[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today, I am lucky enough to be joined by Kelley Thornton of Siege Hanley. Did I get it right? Oh, Tiege. You said Siege. It sounds like Siege. It's Tiege Hanley.
[00:00:43] Kelley: That's right, Tiege
[00:00:43] Jay: How are How are you, buddy?
[00:00:45] Kelley: Awesome, Jay. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:46] Jay: my first question that you mentioned a little bit before the show, where did the name come from?
Silence.
[00:01:07] Kelley: And, you know, like many, we're all immigrants here in the U S like many people. my, family came over duringyou know, hunger, potato famine, you know, formed shop in, in Pittsburgh and they were coal miners and, steel makers.
So that's, that name came right out of our family Bible, 1400s, handwritten in the back in the family tree. I just love Tiege Hanley. I just, you know, kind of one of those guys that like family history. And, and so it stuck with me and I grabbed the T I E G E. com website many years ago. and, I just loved it.
You know, I figure if there's a Paul Mitchell out there,and on, there could be a Tiege Hanley. company that's focused on helping men look and feel amazing
[00:01:53] Jay: Well, so far, it seems like it's working. And so, and we
will get. we will get to that. so where did you grow up and, did you have any kind of entrepreneurial, you know, people in your background as you grew
[00:02:03] Kelley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, that actually, that's a very interesting question. I haven't gotten to the very, very, I haven't soul searched deep enough in there, Jay, to figure out where the total entrepreneur thing came from. I grew up in Maryland. I was talking to my mom. She's 87. I was in Florida with her a couple of weekends ago. She was in the antique business and, I don't want to offend anybody, but I just don't like antiques, like all that old stuff just really bothers me, but she was in the antique business and she was in, she was an entrepreneur herself. I don't know if that's exactly where I got it from. I started my first business, which was a painting company, hired a bunch of my college friends, and was very fortunate.
I didn't realize. How good that was. It was able to, I was able to get out of college pretty much debt free. and then I spent 18 years in corporate and then I spent,10 years with an agency that I created eight years with an agency, global agency that I created called purchase point. So I have had a, an entrepreneurial journey. and you know, and I will tell you, it was interesting. I was. I was at, black Chicago Blackhawks season opener. So, I've got a new, a new player that's very promising,
Bednar at the, on the Blackhawks and, he happened to score the first goal. But I was at the game and we were kind of brought in, you know, some people were there and there's this guy there who manages all of Anheuser Busch's players.
You know, promo, like the whole thing at the stadium is a big way sit next to me. And she, and his wife said to my wife, like, what are you guys doing? She said, Oh, my, my husband has a, has his own company. And she goes, Oh, he's an entrepreneur. I'm like, yeah, she's like, I love entrepreneurs.
And I'm like, man, oh man, where's she going with this
thing? she's like, there's something about you guys. And she went into this whole thing. And, yeah, I mean, I've been an entrepreneur from early on. It's, there is something about entrepreneurs that's very compelling in my opinion.
[00:03:57] Jay: Yeah, no, I agree. yeah, we're a huge hockey family. So my son is, obsessed with, Bednar. We'll see how that turns out. so, you mentioned your painting company, you mentioned a couple other companies along the way. What kind of brought about, Tiege Hanley? Like, it seems like such a saturated space and, you know, I feel like I talked to a lot of people who are super successful who ignored the fact that it was a very successful space and just went for it anyway.
Where did the idea come from? Like, how did you start to get, like, what, just give me the genesis.
[00:04:30] Kelley: I mean, I started getting old and looking like shit and was like thinking, what can I do here to like, turn back time? but it was actually like through my agency where I was really focused on, we were an in-store agency, so we were like trying to figure out the psychology of a shopper retail and like, what is going on when it, when someone makes a purchase.
And how can we influence that purchase? And we were doing it globally. So I spent a lot of time really understanding the male shopper in this category, in the personal care category and skincare was just like really interesting to me. nobody was really doing a good job selling skincare retail. in the U S and it was very interesting to me, like the psychology of that. so I've really spent a lot of time and that, like I said, I really was very interested in trying to see if, is there anything I can do to look, you know, look better and feel better about myself. So I really got engaged with the category. I thought there's a huge opportunity in the U S for the U S market, for guys to learn about skincare.
Cause you know, we just don't learn about it. We don't learn about skincare. It's not part of, you know, it's not part of our upbringing, right? Your father gives you a razor, your mother gives you a razor and says, go upstairs and shave for the prom or whatever that one event is, but you don't, we're not getting, guys are not getting lessons on skincare.
So I figured there was an opportunity to change that. I got,
[00:05:50] Jay: I think it was, it was Seinfeld or something. And he said, like, That was like the 1 thing he suggested. He was like, get us get, you know, get a skin care routine. which is like, you know, a funny thing for a comedian to say. But, and he's like, I didn't realize that until I had a wife. He's like, you know, I didn't even know what the hell to do.
And I didn't either. how did you, You know, what was kind of step one for you to build this brand in this business? it's
[00:06:13] Kelley: mean,
[00:06:14] Jay: it's an interesting place. Like you said, I mean, did you dive into the research of like, you know, ingredients and effects and all that sort of stuff, like how did you immerse yourself in this world?
[00:06:23] Kelley: yeah, I was really interested in the numbers and the size of the market and like, who, what was the trends and what was going on and who was buying it? And when, so I really kind of wrote out. An executive summary, a 10 page executive summary. My idea about what's going on in men's skin care, why is there changes taking place, societal changes, cultural changes, or, you know, creating this increased demand for knowledge. and then what was going on overseas? I really saw like massive spike overseas in the market for these products and thought, well, like, You know, us guerrilla style males in, you know, in the U. S. you know, our marble smoking horse riding males need a little more education. So I put together 10, you know, kind of a 10 page document and spent a year or so with it. and I brought in. My first business partner, who was, high school, high school and college roommate, high school friend, college roommate, into the business to kind of work on that thesis. So we spent about a year working on it. We actually launched a V1, which was all around building skincare routines for guys and educating them. but we were, I was curating like really. High end skincare in a guy's box in this, in a box. So it was other people's products. It wasn't ours. so it wasn't right. And it, we couldn't really sell much and brought some advisors in, talked me through it and realized we couldn't sell other people's products.
Very well. it's kind of like a birch box concept.
So, We couldn't monetize it. and there's a lot of flaws in the business plan, but, we took about a year working on our own formulas, developing our own formulas, and then reaching out to our current, 3rd partner, which is this gentleman named Aaron Marino, who's the YouTuber who was talking about skincare, healthcare, dating, what it means to be a man today.
And he was the perfect person to come on, to be our, you know, third triumphant in our partnership to really help our business grow. He was the mouthpiece. He was the spokes guy,
[00:08:27] Jay: very uneducated question and maybe ignorant question, but, I had somebody on who was developing sunscreen.
[00:08:35] Kelley: right?
[00:08:36] Jay: she said, you know, I was like, well, how did you even, and she's like, well, there's only like so many things that like FDA will like, let you put in to something like that. Did you kind of come to the same conclusion where like, there's a limited amount of stuff, you know, if you're going to make product X, Y, Z, that these things need and have to contain.
And it's just some kind of mixture of those things. And you kind of go through the process of figuring out what those things are and the amounts that go into them.
[00:09:03] Kelley: You know, there's something about like, it's in the book, like how to think like an astronaut. There's something about, being really ignorant. About an industry that gives you an advantage.
and, I wish would, and it seems Pavlov. I really wish I understood. I remember that term that he used, but, we, Myself and my other two partners, I just described to you, Rob Hoxie and Aaron Marino, we knew very little.
We knew nothing about chemistry. and we knew nothing about like, you know, formulation and ingredients. We just by complete happenstance. Ran into a chemist who specialized in cosmetic formulation. I mean, it's just pure coincidence. and it was right when we formed our partnership was about three weeks before our partnership. And actually we had him on board before, before we had, kind of solidified Rob and Aaron and I's, partnership agreement, and we told him what we liked. And we told him, we like, just make whatever you think is best. and it was probably like the moment in his career he'd been waiting for, because everybody had been telling him what to do, what not to do, all of his customers that he formulates for and the companies that he works for. And so he just created for us what he thought, and he did say like, what do you like? What don't you like? What brands do you like? What Brands. Don't you like, and like, what are like the most important things that, that you care about? So we wanted to be, we wanted all our products to work together seamlessly. We wanted our products to be very light, like feel light on your skin because guys don't like heavy shit on their skin. It's just like, you don't want to be shiny. You don't want to be It doesn't want to feel heavy. we want it to like, you know, absorb quickly. we don't want much of a smell. We just want like a natural kind of smell.
And we were kind of going for this organic thing early on. He's like, do you want your products to really work or do you want them to be like natural? We're like, we kind of really want them to work.
He's like, all Right. well, there'll be like partially natural, partially like technically organic or synthetic.
so that's kind of how it went down. And then when he gave us the formulas and he gave us all the samples, we're like, this is perfect. I mean, it took us a while to get there and we started bringing them to contract manufacturers. Cause you don't, you know, make this stuff you can, but it wasn't our, you know, Intent to like make our own stuff.
We just, you know, we're not capable of that. We took it to contract manufacturers here in the U S and they were just like, this is ridiculous. No one makes formulas like this. And we didn't
know what to say. Like we, we just honestly did not know what to say. We're like, yeah, we've been working years on those.
Just that's what we want you to quote. Like, they're like, we can substitute this out and put this in. We're like, no,don't do anything like give us exactly what's in the formula. And, And it real product, good product, really, you know, you know, this from your background, having like really good product means a lot.
if we hadn't built such great products. if our chemist hadn't built such great products, we would not have a great company. The fact that he built great products and we gave him the license to do it, you know, was really like that and having a voice in the market. Those two things were like gold to us and we didn't realize it, you know, until many years later.
[00:12:24] Jay: happened? I need to know the rest of that story. I mean, when you tell them like, just make it, what do they say?
[00:12:29] Kelley: Yeah. I mean, I am not like pulling punches here. This is exactly how it
works. It's like, they would be like, like, we don't need this. We can take stuff out. More like. We honestly didn't, had no idea what they were talking about. So the only answer we could give them was no, just follow it. Exactly. That's
exactly what we want. I mean, the, I know, you know, 10 times, a hundred times much more now that it's not, there's not only like an ingredient list, but like there could be an ingredient like niacinamide. And we will specify the ingredient that we want, like this company's niacinamide. But then there's like a breakdown of all the things that are in that specific company's niacinamide.
Like, you know, very specific thing there. So there's like an inky number, which is like the number of that product. And then there's like a quantitative and qualitative analysis of each item in that thing.
And like today we'll, we will like specify it. Each one of those quants, like of each ingredient. But back then we were like, don't change anything. And our answer had to be that because we wouldn't have been able to. To say like, yeah, swap this out or swap that out.
anyway, when we launched our product,our company has just done very well, as you mentioned earlier, we've been very fortunate.
We just shipped our 2 millionth box, about 30 days ago. And, you know, we, you know, we very fortunate. I mean, all time,I don't know the number, but it's probably close to a hundred million dollars in sales all time. And, And it has to do with like the product working for the consumer, like the product does perform outstandingly well for the consumer.
So if it,
if it didn't perform well, guys wouldn't come back. So yeah, I, that's the story. I mean, we, since then, you know, we've been working cause it's, you know, eight years ago, we're seven years old in July, but we made these products, you know, a year and a half before.
so now we're, you know, now we are looking at. Working on our formulas and making sure that we've got like the latest chemistry in our formulas and things of that nature. But we still, to this day, haven't reduced the cost of making product. Our products very expensive to make. We sell it for very reasonable price point. And it's, it costs us, you know, it's a very, it's a very high, it's very expensive compared if you go buy anything from Dove plus men or anything, you know, that's out there at all, that's in, you know, any retail store, they just don't use that high quality ingredients.
Like, and how can I say that? Like I go and I, you know, we make our product at some of these places where these companies make their product. we received some, our eyes, our facial serum in. From our vendor out of LA and goop, which is like, you know, a huge women brand. I have Jenna, Paltrow, Gwyneth Paltrow's brand. And she makes her product in the same, you know, same manufacturing plant. You know, I mean, we have her, we, we received her product. I don't know if I can say this. I'm going to say it anyway. We received by accident.
[00:15:36] Jay: She's not listening, by the way, I'm
sure she's not listening.
[00:15:38] Kelley: she doesn't give a shit what we
say. we received 11 pallets of her product on our loading dock about three weeks ago.
And it was supposed to be a shipment of our serum,our facial serum. And, that product is like, we, you know, we open up our shipping department, you know, our transportation department, open up the pallets, look the low tags, said these, this product's not ours. So. Open up the boxes, verified, pulled out Goops product.
It's a facial serum. Said, yeah, this is definitely not ours. We looked at all the product, all the formulation of the product and like the, you know, and the per ounce size is identical. It's, as a matter of fact it's in this, almost the same packaging from the same, and it's made in the same place that we make ours.
Our, we have their own, our own formula. They have their own formula. They sell theirs for $135 for 0.5 ounces. 135. We sell it to our guys that are on subscription for like 1999 and we sell it like, you know, our MSRP is 27. It's the same fricking product. I mean, like it's not, you know, the formula is not the same. I don't mean,
to represent it that it has the same, very typical ingredients made in the same, Place high end place, high end ingredients. They are selling there's one 35. We sell ours for 27 retail, our face mask, which is our number one selling product. Also made in LA a different company. it there, there's a company called Glam Glow, which is like, kind of like the number one women's face mask.
They sell it for a 0.1 0.9 ounces for $85. Our formula is better by about seven 8% based on the ingredients and the things that we use. we set large for 23 point 99 for two ounces, the exact same. So it's just. We have really good products and guys buy them and then they say, Oh shit, these products work really well.
And it's because we have really good ingredients and
we pay a lot of money for it. And we make them in the same factory that a lot of these big companies make their stuff in. so yeah,
[00:17:36] Jay: That's very,
[00:17:37] Kelley: got me going there, Jay.
[00:17:39] Jay: that's super interesting. I appreciate the, like, that's the type of stuff. I like to, I mean, you don't hear that, right? Like, nobody's going to, like, if I look up your company, or I look up any of those other companies, I would never find that story anywhere, or even any information about the ingredients of formulation or the manufacturing.
[00:17:56] Kelley: Right? So it's all super, super enlightening. Yeah. I mean, we were, I was at a plant in Indiana and, they're making all of like Johnson and Johnson's haircare products and they, like what they do is they analyze your product and they took all of our products and put them apart and they said, Hey, you know, they're like, your products is amazing.
We said, thank you very much. They go, this is the exact words from their lead chemist. They said, you know, at this company, I'm not going to say the company and at this company, they have like mostly water in their products. And then they have some fufu dust sprinkled in,
literally verbatim, the word that the words that she used, they have some fufu duff, like, you know, Agua Pouy or aloe something or vitamin E and that's it,
that's all they've got.
So it makes a difference.
[00:18:41] Jay: that's wild. well, I mean, you've got such a great background in this stuff. I mean, how, and there's probably 50 million layers to all this, but how are you kind of using all that expertise to go after men and like, how did you, how have you refined who you're. Your target is who your ICP is over the years.
Like, has it changed since when you first started? Like, have you honed in like very specifically like age wise, demographic wise, like how have you done that? Has that changed as you guys have learned more about your product and more about your customer?
[00:19:14] Kelley: Yeah. Yes. And no, I mean, we know, but so we're a digital marketing company. We have, you know, insane analytics and attributions. We really know we have a very good sense of like, Where our guys are coming from and a lot of demographic information on them. we spent, you know, hundreds of hours researching them qualitatively and quantitatively, and, and we use different messages for different guys, but our, and in the beginning, I actually thought the guys would be older, more like me, so late thirties into the fifties, but. And this is a specific answer to your question. That's what I thought. I, like, I wanted to go after guys that were like me that realized they need help. what happened in the very beginning, like year one and year two, we had a lot of younger guys and I was actually really upset by that. I'm like, this is terrible.
These aren't our guys, blah, blah, blah. I was very wrong, by the way, that was, you know, really an ignorant, early observation for me. We got to get back to the older guys. But it was because of the channels that we were communicating on. We were communicating with, you know, through channels that were really resonating with younger guys were on those channels. So, you know, I wasn't like on YouTube. You know, eight years ago, unless I had to fix my wash machine,
Right. You go on YouTube, you know, the wash machine doesn't work. you got to fix it. You got to get it done tonight. Cause you're going to be on a plane to go visit somebody tomorrow. So you're just like ripping the thing apart, watching some YouTube videos.
So. we, you know, early on, we were all over like YouTube and social channels. Like today, Tik Tok's very young.
Facebook was very young, but it's gotten so much older. Like, so there's a lot of older people now, like, you know, so yeah, we know who our customers are. We have a very good sense for what resonates with different age groups.
Our biggest cohort goes from 18 to 31. So we have hundreds of thousands of guys between 18 And 31. And then between 31 and like really 70, we have like another couple of hundred thousand guys. So there's a huge gap, you know, between 30 and 70, like 40 years, we have like half of our population.
[00:21:25] Jay: will How are you kind of traditionally marking it, marketing it? Is it traditional marketing these days? Is it like, is it, you know, are you dumping more money into SEO stuff? Are you dumping more stuff into Amazon? Like how are you guys kind of trying, it may have changed. Like you said, as you started, you was like the younger YouTube guys and you're, are you still doing that?
Like, how are you guys attracting new
[00:21:47] Kelley: Yeah. We're spending millions of dollars on training. You know, on, it's funny you say traditional marketing. I don't know, like,
you know, I'm not sure how, what that really means anymore. But we spend millions of dollars on, you know, on marketing and we spend it across, you know, a wide variety of chat of digital channels. our biggest bucket of. Spend is in what we talk about as an influencer marketing, which is in for us, that's a long form, digital content. So integrations into, you know, a guy talking about a specific topic or potentially a woman talking about a specific topic, or could be in shorter form, you know, you.
User generated influencer content. we spend a lot of money there, but then we spend money across the board, like in everything from, you know, our website to affiliates, to, you know, SEO and paid social. and we spend a lot of time, you know, in organic market, we spend a lot of money on organic, which is like a brand building, you know, platform that's just about building our tribe. so, and then it goes into, we're very subscription based. So we spend a lot of money on what we call success marketing, which is. You know, making sure that Jay and is very happy with us, that he gets great experience with our customers, experience team that he gets like a pretty unique experience in his box when he receives our product and so forth and so on.
[00:23:18] Jay: yeah, I was just mentioned, I was literally looking for exactly what you guys do. You came up on Amazon. I still need to try you guys. but I think there's You know, it's just, it's impressive to hear that story and then see it be so well received online and, you know, whatever you're doing is working, right?
All those 50 million different things you just mentioned, which I think is the kind of the spinning plates that a lot of business owners deal with is like having all these different channels. Moving, but doing them in a way that generates revenue, right? Cause it doesn't pay to be busy. It pays to like find the right channel, spend the right money on it, and then get some ROI, which it sounds like you guys have been pretty successful doing.
[00:24:03] Kelley: Yeah. I mean, it's really super hard. So you need to be dialed into every channel. The amount of fluctuation we see in channels is daily and weekly, monthly. We're looking at every channel every day. You know, I'll get a report that, that line that like line by line, every single channel that we spend money in how we performed yesterday in that channel.
So, and we're constantly just like, like a DJ, like slightly turning the dials a little bit to see if we can get it right. We're constantly fine tuning it to get, to see if we can get it, get our marketing mix. Right. Cause it changes and it changes in season too. I mean, it changes for all different types of reasons. you know, we're coming up in our, in a busy time for us. not our busiest time, but a very busy time in Q4 and, you know, and people. Our competitors will be starting to spend millions of dollars. So they'll like literally just kind of drowned us out of the market. so we really just want to be, you know, in the mix, but be careful.
I mean, we could lose so much money in a day or two. If we're not being really careful, you just get outbid on everything.
[00:25:11] Jay: Right. Yeah, I think that's and I think that's a big, you know, reason why a lot of people just stay away from all that. Right. They're just like, I don't even want to deal with SEO. I don't want to deal with whatever because you're afraid of being drowned out. Um,if you had to start over again tomorrow, what would be step 1?
[00:25:31] Kelley: and regardless of what business it's in, right, I would say like, without a doubt, 150%, like, how are you going to sell, you know, your fill in the blank, your
Service.
or your product? Like, how are you going to sell it? And will someone be willing to buy it? So I think like That is so critical.
I was with my advisor board in the story that I was describing earlier, the first time we went out, Tiege versus V1 and, a guy on that board that I put together, who I still talk to regularly, his name's Joe. He said to me, look, just tell me one box. I thought he was like such an ass. He's like, and I love the guy.
He's like, just sell one box to like, not a family and friend and come back and tell me that you sold one box. And I'm like, okay, Joe, you know, you're an ass. I'll sell one box. I'll be done tomorrow. it, you know, it took weeks and weeks to happen. so it's like, you know, you really have to have that dialed in.
Like, how are you going to sell your services? How are you going to sell your product? and is there really, truly like a demand there for it? so you gotta figure that out, you know, and I would say to do that, you can do it. On the real cheap and down low. And we actually do it right now too.
Like we'll not with our product, but with like things that we'll give away, you know, with
us, with an order, we'll like buy very low quality quantity of something and just, and it may not even be like branded, like our teach Hanley brand,
and we'll see if someone like, if it's as a free gift, will people buy it as an
example, and then if it works well for us, then we'll.
You know, spend time to develop it so you can growth hack your way into figuring out whether or not your idea is sellable by coming up with some scaled back version And see whether or not you can sell it before you really go all in on whatever it is you think you're doing.
[00:27:24] Jay: think a lot of. People get in trouble because they think people are going to buy stuff, and think they have the greatest idea, but don't know that anybody's going to actually buy it before they go out and spend a bunch of, sweat equity and real equity. Um,last question. who was your first customer?
Who was that non friend and family member? How did you, and even if it's not the exact person, how did you make that sale? Silence.
[00:28:16] Kelley: this week. We're doing this. Yeah. Selected our packaging this week. We've done all this stuff. So, and we were signing up guys to buy our product during that period of time. And so we had a list of thousands of guys to buy our product when the day we, you know, we launched the new site. andwe actually gave, I think it was like a. One to five day period of time. I don't remember exactly how much it was. We gave everybody like a day one VIP coupon that they would be like, get 10 percent off for their entire life. And we still have, and I think there was like a thousand guys, 800 to a thousand guys that got like this day one VIP. And we still have. Like hundreds of those guys still buying from us regularly. So, it was just really, you know, man, I love those guys. I mean, they're our best customers or some of our best customers that have been with us for, you know, a long time. That's how we got started.
[00:29:15] Jay: That's a great idea. I love the 10 percent for life. all right, well, I feel like I could talk to you for about five days about all the cool stuff that you got, but let's, let's end it there, Kelley, if you want to find Tiege, if you want to reach out to you as well, how do they do that?
[00:29:28] Kelley: I mean, hit me up on LinkedIn. I publish a lot of content there, which is meant a hundred percent meant just to help people, based on the experience that I've had in my career. you can go to tiege. com and backslash first customer podcast and get, you know, a great offer. I think it's, I think it is a 30 percent offer, which is our best offer out there. so I encourage anybody that's interested in thinking about a skincare journey, you know, to go to teach. com, backslash first customer podcast and try our product out and let me know what you think, on LinkedIn.
[00:29:59] Jay: Beautiful. And I will definitely post that link. And, dude, you're awesome. I love the story. You've got a great journey. It just feels like, you know, kind of, you figured out a lot of things that people are trying to figure out. So, there's a lot of useful stuff, in this episode. So thank you for being on brother and, have a good rest of your week.
We'll talk again soon. All right.
[00:30:16] Kelley: You too. Thanks. Bye
[00:30:16] Jay: Thanks, Kelley.