Brandi Dugal 00:03
I think there's something to be said about just throwing something out there to make money versus actually, deeply wanting to help create change.
Narrator 00:10
Welcome to the E-comm Show podcast. I am your host Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetuskr. From groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff 00:19
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E-comm Show. As usual, I'm your host Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Brandi Dugal of The Fidget Game. Brandi, how are you doing? Ready for a good show?
Brandi Dugal 00:36
I'm doing great. I'm so happy to be here.
Andrew Maff 00:38
I'm super excited to have you here. I always love having Shark Tank stories on — they're always interesting. I know we'll get into that, but it's always fun because there's always some type of drama that happens. Either way, I really appreciate you being on the show. I love starting these off pretty typically and just giving you the floor. Tell us a little about your background, how you got started with The Fidget Game, and we'll take it from there.
Brandi Dugal 01:03
Yeah. Okay. So I started The Fidget Game almost five years ago now, and I was a teacher before I started. I was an elementary teacher for six years, teaching anywhere from kindergarten to grade six. I actually would gamify all the curriculum in my classroom, and it was so effective. In my last year teaching, there was a great story: I walked into a grade three classroom where 90% of the kids were reading at a kindergarten level, and I gamified it with fidgets and squishies and all these different toys. By the end of that year, 95% of them were reading at or above grade level. That was my last year teaching, and that's when I was like, "Oh, I think I'm onto something."
Andrew Maff 01:44
Yeah, nice. And that's where you got started with The Fidget Game. So you started to just build it out from there.
Brandi Dugal 01:50
Yes, exactly. It started with one product — that's why I called it The Fidget Game — and now we have over 70 games.
Andrew Maff 01:58
Okay, so it's games now.
Brandi Dugal 02:00
Yeah, it's games now. Exactly.
Andrew Maff 02:04
So tell me a little about the approach here. Are you primarily targeting the parent, with the child as the consumer, or are you actually going directly after a younger audience, which is typically a lot more difficult to do?
Brandi Dugal 02:18
No, it's parents and teachers, educators, homeschool families — those are our main markets. Everything we do is definitely targeted toward parents.
Andrew Maff 02:28
Nice. So what's the thought process on product development? You started off with one product, but you've obviously expanded it a lot. What's that process like? Tell me a little about that.
Brandi Dugal 02:39
Honestly, I followed what our customers wanted. After the first product was made, customers started saying, "Can you guys do a game for this skill? Can you do a game for that skill?" So we decided to build out the entire pre-kindergarten to grade five reading journey. We cover every single skill for each grade level, and we have a game for each. If your child is struggling with writing, for example, we have writing games. If your child is struggling with digraphs — every skill your child has to learn in reading, we cover. From there we expand into math and into learning other languages like French and Spanish, and then we're going to keep expanding into science and social studies. We're going to cover the whole curriculum.
Andrew Maff 03:22
Genius! So you've got more games coming down the pipeline, I'm guessing.
Brandi Dugal 03:26
Oh yeah, we have 14 new games launching just this year still.
Andrew Maff 03:30
Oh wow! And you've got time. That's great.
Brandi Dugal 03:33
Yeah. We develop a lot of product, and we love doing it.
Andrew Maff 03:37
Yeah. By the time this comes out, it'll technically be Q4. Do you find Q4 to be a busier time, or is your busy season actually right before school?
Brandi Dugal 03:51
No, Q4 is insane for us. But back-to-school season is also insane. Basically, this last six months of the year, we don't stop — it's pretty intense. The first six months are a little slower for us, so we're ramping up through those first six months for the second half of the year.
Andrew Maff 04:10
That makes sense.
Brandi Dugal 04:10
Yeah.
Andrew Maff 04:11
One of the things I was curious about — I don't really know that you'd call this a B2B play — is that traditional marketing going after parents, the ones who are homeschooling their kids, makes sense. Getting into classrooms is sometimes a little more difficult.
Brandi Dugal 04:30
Oh, it's so hard. It's so hard.
Andrew Maff 04:34
Yeah.
Brandi Dugal 04:34
It's such a closed community, a closed door. So I came at it with a bottom-up approach. On TikTok, there's TeacherTok. We really started working with and promoting to teachers, and then the teachers started reaching out to admin, and the admins started reaching out to their school districts, and it was like this domino effect. But we really went bottom-up. We didn't try top-down — I don't even know where you would start with that. So we had the teachers advocate for our products, which was great. Now we work with education distributors who help get us bigger deals and contracts with school districts.
Andrew Maff 05:17
Yeah, and the last thing I want to do is get on my high horse about how poorly teachers are paid in this country, which I'm sure you'd agree with. But is the approach more about getting it in front of the teachers, and then they go to the board to fight for the funds to purchase it?
Brandi Dugal 05:36
Yeah, that's kind of what the play has been. Also, with teachers, if something works in the classroom, the information spreads really quickly. Teachers will be like, "I found this amazing thing, I found this amazing hack." So it's happening on that bigger scale of going to school districts and saying, "we should get these in our classrooms," and it's also just spreading news from teacher to teacher, which is really great for us.
Andrew Maff 05:59
Nice. Is the majority of that messaging on TikTok? Is that your lead channel right now?
Brandi Dugal 06:06
I would say TikTok and Meta both do their thing, and then from there we do a lot of school conferences. We go to a lot of trade shows where we're meeting with educators, things like that.
Andrew Maff 06:19
Yeah. So where else are you selling right now? Is it just the DTC website? Are you in marketplaces, retail? Tell me about it.
Brandi Dugal 06:27
Yeah, we're in retail. We're in all the staple stores across Canada. We have some big retail stores launching in 2027 that we're about to sign contracts with. A lot of small retailers as well, across the country in both Canada and the U.S., and we've launched in the U.K., and we have a really good presence on Amazon as well.
Andrew Maff 06:51
Naturally, as everyone should.
Brandi Dugal 06:53
Yes.
Andrew Maff 06:55
So you're five years into this, you're an eight-figure brand, you're on however many marketplaces, you're on your own D2C site, you've got retail, you've got some big box coming down the pipeline. To do that in five years is wild.
Brandi Dugal 07:11
Yeah.
Andrew Maff 07:11
Tell me about the process. I don't even know the question to ask, because it's just — how did you do that? A lot of brands struggle to get to that goal for a decade. What do you think has been part of the success, either internally or externally, knowing that putting out a great product always helps?
Narrator 07:35
Is your e-commerce business experiencing falling revenue? Bluetuskr has helped many brands like yours excel. Unlike other marketing partners, Bluetuskr leverages a team of specialists to ensure every strategy is created and executed toward your business growth. As an extension of your marketing team, Bluetuskr prides itself on helping to fill in the gaps and develop strong omni-channel strategies to diversify your business from the rest. Ready to scale your marketing initiatives? Visit their website, Bluetuskr.com. That's B-L-U-E-T-U-S-K-R.com.
Brandi Dugal 08:08
It's a great question. First of all, I've worked like a psycho. I've been psychotic about work, I've been obsessive, and I'm actually trying to get myself out of that a little bit, because you burn out really hard after that. So I'd say it's a mix of me being psychotic about it and, second, we listen to our customers. We keep a really close pulse on what's needed and what's missing in the market, and I think that's really important — never get too far away from that. I built the company around something that's incredibly close to my heart. I think there's something to be said about just throwing something out there to make money versus actually, deeply wanting to help create change. I think that's why things can go so well. Also, I don't know — there are many different things. It could be luck, it could be forces outside of me that I don't even know about.
Andrew Maff 09:10
Every time I interview someone on this show, I can kind of tell. In fact, we did an episode earlier today with someone who found a solution to a problem that no one had chosen to solve, and their passion behind it has allowed it to grow with really no ceiling. It seems like the same here: there was a problem, there were many solutions but none of them really great, so you put a solution in place, and the passion and ownership behind it tends to have a trickle-down effect, especially with the rest of the team. How big is your team?
Brandi Dugal 09:55
We have 25 people on the team now.
Andrew Maff 09:58
Okay, that's awesome. That's fantastic.
Brandi Dugal 10:01
And I hire teachers. That's also a hidden lesson I have: I hire teachers, transitioning them out of the classroom, and they are the hardest-working humans you could ever hire. It's the best thing we've decided to do. We're actually still looking to hire someone now, and I just want a teacher. I want to take a teacher from the classroom and train them on something they've never done before, but I know they'll execute well.
Andrew Maff 10:30
We do the same thing here, actually. I usually keep an eye out for teachers because they're just so good at it — the organization and the ability to communicate are fantastic. On my end it's marketing, so I can position it more easily with that role. But in your scenario, I can imagine teachers joining with not a ton of experience in whatever you're hiring for. That makes me believe you've probably got some pretty nice SOPs and processes built out.
Brandi Dugal 11:02
Well, I didn't in the beginning, and all of the teachers literally had to figure out what an SOP was. I have my head of marketing, who had no training — she just had to figure it out. Everyone I hire is super, super scrappy, and that's how I want to keep things. Now we have systems and SOPs, and we do things a little more properly. But the people who've been with me since the early days figured it all out, and they're the only ones who survived, because we were really scrappy.
Andrew Maff 11:35
Oh yeah, that's awesome. It takes a while until you go, "I should probably document this."
Brandi Dugal 11:40
Yeah, exactly. It's so boring.
Andrew Maff 11:43
I know, tell me about it. I hate doing SOPs. I digress — there's a lot of train of thought here. What I was going to ask you: what regions are you selling in? Canada, the U.S., anywhere else?
Brandi Dugal 11:57
The U.K.
Andrew Maff 11:58
And the U.K. as well. Beautiful. What's your bigger market?
Brandi Dugal 12:01
The U.S. — oh my gosh, the U.S. is the biggest market. The U.K. is starting to come up, but Canada is pretty strong for us as well. Very strong, actually.
Andrew Maff 12:11
Nice. Where are you based out of?
Brandi Dugal 12:13
I'm in Austin. I'm Canadian originally.
Andrew Maff 12:17
I thought you were Canadian. Okay.
Brandi Dugal 12:18
Yeah, you can hear my accent. Austin's great. Where are you based?
Andrew Maff 12:23
I'm outside Philadelphia.
Brandi Dugal 12:25
Oh, nice. Okay.
Andrew Maff 12:26
Yeah. I love Austin. Austin's awesome.
Brandi Dugal 12:29
Yeah.
Andrew Maff 12:31
So on the marketing side, you mentioned TikTok and Meta. What tends to be the better channel? Is it the advertising efforts coming out of there, is it organic, is it affiliate or influencer?
Brandi Dugal 12:44
Meta's our engine pushing it.
Brandi Dugal 12:46
I would say Meta's our engine. B2B is growing really strong — very, very strong — and I want to keep growing that. I want to diversify, as we all do, so we don't have one channel. But Meta would be first, and TikTok just this year snuck up to our second best-selling channel. And then Amazon — no, it would be Meta, then our website, Amazon, and then TikTok.
Andrew Maff 13:09
Yeah. Have you done anything to measure — because I literally just talked about this, so it's high in my thought process —
Brandi Dugal 13:16
The halo effect.
Andrew Maff 13:17
Yeah, to measure the halo effect of how many people on Amazon are just searching for your brand name, which probably means they learned about you most likely through Meta or TikTok.
Brandi Dugal 13:27
We have measured it, and we continue to measure it. It's really crazy. We do everything with DTC MER — overall everything for the MER — and that's how we know when to scale or push ads. What we're seeing is that if we run an ad for a product, we see a 50% increase in sales on Amazon. So it's really clear it's a huge driver for Amazon. The halo effect is huge, and that's why we scrapped ROAS on Meta. It can look really low, but we just know the whole engine is working really well.
Andrew Maff 14:06
I am loving this conversation. You are preaching to the choir. I literally just did this last week — I did a boot camp with a room of about 20 eight-figure brands, and you'd be surprised that literally none of them were looking at MER. They had no idea how to evaluate the halo effect. We built out this cool little AI tool that measures it, and we showed them how to create it themselves. A lot of them didn't realize that when they increase ad spend on Meta, all of a sudden you see Amazon fluctuate, and they're like, "Oh, I've been aiming for a ROAS on Meta or TikTok this whole time." It's just a fake number — don't look at it, because it does nothing for you. It's really just MER, which is hard to judge because you kind of have to guess a little bit and just hope.
Brandi Dugal 15:04
Yeah.
Andrew Maff 15:04
So, back to the good old marketing days.
Brandi Dugal 15:07
That's what it was. We've grown 100% year over year for three or four out of the five years, basically, and the only way I could do that was because I wouldn't have had the confidence to spend more on Meta, which allowed us to scale a lot more, if we didn't track MER.
Andrew Maff 15:27
Yeah.
Brandi Dugal 15:27
Because with ROAS, you can't scale to $20, $30, $40, $100,000 a day on Meta and keep a two or three ROAS. It's impossible.
Andrew Maff 15:36
Right. And do you also factor in LTV? Do you have repeat purchase? I'd imagine you probably do.
Brandi Dugal 15:42
Yeah, we do. That's why new products are really important for us — people don't need another, another, another Squishy Land game, but they'll want the next best thing or the expansion pack. So we have to keep our products coming constantly.
Andrew Maff 15:58
100%.
Brandi Dugal 15:59
Yeah.
Andrew Maff 16:01
So tell me, Shark Tank — what was that like? Good, bad?
Brandi Dugal 16:05
Well, neutral.
Andrew Maff 16:08
Amazing response.
Brandi Dugal 16:09
Yeah, a neutral experience. First of all, I had a great episode — they call it a "sweetheart episode," where it's just like, "This is great, you're amazing, your numbers are great." There was really nothing negative about my episode. But it was a tough experience preparing, and it was a tough experience after. There were a lot of things that came with it, and I'm really grateful for the experience, because I didn't know what ROAS meant before I went on Shark Tank — I was only 13 months in business and I was a teacher. I started selling, it just started selling, and I was like, "Whoa!" I didn't know anything about business, so Shark Tank prepared me for a lot of things, which is great. But I didn't take the deal. I said yes on air, and then I said no after, because they're sharks for a reason, they really are.
Andrew Maff 17:06
Yeah, some fine print stuff you probably weren't a fan of.
Brandi Dugal 17:09
Yeah, lawyers — and you're dealing with their team, and you have to get along with their team. If you don't feel good with their team, you're not going to feel good with the whole situation. So it was a no at the end, and I'm very glad I made that decision.
Andrew Maff 17:25
Oh yeah. Do you still see — I assume your episode probably still airs in reruns every now and then, right?
Brandi Dugal 17:31
Yes. What's great is we get little bumps. We'll be like, "Whoa, what happened?" And then we find out we had a little re-air. It's great.
Andrew Maff 17:39
Hey, those are nice little residuals. It's pretty funny — one of our guests, and I won't say his name because it's not a good story, actually sees the opposite. He hates when they re-air his episode because it wasn't a good episode, so sales drop off for a little bit and then come back up. It's very interesting. I know the prep is wild. At this point we've probably had at least 30 guests on the show from Shark Tank, and the stories are interesting. It's a cool show for the regular person, but then it's like—
Brandi Dugal 18:19
You guys see like 10 to 15 minutes, but you can be over an hour pitching in front of them. It's a real pitch. It's intense. But yeah, the prep is really wild, and I only got six weeks to prep — they pushed me in last minute, which was insane, because the amount of paperwork and due diligence is intense.
Andrew Maff 18:40
Yeah.
Brandi Dugal 18:41
Yeah.
Andrew Maff 18:41
A lot of long nights. Did you end up going to get investment after that?
Brandi Dugal 18:47
No, no. I remain self-funded, and I'm going to try to ride that as long as I can.
Andrew Maff 18:53
Congratulations! That's awesome.
Brandi Dugal 18:55
Thank you.
Andrew Maff 18:55
That's the way to do it. That's even harder. Fantastic. What about the tariffs and all that fun stuff — are they affecting you at all?
Brandi Dugal 19:04
Well, they did. I had a really good approach to tariffs. It was so crazy — it was insane what was happening in that period — and I just kind of ignored it and was like, "It's all going to work out," and it just worked out. We had good margins. We got hit with a few things, but we've been refunded now, so we're good.
Andrew Maff 19:25
Yeah, that's good. I'm glad that worked out.
Brandi Dugal 19:27
We survived that. We had overstock at the warehouse at the time as well, which helped a lot.
Andrew Maff 19:32
Oh yeah.
Brandi Dugal 19:33
Just like, okay, yeah.
Andrew Maff 19:34
That's always nice when you've got some backup. What's the 2027 plan?
Brandi Dugal 19:40
2027 is to do another 100% year-over-year growth and launch new categories and a ton of new products. We're going to go after it and see how it goes.
Andrew Maff 19:53
Nice, that's awesome.
Brandi Dugal 19:55
Yes!
Andrew Maff 19:56
This was great. I really appreciate you being on the show.
Brandi Dugal 19:59
Thank you!
Andrew Maff 20:00
Yeah, this was fantastic. I'd love for you to tell everyone where they can find out more about you and, of course, more about The Fidget Game.
Brandi Dugal 20:05
Yeah, you can find us at thefidgetgame.com, and you can follow me, Teacher Brandi Dugal, on Instagram or TikTok. We're on all the socials. That's about it.
Andrew Maff 20:20
Great, Brandi. Thank you so much for joining. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Do the whole usual thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff, on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. As usual, thank you all for joining us. We'll see you next time. Have a good one!
Brandi Dugal 20:35
Thanks, Andrew.
Narrator 20:39
Thank you for tuning in to the E-comm Show. Head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, or on the Bluetuskr YouTube channel. The E-comm Show is brought to you by Bluetuskr, a full-service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to Bluetuskr.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E-comm Show.