Episode 9: Grant and Mike’s Fireside Chat

Today we are giving you the Grant and Mike fireside chat as we take a look at how things have been going for us for the past 30 days and talk about some of our goals for 2016.  For both of us sales have been going really well and we have some exciting things to look forward to as we head into the new year.

Grant explains that sales have exploded over the holiday buying period at CuttingBoard.com.  Things are also going well at sister site ChoppingBlocks.com.  He talks about other Amazon projects he has going on too.  Grant notes that container pricing has dropped and talks about the impact of decreased shipping costs. His long-term goal is not to have to package anything himself ever again.

Mike has seen substantial growth in sales as well.  He has taken a major step in his business by eliminating dealing with third-party items from Amazon.  Mike has replaced those third-party items with items that have his brand name. He has also hired his second full time employee and moved operations to a larger space which allows for a better office environment.  Mike’s long-term goal is to not have to ever move again.  He explains his plans to make the most of third-party fulfillment going forward.

We also take the wraps off some new things we’ve been working on:

• Grant has a supplier lined up his leatherjacket.com domain and believes he will be able to carve out a great small niche in the business.
• Mike has launched colorIt.com, which offers high-end premium coloring books for adults.  He will round out the brand with journals, sketchbooks and other items.

We talk a bit about logistics, which we will get into greater detail on the next Ecom Crew podcast episode.  

Mentioned on this podcast:

• CuttingBoard.com
• ChoppingBlocks.com
• Ironlinx
• Fulfillment by Amazon
• StitchLabs
• ColorIt.com

If you have any questions or anything you’d like us to discuss on the podcast please go to ecomcrew.com and fill out the contact form. Also we would really appreciate if you would leave us a review on iTunes.    

Full Audio Transcription

Mike:   Hi, this is Mike Jackness.

Grant:  And this is Grant Yuan.

Mike:   And welcome to this episode of the Ecom Crew podcast.  It’s actually been a while since Grant and I have recorded one of these together.  As you guys know, I was off in China doing a purchasing trip and just learning all about that, so hopefully you guys enjoyed the Chinese podcast, the Canton Fair and Hong Kong Mega Show.  And we thought it’d be kind of cool – you know, Grant’s sales have just been on fire since I’ve been gone in China, and we’ve been doing well on our site as well so we thought we’d dub this podcast the Grant and Mike fireside chat and just talk a little bit, maybe for a half hour here, about what we’ve been doing, you know, in the past 30 days, which includes Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all that stuff.  So, hey, Grant, do you want to maybe kick it off and then I’ll go second?

Grant:  Yeah, sure.  I’d love to.  So, as everyone pretty much knows, like the holiday season is really what kind of makes and breaks a lot of retail, and with CuttingBoard.com, it’s no exception.  We really positioned ourselves as high-end cutting boards and that makes for a very good type of present and it’s a lot of marketing behind that because you really kind of go and try to get this idea of, you know, what’s going to be something you can buy for somebody else that normally they wouldn’t want to buy for themselves?  And so a cutting board, like a very high-end one, makes for a good gift.  So that said, yeah, our sales have kind of exploded and Mike and I were just chatting before the talk and the last trailing 30 days, I’ve been doing about over 500 sales, so that’s going to be about $65,000 roughly for the trailing 30 and I just expect it’s going to be quite a bit higher.  So that’s going to a pretty big month for Cutting Board.  Normally, we’re, you know, not even close to that volume.  It’s been a heck of a ride just because, the same time last year – what do you think, Mike?  What did we do?  Maybe what?  $20,000 for that month?

Mike:   I think it was even less than that.  I mean we were just getting started.  I think we started Cutting Board maybe, you know, August or September of that year and, you know, we ran out of inventory.  That was really our biggest concern last year, or problem.  We didn’t really know what to keep on hand so it was, you know, one of those types of situations.  But I think we did less than $20k.  We have to go back and take a look at that.

Grant:  Yeah.  Yeah, that’d be interesting.  And yeah, so, you know, this is really kind of only like the one-year anniversary of CuttingBoard.com and I remember when Mike and I were doing it and we ran out of inventory, like Mike said, and we just had to kind of reorder on a rush just because we didn’t know.  So this time, I thought I was going to be prepared.  Apparently I was not again.  I’d ordered somewhere on the, you know, magnitude of just – I don’t know.  Maybe like 40,000 inventory or quite a few pallets from various vendors and I’m just still, you know, blowing them off the shelves faster than I can count.  And one of the, you know, really interesting things that you guys might want to know, like what our fulfillment setup is, believe it or not, I actually do Cutting Board pretty much by myself in terms of getting everything out the door.

And really, the trick to that is having fulfillment work for you.  I have a 3PL that I use, Iron Links.  I’m happy to say their name.  They’ve done good to me.  They’re based out of the East Coast.  I use Amazon.  They are definitely cheap when it comes to fulfillment but they don’t really have any kind of customization so that’s kind of the drawback for Amazon.  But yeah, as one guy being able to like get out all these orders and, you know, focus on sales, it really is able to do something that’s pretty amazing.  And that –

Mike:   And just real quick – I wanted to interject real quick, Grant.

Grant:  Mm-hmm.

Mike:   We were talking beforehand.  I think maybe the next episode or the one after that, we’re going to do a whole episode just on fulfillment and logistics.  I think it’ll be a really fun episode.  We decided to kind of do this format for this episode here, but that’s obviously a whole can of worms that we can get really into, and both of us are doing kind of different things with fulfillments, so I think it’ll be cool to talk about both of our perspectives there.

Grant:  Yeah, definitely.  It’s a huge, huge topic to have fulfillment one and I think, you know, kind of jumping a little bit forward, my long-term goal is to not ever have to package anything every again.  There’s another guy that I personally read.  His name’s Chad Rubin.  He does the platform for Skubana and, you know, they do all of their inventory and fulfillment outside of their internal company.  And, you know, there’s a lot of plusses and minuses on why you would want to do that or why you wouldn’t, but I’m kind of of the camp of being able to walk away from your business and have somebody else fill your orders if need be.

But anyhow, so CuttingBoard.com’s been doing good and Chopping Blocks has actually really started picking up too.  I know I’ve been slacking a little bit on the updates on the site about, you know, how to run a chop shop, but essentially, that one’s done.  It’s probably going to be doing about $20,000 for December, which is pretty darn good as well.  So that one is getting up there.  And that one has the beauty of the fact that I’m pretty much rarely ever doing fulfillment on that site and that one’s mainly a drop ship model.  So yeah, it’s been great.

And then, otherwise, I’ve got my own Amazon projects going on and I’ve got some shipments going into Amazon right now.  I’ve got another container from China that’s going to be on its way here soon that just got through inspection, second round, and working on getting that over.  And container pricing has dropped dramatically in the last six months apparently.  I’ve got a container that’s going to be shipping for about $2,000, which is pretty nice because back in the day, you got them more for around $3,000.  So the shipping cost have really, really gone down.  A little bit of a kind of cloud on the horizon with that because we’re kind of wondering what’s going on with the economy when the shipping rates are getting so darn low, but we’ll cross our fingers on that, I guess.  So –

Mike:   Yup.

Grant:  So, yeah, I’ll let you go ahead, Mike, and let them know what you’ve been up to.

Mike:   Yup.  So I think you really, over the last two months – you know, I think business and entrepreneurship’s always about pivoting and just, you know, learning and kind of trying to build on these building blocks of nuggets of things you learn.  So the biggest thing we probably have done in the last couple of months here has been to just completely eliminate all third party items off of Amazon.  So we’re selling, you know, mid-five figures a month right now on Amazon and that’s been a pretty consistent number, which I’m actually really proud that’s been consistent because we’ve been eliminating all the third party sales and, you know, replacing that with branded products.  We’ve been able to keep that number pretty steady and now it’s actually starting to grow again, which is awesome.  But, you know, it’s a relief really, getting all these existing manufacturers’ products off of Amazon and not having to worry about, you know, other sellers getting ahold of those items and undercutting us and doing that race to the bottom thing, and we’ve had some issues with manufacturer’s that, you know, changed their mind about their position of selling on Amazon and another manufacturer started selling directly against us on Amazon and all these different things.

So that’s been a pretty major step in our business.  We just, you know, one day just said, “Look, we’re not going to send – no matter how painful it is, no matter how profitable a SKU is or has been for us, we’re just not going to send any more stuff into Amazon that doesn’t have one of our brand names on it.  And there was a couple exceptions that we had to make based on existing inventory levels that, you know, it made sense but we’re pretty much through all of that now and most of the things that we have in Amazon have completely depleted or are almost completely depleted at this point that were third party items and now, like I said, we’re not segmenting but replacing those with our own branded products.  And we actually are in the process right now of sending 17 new SKUs off to Amazon right now of our own branded stuff between our different brands that we’re doing.  And those are in various stages from they just got to Amazon in the last day or two to they’re in the warehouse right now and getting ready to go off or they’ve been shipped.  So they’re like, you know, within a three- or four-week timeline, pipeline of each other and this time next month, all 17 of those SKUs will be up on Amazon and ready for sale.

So, yeah, that’s been a pretty big thing for us.  I’m really happy with that.  And like I said, I mean all through this process, we’ve still bee growing our top line revenue.  Month after month., it’s been growing.  It’s slowed down quite a bit because we, you know, had to get rid of what was $30,000 or $40,000 a month in top line revenue from Amazon on these third party manufacturers but, you know, my head’s just so much clearer.  The stress in my life is so much less.  You know, we worry about our own products and don’t have to worry about the amount of inventory that we have off at Amazon, if there’s another seller who’s going to just basically screw up at any moment, or a manufacturer going to screw us at any moment, which, you know, after a couple times of that happening, I was a little but shy of continuing down that pipeline.  So that was the first major thing.

The next thing is, you know, we just hired our second full-time employee, which I’m like absolutely ecstatic about.  It was uh, a long process.  I interviewed dozens and dozens of candidates and, you know, came down to the wire between three actually.  Really between two and yeah, I think I made a great choice.  I mean she’s only been working here now for, you know, two, three weeks so obviously the writing’s still kind of one the wall, you see, you know, how things work out over a long period of time, but so far it’s been an awesome experience and she’s really bright, got a great attitude, has a lot of great skill sets that I think are going to work well for our business and, you know, already she’s just kind of proven that I probably should’ve hired this person six months ago.  That’s really what it comes down to.  So that’s been a pretty big thing for us.

And then the other thing, last thing I want to just kind of talk about here real quick is, you know, our move.  We alluded to this on a previous podcast.  We were, you know, debating whether we were going to move offices.  Our lease ends at the end of this year and we went ahead and signed a new lease at another location that’s a little bit more than double the space that we have now and, you know, so it’s giving us room to expand on the office side and, I don’t want to say more importantly, but just as important, it’s a better office environment. I mean our old environment was basically a room with really high ceilings that echoed loudly and trying to have all four people, you know, crammed inside this one room just wasn’t a great work environment.  I’m definitely into like the open environment, I like that, but like having a door to shut, like for instance, to record this podcast, is really nice.  So I’m recording this at the new office and we’re actually moving all of our inventory over tomorrow and we’re going to be operating out of the new place starting on Monday.

So big things happening on this end, you know, and we’re going to talk about – the reason I really want to have a whole episode on logistics and, you know, Grant kind of alluded to what his vision for logistics are and I want to just talk briefly about what mine are, which is to never have to move again.  You know, really.  So with that, I mean yes, we did double our space.  We can ship a lot more stuff out of here but, you know, I want to grow our business significantly bigger than what can operate out of this office, which is going to, you know, force us to use third party fulfillment more.  And we’re already doing quite a bit of third party fulfillment with Amazon FBA but, you know, when it gets to the point where we would have to hire a second shipping guy, I want to stop and say, “Okay, we need to be using third party fulfillment.”  It doesn’t make sense for us to keep hiring and growing our business in a very high-rent district and a high employment cost district in Southern California when there’s people that can do that better than us and cheaper than us and let us focus on what we’re good at, which is, you know, the marketing and sales part of it.  So yeah, that’s kind of what I’ve been working on on this end, Grant.

Grant:  Definitely looking forward to seeing what you guys are going to do in that new space.  I’m so jealous of it just because I’m operating out of like a limited capacity, but I think sometimes that challenges force you to essentially make do and get creative.  And I tend to think if I actually started off in probably a big warehouse – I think you’d probably think the same too, Mike – I probably would be spoiled and like, “Oh, I’m just going to, you know, put product everywhere,” just kind of randomly place it and, you know, not really make my operation efficient and just kind of do things kind of half-assed.  Just because if I had a lot of space, I would just, you know, not really know really what a premium space is.  And now that I know that every nook and cranny is just like so valuable, to me, just having like a third party logistics provider that can pick, pack, store it, warehouse it and not having to go and buy shelving even.  Like, you know, at some point you do like the cost/benefit return of, you know, spending $5,000 on shelving and you go, “You know, how much product do I need to sell just to pay for that damn shelving?”

And, you know, at some point, you keep having to buy more product and have more shelving which leads to more space which leads to, you know, a higher cost in rent which means you’ve got to sell more which means you need more product.  It’s not really a virtuous cycle in some ways, unless you can scale it efficiently.  So three PLs, I mean they have the virtuous cycle.  The more people that go through them, you know, the better they become, at least you would hope.  I mean you take one look at Amazon.  I mean you’ve got robots picking product at some point and slave labor running around in, you know, places like South Carolina, not that I advocate slave labor, of course, but I mean Amazon’s got this down to a T and I’ve got my marketing down so I really want to focus on that.

Mike:   And, like I mentioned, you know, we’d already been using a 3PL a decent amount ourselves.  I mean Grant kind of was going through his numbers just to kind of go over where we’re at for the last 30 days.  I mean we’re at $117,214 in sales over the last 30 days – and there was another sale there.

Mike:  Let me turn my phone off.

Mike:   That’s the Etsy sale app, or the Etsy apps that rings a cash register when a sale comes through.  And then the number of sales orders, you know, because our average order value is significantly less than Grant who’s selling, you know, premium cutting boards that are $150 apiece or something like that, we’ve done 3,484 orders, which was actually 8,544 units.  We actually sell a lot of two and three and four, you know, items per order.  I mean that’s just – there’s no way.  Even with the crew that we have here, with me and Dan doing shipping, impossible.  So I mean 3PL is definitely the way to go and, you know, we use that more and more to ship to the East Coast and do things smarter for shipping cost and it’s just, you know, with the advent of things like Stitch Labs and other products that allow you to automate the whole process where – I mean we have that right now for our Etsy store where any sale that we make on Etsy, 100% of them flow right through stitch to FBA and we’re completely hands off with it.

The only exception is international orders because the process breaks for Canadian and a couple other countries, so we actually turn off that feature for international orders just so we can look at those one at a time.  We get maybe three or four of those a month so it’s insignificant, but you think about that process and just like how worry-free it is and you start to wonder like, “Why the hell are we sending out 50 boxes a day and going through all that effort when, you know, it can be so much easier?”  So definitely something that we’re thinking a lot about in 2016 and beyond, and especially, you know, as we start to fill this warehouse up more and more with container-sized shipments from China and have to have a place to put them and things of that nature.  Don’t want to be expanding in the high-rent district like Southern California for sure.

Grant:  It’s definitely an interesting time for ecommerce because 3PL has always been there and logistics have always been there, and I’m not going to get too deep into this, but just kind of going the way that same – it’s a lot more accessible now than it ever had been in like the history of, well, I guess humanity really, to be able to like outsource your shipping and that’s always been like a major, major barrier toward entry and that’s why, you know, the guy operating out of his garage essentially has been the MO for a lot of things.  But to be able to scale, you know, in the ecommerce business to a huge, huge amount of orders, now it’s completely possible without needing all that infrastructure.  So it becomes a lot more competitive and then, you know, volume starts becoming a huge part of that, and cost, and at some point, you really have to know where you can make your edges.  So it’ll be interesting conversation for the next show.

Mike:   Yeah.  So I think it’ll either be the next episode or a following episode pretty soon.  We have possibly even a special guest to bring on.  I need to talk to someone in the fulfillment business that I’ve been talking to.  I think they want to come on the show.  So we might have a cool guest to bring on for that episode as well and maybe even make it a couple-part series.

Grant:  Ooh.  I don’t even know who this is so I’m –

Mike:   I’ll tell you later.

Grant:  I’m excited now.

Mike:   It just hit me.  I was like, “Wait a second, that guy mentioned that he wanted to be on the podcast,” so I’ll reach out to him and I’ll let you know about that obviously, Grant, and we’ll talk about that, but I think that’ll be cool to make it a multi-part series.  I mean, you know, anyone that’s listening to this show, whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been, you know, doing ecommerce for a long time, I mean this is probably the most important part of your business. I mean realistically, is getting, you know – it’s easy to take the orders sometimes, but getting it to the customer in a timely fashion and making them happy and making it efficient and all that stuff is obviously really important.  So yeah, I think we probably need to devote quite a bit to that.  So any other things you can think of, Grant, before we sign off as far as – been working on anything else or anything new and neat going on, you know, as we end the holiday season here and move into 2016?

Grant:  I would say the thing that I’ve got on the table, it’s a little bit under wraps right now.  You know, generally me and Mike don’t mind talking about what we’re doing for the most part.  Some of the things that we’re kind of seeding, we generally don’t talk about a little bit too much because we’re wanting to give them a  little bit of time so that they have traction and just in case there’s any very entrepreneurial guys out there listening too.  You know, we’re obviously usually pretty open but I’ve got a few other domains that we’ve picked up in the recent time.  We’re kind of working out the sourcing for those.  Now those are all kind of months down the pipeline, but one of the things I am happy to say: LeatherJacket.com, that was one of the things I made a blog post about, you know, picking up a domain for $7,000 and I think it’s worth far more than that.  I do have a supplier of sorts lined up and I’m really looking forward to getting that business going.  I think there’s a huge market for leather jackets and I can carve out my little space.  I don’t plan on being Hugo Boss, I don’t plan on being Wilson Leather, I don’t plan on, you know, competing on that scale, but I think there is a very, very small niche that I can carve for myself and I believe I found the perfect supplier to line me up, so hopefully I’ll have a podcast about that pretty soon.

Mike:   Cool.  Yeah, and actually that reminds me of one of the things I wanted to talk about on this podcast actually.  I’ve been alluding to I think ever since we started this show, one of the brands that we’ve been working on and hadn’t really ever mentioned the name of it because – same thing with Grant.  You know, until you kind of have it to a certain point, I think it’s good to kind of keep it under wraps until you feel like it’s ready for primetime and stuff like that.  But we just launched ColorIt.com, c-o-l-o-o-r-i-t, which is our line of premium adult coloring books, which is, you know, one of the top 10 trends of 2015 and this holiday season.  We hope, obviously, this isn’t a fad and things of that nature, but yeah, we got ColorIt.com which we’re pretty proud of.  I mean it’s not 100% ready for primetime yet but it’s generating sales.  We already got six orders on that today, on ColorIt.com, and we’ve been selling, you know, about 50 books overall per day through either Etsy or Amazon or ColorIt.com cumulatively.  So it’s, you know, pretty successful already and we’re rounding the brand out with things like journals and notebooks, coloring pencils, sketchpads, things like that.  So those are some of the SKUs that we’ve been adding on there, but yeah, I mean that’s up and running and kind of ready to take the gift warp off or shrink wrap off and kind of unveil it to the Ecom Crew audience.  So yeah, pretty excited about that and what that can do in 2016.

Grant:  Yeah.  I’m really excited for you and that’s going to be quite a big market, not just like a fad thing.  I think there’s obviously going to be a bit of a spike but I think people really just have a good passion about this, and I don’t know if you heard this, Mike, but the CEO of Barnes & Noble was even talking about adult coloring books and I’m not saying that you should go try to get yourself inside the door and get on some shelf space because it’s probably expensive.  I’m sure you have to buy your shelf space over at Barnes & Noble.  But it’s definitely a hot market and I think you’re well-positioned right now.

Mike:   Yeah.  You know, the thing that I worry about is, you know, the fad-y-ness of it.  I hope it’s not like a hula hoop type thing where it’s a big thing and then goes away.  You know, Grant and I were in the online poker affiliated industry and that kind of had a peak and then kind of, you know, fell off.  But I thought it long and hard about this and this brand.  I mean first off, we’re going to be doing more than just the books; we’ll be doing journals and sketchpads and pencils and I think that those other areas have, you know, good longevity and just aren’t going to go anywhere but I really think that just with all the studies that have been coming out and the growth of this industry and this space, that – you know, and I look at it in my own life.  I mean I’m a tech guy.  I mean I’m a guy that’s just like immersed in my iPhone or any of my computer products and even I’m getting sick of myself and what I’ve become with technology and just constantly immersed in it.

And, you know, people are looking for ways to get away from that and do things either with their family or just meditate and, you know, it’s also been proven that this is a good cure, or at least helps with PTSD and all kinds of things, and it helps with, you know, meditation.  And, you know, I think that there’s going to be a long-term trend as technology surrounds us more and more to have ways to escape that.  And, you know, maybe that’s just me convincing myself because we’re now in this industry, but I really think that it’s going to be a good long-term trend and, you know, we’ve gone to great lengths to create a very high-end premium product and a brand that hopefully will have a lot of longevity and it’s definitely a big barrier to entry with the products we’ve made because they are such high quality and we’ve used a, you know, professional type artist to make our artwork and, you know, not doing what a lot of other people are doing, which is just like going to one of these ClipArt sites and throwing in random junk into a book.  I mean it’s, you know, hard-back cover books with a really premium spiral binding and legitimate artist quality paper and then, you know, really high quality artwork.  So all that stuff together I think is going to differentiate us and set us apart in this industry.

Grant:  Yeah.  And a lot of people don’t realize that, too.  And when me and Mike are talking to our Chinese suppliers and whatnot, I mean there’s a lot of ways you can cut corners.  One product that I have, somebody was asking if I wanted double stitching for 10 cents more.  And, you know, to some people, the answer’s an automatic, “No.  10 cents is profit.”  And for me, the answer was an automatic, “Well, yeah.  Duh.  Like what’s 10 cents to me.”  You know, I want to make a product that people are going to like and 10 cents adds a whole – you know, it might not make the product like twice as good, but the double stitching will like ensure that it’s not going to tear from just your regular daily wear until, you know, it’s got some good use.

And I think what your paper’s like – like you were saying, Mike, the artist, like acid-free or whatever the high quality whatnot.  But yeah, just the small things matter a lot and people really do notice when it matters and a lot of people can tell, especially if you put two things side by side.  You know, a little bit of extra money on the supply side really makes a lot of difference.

Mike:   Yup.  And when you can really tell is in the reviews.  I mean if you like pop onto Amazon and look at the reviews for our books so far, I mean I think – you know, the first book we put up has like 75 or 77, something like that, reviews right now.  All but one I think have been five stars.  And like the reviews are crazy.  It’s not just people saying, “Yeah, this is a good book,” but it’s like – my favorite review, I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s basically, “You know, I gave this book to my sister for her birthday and she liked it more than a diamond ring that she got.”  I was like, “That’s a pretty cool review.”  But yeah, I mean people just have the nicest things to say about our products where like, you know, you get like emotional reading some of these reviews where, you know, if you just have a run-of-the-mill product, like even some of the stuff that we have branded for our ice wraps company, which we still make high quality products, but people still don’t rave about them like they do with these, and that’s really just giving us a completely – you know, we’ve already had that mindset, but it’s like pushed us even more to make just the absolute best products.

And then it’s easy to market, right?  I mean once people are doing the word-of-mouth advertising for you, I mean it just makes it so much easier to promote your products.  And, you know, I think that you – since Grant and I are both – we keep on alluding to future episodes, but just sitting here thinking that Grant and I’ve both been developing brands from scratch and it would probably be a really cool episode to just talk about like how to develop a brand from ground zero because there’s quite a bit that goes into it.

Grant:  Yeah.  I think that would be a lot of fun.  And I think with Color It, I do believe it’ll have a lot of legs and it’s not just going to be just some random, you know, schlep on Amazon, like you said, of ClipArt, but something that people can get passionate about because at the end of the day, that’s really – you know, a lot of people think of ecommerce and Amazon as an arbitrage where we’re just really trying to like buy low, sell high, you know, get in, get out, the hustle game.  But brands is like the big boy game.  I mean Louis Vuitton, you know, Gucci, Hermes.  Like these guys are people that sell for, you know, ridiculous margins because they’ve got that brand, they’ve built that goodwill and for all of the talk about, you know, the expert Amazon sellers and expert sourcing and everything like that, I mean that’s really like, you know, the majors compared to the minors of what we do.  So brand-building is really kind of your ultimate goal and I think anybody that is worth their salt is always going to be wanting to get into some level of being able to play the brand game.

Now, some things you can’t really, really brand, like – I don’t know – toilet paper.  But actually that’s probably false.  I mean yeah, you can walk into a store and know which toilet paper is the “good paper,” but I mean you can even see your everyday commodities can be branded.  So  it doesn’t matter.

Mike:   Yeah.  Cool.  All right, well, we promised each other, and actually one of the things we wanted to mention to our audience as well, that we’re going to try to limit these episodes now to a half an hour.  We got lots of listener feedback and been trying to incorporate that feedback into these episodes.  So yeah, we’re at the 30-minute mark, so we’re going to shut down for this episode and come back next week probably about the logistics stuff.  One thing I wanted to mention: we had a great listener question come in last week.  We did a whole episode on that.  So if anybody has any questions or things they want us to talk about on the podcast, please pop over to EcomCrew.com and hit us up on the contact form over there.  We’d love to hear from you.  Also if you have time to leave us a review on iTunes, that really helps us a lot.  You know, that’s something I hear lots of other podcasters talk about and never really understood how important that was until we started out own podcast.  So if you have a couple minutes to head over to iTunes and leave us a review, I’d really appreciate it.  And until next time, we’ll see you then.

Grant:  All right.  Merry Christmas, everybody.