Michael Yarbrough 00:00
You basically have to take risk. This is all about entrepreneurship; it's what we do.
Andrew Maff 00:06
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Mapp, owner and founder of blue tusker, 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. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the E comm show. As usual, I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by Mike Yarbrough, who is the owner over at Rustic Main. Mike, how you doing, buddy?
Michael Yarbrough 00:32
Great. Andrew, man, thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm really excited about it.
Andrew Maff 00:36
Yeah, super excited to have you on the show. I love this whole product line. I love the whole concept. I have something similar, and I'm hoping to change soon, actually. So fantastic to have you on the show.
Michael Yarbrough 00:45
Yeah, good time.
Andrew Maff 00:45
Love to always kind of start these off pretty stereotypically. Just give you the floor and tell us a little bit about, you know, where you were at in your career, how you kind of got started with Rustic and Main, and then we'll take it from there.
Michael Yarbrough 00:58
Yeah. So back in say, 2015 I was a software Dev. Had been doing that for about 12 to 15 years in some capacity, and I really just wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I'd done a few things in fits and starts and but I really wanted to do something that was handmade, crafted. I just didn't know what that was. And around that same time, I was doing a lot of typing, a lot of blogging, just as a dev, but also I was doing some blogging, and I started to get carpal tunnel, like feelings in my hands, so my regular gold ring just started to feel sort of cold and heavy, and so I stopped wearing it. And maybe, like, six months goes by, my wife's like, You got to wear a ring, man, like, You got to have something on your hand. Yeah. I was like, Yeah, I know. I just don't know what to put on it. And I thought, Well, I'm a woodworker as well. I've got some exotic woods out in the garage. I'll just drill a hole in one shape it out into the shape of a ring, wear that out and that's, that's what I'll do. And I did. And that very day, people started asking me about it, asking me to make one for them. And so that kind of got the wheels turning. And I thought, you know, there's really not, especially at that time, there's really not really cool stuff, rings for men, especially if they were made with, like, really historic woods, or really meaningful materials, you know, military materials, battleship woods. The ideas just started to come along. And so in April of 2016 we launched, and to kind of give you an idea of how quickly we grew. By the end of 2017 I had quit my job, and we had about nine people working out of the house, and so it just took off like a shot, and we've been busy ever since, and growing ever since. Now we have about four different buildings just kind of spread out here in the Huntersville, North Carolina area. We've got about 35 employees, and so, you know, the sky's the limit at this point.
Andrew Maff 02:43
That's such a cool story. I apologize for kind of looking off to the side here for a second. I had to look this up. We had someone on the Show. Original Grain, where they do a relatively similar where they do it with watches and stuff. And I was like, That's genius. Like, it makes so much sense to have like, some type of style behind it and use, like, more historical woods and things like that. It's genius. So how do you come across? Like, being able to get that kind of stuff?
Michael Yarbrough 03:16
Some of it is like, for example, the USS, North Carolina, the battleship. It's been decommissioned for a long time, and it's been in repair for a long time, just as a museum. And we would buy small blocks of the original teak, the World War Two teak that was on the ship as the sailors walked on it. It was in war and all that. And we would buy little blocks of it for about 50 or 75 bucks a piece. And we were just going through it. And so we just called them up and say, Hey, can we buy this in bulk? And, you know, they said, nobody's ever asked to do this. And it was really sad. We went out there. It was fortunate for us, fortunate for them. We went out there to the ship, and a lot of the wood was just sitting in a pile, just rotting away, because it gets so deteriorated over time. People can't really use it for cabinets or, you know, really cool, big projects, but we can, we can make use of it. So we bought up pretty much everything they had. And we've done not, you know, we've done something similar with other battleships, where we just call them up and say, Hey, can we, you know, come out there and purchase them from you guys, and those proceeds go back to the restoration of the ships. So we've done that. We've done the same thing with rifle stocks and various other things. So it's really just kind of, we come up with a concept and think, Well, where do we get this from? Who has this? Another quick example was, so the Springfield 1903 rifle was used primarily in World War One, but it got used in World War Two a little bit as well. And we wanted to find some old stocks. But we don't want to, like, take a nice rifle that's been historically preserved and, you know, use that. And we found that there was actually a cache of the old stocks over in England that just, I guess, we had put over there at some point during the war. And when we switched to a different rifle, they just stayed there. And we just, you know, said, Hey, can we, can we purchase that? So we do that with a lot of things. But some of the most exciting materials we use is actually just stuff that our customers send to us. It might be something like coffee beans from the place where they had their first date, or sand from a beach, you know, where they that they love, or something like that tree from, you know, the backyard of the home where they grew up, something like that. So we do a lot of things that are just really, really sentimental as well.
Andrew Maff 05:23
That's very cool. How did so tell me about the marketing side of this, right? Because you're not a small brand. You're well into the seven figure generally, like you're you've gotten it up there. It's a very differentiated it sounds like, in some elements, custom type of application. So, like, how did you, how did you start to get this out there? What was that? What was the original approach?
Michael Yarbrough 05:47
Well, I'm sure a lot of your listeners will remember back in if you say, if you think about the 2016, days of being able to market on Facebook or Google, a lot different than it is today, yeah, the good days, yeah. I mean, you could literally, when we started out, it was just me, and I was doing some ads, and I would just be like, let me just target people who got engaged. And it was like, Oh my gosh, we're doing like, 11 12x row as it was incredible, right? And then, because we were so unique and so niche as maybe the next two years went on, a couple of things happened. More competitors started to come into the space trying to do something similar, but a lot of rings being made overseas and not to the same standards as us. But also Facebook began to change up things. They made it, you know, AI started their own. Ai started to become the way, you know, how they were kind of doing things behind the scenes. And then around the 2020, timeframe, you know, things, just with the Privacy Act and all that kind of stuff, it just became harder. But the primary way that we, that we market is is still the same mindset, even though it's harder for us to control exactly what the ads do and who they target, the mindset is we want to showcase the unique features of our of our product, and also that we're really a story driven brand, like, that's what we do. We just love stories, and so we want to make sure that people can see the story behind the ring, not just, Hey, here's a here's another piece of jewelry that you know, where it just looks different,
Andrew Maff 07:14
Yeah. And is it? Is it primarily men's rings? I believe you've gotten, you've started to get into traditional kind of engagement rings as well, correct?
Michael Yarbrough 07:23
Yeah. So we started off with men's rings, and then we expanded that line. Well, we started off with just wood rings, like rings made from wood, and then we expanded that line to titanium and gold rings that contain inlays of the specialty woods and other materials. And so we did that for quite a while, and that was our primary, you know, kind of our bread and butter. It still is. Last August, we kind of got into engagement rings. And, you know, doing a lot of custom engagement ring designs and just things that we just find interesting, unique, just styles that we're drawn to, that may or may not be on trend yet, but, you know, probably making a comeback. Who knows? And then a lot of classic, you know, engagement ring styles as well, so and so that's been taken off as well. So now we want to, we've been focusing really, really heavy on that for really the primarily this year, yeah.
Andrew Maff 08:11
Yeah, it's interesting. Tell me about a little bit about the business side, because I know, especially with a product line like this, it's typically a one time purchase. Maybe they'll come back and, you know, get a few different styles, or, you know, they might want to change it up, like a while down the line. But that's not as frequent. So from, like, a projectability type of aspect, like, how are you managing that, in terms of kind of deciphering customer acquisition costs versus, like, you never really know what the next couple months are going to bring it.
Michael Yarbrough 08:44
Yeah, that's, that's a fantastic point, and I'm glad you bring that up because we've worked with a lot of marketing agencies in the past who don't really understand that. Like, we're trying to sell them one product. You know, you know, for the we don't have other jewelry things to sell yet, they're used to the scenario where, like, you're selling a t shirt, and you can sell it to them and not make very much profit initially, because you're going to sell them five or 6 t-shirts over the course of the customer lifetime. Yeah, and that's just not our model. And so it's really difficult for them to understand that, not only that, but things are handcrafted. There's a longer turnaround time, just a higher price point for that. And so the way we the kind of, the way we project it is, we realized that, okay, it can only cost in order to sell a customer ring. We had to say, what is the profit we're going to make off of it? You know, assuming it costs $0 to market and then what's the amount, what's the percentage that we could spend on it in order to market it, and then we're constantly watching the customer acquisition cost on Google, Facebook, you know, Pinterest, wherever we're, you know, wherever we're marketing. We don't do Tiktok. I know that's big for a lot of folks, but we just don't do that. We may try to do m2 when that comes out, we'll see, yeah. But we really just keep an eye on that, because that's big for us. Because, you know, sometimes customer acquisition will be 250-300 bucks, you know, maybe more than that depends on what the product is, especially if it's a gold ring that's going for 3500 bucks. Yeah, it's, it's, it takes a lot to kind of cut through that ocean of competitors and other people out there, so we have to just price accordingly and just keep an eye on it. The other thing that happens is, you know, we'll work with Google. They actually, they've actually been really, really good to work with, compared to, say, like, meta, who they just, I don't know, they're terrible as far as, like, just, like, working with them as a company, but Google's been really, really good. But we have to kind of train them like, No, we're not cool with the two and a half x row as like that doesn't work for us. We need to be at three and a half or four for these ads to really justify themselves. Otherwise, we'll just do organic traffic. So there's some of that, but you just have to have your eye on the numbers for sure.
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Andrew Maff 11:26
I'm shocked that you're, I imagine you're probably performing pretty well on the Google side. Since you mentioned they're a good company to work with. So you'd probably say otherwise that wasn't the case. But like, there's so much limited real estate for things like, let's just say, men's engagement rings. And anyone who's searching the term like men's engagement ring, you're going up against some behemoths, and your product line is very differentiated. So how are you kind of, how are you getting the Google ad side of things to work and really hone in on people that are looking for something a little bit different?
Michael Yarbrough 11:59
The hardest thing with ads, whether it's Google or meta Pinterest, doesn't matter where it is, is the trial and error period, you know, like testing and letting it run for a long enough period of time. So one of the challenges in our industry because we have a higher price tag item and something that takes a longer consideration time as well, because people will come and they'll design, and they'll have two or three rings in the cart, and then they'll finally make a decision. You know, at some point down the road, it's difficult to go like, Okay, we can't just put an ad out there for 50 bucks a day and then watch it for a week and hope that, you know, we get the right results from it. Yeah, we really have to leave it for you know, we're spending $150 a day letting it run for two weeks to just get a baseline like, Is this okay, or is it not okay? And then tweak, you know, or we even wait a little bit longer, if we think it's kind of, it seems to be going in the right direction. So you have, you know, the longer you know, the consideration timeframe to purchase, if you add that in, as well as to where, like, Google's just not able to track as many people as it used to, just because of the privacy things and people, you know, from phones to going on to different, you know, desktops, from their phone, that kind of stuff. But then also because we have couples looking at rings, and we don't always know which person is going to make the actual purchase. So maybe one person saying, Oh, I love this design. They're looking at it together on one phone, and then the other person goes and makes the purchase right at work from a different device, you know? So it's hard to track that stuff, so we just have to keep an eye on it. And it's just, it's that long period of time of just allowing it to like, you basically have to take risk. This is all about entrepreneurship. Its what we do is like, you make an assumption, you take a risk with an ad, put it out there, see how it does. And at some point you just got to go, that's not working. Do we tweak or do we? Do we cut it off? Yeah, but it's just, it's not, it's not quick. That's the thing about it.
Andrew Maff 13:49
Yeah. So you probably have a pretty you have such a long sales cycle that I'm imagining those attribution windows have to be, yeah, 30 days, whatever. Yeah, geez. And then, and then, of course, like you mentioned, you've got the issue of your consumer and your customer could potentially be different people.
Michael Yarbrough 14:04
Yeah, and I kind of liken this to what people experience back in that doesn't really matter with ads or not ads, but like you'd put an ad in a magazine, well, there wasn't really a way to track and still not really, unless you do a QR code or something, there's not a great way to track that ad in the magazine really, really worked. The only way you would know is if you pulled the ad from the magazine all of a sudden, your sales dropped. That was the only thing you changed. Maybe you could make that conjecture. And so it's a little bit like that. You just have to kind of go with your gut, like, yeah, this should work like this. This ought to be resonating with customers, even if you don't always see the data.
Andrew Maff 14:42
Yeah, I love that. You just said that one of my go to, like, when I'm, like, speaking on another podcast or something, I always say, like, in my eyes, digital marketing is becoming a lot more like traditional marketing, right? Like you can't track everything, like you used to, like, if you watch Mad Men, none of the questions they ask or like, what was my return on that billboard? Like, you don't know, like, it's you put out a message, you put out a campaign, and you hopefully you see sales grow. And I know that especially for brands that sell online, like the idea of that unknown is so, so ridiculous. They are so spoiled with getting to know where every penny went. But it's just not doable anymore, which obviously, actually brings me to my next question. You obviously have your own website. You mentioned your retail now, correct?
Michael Yarbrough 15:28
Yeah, we have a retail store.
Andrew Maff 15:30
Anywhere else, or those that are your two sales channels right now. Those are really our two sales channel.
Michael Yarbrough 15:34
The retail store kicked off in August of last year, and we officially, kind of launched, because there was still some setup stuff to do. Launched in January, and we're still trying to navigate that, like, getting the word out retail, like, locally, kind of goes back to more, like, traditional advertising, things like, is very different than it, yeah? Like, e commerce, online, you know, global, you know, type of stuff.
Andrew Maff 15:56
Yeah, that. So that was, that was kind of what I was going to ask, because, like, down the line, retail is up and running. You've been trucking along for a while. The question always becomes, like, your advertising efforts, do you saturate the market around the retail establishment, and then, like we're just talking about, do you kind of just hope that you start to see foot traffic, because you can't. You could claim that there's ways to track it. There's really not it's difficult, and you're forcing people to come in with coupons and things like that. And it gets kind of, especially for a brand like yours, it gets like, I wouldn't do that, so like, thoughts on how you're going to judge the success of your local marketing efforts to improve the retail side, knowing that there's probably some bleed over to the website as well.
Michael Yarbrough 16:39
Yep, now that's a great question. So what we do track is, you know, how many people come into the store, how many purchases are made, and that sort of stuff. What we'll see is, we, you know, we may do, I don't know, seven or eight different events this year, just being part of the community, we'll sponsor some coffee shops, you know, like, hey, the first sip's on us. And, you know, come in and get a drink, and, you know, we're just around the corner. The people who walk in aren't always going to say, I saw you guys at this coffee shop, or you were on the back of my son's baseball jersey or whatever, right? You know, because we sponsored some little league team, we don't really know. Like you said, this kind of back in the day, you just don't know. You can't track that as easily. But what we can track is, is, over time, the people becoming, are people becoming more aware that we exist? Are they stopping in, you know, to the retail store, and are we growing in the revenue that we're generating, and they continue to have a positive experience here? So those are the only things that we can really track. And it's one of those things where it's a long game, which is people, people in the E commerce world don't like long games, because they want immediate results. You know, I put a product out there. Why am I not selling it? But we're a brand that wants to be around for 100 years or more, so it's like, Okay, we're gonna put a retail shop up. It's in a cool spot. We really liked the location. It actually our retail store here's in Huntersville, North Carolina. It's actually the childhood home of Luke Combs, the country singer. So some people will be familiar with him. A lot of people will be familiar with him, yeah. But so it's kind of like we're kind of preserved this little historic home as well, but turned it into, like, a really cool boutique shop. And so it's just, you know, it's not like we're in a storefront downtown Charlotte, which has got good walking traffic, but it just looks like every other storefront anywhere else. It's a really, really unique space, and we want to try to make it work. And we'll just have to see it. Just takes time. Who knows?
Andrew Maff 18:40
Yeah, are you manufacturing and fulfilling out of there as well, or is it two separate locations?
Michael Yarbrough 18:46
All of our shops are here in Huntersville, our production studios just a little bit over a mile away. And so we've got two buildings, kind of side by side there. Our marketing teams kind of just across the street in a house. And so we're kind of spread out right now, just because we've grown so much and there's much. And there's not, like, a big building that we like, that we would all, you know, fit in, but we were doing our production, you know, especially for our men's wedding bands and many of our engagement rings here in house just down the road. So sometimes customers will drop by the retail store. I mean, people fly in from all over the place. We've had people fly in from California just to come and check out around, yeah, and check out, you know, in the area. But we'll take them over to the production studio and just kind of give them a little walk through tour, and just have, you know, check it out, see how things are done, like how we do things, yeah.
Andrew Maff 19:34
That's very cool. Yeah. What is working for you right now in the marketing side? Is it the advertising, or is it, where are you doing something? Because I know earlier you mentioned about telling the story and things like that. Is that part of that effort?
Michael Yarbrough 19:45
It is. Yeah, so advertising, typical e commerce channels, we've kind of talked about Google, meta, Pinterest, things of that nature. Those work. It changes, not necessarily on trends. But it changes on what kind of ads are out there. This is sort of a trend, not like a Tiktok dance trend, but, you know, there's a certain type of ad that, once it starts working, all of a sudden, everybody else starts to do it. And people just get fatigued of seeing that same type of thing over and over again. And so then we change it up. And, you know, want to do something a little different. And we kind of go back to the storytelling. We've tried some really, like longer form videos, like really, really touching videos that tell the story of a particular couple's ring, and we've tried several of them, and it's just still really difficult with longer form content that we love, that we think tells the story. Like, if you saw it on HGTV, you'd be like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. But trying to do that in an advertising form where you've got a really cinematic sort of video, people are just scrolling too quick. They just don't even, they're not invested in it. So trying to figure out how to tell, how do we tell the story, but in shorter, little, you know, chunks, but that also gives the that really gets the point across. And so that's been a bit of a challenge. We're still trying to figure it out.
Andrew Maff 21:05
Yeah, do you lean in on, like, current customers and like reaching out to them and seeing if they have interest in sharing their story? Is that, yeah, we'd imagine that's got to work pretty well, right?
Michael Yarbrough 21:16
Yeah, that does work really well. And that's how we've done those. Did those videos in the past, and so and customers just had these real tear jerker just amazing stories, and so they're out on YouTube. If you guys want to go watch them, they're fantastic. But the best things that we're getting right now tend to be photos or short videos that we're getting from the customers along with the testimonial. And then we'll just mock all of that up and put it out there. And that seems to do pretty well.
Andrew Maff 21:41
Makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I could definitely see for a product line like this, like how just telling the story is what's going to attract people. And really, that's shareable content written all over it. So what's next for Rustic and Main how you growing from here?
Michael Yarbrough 21:56
Yeah. So we've got quite a bit of growth ahead in the engagement ring space. Like I said, we've spent so much time on, focused on wedding bands that we're really building out that wedding, you know, the engagement ring fine jewelry side, and that's a very competitive market. It's, you know, obviously we're not as niche in that because, you know, we're not putting, like, historic woods in an engagement ring or something like that. But it's so that's, it takes longer to, you know, kind of become an SEO authority on those things. So we're building that out and having a lot of fun doing it, just because it's so different for us and so much fun. We've got an in house jeweler. We do a lot of our CAD designs in house, and so we just come up with some crazy idea. We're like, let's do this ring, and it's a lot of fun. So we're going to be doing that and focused on that for the remainder of the year and next year as well. And then we want to actually start bringing the from an esthetic standpoint, bringing the Rustic and the Main kind of together. So we've been far more focused on the main street kind of side appeal of things that sort of 1940s glamor, or small town, Main Street kind of, kind of feel and weddings, we really want to bring more of the rustic element back into it, because that's really what we started with. And so later this fall, we're going to start doing more photo shoots around that, and trying to get, you know, pair those things back up, and get that content out there. And then big focus on local really trying to push the retail store, and then eventually we want to expand into other retail locations as well, so that each retail location kind of has its own personality. It's a unique experience. And I think this is, if anybody's listening to this and they're thinking about opening up a brick and mortar, I think especially these days, it has to be experiential. You know, we hear all about, like, the movie theaters and stuff closing down, especially after the lockdown period, and it's because they're, yeah, they're just trying to be a place where you come and watch a movie, make it an experience. And the same goes for pretty much any store. It needs to be a place where you just, you can't get that same feeling online, and so it can't just be come in make a purchase. It's got to be something where the customer comes in and they actually experience the heart and the soul of your business. And so that's really what we want to do. We have a lot of fun with that as well.
Andrew Maff 24:11
Yeah, yeah. I completely agree. It's really interesting to see how retail is kind of slowly reviving itself, but with these new brick and mortars that are providing some type of additional value outside of just the basic stuff, like a reason to go otherwise, like, what's the difference? So you always just order it. Try it on at home, send it back. Yep. Very cool. Mike, this was awesome. I really appreciate you having on the show. I love to give you the floor let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Rustic and Main.
Michael Yarbrough 24:42
Yeah, so Rustic and Main. That's Main, as in Main Street. So rusticandmain.com you can head over there. You can if you're in the Charlotte area or somewhere around here, even North Carolina, South Carolina, you know, feel free to stop in if you're if you're seriously looking for a ring of some kind, wedding band, engagement ring, or just to say hi, but you head over to rusticandmain.com you can see all of our rings out there, the wedding bands, the engagement rings. We also have a really cool customizer, so if you're thinking about doing an anniversary band or maybe a band for the guy, you can go out there and just you can actually build it and see it in real time with all these cool materials. You can even choose options to select, like, I want to send them my own rocks or sand or coffee or whatever, and we'll help you build that out. It's a really, really cool thing, so definitely worth checking out.
Andrew Maff 25:30
That's awesome. Mike, thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecomm show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. And as I always say, thank you all for joining us. See you all next time. Have a good one!
Narrator 25:49
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, 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.