made $150 million last year in your bank account. It's. It's in my account right now as. As we speak. No. I could have never, you know, I could have never imagined. Of course, I didn't even think that there was a customer from. My sister and I. We were like, we're not fashion girls who. Who want clothes from us. I could have never fathomed that. This is where we'd be sitting now. And the girl that's not the fashion girl, but that wants to feel chic and cool is our customer. She's us. So I think that's why you've seen probably a lot of, you know, influencer celebrity brands, maybe not scaling as fast as we have is because we are the girl. We're not wearing Dior out in the world, but then telling you to wear favorite daughter. We're wearing favorite daughter out. Yeah. It's authentic. Talk about this year. We live in la. It's been.
You know, a couple days before Black Friday, then trying to start it on Black Friday and experiencing those high CPMs out of the gate. Yeah. And then what about from a. Like, this is. This is the first, like, real holiday season for Rora and then the first kind of like new year cycle that a lot of health brands go through where the business is, like, starting to, you know, be at pretty meaningful scale. How do you, like, do you think this is kind of like a lot of brands get the benefit of like, they're either a gifting brand and. Or like it feels like Rora could be you health brand. Yeah. Feels like it's like everyone's been split as we've talked to all the entrepreneurs. Yeah. If you're doing supplements, it's like people might buy this week. This isn't gonna be the biggest thing for you, but January will be a lot bigger. Whereas I feel like I expect January to be significantly bigger for Aurora, but really just because the business is scaling so quickly. But it should be a big gifting product. Yeah. I think we saw yesterday a large amount of organic sales of being Thanksgiving. And I think people go wherever they go for Thanksgiving, and a lot of people tried out Aurora system at somebody else's house. I think we'll see something similar around, you know, Christmas and the holidays. But I think going into, going into January, there's going to be an entirely new demographic that kind of comes into the funnel that's focusing on their health again. And I think it'll be a big opportunity for us to capture that demand. We've also got some big partnerships that we're going to be launching right at the beginning of the year around that as well. So I think it'll all tie together. But I think, you know, there's an opportunity for both from a gifting perspective and, you know, the health and wellness forest leading into January. Well, close us out with a big number, which it is with a big number. What can you share?
Scaling so quickly, but it should be a big gifting product. Yeah, I think, you know, we saw yesterday like a large amount of organic sales of being Thanksgiving and I think people go, you know, wherever they go for Thanksgiving and a lot of people tried out, you know, Aurora system at somebody else's house. I think we'll see something similar around, you know, Christmas and the holidays. But I think going into going into January, there's going to be an entirely new demographic that kind of comes into the funnel that's focusing on their health again and I think it'll be a big opportunity for us to capture that demand. We've also got some big partnerships that we're going to be launching right at the beginning of the year around that as well. So I think it'll all tie together. But I think there's an opportunity for both from a gifting perspective and yeah, the health and wellness forest leading in January. Well close us out with a big number which what can you share.
Moment to stock up for yourself, but also as a moment to give back. What's the biggest, what was the biggest unlock this year from a marketing perspective? What was one campaign or strategy that you feel like as you look back on 2025, you feel like it went particularly well? Oh my gosh, we've had an epic year. It's been so awesome. And I think one of the things, and I was reflecting on it with a moment like today, Black Friday Cyber Monday. For us, it's not just about these moments, it's about how we show up 247365 for our healthcare community, who we call awesome humans. This year we launched a year long campaign called where do youo Wear Figs? And it talks about all of the places that healthcare professionals wear figs, which is literally everywhere. It's before their shifts, after their shift, it's to work every day. And so we've had a series of chapters throughout the year, celebrating Women's Month, celebrating Nurses Week, most recently celebrating the holidays. And we've really shown the inside of what it's like to work within this industry in the space and all the different places where our brand shows up. And so I think what's so important on a moment like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is that you're building this brand equity and you're building this connection with your community throughout the year. And then that pays off in these big moments. And so showing up for them, listening to them, telling their stories throughout the year, which we've done with our where do youo Work campaign, has been really incredible for us. And this is just another moment to celebrate that. Well, congratulations on all the progress on the epic year and thank you so much for taking the time to.
Continued. How are you thinking about it as part of this acquisition that's going on, all that stuff? TikTok is actually pretty insane. So TikTok shop is this crazy platform where you can go from doing nothing to doing, you know, multi million dollars a month in like three months. And so that's what, that's what happened to us when we were in the Alps, Jordy. Like we were just ramping up. By March we were doing seven figures per month, per month just on TikTok shop. And so that was like a, it was really, really cool, really fun. But what's crazy about it is the amount of investment that you need to get that going is just a lot. So TikTok is interesting because you get this virality, you get this insane amount of impression share and you're really banking on the halo effect it has on other channels. So when TikTok goes viral, you're not really making any money in TikTok, but you're making money in Amazon, in retail and even a spillover effect on dtc. And that's where you're seeing the results. So the thing about that is you, you do it, you know, you're not going to make a lot of money, but you got to like staff up and get really complex on like incrementality and just your overall marketing strategy and just getting really good at measurement so you know where you're making money. But TikTok shop is really interesting because it's actually changed Black Friday behavior quite a bit. It's in a, it's in a position where it's a constant deal seeking like throughout the 12 months of the year because they have so many sales and so many problems promos happening all the time. And so consumers on TikTok shop are like, okay, I just going to go look for the best deal and I'm going to go for whatever creators are telling me are the best product but also the best value. And so it's like really change things because you know, you really don't want to be on sale all the time, but you kind of have to be if you want to play competitively on that platform. But it's still really interesting because you can, you can have certain products that are like really meant for TikTok Shop, other products that you're kind of on your D2C and you're cross selling upselling. But it's a strong platform. Like once it gets going, you know, there's no denying the halo effect it has on everything else. Makes a lot of sense. How are you navigating?
Three years ago, Something like that. Yeah, we've been profitable since. Insane. What's been the strategy this year? I feel like other categories in E. Comm have had more volatility this year, just given the trade war and all that stuff. But how's it been so far? No. Okay, so the first half of this year was completely different than the second half of the year. So the first half, something about just buying sentiment was a lot better. And so the way you're able to grow these consumer businesses and just marketing in general is really efficient, really strong growth. Second half of the year has been really interesting. Something has changed in just like macro environment where people are not spending as much money just buying things online anymore. And so I'm noticing this across the board. If you look at like macro 10 data, look at even retail category data, just customer acquisition costs have really, really gone up. Meta acquisition costs have really gone up. Brands are still growing, but it's as hard than it was in the first part of the year, that's for sure. Jordy. Yeah. And so to counteract that, you guys are launching new products. You launch Target. Walk us through that. Yeah. So for us, you know, launching new products has always been a really big part of the strategy. I think innovation is so important because without innovation, you just can't really build the company and you kind of die. So we're always launching new products, but we try to launch very few products that have a really large tam. And so this year we launched a Tone Tone Gummy, which is basically creatine that was built in a form factor and has certain additional ingredients that is really geared towards women. And so a lot of women, like, so scared of taking creatine and so scared of bulking up. And so let's make this more approachable for them. That was like a really strong product for us. We have another clear protein product in the protein category. Protein's been going crazy this year. So that's like. That was another really big launch. We have a clear protein with the. That slides in it. So that did really well. And. And then more recently, it was a product line extension. We have a really strong NB1 metabolic health product. And so we did that as well. But the biggest thing for us is we've been expanding heavily into retail just because that's where the next kind of phase of growth comes from. So we've went nationwide, through Target, Nationwide sprouts. Those two are really. Yeah, big, big launches. No, it's been. It's been a crazy year, man. Crazy year. Really good. What about. What about online channels? How's. How are things?
Through what's working on the marketing side, what strategy, what area has been the most exciting this year for gymshark as a whole? To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. It's. It's less about, you know, it's not. There's a particular channel that's ripping right now, or there's this. There's a new version of Influencer Martin, or it's TikTok shop or anything like that. It's finding our lane and sticking to it. Right. And being relentless about the fact we make gym wear. That's what we do. And we're better than anybody else at it. Right. We noticed a little while ago, everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things. And, you know, there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well. And then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were. We doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand. We launched our brand platform. We do gym, and people have taken to it incredibly, incredibly well. There was a. There was an article I read on LinkedIn the other day that said the world doesn't need more bland brands that need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies. And I think that is exactly what we did. Not enemies per se, but we're willing to say, hey, if you don't rock with us, that's absolutely fine. There's a million other brands out there that are probably for you. But if you want great gym stuff, you should come to gymshark. How. How is gym culture evolving? I feel like the story.
To you was probably more depth as opposed to width, if that makes sense. Yeah. Just working with the biggest names in the category. And in terms of 2025. Now, take me through what's working on the marketing side. What strategy, what area has been the most exciting this year for gymshark as a whole? To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. It's. It's less about, you know, it's not as there's a particular channel that's ripping right now, or there's a new version, influencer Martin, or it's TikTok shop or anything like that. It's finding our lane and sticking to it. Right. And being relentless about the fact we make gym wear. That's what we do, and we're better than anybody else at it. Right. We noticed a little while ago, everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things. And, you know, there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well. And then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were. We doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand. We launched our brand platform. We do gym, and people have taken to it incredibly, incredibly well. There was a. There was an article I read on LinkedIn the other day that said the world doesn't need more bland brands. It need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies. And I think that is exactly what we did. Not enemies per se, but we're willing to say, hey, if you don't rock with us, that's absolutely fine. There's a million other brands out there that are probably for you, but if you want great gym stuff, you should come to gymshark. How. How is gym culture evolving? I feel like the story of the last couple years was this, like, hybrid, hybrid athlete.
I'm a huge fan, I'm honestly a fan of all gaming harbor and I think Palmer would say the same thing for Mod Retro specifically. What we try to do is kind of dig into the past for these threads that are still relevant today. So in the case of Chromatic, it's this idea that you can pick up a game and play it and the game doesn't ask anything of you after you're playing it. Most modern games, they're constantly trying to get you to, to pay more money after you've already bought the game. For example, this it, you know this. It's the same reason that you can pick up a Game Boy game that was left in your parents closet today, stick it into a Chromatic and have the exact same experience. That that is the thread that we wanted to pull on for Chromatics. So I think with Mod Retro, a lot of the hardware that we're going to make is have these, these elements of the past that are still valuable today that have just been kind of steamrolled by, by modern times. It's not to say that the devices aren't modern in their technology stack, it's just that it gives you an experience that isn't common in modern harbor ecosystems. And so all of the stuff by Valve, I'm obsessed with it, I love it, I'm a customer of it. But the types of experiences that Mod Retro creates live alongside that for somebody who is interested in gaming. And they're also better for people who actually just don't consider themselves to be a hardcore gamer. But sure want to play around with Tetris on an airplane or something like that. Yeah, obviously with Palmer. Hey.
Wow. Okay, So I also have a few other things for you. Yes, yes. Okay. So I'm gonna wrap up some trending. Categories for the day now that we're getting to 5pm EST. Skincare. Vitamins, supplements, T shirts, activewear, makeup did really well. This is really interesting. At 5am when I was on CNN, I looked at. Trending products. At 5am it was aloe yoga with their crewneck pullover. It was Cozy earth with her bamboo sheet set and. And mirrored beauty with their flesh balm. When I look at it now, it's totally switched up. You have Victoria Beckham's eyeliner. You have earplugs from a company called Loop Switch Earplugs. Interesting. Yeah, Loop earplugs, the ones that's trending, is called the Loop Switch two. And you have Lola blankets, the antique ivory blanket. Here's what's really interesting if you go back to this time last year. Last year was all about getting outside. You saw ski equipment, adventure stuff, outdoorsy stuff. That's over. We're going on. We're going. We're going terminally on. We're going cozy. So things like bakeware sets, blankets, wooden toys, and coloring books are all up 100% year over year. Interesting. Goose Creek candle, Christmas tree, three wick candles, killing it. And caraway cookware set is also killing it. So those are the trends. It's been. I mean, the cozy era is definitely here. We're in the cozy era. Cozy era, dude. All those are great brands. If you guys don't know Loop like, they're.
Practices for big influencer partnerships in 2026. What you got? I think more and more the brands need to be somewhat creator led and I think it's way easier to do that internally. Right. You guys had a couple creator brands on today, right? You could say Mod Retro is a creator brand. Palmer. It is crazy how many views Palmer gets even though he's not an influencer, just by going around onto Rogan, onto other shows and plug it. He pulls it. Yeah, yeah. The audience. Yeah. So I think there's free impressions to be had. And the most expensive part of my P and L is impressions. Impressions. Right. So if you can go out there and tell a story and be good, like, you'll get a ton of impressions. We just an hour ago had an MKBHD video go live and It'll probably get 3 million views and sell a ton of stuff. And it just needs to be a tighter feedback loop there. MKBHD on Black Friday. I'm assuming that's only possible because you guys have had.
I'm trying to think of where to actually dig in there. Yeah, take me through TikTok Shop. You were saying that you made a seven figure day. Yeah, $700. What's actually going on? Because reading behind that tweet, I was thinking like, okay, he's extremely bearish on TikTok Shop, maybe TikTok broadly. How much should I read into that? Okay, explain what happened. Yeah, the general thesis on TikTok Shop is it's really, really good for a certain type of product brand. If you're female focused, if you are a supplement, if you can make pretty, you know, bold claims, TikTok Shop's gonna print for you. Bold claims. That means people are like. Restores all your hair for $5. Something like that. Because the brand doesn't make the claims. The affiliates make the claims. The affiliates are incentivized to say crazy stuff to try to get the affiliate commission. So if your wallet will turn you. Into a millionaire, you put a hundred. Dollar bill in here, it's to shoot $200 out. You can get $200 out. Yeah. And there's a whole cohort of like Gen Z brands that are doing nine figures in like six months off of TikTok Shop. Like you guys should. What are the categories? It's supplements. Supplements for sure. Like get jacked, look hot. Yeah, yeah. Like testosterone gummies on testosterone gummies. No way. Yeah, gummied everything, dude. Test gummies. The biggest brand no one's ever heard of is, is Comfort. Okay. You guys should just go on TikTok Shop and just check out what Comfort's doing. So it's hoodies. Okay. And it's like, you know, price at 120 marked down to 35 bucks and they'll do. So they're like eating into mad happy. They're like mad happy clone or really. Like a fast fashion clone, like a Teemu Shein like Zara type clone. But like really high quality anxiety reducing hoodies. They'll do. That's the claims, man. The claims. But they'll do over 700 million this year. 700 million. Third year in business. Third year in business. Yeah. They're killing it. Wow. So TikTok Shop can totally work now. The joke there is that for a men's like almost luxury good brand, it will not work at all. We did multi million dollars yesterday and we did 700 bucks on TikTok Shop. But I'm working, dude. I'm grinding now. Bigger bolder claims. Yeah. So do you think there's just like there's no way for you to get it to work. Like, you've tested everything. You've done a bunch of specific TikTok creative and hired people who have gotten into working other categories. At this point, you know, it's not you. The shops program is way different than the ad program. Okay, I'll spend 50 grand on TikTok shop today. Or, sorry, TikTok ads today. But that's driving my website. Yeah. To make TikTok shop work, it has to be an impulse purchase. But I haven't given it my all in January. We're giving it our all. You are? Yeah. We're going to throw everything at it. Is it your number one, like, big opportunity for 2026, or are you thinking like, AI agentic commerce? I would say that there's probably six things a branch should be focused on in 2026, and I'll see if I can rattle them off.
Products, new products, expansion. But if there's one marketing or growth strategy that really stuck out over 2025 as particularly effective, what can you share about a strategy or a channel that you think you executed particularly well on this year? I'll share one strategy and one channel that stood out for us this year. One strategy was shifting the marketing focus from as influencer and creator forward to more science forward. You know, we invested over 10 million in four double blind randomized placebo controlled human trials. And it makes a lot of sense to try to get credit for that and help to stand out in the crowd. So for the first half of the year, we pulled back marketing investment 40% to focus on executing product launches, executing channel launches, and building the story around the real work of quality science and research. So that strategy, that approach which colored everything we did from the actual marketing where we put up huge billboards, we invested millions in out of home advertising that said something like, please enjoy your randomized double blind placebo controlled daily health drink. You know, for out of home advertising. We love advertising here. Beautiful. I don't know, you know, I would say maybe like literally, like 0.01% of supplement companies actually do studies on their products and they're just like, hey, this study happened over here with this one ingredient. And so we're just going to apply that. Yeah.
Business models that are difficult to explain in that way. Usually the ones that are most interesting. What's, what's been your guys policy around using AI on the, on the content side? Any, any strong opinions or kind of guidelines that you've been following? We've been asking some other, other founders. Yeah, that's a good question. We, we have not gotten to the point where we have deployed any AI produced content into any of our ads are free and we're certainly used it to help brainstorm and come up with ideas of how things look or you know, get some, some storyboards or things like that. We haven't gone all the way off like the Coca Cola rails here and like a weird AI ad. That's not something that we want to get to right now. We think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the Georgia Jordan Tech game. We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech event Endgame. And those ads like have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty. They fit real naturally into like Landman and Yellowstone and some of the other big commercial brands that we're sponsoring and being a part of. And we are, we couldn't be more happier with what we're doing right now. From a creative perspective. I'm curious how, how much is.
Different permutations. And that's what's. That's what people. This hermes versus gap.com I thought it was somewhat relevant to Black Friday. Hermes is pulling 25 million visits, I guess per month or I guess from August to October. So for that quarter, 25 million. Gap 200 million. So gap 10 times the viewership, basically, or the visits than Hermes. And of course, people are. This is in reaction to the difference between Claude and Perplexity in the App store. Claude has 33,000 five star reviews. Perplexity has 370,000 five star reviews, is number 14 in productivity. Pretty remarkable results from Perplexity. I think a lot of this has to do with the pricing strategy. I think there's much. There's a lot more to the free tier of Perplexity, whereas I was even just trying to randomly pull up Claude, just just to run a quick test and like it immediately before it hit me with a sign in page, before you could even fire off a single prompt. A lot of people, A lot of people use Perplexity. A lot of people use Perplexity. And there's a lot of channel partnerships credit to Perplexity. As much as ChatGPT, as much as ChatGPT is AI to most people out there, there's a lot of people where Perplexity is AI to them. Totally. Totally. They've done a really good job. Yeah, we'll see how they can continue to hold on and scale that user base over time. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Numeral. Com. Let Numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance.
Business models that are difficult to explain in that way. Usually the ones that are most interesting. What's, what's been your guys policy around using AI on the, on the content side? Any, any strong opinions or kind of guidelines that you've been following? We've been asking some other, other founders. Yeah, that's a good question. We, we have not gotten to the point where we have deployed any AI produced content into any of our ads are free and we're certainly used it to help brainstorm and come up with ideas of how things look or you know, get some, some storyboards or things like that. We haven't gone all the way off like the Coca Cola rails here and like a weird AI ad. That's not something that we want to get to right now. We think the ads that we have right now are fantastic. We've actually got an ad that's probably airing right now in the Georgia Jordan Tech game. We've got an ad tonight in the Texas Tech event Endgame. And those ads like have storytelling elements to them. They're super gritty. They fit real naturally into like Landman and Yellowstone and some of the other big commercial brands that we're sponsoring and being a part of. And we are, we couldn't be more happier with what we're doing right now. From a creative perspective. I'm curious how, how much is.
Can draw a ton of attention to the company, to the category. But what else is working on the growth side in 2025? Have you gotten into performance marketing, doing paid partnerships with other influencers? What does the growth engine at the company look like these days? Yeah, we're just starting to scratch the surface of that stuff because the product with no growth engine behind it at all does pretty well. And what we find is that the biggest thing for Chromatic, for example, is to get it into somebody's hands. And when you have it in your hands, it's. It creates a network effect of other, other people buying it, especially just. Yeah, you can't fully communicate that feel, that click of the cartridge. And it's also a forgotten. It's like a forgotten feel. Like I think that people remember abstractly liking the game boy, liking, you know, physical handheld gaming, but they don't quite remember what it actually felt like to. Feel it so good. Last question. Anything you can share around the time Horizon for the M64 preordering order? People want to know when they can pre order their.
Like a house of brands. And that's cool. I think Mars is a great role model. I love it. Do you think there's a finite amount of good consumer brand ideas? Like, do they come. Do they come in, like, based on consumer preferences and then innovation, like, innovation on the ingredient side? Because David was coming into a category that people thought was noisy and had a number of winners. Everybody could name, like a protein bar company. But clearly you came in innovate, you know, innovative product and. And have just, you know, very quickly dominated. So I'm assuming, like, whatever the next brand is, it has to fit. It kind of has to fit within that same criteria of, like, it doesn't matter if the category is noisy, but there needs to be something that is, like, durable and differentiated about. About the product. Yeah. And I think the. The both good thing and bad thing about food, and it's similar to fashion, like, there's always a need for novelty with humans, and both food and fashion, there's always going to be room for something new. The ugly side of that is there's, like, product fatigue. And so you have. Staying relevant and innovating is the challenge, but there's always room. And then there will be different sort of waves or opportunities that come, whether it's a trend or a new ingredient or something like that, you have to spot. But in general, my. My approach to something new, like, we're planting a seed now for something to launch next year, and the. I would say, like, the product has to be 30% better. Like, measurably better brand cannot be a differentiation. If I'm sitting here telling you how our brand is differentiated, like, that's just, like, so abstract and doesn't mean anything. So it has to be materially better than what's on the market. And personally, I like categories that are sort of boring and what appear to be on the surface, like, really competitive. Yeah. Do you spend any time at all thinking about the kind of strength of the consumer? Obviously, David kind of customers are all strong because they're consuming a lot of protein, but more.
Denim. And we always said the logo is going to pay for the women, for the ready to wear. Yeah, yeah, Very cool. How are you thinking about AI specifically in AI generated content? I feel like you're going to hear from fans directly if they are not cool with AI generated imagery and marketing materials at the same time. Sometimes people want to see how it looks on them and so they might want to see an AI image do something. Yeah, not all created equally. Totally. I feel like consumers are going to have a massive aversion to AI generated ads, specifically of clothing. Because if you buy something and then it fits terribly and you're like, I've been like, lied to. But then at the same time, AI try on has been really cool. Amazing. I mean, look, the thing that we all talk about under the hood, all of us, is how to mitigate returns, how to help returns. That is something that we are talking about all day. So I will. We will embrace the right AI in certain. But like, when it comes to E Comm models, I don't know. I mean, I think that's where it's going. Of course it is. We spend way too much money and too many days on E Comm because we're perfectionists and we want it to look great. But I'm not gonna lie, it's expensive and it's time consuming and if all of a sudden they're introducing ways to change that. But I don't know, what do you guys think the customer is gonna. We're nervous about it. I think that customers will want to try on products and see how they look on themselves. I don't think customers are going to be thrilled to be like, oh, I'm looking. I'm considering buying this item and it's on a robot and it's completely. Yeah, it's not real. At the same time, like, the line of AI is getting very, very blurry. There's a debate going on in the video game world right now because one of the biggest video game platforms, Steam, has a tag. Was this game made with AI but the question is, like, what does that mean if one of the software developers on the game used AI to write a little bit of code? That's very different than being like, we went to the AI and said, like, make a video game or like the entire characters are AI generated. Like, there's this huge continuum. And I think there'll be something similar where it's like, yeah, if you're on a photo shoot and there's a light stand in the background and you want to Remove it. Like you go into Photoshop today, you do content aware fill. In the future, you do generative fill. You technically used AI. Does the consumer care about that? There's going to be this, like, back and forth around trust. And as long as you're not abusing the material or abusing the trust of the individual, of the consumer, I think you'll be okay. But you have to be more open about it. And I think that's probably where you have an advantage, because you have such a direct line with the consumer that you can wrestle with these publicly, essentially, and then set a very clear boundary, as opposed to, like, some of the faceless corporations that will, you know, have to issue, like, PR releases when they make mistakes. I know. Listen, it's so tempting, right? Because at the end of the day, your customers trust in you, your customers loyalty to you. It's all you have. So we've, We've. Before AI, we were like, should we start doing headless models? You know, because it speeds up that a lot of brands do it. Moda does it, and they do beautiful, you know, everything they do. I'm like, I want it, I want it. So we've wrestled with all the ways to, of course, spend a little bit less, but it's tough. I mean, product, obviously, number one, at the end of the day, none of this matters if the product is not good. So that is, like, first and foremost, that is our focus. How can we do better? How can we source better fabrics? How can we do better quality? How can we do better fit? But when it comes, you know, to your question about the AI, it's like, our customer doesn't always even want to see the clothes on me, you know, and that's the thing. Like, of course, when I post something or when I push something, it sells. But it sells just as well on girls that work in our office who are different shapes, different sizes, different ages. And that's what we've really leaned into in the video. I mean, video's crushing for us. Interesting. It is crushing. Like video on the page, you're saying, like on the page. A video on the page and in paid. Yeah, sure, yeah, all of it. I mean, video is. Video is crushing. Is that the marketing strategy that you think.
We hit the gym as a team every single morning. We gotta get into doing some more cardio. But how has that kind of impacted the product strategy, if at all? We've got about 500 people run club this Sunday in Dubai. So get me a green jacket. You boys are happy to host you down here, we'll all run together. Yeah, you're right. So the first thing I'd say is the culture of resistance training and quote unquote, sort of traditional gym work has really, really grown in the past few years. So you talk to any of the big equipment providers, and they're telling you that they're going into some of the big gy chains in the U.S. they're removing steppers, they're removing cross trainers by the bowl for. And they're putting squat racks in. Right. A little while ago, squat racks look like a medieval torture device to some people if they didn't know how to use it. And now people are really learning how useful real resistance training is. But you're absolutely right. The rise of the hybrid athlete is a. Is. It's a while. It's like, it's a real step forward in people's understanding of fitness. So previously, you saw a big guy, you're like, he's a big guy. He lifts weights, but he can't run. You saw a guy who weighed, you know, 120 pounds, you're like, he can probably run, but I doubt he can lift weights. And now the two things are merging massively. I ran the London Marathon last year, and I had guys coming past me at like £230 lean, with a ton of muscle mass. And I was just like, man, that is so unfair. Yeah. And they're going past me as well, and they got £100 on me, which I thought was wildly unfair. But, yeah, this hybrid thing, you can still carry muscle and you can be a runner and this and that and that. Do you know what I mean? It's a real new development, and we're leaning into that pretty heavily. How are you thinking about competing with some of the older, more like legacy brands in the space?
We're going to introduce you to other channels where we think you can probably find real success. Yep. How have brand. How have things on the macro kind of the tariff side settled? Thankfully, we haven't had a crazy. Anything crazy in the last two weeks or two months. But is that your gauge of if it has like two weeks is a sigh of relief? Yeah, pretty, pretty much. I mean, I mean, I would have been concerned, you know, if Liberation Day had happened like three months ago. It would have been potentially really Black Friday. Yeah, that would have bad. Yeah, no, it would have been highly disruptive because, I mean, a lot of, I mean a lot of brands today will fully sell out of especially their hero products and be leaving a lot of revenue on the table. And so like having a successful Black Friday is. Comes down to a lot of just like high, you know, good demand planning. And earlier this year, you know, it was just really chaotic. I mean, we have a good mutual friend in Ryan from Flexport. Ryan's an amazing guy. I think he was on the show yesterday or the day before that. We were reposting clips, but he. Oh, that was okay. Yeah, yeah, that clip was from like a couple weeks ago, but yeah. Okay. So Ryan, I mean, Flexfort's an incredible partner of us. So, you know, we hear from Ryan quite a bit of what's happening. Supply chain, the supply side of just commerce. Sure. In terms of the tariff side, look, I mean, we've seen merchants go through. Shopify is 20 years old. We've seen merchants go through the global, you know, financial crisis, through the pandemic, through a bunch of. Obviously through Liberation. The way that we sort of. Most of the merchants on Shopify seem to be incredibly resilient. Our job is sort of to make it really easy for them to navigate whatever comes their way. On the tariff side of things, we haven't really seen any change in behavior. Certainly we did Q3. We saw about 91 billion of GMB through the platform. That was, I think just over 30% year on year growth. So we haven't seen that. We haven't seen any type of change in behavior. And then on the pricing side, I said this on the call also, we haven't seen merchants change their pricing all that much. And so I think that again, it's not that consumers don't care about it. I just think that they're being more selective, which I think leads to kind of what you'll see, what you'll hear a lot over the next couple of hours on the show today, which is that brands really matter. Like the relationship that direct to consumer used to be this thing that effectively was a bit of a fad, like, oh, this is that kind of business. And this is a different this is a, you know, this is Sean at Ridge. He runs a direct to consumer wallet company. No one calls Ridge a direct. It's just a wallet company. Now, I think the advantage to direct to consumer is because they have a direct relationship, they also have a direct connection, and they're able to cultivate a different type of dynamic with their customer base. And you'll hear that from across the board, I think, today. So generally, again, what I said to Steve, and I'll say to you guys, is we measure consumer confidence at checkout and people are buying. It's a great way to do it. Great way to do it. I was driving in.
Sales. Excuse me, dollars per minute right now. And again, we peaked at about 5.1. And it's really cool. One of the other things I want to show you is you guys, I don't know if you can see it here, but we also took over the Sphere in Vegas. I don't know if you guys have a shot of that to pull up. But there we go. It's amazing. Yeah. So we took over the Sphere in Vegas. We've done this the last two years or so. It is the world's largest LED screen. And the idea here is like, can we just put entrepreneurship on stage? And so this is a visualization of global sales happening in real time. Every arc you see is actually a live order. And what's really interesting is that every one of these confetti bursts is a merchant's first sale. So it's happening right now. About every 26 seconds, a new entrepreneur is making their first sale on Shopify. That's amazing. And this is people's entrepreneurship journeys starting in real time. I love seeing this. Yeah, I love the Sphere just as like a. Like a monument, but it's also just. I love it when you find, you know, a match for what fits on the screen. Like, the globe obviously works very well. It works well. Yeah. There are lots of things that, you know, they do marketing campaigns on the. On the sphere, and you're kind of like, oh, well, like that would have worked on a normal billboard. The Black Friday Cyber Monday sphere is like uniquely. Yeah, we were in Vegas for F1, and they were just. They just had a bunch of different driver views on the Sphere. There were some cool ones where it was like the helmet and you could see Brad. Brad Pitt's face. That one was kind of cool. Obviously, if there's like a tennis ball or a basketball, like, that can work really well. But yeah, what's interesting actually on the Sphere, when we first went to them two years ago, we told them we wanted. We want to broadcast live. And. And actually at that particular point on the Sphere, it had to be a recording. You couldn't actually broadcast live. So now you can do it live. But that's. That's basically. That's the reaction to Shopify actually building it. That's really cool. And we started. Yeah, they have to have a pretty high level of trust with the company that is broadcasting live to the sphere, especially when we're imagine. They're certainly not going to make that open. Programmatic. I think the cool thing about the Sphere also is the sphere. Obviously, it's located in Las Vegas, but the vast majority of people that look at it's usually on social, not in Vegas as well. So it's kind of an interesting thing to do because you're doing something physical in a particular geography, but the actual distribution of it is global in a totally different way. And I think having these new cool things. And you're building a second sphere. Yeah, in London, I think. Oh, did the London one. I know there was a. There was proposals to build one in London. I think it hit snags with. With a permitting or something like that. But I mean, Middle east makes a ton of sense. That would be a very logical place to have one. I mean, the pressure and the pressure. Right. Right now it's a big investment to take over one sphere to take. Eventually it'll be like, oh, well, if you're going to do this fear, you. Got to do them all. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, that's. But I do, I do love these, really. I mean, you guys is exactly right in your wheelhouse. But I like these really ambitious projects. These projects that in the first meeting someone proposed it and someone else said, there's no way we're going to do this. And then of course, they end up doing it. So I think more of this is good, but it lends itself really well. But in many ways, I think back to the original question. I think BFCM is.
Insanely packed. So he'll tell you the story of what they're doing there. But it looks really cool. Amazing. And what do you got going on behind you here? Yeah, so we're. I'm at the. I'm at the New York port, our office here in New York City, the other capital of capital, other than, of course, where you are right now. And I have the Shopify dashboard behind me, and we are doing $4.3 million per minute. We're doing 40,000 per minute. Per minute? Yeah, yeah. 40,000 orders per minute. And since we started counting last night at around 7pm EST, about 26 million unique shoppers across Shopify. And then I just posted this just before I got on the show here. Let me tell you guys. You guys want this information? Of course you do. 12:01Pm today, we hit a peak sale of $5.1 million per minute. 5.1 million. Hit the gong for that one, John, which is pretty good. We got to warm up the gong. I feel like we're going to be hitting it a lot today. There's going to be a lot of that. Yes. Good. A lot of that. Excellent. Maybe I would love to kind of get your view. I think people have a good sense of the history of.
So what is working on the growth side in 2025? That's a good question. I mean, it's hard to attribute to, like, one thing. You know, I think the. If you're in the health and wellness space, the health and wellness podcast are great. Um, Huberman, of course, is really powerful. Meta ads are working really well for us. And then, like, I. I'm kind of old school. Like, just trial, like, sending product out, sampling. Like, the business is really simple. We have a. We have a bar. It's really easy to sample it. And if you do that at scale, it really works. And so at scale, sampling means you have hundreds of people out in the real world that are going to retail stores and maybe fitness studios and just like, physically sampling. Or are you saying more like sending out sample bars to individual consumers or both? Both sending up. We don't have much retail, so sending out individual sample packs to consumers and influencers and people of influence. And then events, doing good, good events and micro influencers. I heard your previous guest talk about that. That, like, really powerful because they have credibility. But from a group, like, tactically speaking, like, everything's working for us. And it's not to be arrogant. It's just that the products just really differentiate. Like. No, that's the key. That's the key in cpg. I've. Every time I've invested in a company where I try the product and I go, this product is 10 out of 10. It's the best in its category. The business just crushes and the founders can. You can still make a bunch of mistakes. You can, you can. You can not have the best ads, you can not have the best website, you can not even have the best team. But if you have the best product, it just. It just works. People, People come back. And so if you have the best product and the best execution, you're pretty much unstoppable. And you just see this lift across the board. Yeah. And so it's what's really hard to attribute to working because it just kind of works everywhere. I know where it doesn't work. And it's usually like a price thing, but because our product is expensive. Yeah. What about. So what is the plan on the retail side? Like, I'm assuming it's.
Worked best for you in 2025 or is there another sort of growth initiative that as you look back on the year, you're really, really happy with how it panned out? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of so many things, but I do think that we hit this sort of this wide open white space for the working woman, you know, like the biggest compliment the most. The people that come up to me the most are career women. They're women who go, oh my gosh, my whole law firm, all we wear is favorite daughter because we're offering you chic, elevated, tailored suiting, good quality. But that's not, you know, $1500. You don't have to spend $1500 on a Blazer to look great, to show up to work feeling like you look fashionable, like you belong, like you feel good. You don't have to spend that. Yeah. Yeah. So how, how do you think about working with influencers? I feel like you're probably.