Creating a product is one thing, but how do you create a system so you can take on more than just one venture? On this 146th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Ethan King, CEO of stuff4GREEKS/Zeus' Closet. Ethan’s ability to venture into multiple industries by creating sustainable systems is part having the right technology and part having the right mindset. 

In this episode, Ethan King shifts the paradigm of AI, encouraging us to treat it as a member on our team- much as professional writers do with a “writers room”. Ethan will dive into the power of leveraging AI and how to create AI lead systems that can be applied to multiple ventures... in other words working smarter, not harder. If you're looking to take your e-commerce business to the next level, this is a must-listen episode!

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

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Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Do More with LESS with Zeus' Closet

Andrew Maff and Ethan King 

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Ethan King

Ethan King is a TEDx speaker, author of #1 international bestseller Wealth Beyond Money, and co-host of the Kingspiration podcast. He is a living testament to the power of entrepreneurial vision and grit. As a former president of Atlanta’s Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and the co-founder of Zeus’ Closet, Ethan's journey from a starving artist to a celebrated CEO embodies the spirit of small business innovation and resilience. His first foray into entrepreneurship was a school project called stuff4GREEKS.com, which quickly became, and still is, one of the top ecommerce sites for custom fraternity & sorority gear. He now teaches professionals around the world the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and automation. Ethan's expertise in crafting simple yet effective strategies empowers individuals to reach their goals swiftly and efficiently. Through engaging keynotes, insightful books, and transformative programs, Ethan shares the keys to unlocking potential and achieving ambitions at an accelerated pace.

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Immerse yourself in in rooms where you can learn from other people to help you grow. Hello Everyone. And welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. As usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Ethan King, who is the CEO over at stuff4GREEKS and Zeus' Closet. Ethan, how you doing? You ready for a good show here? Hey, thanks for having me. Andrew, happy to be here. Doing great. Yeah. I'm super excited to have you on the show. Your background is nuts. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna love every minute of this. I always like to start off in a very stereotypical manner. Let you kind of have the stage here for a second. Let everyone know a little bit more about you know, your background, where you started, and then we'll kind of take it from there. Yeah, I guess I'm most I kind of my entry way into this was a school project that I started called stuff for Greeks. It was just a branding project, and I had just pledged my fraternity and was this overzealous art major, and that ended up becoming a real company. And here we are, 22 years later, and it's still one of the top providers of fraternity and sorority apparel across the country. And then along the way we started, we spun off and opened up a retail store, and we called it Zeus closet. So we kind of spun that off into its own brand so that we could, you know, it's the same as a custom apparel, but we appeal to a different mark, niche market where we do a lot of like school uniforms, business uniforms, but we also do really high end embroidery for the entertainment industry, like TV custom wardrobe type stuff. We've had rappers entertainers wear these elaborate jackets that we've made, and they were even worn on the Grammys last year. So it's been a fun journey. But, yeah, I've been doing entrepreneurship for 20 years now, and of course, we were actually that school project was 99 so we're talking about the early days of the web and E commerce. So I was like, hand coding HTML back then. Nice, promoting your MySpace page. So that's, I mean, that's pretty crazy. You've been doing it for that long. There's not many people that we have on the show that have been around doing any kind of E commerce that long, because even back then, it really wasn't a thing. So obviously, you know, you were a first mover in the space, which is always fantastic. But even if you disregard that, customization is a bitch, like it's it's not an easy space, like it is. You know, there's so many nuances, there's so many skews, there's so much that you've got to manage. So, like, from an operational perspective, like, obviously my favorite thing, we're going to get into the marketing in a second, but like, from an operational side, how did you get it to where it is? How did you kind of put those processes in place? Because I know customization is, you know, it can be a nightmare if you're not staying, like, well organized, yeah, you know, the beauty of it is, everyone's done something, but we always, always look ahead. I always look behind and say, well, who's done this before me that I can, kind of like, copy their style or their processes, and it doesn't always have to be in your space. So I actually looked at Dell Dell computers, because they offer customizable computers, but they're obviously worth multiple billions of dollars, so they figured out a way to standardize the customization process. So I literally read Michael Dell's book, and I was like, I just took that same concept and applied it to the apparel space. So you can customize within these different frameworks, within these different templates, and then we have the processes that we've documented for, you know, each level of customization, so that that way, even though, like I was the artist starting out doing everything, from start to finish, from sketches to all the way to stitches and going out the door, I've been able to train other artists, because we have all the SOPs documented. Videos and and so they they're able to embrace the style, so it feels like it's still the same person doing it, even though I rarely actually do the work myself. Now, yeah, that's good, very good point. I mean, the power of I'm not, I mean, I'm obviously preaching a choir here, but the power of SOPs is, it's pretty nice. It's one of those things, like, I'm always very intrigued by the businesses that we speak to that just don't have anything like that in process, and it's just constant retraining and starting everything over. And that concept is just nuts. But the the one thing obviously, I want to, I want to pivot real quick, because I don't want to disregard a lot of the other stuff that you do outside of these two brands. Like, you're a you're an author, you're a podcast host. I believe you've, you've been, you've done TED Talks. So tell me a little bit about like, obviously, you know, you're kind of developing yourself as, kind of, like, in that influencer space, from an entrepreneurship side, like, what's that looking like, yeah, it kind of happened organically, maybe starting about 10 years or so ago. I'm a big advocate of, you know, immerse yourself in in rooms where you can learn from other people to help you grow. You know, you got to elevate yourself. So I got involved with things like EO Entrepreneurs Organization, got in some leadership roles there, found myself speaking on a stage when I was it was very uncomfortable for me to do so, but I like to exercise muscles. If I feel like weak in a certain area. I like to try to just put myself in uncomfortable situations and exercise those muscles, because that's where the magic happens, right outside of your comfort zone. Well, in doing that, I ended up doing a lot more speaking, and then that led to publishing the book. My first book, wealth beyond money, came out two years ago. I was very fortunate. It did well in the marketplace. Hit bestseller status in 50 different categories on Amazon, number one in three of those categories, which was what's really cool. And now I'm actually just finishing up my next book, which is called Chat GPT, to double your business in 90 days. So I'm always been about automation and processes way before chat GBT. I mean, that's like the buzz word from the past two years, yeah, but back in like 2011 you know, we had a situation where our backs were against the wall. We got we were running on paper thin margins. We got slapped a lawsuit. We were having to fight all this thing, all these things. I was like, I gotta figure out how to survive here. So I had to learn marketing automation way back then, and now AI has only amplified it. So I teach AI workshops all around the world, and I teach businesses in any space, not just e commerce, but how you can leverage AI to do the work you can do things now with one person that would it would have taken you a whole team or an agency to do just two or three years ago, I'd like to take a moment from today's episode to thank our sponsors. Revenued, unlike traditional lenders, revenued provides working capital to SMBs that is based on your revenue, not your personal credit score. With revenues, flex line draw funds and a click of a button and only pay for what you use. Also, there's no application maintenance or draw fees applying is easy. Go to revenue.com and get a decision in as fast as an hour. Join 1000s of business owners who choose revenue for their working capital needs. Again, that's revenue.com so fantastic. Segue, obviously, really wanted to touch on that. I did not know that that was the next book you're working on, though, which is fantastic. So the AI thing, what is your thoughts on it at a high level? There's a lot of brands I know that have really taken it and they're just like, doing everything they can with it. There's others that are like, Ah, this is a fad and it's gonna pass over time. I also know that, you know, chat GBT is pretty much kind of the clear front runner of all of them. But there's a ton of other ones out there, and some of them, like, you know, every platform now says that it has AI when, in reality, it's just like an if then statement, or something like that. So what's your at a high level for the industry in itself, like, what are your thoughts on that? Oh, man, how deep, how deep down the rabbit? I have so many thoughts. Well, first of all, anyone who thinks AI is just a passing fad is gravely mistaken. I mean, that's like someone in in 1995 saying, Oh, the internet's just a fad. I mean, what you did have people who thought that, but obviously it's, it's woven into our everyday lives so much now that we don't even think about it. It's like air, and that's how AI is going to go. It's already kind of going that way. It's accelerating at such a fast pace that it's just going to evolve so quickly. It's going. Blow our minds like your one thing, one of the first things I teach with chat GBT, because most people actually don't do this, is you need to customize it to have your brand voice, whether it's coming from you as a person or from your company. Brand voice, you really need to take the time to train it on how to speak and how to write like you by feeding it a bunch of samples and having it write a prompt for your custom instructions and then put that in your chat. GPT, most people don't do that. You can tell it's generic, like aI when you see all the emojis and the title case and all that, right, yeah. But what's going to happen at a high level is you won't your AI will know you so well, it'll know you better than you know yourself, and then it will be able to make decisions for you. And the next phase of this is agents, where your AI will be able to just act on your behalf, like your AI will know how much milk you drink, and then it will just go order more of it for you from Instacart, and the milk will just appear in your refrigerator. I mean, it's like it will think for you, because it knows you that well, but so that's why I teach people to get the most out of AI. Now, go ahead and train it to sound like you, to think like you, to know your background, know your interests, know about your business, know about your hobbies, because the more you can do that, then the better output and results you're gonna get from it. It's very interesting. So you spend most of your time, at least in the beginning, teaching it what you want over the course of time, and then it just turns into, like, almost like an assistant. Am I right exactly? Yeah. I mean, imagine if you have an assistant. I mean, like you see those, those movies of back in the 50s where the guy would just be standing there dictating to his secretary, right? Yeah, and but if that, if that Secretary, let's think about it. You know, in that sense, if that, if you work with if that Secretary works with you for years, and they start to know your brand voice, and as you're dictating, they can write like you. That's almost like how it is if you train your chat, GBT in the right way can, yeah, if you, if you train it well, and, I mean, it can hold a lot of information. It can, it can sound almost indistinguishable from you, yeah. So in terms of how you're leveraging it for stuff, for Greeks and Zeus closet, ha, obviously, you know you've trained it up to this point. So how are you leveraging AI now for the two brands? Yeah. So the easiest path, the first thing we do is the content marketing, right? So speeding up things like writing blog posts, articles, email newsletters, designing out email drip campaigns, helping beef up product descriptions, things like that, even responding to emails. A lot of the things that we would say over and over again or take the time to type out, you know, we can just quickly put it in a GPT and have it do an auto response that that it'll put in our email drafts, and then we can read through it, make sure it sounds correct, put any other details in there, and hit send. So it's a huge time saver. In that regard, it's a huge boost to our content marketing. Let's see what else. Yeah. I mean, those are the main Oh, social media. Social media is huge. So one thing I teach in the book and in my talks is how to go from take your long form content, like your long videos, like you could do this podcast, and then chop it up into smaller content using AI, like Opus clip, things like that. So I teach a process where, if you do it in the right order, you could really post on every social media channel every single day, and it really should only take you about 15 minutes of work if you're doing right so you're leveraging, so you're you're creating longer pieces of content, let's say like this podcast, throwing it into an AI platform, letting it, chop it up, and then now you've got your social creative for the foreseeable future, and then you just kind of rinse and Repeat that process. Am I right, exactly? But on top of that, you also have now, because you have transcripts, that's meat that you can use and put in your AI to generate long form written content as well. So those are your blogs, your newsletters, your articles that you can publish. You can go on on ho Help a Reporter Out find you can find reporters that are looking for certain articles. You can use your transcripts to help write those articles, because now your chat GBT knows about you. It speaks like you anyway, so it can help you write articles and save a bunch of time that way. Can help you write press releases. So not just your video your long form video content, your long form written content, then your short form video content, by chopping up the long form video content and your short form written content, your tweets, your Instagram threads, things like that, then you can take those, pop them in. You can do a batch import into Canva and generate a bunch of images with your quote. Notes and your tweets and things like that, to repurpose social media beautiful. I love that. What's your what's your thought on the content creation side, from a creative aspect, like it letting AI create imagery and video by giving it its own prompts. My opinion, I've seen it like, like, it's not the best thing. Sometimes it kicks out stuff that's just hilarious, but it's not really effective. What's your Have you found kind of like that sweet spot from a creative perspective? Yeah, you got to know when to use it. The technology isn't quite there yet, yeah, even with like, mid journey version six that can generate these photo realistic images, there's still something a little bit off in every photo, like you might look in the background of the photo and there's a girl with eight fingers or something like that. You cannot. You can tell when something's AI generated. So it's fun to use, though, in the right application, but don't, don't try to pass it off as like a real photo. It's not a replacement for, like, stock photos or videos or anything like that. But if you're doing something fun, like I use it. I used it to do my book cover, because it's appropriate, right, for chatgpt to double your business in 90 days. It's, it's appropriate that I use AI to generate the cover, yeah, or in my presentations, or something, anything light like that. But if you try to pass it off as like a real image, it's not gonna fly. Yeah, did you use chat GPT to write the book? I did? I use it to help me? Yeah? Yeah, you can. A lot of. A lot of people on Instagram will say, Oh, you can get chat GPT to write the whole book for you. Don't do that. I mean, you, you can't. You can make it right a lot, but it's going to make up a lot of fluff, and people can tell. However, just like a human assistant, I believe it's there's nothing wrong. In fact, I encourage you to have an assistant to help you write. Look at the top writers in the world. Tom Clancy doesn't sit down and write all his novels. He has a writer's room. Shonda Rhimes, all these TV shows, uh, movie producers. It's a team of people who contribute to producing written pieces. So you don't have a team now, you have an assistant in chat GBT, as long as it is trained and has the background information to to deliver things authentically. And I also tell people, like, make sure I don't just have aI write for you. Give it your own actual stories and anecdotes and experiences to incorporate into the writing, so that you're still being authentic, because you want to be ethical about it. Yeah, like, our our approach to to that point is kind of like, you know, we'll leverage different several different AI platforms when writing content and stuff like, I find you still have to have that subject matter expert to kind of be able to review things and edit and kind of tweak. Because no matter how much you treat these, chat GPT is a little bit different. Chat GBT. Sometimes the stuff that thing kicks out is like, Okay, this is creepy. It's awesome. Some ones it's like, alright, let's clean this up a little bit kind of thing. But I know sometimes with chat GBT, like you mentioned, like you can kind of hit a wall with how much it's willing to write and how much you can actually get out of it. But you know, the amount that they're continuing to grow with it is insane, so I'm sure that'll surpass but when it comes back to stuff for Greeks and Zeus closet. How are you kind of leveraging that to kind of put this content creation on autopilot? Like, I know, you know, you've got a book coming out, you've been you've been doing speaking engagements, you've got your own podcast, you've got two different brands. Like, there's no way in hell you're sitting down pumping out all this time. So how are you kind of automating that process throughout so we have a couple of vas. So we've really, especially post covid, we have really decentralized our operations as much as possible. So we have specific VAs for different tasks, and they're in different countries around the world. So like I, for example, I have one who handles all the content, but she's using chat GBT there. Well, they're all using AI in some form to accelerate their output as well. So it's like each of our team members is giving us a super charge from AI to do more of their jobs faster. We're able to do more with less beautiful. What's, uh, what's the the game plan, right? Like, you've got a lot of different stuff going on, but specifically for, like, stuff for Greek Zeus closet, like, what's the goal? Are you thinking of, you know, turning it into a franchise model, at least for the retail outlet? Like, what's Where are you planning on taking these brands? Yeah, so the goal. Now, it's funny you asked that, because at first we were we actually franchised Zeus closet, and we were planning on growing in that direction. And then the pandemic hit, and it was like, just, boom, you know, of course. And then we were like, man, brick and mortar retail is not the space. We want to be in anymore. So now it's really all about designing these online stores that we can host for other people and handle their back end fulfillment. So here in Atlanta, we have a lot of people who come to us who are starting their own clothing line, and we help them. We first, we sit down with them and do a strategy session, learn about their brand, learn the best approach, the best clothing, to put their logo on, and do all the design work. Then we do their prototypes, and then after that, we design their online store, which we host for them. We handle all the customer service and all the fulfillment for them, and we do a revenue share model. And then as that grows, like a lot of people are just happy with that. All they have to do is do the marketing, get people to come to the site. They don't have to touch it. They just get money. But then some people want to go to the next level, and they say, Okay, I'm ready to get my apparel, like mass produced in China or Sri Lanka, and get it because now, you know, that's the the next more advanced level, where they're ready to have a bunch of inventory, because they know at that point that their product is hot in the marketplace, they have some buzz around it. So that's where we want to continue, helping brands grow in that capacity. And whether it's a clothing line or you're a rap label or you started your own fraternity, whatever, whatever your cause or your mission is, we want to support you in all of those ways, with clothing being the foundation, but really helping you with all, all of your business and marketing and growth needs, even teaching our our our clothing line success, people about AI and things like that, and having workshops and conferences and things, that's where we see the brand going in the future. It's a very interesting model. So it's almost like you're almost building out a franchise of like DTC sites, as opposed to actual brick and mortar. And it sounds to me and correct me, I'm wrong, but it does sound like a a great way to actually prove, like, the viability of a new brand being created before they go and like, you know, order a ton of inventory, they can kind of like, test the market with a couple things before jumping into a significantly larger order. Is that more or less the model there, that is 100% the model. And because that's how I've always done things in business, sell it first and then build it and then figure it out. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, legit, like, I remember our first so I remember, remember, I told you that stuff for Greeks was a school project, yeah, and it just kind of sat out there on the web for a couple of years after, after the semester was done, but then we started to get, like, real phone calls, and real people would fill out the form for interest. And at first, all I did was design jackets. I was, I was a graphic designer, so I would, does not do the layout for your sorority jacket, and I'll send it to you, and you go get it made in your city. And this girl was like, Well, no, I want you to make the jacket. It's like, I don't know how to make jackets. I'm not, not a seamstress, or whatever you call I didn't know what it was called, right? And then someone else said, No, I want you to make the jacket. I don't have anybody to make it. I want you to make it. So enough people kept asking, and we finally said yes. And I remember, this girl paid us, like, $200 to make her jacket, and I had no clue how to do it, but I was like, well, she's paid me, so now I have to figure out how to actually get this jacket made and ship it to her. So I'm a big believer in sell it first. That's the true test in the marketplace when someone actually pulls out their credit card and pays for something. Because someone can say they want to buy something all day. Yeah, they actually pay. You don't know. So when it comes back to the apparel and clothing lines, I see so many people make the mistake of just going off of emotion and thinking, Oh, this product, I know this idea is so hot, and they invest 10,000 $20,000 and get a crate of stuff from China, and then it doesn't sell, then you have a garage full of product that just collects dust, exactly. You got to grow the right way. Yeah, I completely agree. This was great. I really appreciate your time. I don't want to take up too much more. I know you're super busy. You've got a ton of stuff going on, but I'd love to give you the opportunity let everyone, let everyone know where they can find out more about Zeus closet, everything that you got going on the whole night, sure, probably the main part, main place to go is to my website, ethanking.com where you can find out about everything I'm working on. Zeus closet, Z, E, U, S, like the Greek god Closet. We're on all the social media networks, and we're at Zeuscloset.com. And if you're in a fraternity or sorority, if you know someone who is and wants to get the most advanced, hottest custom Greek wear available, that is stuff4greeks.com. The number four beautiful. Ethan. Thank you so much for being on the show. Everyone who tuned in, of course. Course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual and rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining. See you all next time.

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