The Wild Ride of Retail: Adapting To A Changing Ecomm Landscape With California Cowboy

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen interviews Drew Clark CEO, Founder, and Director at California Cowboy. Drew opened up about the rollercoaster ride of running a retail business, especially with the crumbling of the digital and seismic shifts in e-commerce. From website redesigns, site speed, and content creation to the return of physical stores; Erik and Drew cover the essential tweaks that can skyrocket your conversion rates.

Erik and Drew discuss:

• From fires to covid, how California Cowboy bounced back in the face of unpredictable challenges.
• The digital shift and its impact on marketing.
• Product features and design elements of California Cowboy apparel.
• The highs and lows of return on ad spend.
• Website redesign + speed, growth trajectory, and conversion rates.
• Community, cost-saving, and creating a collective experience through sharing retail space with local brands.

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Drew Clark, Drew Clark, CEO, Founder, & Director at California Cowboy

Transcript:

Intro 00:00:05

Welcome to the Conversion Show, a podcast that's all about. You guessed it, conversions, everything that gets you to your goal, whether that's purchase, lead capture app, install content downloads, chat engagement, or demo requests. We're talking conversions hosted by Erik Christiansen, CEO and co-founder of the leading conversion optimization platform, Justuno. On the conversion show, Erik sits down with industry-leading marketers, e-commerce growth experts, founders, and entrepreneurs to chat all things conversion marketing. Be sure to follow the conversion show podcast to be notified when a new episode goes live. Like what you hear? Leave us some love with a review. And now here's your host, Eric Christiansen.

Erik 00:00:50

Welcome to the conversion show. Today is a special day. It's our first in-person interview. Here I am joined by Drew Clark, CEO and founder of California Cowboy. California Cowboy, Do you want to share a little bit about California Cowboy? Sure. You guys are done?

Drew 00:01:09

Yeah, We make after sport apparel that's kind of designed to help you enjoy life offline as all of our product kind of has designed features that enable you to put your phone away. There's a dry pocket on the back of most of our products and it come with conversation cards. They're really fun. It can help you start or stop conversations, subtle reminders that it's so fun to talk to people in real life instead of just sliding into their dance.

Drew 00:01:36

And then there's also bottle pockets of package our shirts and robes.

Erik 00:01:39

You can lock your phone?

Drew 00:01:41

We do make a product at all, and we call it the pocket pouch that actually prevents electromagnetic signals from getting to your phone. So this is very dark edge technology fabric that you slide your filter to the pouch and you kind of put it down, and it's just committing to yourself and your loved ones and your friends that you're not going to look at your phone while you're trying to enjoy life with them. So we're kind of all about celebrating the outdoors, celebrating each other and togetherness. And you know, we know our way around a few beers.

Erik 00:02:12

So originally based out of San Francisco, you're here we're in now a popup store in Fairfax. Shopify.

Drew 00:02:22

We are on Shopify.

Erik  00:02:23

Shopify POS, I was in their store in Fairfax. Anyone in the area, go check it out. Shopify POS, klaviyo, really nice. We're talking about tech stack here, so I went into Drew's shop last week. I wrote that up and thank you. I use it every day in the shammy on the inside. Perfect. I don't need a towel anymore.

Erik 00:02:51

I walked in there and we started chatting about the last two years of business. And so for today, at any retailer that has experienced the third-party cookie demise and what it's done to your business, we're here through story. We're the last couple of years and then where we are today and how we're moving forward and being successful and run our retail businesses.

Erik 00:03:16:09 - 00:03:23:12

So with that said, you shared with me your ten x A6'S so let's start there.

Drew 00:03:23

Sure. So a lot of trolley here, but so that we've been around for quite for a kind of a while. We got pretty good at e-commerce in 2019.

Erik 00:03:35

Frame founded in 2000.

Drew 00:03:37

2016 and hit the market in 2017. Had a big bump on the road because our store where we were keeping all of our inventory was basically on fire. So we actually literally lost all of our inventory to fire it in the first year of business, which is pretty tough, but kind of recovered in 2018. And then really the end and e-com in 2019 and got pretty proficient with them kind of in the fall of 2019 and then in 2020 were really soft races.

Drew 00:04:14

Now COVID obviously happened, but we make product that's kind of designed to be outside. And so that was timed pretty and pretty well for us that COVID caused a significant number of problems for our supply chain. But, you know, e-commerce was get so our numbers were so good, in fact, that, you know, we make really unique and distinctive products.

Drew 00:04:36

And we were you know, we were working with a great agency that was really able to do a couple of different things for us.

Erik 00:04:43

Your price points a little higher.

Drew 00:04:44

The range. Yeah, we're premium slash luxury price points. So our shirts, you know, were a little bit less expensive. But you know, we've had to increase the price because raw materials and labor costs. But you know so right now our our shirts range from around 125 to 170.

Erik 00:05:03

I think.

Drew 00:05:03

Shirt that's kind of short Jacket.

Erik 00:05:04

Yeah. And I know Nicki's had her her robe for like about on the pulp street store years ago so. We're talking six-seven years. I don't know.

Drew 00:05:17

The durable great products so you know we make really great fun product. We're kind of unique in that our brand is seen it positioned as an outdoor brand. But there's there's a and there's a fun element to it. So you know most outdoor brands are that fun. Most luxury brands aren't that fun. We're one of the few kind of outdoor to like luxury premium luxury brands that actually takes our product development and our execution very seriously.

Drew 00:05:44

But we don't take ourselves too seriously. And you know, there's beer pockets at a lot of our stores. So you can imagine, you know, the way that we think about. 

Erik 00:05:52

Well, it comes with the Koozie.

Drew 00:05:53

Yeah, yeah.

Erik 00:05:54

I'm like with me, right? Or those watching the YouTubers here's accused there comes with every.

Drew 00:06:02

So yeah I know this is new found product.

Erik 00:06:07

Is this is this Cowboy?

Drew 00:06:08:28 - 00:06:30:17

It’s one of our older shirts so you know we make great product and it is really it works pretty well for online advertising and we got really good at selling it in store at retail, which is what my background is. But we got pretty good at selling kind of it, putting our value proposition together with, you know, creative ads.

Drew 00:06:30

And when we started, we've been on Shopify by the whole time, but we launched our agency, the guy who is kind of the head of the agency was like, Your guys' product is awesome, your brand is awesome. We're driving qualified traffic to your site and is just not converting. So he's like, we have to redesign said we basically took two months off from driving and traffic invested in redeveloping and redesigning the website both for a better brand and customer experience customer journey and brought a new team in to Shopify that was more effective.

Drew 00:07:06

And we then started traffic again after this. This guy had kind of done all this work with his team and our numbers just went the rest away. So we were kind of, you know, burning cash on it first. And then all of a sudden we went from like, you know, boss back day ads on social media, Facebook, most primarily Facebook and Instagram are better now, but we were you know, we were kind of getting like a one or two before the site redesign.

Drew 00:07:37

And that after we did the site redesign and tweaked our creatives a bit, we in many cases we are between a six and a 1314 return on that done. So that is basically printing money.

Erik 00:07:49

I'm like jaw dropping, like I'd never want to get back to hear what those things were that.

Drew 00:07:56

Yeah, I can talk about that too. But you know, we were kind of novices when we started and now I know you converse well.

Erik 00:08:04

Which is standard. I think