Welcome to DTC Pod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter, join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok. And IG organic creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a D to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final Loop is a real time accounting service built by D to C founders. For D to C. Founders try final loop. Completely free. No credit card required. Just visit Finalloop.com D to CPOd and get 14 days free and a two month PnL within 24 hours with all the Ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. DTC Pod today we're joined by Ethan Didascalu, who is the founder of July. So, Ethan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about July?

Gabe, can I just comment? Very great pronunciation of my name. Most Americans get that totally wrong, and you smashed it. So the background of July, we're a D to C luggage brand. We started back in 2019. We're here to do some great things in the product space. We're product guys by default. So myself and my co founder, Richard We, are we're product guys. We're hands on and we go deep on that stuff. So for us, building travel, accessories and products that try and differentiate and beat the game a bit is is what we've been about. So, you know, since 2019, it's been an interesting few years, thanks to COVID, but we're absolutely and the products we're splashing and the brand is resonating well.

So, yeah, why don't we go back a little bit? Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and then kind of the inspiration to build the travel brand.

Yeah, my background is in advertising. So I used to work as a strategy director for an agency called Ogilvy, a big multinational agency. And my business partner was a product guy. He was in manufacturing. He used to supply a few other brands back when he was in uni, then went out and did his own thing in furniture. And so we sort of got together, he's sort of this like, manufacturing supply chain guy. And I've always been this the marketing strategy guy. And so we sort of got together, having known each other through the networks and just through the local coffee shop. Actually, it's the one shop that most people went to. If you're based out of Collingwood in Melbourne, there was this one shop called a coffee and that's how we sort of met and we used to just connect and talk about all the things that we were doing. For me, I did the advertising thing and then went off and did coffee subscriptions and a few other entrepreneurial activities that were fun exercises in their own right. But when we got together, we discussed the opportunity about tackling a big, juicy category. And for us in particular for the APAC region, it's 100% dominated by Samsung and its multitude of brands. And so for us and even globally, right, samsung globally is like 23, 24% market share. And then second is LVMH at around eight or 9%, and then everyone else is other. So the reality was that this is a heavily consolidated market with a lot of opportunity to create differentiation and we felt we could create something quite special. Having a guy who knows how to make things knows how to make things extremely well, and then having a guy who, as I like to put the marketing side, just coloring in. So we sort of said, yeah, we can make some really nice stuff together. Let's build a brand around that. And for us, even the name July was that mark. For us, northern hemispheres in summer, it's when you guys will go on holidays, it's when Europeans go on holidays and it's when Australians in particular leave winter to try and go to like, Italy or the Greek islands or more enjoyable, enjoyable places, warmer places. So it has that beautiful travel connotation from day one. And we're extremely lucky that we could turn that into a brand for ourselves.

Yeah, the name is great. I'm actually lucky enough to be born in July, so I love everything about July summers, everything. The grand. I knew I liked your name.

I knew I liked you.

I think that's really great to start, samsung has a massive market dominance. You guys are like, okay, we can bring in some fresh perspective, bring in a great brand and kind of attack some of that market share, especially in the APAC region. But why don't you tell us a little bit about leading up to the launch, right? So once you decide, okay, there might be an opportunity to go after here, what were some of the next steps and what went into actually making the brand July a reality?

Early days, you get these ideas and you've spoken to a lot of founders, right? A lot of the time these ideas just come up in conversation and then it kind of progresses a little bit and a little bit and a certain point you guys sit down at a table and sort of go, are we actually doing this are we going to be international traveling suitcase salesmen? Is that going to be our jam? And so we were at that point where we were discussing it. I had my in laws in town, and it was the day that they were leaving. So after I had met up with Richard and discussed it, I took them to the airport, and I was telling him, my father in law is a diplomat, an asian ASEAN political operative. And so he travels a lot. And so I spoke to him about it. I was like, roger, what do you think? What do you think about luggage? Do you think it's a good category for us to enter into? We know we can make it well. And he sort of guided me. He's like, look, I had this suitcase for over 15 years. I used my companion. I traveled. I love this thing. I love the wheels. I love the handles. And so you start to realize that luggage, I mean, we knew ourselves, but luggage is actually quite a passionate point for a lot of people who travel a lot. There are certain details that people absolutely love about their suitcases. They're things that you typically wouldn't really think about until you've traveled a lot. And so even for ourselves, we had luggage. There are things that we knew that we liked, that we wanted to sort of bring down into a more affordable price point. And so we're like, okay, we can really do this. We waited till july 7, so the 7th of the 7th, to register the business because we thought that would be a bit of good luck for ourselves. And then we got a room in a co working office, and we locked ourselves in that room and spent around three or four months designing it, getting the website ready. Like, we did everything ourselves in that first that first bit, you know, that kind of like, room smell where two guys haven't left for a long time, and there's like, pieces of paper up on the wall, and it smells like sweat and like, macas McDonald's papers. And it's just like that kind of it was like a dorm room. It was not a pretty picture, but it helped us focus. It helped us get into the right set of mono wars to do and early days for us, all we did is use as much free resources as we could, things like reviews, using reviews to set the design brief. So we basically read as many reviews as possible, found out where all the flaws were in other suitcases, and saying, well, this is the beginning of the design brief. Now for what we need to be able to do, that's a really good we felt it was a good framework to set the tone from day one. We're coming to this game relatively late. Samsung has been around for 50 odd years or so, and all these other new competitors had been coming into the market, what could we be doing? What could we be doing better? So one of those things is that suitcases are quite square and boxy, and one of the issues that a lot of customers have is that it faults at the corners, like it's weakest at its edges. So we said, well, why don't we just make it rounder? Why don't we change the radius of the suitcase? So it was a bit rounder, had a lot more bounce back to a very simple concept from a design perspective. It was grounded in customer insight with issues that they've had in the past and so that sort of set the tone. And I still remember the learning as to why most suitcases don't have that curved radius is because you have to change the bit of plastic that holds the wheel. And so in order to change that, most people get that thing off the shelf. In order to change that, you've got to spend like 50 or 60 grand to get the molding. And we were at this position where we're like, well, is this how we're going to spend our first 50, on a wheelhousing molding that nobody would care about? But we wanted that radius. We believed in that theory, we believed in what we were doing. So it was a great first step in showing what we were trying to do for this brand. Everything had to be custom done. We made the wheels ourselves. We obviously changed the radius, we added aluminium corners for additional protection. All of these things based off of insight are the handle. The fact that the handle doesn't have three stops, it has over 20. So particularly for women who are changing shoes that don't always have the same height shoes, that means that it's always comfortable for them wherever you stop. And men just like to fiddle anyway. We just like to stop it wherever we want to go. So it's all these like, little bits and pieces that we we started bundling in. We obviously have the Power bank underneath and did it with USBc from day one, which now seems like an obvious thing, but back then you didn't know how prominent USBc was going to be, so that's how we started. We basically just within six months, had researched, designed and got into production. Our first carry on, and we presold a couple of containers prior to the product arriving. This is February 2019 now, and from there it's just been all growth. Well, to a degree. Right, so that first year, that 2019 year was a fantastic year for us. Again, we only had the carry on and then eventually grew to make bigger products. In that first six months, we opened our first retail store as well, because we believed in the omnichannel approach. We had this sort of like 2019 felt like a magic year for us, the product we can't make quick enough. We only had one sku to begin with, we opened a retail store and in a prominent location in Melbourne, CBD. And so we got investment. Everything was just moving forward in the right direction. And so we felt on top of the world, though we thought we were pretty good until 2020 came along, we decided that the world was just not going to travel anymore. And so whatever growth that we had in that first year got completely cut in that second.

So I can imagine. Right, because I think the one thing that any travel business really couldn't foresee is literally the complete removal of all travel from everyone everywhere in the world. That's like ridiculous. Why don't we go into the first year? And then I want to get into how you guys dealt with the whole travel thing, how you planned it from a business perspective and how you came out on the other side. So first though, on the side of getting the business stood up, you said a lot went into the product, into the design, and then you eventually launched and did some presale as well as opening retail pretty early. So I just want to kind of walk through some of the strategy there, right? Like how you said you had one product to you at the time, you had the Carry on bag, right, but so what was kind of going into the thought of the launch? Were there multiple colors? Was it one color? And then on the presale side, how did you run your presale? How many sales did you kind of start to convert in that first chapter of the business?

Yeah, I mean, if I think back at year one on how we did it all, I can tell you what happened, honestly. Right. So we wanted to have the product in late 2018, so November 2018, so that we could sell it for Christmas, because we felt that we'd get a lot more Christmas sales because of it. But then the product got delayed because of course we're doing things super quick, like a six month development and land timeline is super quick. And so the product got delayed a little bit. And so we moved even quicker after that. We developed like saffiano leather luggage tags, like really beautiful leather luggage tags that could be personalized and Debost. And we sort of said, look, if you buy a suitcase, pre order a suitcase now for Christmas, we'll give you these personalized leather luggage tags and created what is now known as the Founders Club. And it was a beautiful packaging, little booklet, the luggage tag. And then we were debossing and we got the first debossing, that little debossing machine off ebay, like one of those really tiny ones. And it's like rich and I just sitting there, debossing thing in order to get the sales done. Because we didn't have the product, we knew Christmas was important and that's how we ended up preselling most of the stock like the leather tags. Arguably, people wanted the tags more than they wanted the suitcases. Let me just mute that. It was a really interesting time for us to be able to say, well, look, the product's delayed right now. We've only got renders. The website is a real basic shopify website. Everything was like absolute baseline. But we got it done. We got it done together. It was just Rich and I for most of this, most of this work. So then we got those leather tags over the line super quickly so we could beat that Christmas sale. And then come February, the containers were already sold. We quickly ordered more and started developing our next range, which is basically the check in bags, the medium and the large versions of the same thing. So for us, that was sort of an important run in order to get that sort of Founders Club thing. A lot of people are still Founders Club members, and they still tell us when they email in or when they're coming to buy stuff from the retail store. They're very proud to show the original luggage tag and say, like, I'm an original Founders Club member. We email them separately.

How many people were in the Founders Club?

I don't know. If I had, I'll have to find out. I mean, it wasn't many, right? We were just new business. We didn't have a lot of like we hadn't raised money back then, so we didn't have a lot of paid marketing spend either. And it was maybe 1000 people, sure.

But I think that's really cool. I think it's a pretty cool idea for a company that's really launching. Because when you're in that first stage of launching, right, and you're trying to get your first customers that are your first evangelists, how do you bring them in, how do you get them to convert? And you're not at the scale where you're just trying to run a whole bunch of ads and everyone like, no one's heard of you, right? So how do you build that brand allegiance from your first adopters? And I think the tag and the Founders Club is a really cool way to approach that.

It was great, honestly, the fact that even today they're so proud of it, and we look after everybody. But if you come in with the founders tag, we definitely look after you because you helped us. You helped us get to where we were.

You trusted us.

It was like a couple of guys with some renders on product that didn't exist, and they're like, July didn't mean anything back then. Actually, a really funny thing with the product is that we mold the logo into the product itself. Quite large in comparison to what the category does. They usually just put a little badge in the corner. And so early days, people were like, I'm not buying the suitcase no matter how good it looks, because you've blasted your logo all over this thing. Who do you guys think? For us, that was our commitment early days to be like, well, we want people to know that this is not off the shelf, that it is 100% custom. We did think about this. We want you to know who the brand is and we want you to.

Be proud of it.

And so all big brands, all popular brands anyway, once they reach that tipping point and people want to be associated with them, really do put their logo front and center because you want to be associated with it. So for us, we started with that from day one, knowing that we had to commit to a lot of brand marketing and commit to what the quality was of the product itself within the brand of the logo so that people could be proud. So today we find people wanting our suitcases for the logo and for the design. But back then it was a different story. Back then we'd get a lot of emails saying it looks good, but I'm not buying it.

And that's such an interesting point because as an emerging brand, when people maybe don't know who you are, right? If you have the logo and it's loud and it's proud, people are seeing that and they might be making their purchase decision based on, okay, well, what's this brand about? If people are going to see me traveling with this, what does that say about me? So it's almost like a real statement piece, whereas if it's a smaller CPG sort of product or a snack that someone's just like eating and it isn't so public, people don't care as much. So it's a different process that the consumer makes to evaluate those products. So for people who are listening and building businesses, it's just a really interesting lens to think about product development through is like what your brand is about, how it shows on what type of product medium you're communicating it, right?

Yeah. And it really depends on the category and what's done in the past as well. So if you're making shoes and you're making boots and things like that, if you go D to C from that perspective, I'm only saying that because I'm looking at some shoes right in front of me now and a lot of people end up going that's super minimal, like ultra, like no branding, no this, no that. But it's also hard to differentiate as well when you do that. And so by putting a logo on there, it actually means that you've got more work to do as the brand owner sit and say, well, let's make sure that brand means something to people so that they're buying it for that reason. They're buying it and they're proud to have it, as opposed to being a little bit upset about it or not even buying it because they say it as something that I want to be associated with.

The next question that I have for you guys is as you were starting out, right, like travel accessory suitcases, they're a big thing to manufacture, ship, store, et cetera. Right? So what was the strategy when it came to making some of those first POS? Did you have a warehouse that you were shipping goods to? How did you think about less suitcases fit in a container than, say, T shirts? Right. So how did you guys think about, in the early days, making some of those first POS? In terms of your scale, how many colors were you ordering? Was it just like one when you were getting started, where did you store them? How did you fulfill? Why don't you walk us through that?

Yeah, we've grown so much from that point. Right. And to think about that really early day of what we did, I mean, it's scrappy. It's so scrappy. To actually think about I haven't thought about that for a while, but to actually think about what we did, we had a little office with a car park as part of the office, like an old warehouse, like a little mini warehouse with a little drive through of the car park. And so the early days, the stop would just go there, and so we'd just get the container to just drop it on the road. We'd quickly unload it and we were unloading. If you've ever done this sort of stuff, they weren't palletized. We just jammed in order to get more product in. It was for the seal container. So we've got guys who are just like friends of that climb to the.

Top and just throw them down.

Catching it, throwing it in. It was as scrappy as that. So we kept all the stuff there and we shipped it out ourselves. There was no three pls to begin with. We kept things pretty lean, and for most of the time, even today, we still have an office warehouse where 50% of the office space is warehousing dispatch as special orders, even though we do use now three pls across the world. But, yeah, we still like that element of being very close to the products and have the operations team really connected. So, yeah, early days, man, it was product to the warehouse, and we just got photos of, like, boxes just surrounded by boxes because they're huge things, too. It was a really fun time, and it was a really fun time to do that sort of stuff. It's important, early days, anybody doing Dvc, to be able to control those first few shipments so that you understand what the customer is getting, you're really sort of hands on with it. You're writing notes, you're doing all those sorts of things to make it feel quite personal. These early stages, if you think of them like a mint plant or you think of them like a flower or something, it really takes a lot of nurturing up front. Once it's grown, then it will take over the entire data but very early stages you get to keep that thing well natured.

What were some of the early learnings? Like you said, maybe in those first couple of production runs? Were there any minor product iterations that you started to learn from or little adjustments that you wanted to make before scaling out all of your different product lines?

We're always iterating the products so there's been maybe 150 changes since we first launched for that carry on early days, early days. Things like cardboard quality, you don't really know the strength of the fluid that you need in order to be able to local delivery guys by the time it gets to final customer for that carbon to actually look good by the time it arrives. I remember in that first year we actually were very ambitious. We launched in Singapore online as well and so we were like, okay cool, we're going to do Singapore now too. It's like first step into Asia within our first year. This is great. But we stored the product in non temperature controlled warehousing. It was very humid in Singapore and so the cotton they're all wrapped in cotton dust bags. The cotton dust bags ended up getting mold on them which is just something that we just didn't even think about. And then we had a couple of complaints come through. We're like mold. How on earth are these things getting? Molded them very quickly we sort of figured that problem out and I still remember going replacing the dust bags, shifting the boxes out. It was work. We've had a lot of learnings along the way. Ultimately, product is never finished so this concept of getting something perfect is not real. There is no such thing as perfect. You want to continue to be iterating, continue changing things. For us, customer feedback is number one. It's the thing that we listen to the most, more than anything else. It's very easy to say that, but it was the foundation of the business. Reading customer reviews set the tone for the brief. We have a retail store right next to the office as part of what we do and a lot of the products that we've made have come from anecdotal commercial customers coming in, we showed them samples. Customers who are coming in and talking about things that they weren't we actually then go and show them some samples and see what they think about things. This was how we invented the Carry On light expandable. So we ended up come 2020, 2021 we ended up making the world's Lightest double wheel carry on at 1.8 kilos, 3.9 counts, £3.8 so super light bag but a lot of customers were telling us I love it, but it's just not big enough. It just doesn't have enough volume. I hear you about the weight. I want that weight to be low but I also need volume too. This classic thing of customers want everything and you got to find clever ways to deliver it to them. So we actually sat a couple of customers down and going, how do we solve this for you? How do we make sure that you come back and buy this thing? And they're like, well, I would do this. I would expand this, I would change this. And so they gave us a bit of feedback. We went into product development, and now it's one of our top selling products. Good Morning America voted at the best carry on. So that was it. It was only last week or a couple of weeks ago. So for us, that sets the tone of what we do. We love hearing customer feedback and we love changing things a lot.

Yeah. When you mentioned that about even your brief going to other luggage manufacturers, reading through the customer feedback and then saying, oh, this is our opportunity here to create a brand and a product, I think that's super smart. And I do think that a lot of people, I think, say we listen to our customers and we're customer centric. It's a really buzzword. We care about our community, and sure, a lot of brands do. But I think doing the things and making it truly a part of your brand identity is so, so important because it allows you to build this better product so much faster and skip through all those bad rounds of customer feedback. Right. The faster you can pick up on something, the less amount of times you need to hear the same feedback from a whole new batch of customers. Right. The less times you needed to run an entire product run that you're just going to get the same feedback over and over and over again. That's right.

Look, you'll never, always get it right from day one. And a lot of people love quoting that Henry Ford quote of if you ask people what they wanted, they'd say that they wanted a faster horse. Yes, that's true too, to a certain degree. You need to set the base out of, like, well, let's change. If you want to do a paradigm shift and change fundamentally what you're doing, you need a bit more vision personally, in that to be able to get that over the line. But for the most part, customers know what they want and they're more than we left. The information is out there. This is a D to C podcast. There's a lot of early stage founders, a lot of late stage founders, you need to be as scrappy as possible, as lean as possible. And the leanest thing that you can do in D to see in a physical product world is just ask customers what they want or is go read what they're posting about the category. And so if you can change some of those things, you can baseline it as a brand. Absolutely.

And being even proactive about it. Right. I think what's interesting. Is like you said, when you're reading product reviews for a brand that's not even your brand, you're still learning from potential customers, right, that have their eye on what you're doing. So there's no excuse. You don't say, oh yeah, they just wrote into me and I don't have a way to talk. There's always a way to really get into the mind of your customer. Whether you don't even have them yet, whether you have them and they're communicating with you via text, whether you've built a relationship with them, they're a founder club member, or whether they're literally in your physical store and you're like, hey, we've got these in their works. Is this something that you'd be down with? So I think just like really building that into your DNA is definitely an important thing. So moving forward, you guys have started the brand, things start to look good. You've got your first couple of production runs, and then why don't you walk us through the lead up to 2020 before everything shut down?

Yeah, so we ended up getting some investment from a couple of great investors, which was great. We just opened the retail store and so for us, D to C often only means online only and online tool play. But we really like physical retail. And it's not just a flex, but it's actually for a lot of things. It's what customers actually want. And I'll tell you, in travel in particular, there's a really good subset of people who are like eight weeks out, they book the flights, six weeks out, they book the hotels. They know exactly what they're wearing. They know exactly what they're doing. My wife is that person, right? So like very planned. Can order luggage, no problem, a week per delivery. It's all factored in. And then there are some people like myself who go, I just want a new suitcase and I leave tomorrow. Now I might want a July. I know the brand, I know the product. I really, really want it. I don't trust I don't trust the delivery time frames. I don't trust I'm going to get it in time. I'm leaving super quick. I'm just going to end up going to a department store and getting something. I don't want to lose a customer because of that. So a lot of the time when you really look at the customer journey, you go, you know, physical product actually makes a lot of sense for a lot of DDC brands. Gifting and Christmas gifting is a really, really big part of it. It's when shipping timelines struggle the most. It's when people need gifts at certain times, but they need a media seat because they're either flying a week before Christmas or they need to wrap it and they need to do all these things. So there is a sense that physical retail people love to slam it and say, like, it's old school, but it is experiential. And I think if retail rents actually came down quite a lot. You'd see a lot more experiential retail coming through. Really fun things. Like you can only buy certain products or only have certain experiences within the retail store, and then online is just sort of a baseline. I love that. I love those sorts of things. I think it's a really cool luxury strategy approach to doing retail anyway, so I love stores, right? I love that component of it. And so we did that in our first year and helped us establish the brand as something more than just an ecommerce brand, an online luggage business. From that point on, we had a lot more opportunities to keep growing. We were making new products, and then 2020 came along. Now, for us, like most of the world, if you ever remember it, everyone thought it would be like a one month, two month thing at most, and the world would get back to normal. Well, for Australia in particular, we weren't some of the strictest lockdowns. And so we're talking now almost two years worth of inactivity. We tried a lot of different things to differentiate things like manufacturing, like, we did bottles, we went into the drill bottle game. We tried to do arts, like travel arts and things like that, which is quite fun. But ultimately we spend most of the time heads down in product development mode, trying to restrategize. What are we going to do? But then we also we're resourceful, right? We're still in this very scrappy startup founder world where we're only a year in and the business has been cut globally. So what do we do? Right? We're not going to just be like, well, we had a good ride. That was it. We're still hungry, we're still high energy, so what do we do? We had a look at who was still flying and back then, china. The message in China was that COVID is not a big deal. And so domestic flying was still happening a lot in China. They're the only people flying in the world. So we launched retail in China online through Tmore, and so that helped us, that helped us continue to sell stock. We were building momentum there. And so that was a really good sort of way for us to keep going and try something new as well. Not many people get to say that they attempted retail in China, and so it was a really big learning curve for us, but it was quite successful. So then we just kept going. We're like, all right, well, during that process, we'd gone into product development mode, and for us, our big differentiators of July now from this restrategized moment of having the time frame in COVID to sit down and go, how are we going to annoy Samsung as much as possible, that's really like our goal here, right? How are we going to annoy these guys? Samsung Hbt, these guys have the majority of the global share. Let's annoy these guys as much as possible. What do we need to do? So, for us, we're like, well, there's luxury luggage and then there's another category of traveler who wants light luggage. America is actually like the US is a funny place where one of the few places in the world where the weight of your carrying on doesn't really matter that much. It's more about volume restrictions than weight restrictions. But for the rest of the world, especially if you're flying in Europe and UK and Europe, for budget airlines, it's all about weight. It's all about getting it under the budget weight restrictions. So we're like, okay, well, Samsung trades on light, super ugly suitcases, but they really trade on that light framework and that's how they sell most of their product. And we know because we used to call up all the luggage department stores and just pretend we were students, asking them for like, what was your biggest sellers and why? As part of that free research, that scrappy research stage, we would just pretend we were students to be like, well, we're doing an assignment, like what sells, why, what colors, what are the key points, and weight is a big one, especially for Australians. Weight was a big one and then the other side was luxury. Like, river has obviously done a stellar job since LVMH bought him out, and Ed Trumi and all that. Trumi is owned by Samsonite as well. But basically they've baselined this super expensive luggage range that is very inaccessible for a lot of people. So for us, we sort of said, well, let's beat them on both fronts. So we developed from a luxury perspective, we developed the Trunk range, the Trunk Collection, which is our answer to luxury luggage. It's more expensive than what we do as a classic range, as sort of battleground luggage, but it is significantly cheaper than the luxury stuff. We don't wholesale. The margins are our hours, but it means that we've been able to RP it at a lot less. So that took off, especially in the US. We launched that for July 2021, is when we launched in the US. And we launched our truck range then for the US market because we knew that it was about style. Americans wanted luxury luggage, they wanted beautiful luggage. They didn't necessarily want to pay 1000 $1,500 for that. They could get beautiful luggage, same quality for 500. And the drunks, we couldn't make these.

Things because I'm seeing them on your site. I know, I've seen them in person. They look amazing. What material are they made out of the trunk?

They've made a polycarbonate. They're still polycarbonate. For that first range, we did a new treatment called a glaze. There's a glaze polycarbonate. It's shiny, but like with depth. It was gorgeous. It was a really lovely product. And so, from a US market launch perspective, really couldn't make these things quick enough. There was a really great launch in that front. So that was great to be able to say while we're tackling luxury, a lot of our customers could afford them with a turtle rimoire. Can't afford them, but understand the category, understand that it just needs to be color forward. It needs to have all the features. Like we out feature these guys because of the power banks, because the handle that stops everywhere, because the wheels. So we did a great job there. And then the other side was the light one. So we did the world's lightest carry on. Again, significant sales in that, especially in Australia, but we were still in lockdown. We've got this great product that was sitting there, it was bubbling, like it needed the exposure to budget airline growth. And so once Australia came out of lockdown, so we launched us in July 2021. Australia ended up ended its lockdown around September October 2021. And from that point onwards, it's just been through the roof. And with that light product so the light and the luxury, the light on the trunk, we are now getting ready to launch into the UK and European markets. And mainly, mainly because we know that like budget airlines in in Europe, that's all they fly. We're talking 20 euro Ryanair flights. The beautiful thing, this is my favorite feature, the beautiful thing of the carrier life is that it fits under your chair. It doesn't have to go in the overhead bin, it can go under it. It's crazy. You can tell that we're product guys. We're just obsessed with these little details of how good a suitcase can be and how much you can innovate. Outside of just keeping the same shape and the same kind of feature sets and just changing colors. What else can you be doing? And so for us, it was going, this is our battleground. But what if, what if we tackle luxury? What if we tackle light well?

And I think what's so interesting about the space is like a lot of the older suitcase manufacturers, just from a product perspective, it's just not really suited to the way people travel today. And they're just like, I don't know, I see some of the bags like my parents have, or other people I'll see in the airport, I'm like, how are you pulling that stuff around? Because I know exactly what I want in a suitcase. I want something that rolls on four wheels, looks good, fits in the places that needed to fit is light. It has power, it's like good to go, it can go with me anywhere. So I think it's got to be a ton of fun to be able to innovate in that space as well, because there's just got to be opportunity everywhere. And it's a massive market.

It's a massive market and I go to the airport and so for us, our subjective measure of success is carousel share. So by the time when we get to the airport. How many have we seen? It's never enough, right? Every time you fly international, you like, you know, we I just came back from London, we obviously haven't launched in the UK yet, and I don't see any around there. Like I've said, I saw one at the airport that made my day, but because we're not there, I was like, okay, we've got work to do. The market is just so big and the opportunity is so ripe that getting that carousel share is like our super subjective way of measuring how our success is done.

No, that's really cool. And the other thing I'd like, I want to back up 1 second and then I want to continue what we were talking about. You said during the Pandemic, you guys launched into China and Tmall, right? Like you were saying, that's not something that a lot of other brands are looking to do. It must have been like a good opportunity for a specific niche. But why don't you just tell us a little bit about what selling into China looks like as a foreign manufacturer, as a foreign company, what were some of the things that it took to get set up on Team Ball? How was that experience? Is that something you're still doing? Yeah, just break it down for us.

Yeah. So Richard is of Chinese origin, so he speaks Bender in, which helped the situation significantly. But it was a new process for us to be able to sell into China via Timor, and so it's a totally new thing. So for us, there's a lot of learnings. I think the biggest thing is that there's Timor local and then Team All global. And so we were part of a team or global, which meant that the product come from within China. It has to be cross border. And so you end up hiring an agency in order to do it. You end up hiring a team of agency. You have to register, you have to do all the background work of registering the business and the brand name in China. And we had already done a lot of that. So as part of us registering global IP and brand name stuff, we made sure that we were in all the major markets, and China being one of the early ones too. So we'd already done a lot of that background work. And when it came time to it, because we didn't have to wait any longer to get the sort of brand registration done, we could get straight into business. And we found ourselves in a situation where we'd set up online, we'd set up a team, all we supplied all the assets, we'd worked with an agency, and we just started doing it from our perspective, we just needed to keep giving them more and more. So it was like doing live stream events. It was making sure that they were aligned with campaign stuff. And what we're doing there, it ended up being quite a lot of work. And I think that where it becomes a lot of work is because of the language barrier and because, like, the rest of the team obviously doesn't speak Mandarin. So we really needed to better understand what they wanted so that we could help supply them. And look, sales went really, really well. Part of the reason that they worked well is because we were marketing ourselves as Australian. And from a Chinese perspective, they love Australian products. They see Australia as a source of high quality products that they love coming to our country, buying and bringing back to them. So that marketing worked really well for us until it did it. So there was like some political tension between China and Australia, especially some other primary categories like wine and raw materials. And so because of the fallout there, being Australian didn't work to our favor. And so that's the reason why we eventually sort of like just digested out of that market, but for that short period of time, give it eight to twelve months. China was a really successful, really interesting market to launch in because it's same same, but very different. And so what you think you know about your own product, you actually have to go back and relook at how the Chinese market is marketing similar products and what the things that they care about. So actually a really interesting thing where our product kind of fails a little bit for the local market is that for China and Japan, they travel by train a lot. And so even though they do fly, they do travel a lot by train. And when you're on a train, having brakes as part of the wheel system is a really important thing. So obviously the suitcase doesn't roll down the train. And so you'll find that Japanese luggage, a lot of Japanese, a lot of Chinese made luggage has brakes on it for that very reason we don't have brakes on ours because for us it's very much focused around flying. So that was a really interesting learning in that luggage with brace does really well in these regions. So anyway, it was a learning, it was an experience. And for us, we also did personalization for Chinese orders as well. And so we ended up launching Chinese character personalization, which was cool. I'm pretty sure it's the first multilingual personalization engine in the world. Most people, when you're ordering personalization, especially for Western markets, personalization means English characters. What we did was obviously introduce Chinese characters as well, emojis, and then also allowed from an English character perspective to have things like to have multilingual support for all Romanized characters. So Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish, we sort of allowed all that stuff to work too. So it was like we'd built this international personalization engine. It started with Chinese characters and it's a cool thing to do, right? To say that you're personalizing in Chinese for the Chinese audience, shipping out of Australia, it was a super cool thing to do. And eventually we'll go back. Eventually we go back and things, politically speaking, things are getting better, so we don't mind being Australian there again. But for that period, it helped us get through sometimes when things are in lockdown. We weren't in the US then. We we really needed momentum, we needed to feel like we were winning, at least, and growing and launching in China helped us build up.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure there's a lot of very interesting learnings along the way. Like you're saying the thing about the break, the breaks, that's not something that you probably would even think about, but maybe as you start to get into other markets now, you actually have that tool set to kind of work with. And even when you're launching in new regions, if you've done the exercise of being able to launch your product in Chinese now, that makes launching in Spanish a hell of a lot easier. Right?

It's like going to the gym and lifting the heaviest thing first. Everything else is going to be easy. I love that.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you're thinking about I know you mentioned you're thinking about launching into the UK, Europe. What does that entail from a business perspective? Are there certain requirements that you need to meet? Does anything change when you guys need to sell into the UK and Europe? What criteria you need to meet? How are you setting up for it? Are you setting up a three PL there? What is launch strategy into a new continent and market look like?

Yeah, look, it's different for different for different places and different times in the business lifecycle. When we did, when we launched in the US, australia was still in lockdown, we weren't allowed to leave, so we had to launch in the US all remotely. So it was finding a three PL partner, it was figuring out clever ways to do personalization. We didn't have any boots on the ground at the time, and so we had to do all our press via VC. It was a different time. And look, that was a super successful launch and we don't regret any of it now. A couple of years later, in 2023, we were looking to launch in another region. Being the UK, we have to ask ourselves, well, what would we do differently? What would we change? What would we do in this current situation where we know we know the UK is flying to Europe regularly for holidays, they fly international by default. What do these guys want and how would we do it? And so for the UK now, it's obviously having a three PL partner, having a physical warehouse presence ourselves for personalization, having staff, having a team there from day one. Actually, in particular, we want to send people from Australia, like team members from Australia, to actually set up the base there, because you think, like, carrying the brands and the energy of what we do here over to A. New market is actually a really great way for the brand to just continue on without it being its own thing, without trying to teach people. It actually bringing it over and saying, this is how we do things. This is what July means, and this is how July operates. So we're really excited by that, by actually bringing people over and having them set up and just really sort of doubling down and committing more to it than we usually would. We're talking about retail opening up. I think ideally we'd love to open a retail space from day one, but that's a bit harder. So we're just trying to get all the pieces right. So if you look at those two things, like the US and the UK, the US was was lean one, three PL, no presence, no no boots on ground, no founders coming in and, and, you know, doing interviews and things like that. And with the UK, it's like, well, we're going to be there four or five times this year, we're going to send people over, we're going to set up with a physical presence from day one, and so getting all those bits and pieces right and we think not that one is better than the other. Obviously, the lean is great. We love a lean launch approach, but we want to make sure that the UK market is quite nuanced. Again, some of these learnings that you find in each in each market, just being an ecommerce brand over there is not enough. Having a physical presence, having people know that you're real, especially from a London perspective, makes all the difference to carry you over.

Yeah, it seems like just kind of going back to what we were talking about, about the way consumers buy things, right? Like maybe in the US, the consumer is like, oh, this looks cool online, I saw an ad for that. That's pretty, I'll buy it. And maybe there's a little bit more importance to brand, to heritage, to all those different components of making a purchase decision in the UK and Europe. Is that kind of one of the things that you were thinking about a little bit in terms of making those decisions?

That's right, it definitely is. And you just don't get that kind of trigger happy commerce that you do in the US.

Right?

Because the US is very much and arguably trains off Amazon Prime in the sense that it's like, buy now, figure it out later approach. And returns are free, returns are quick. It's basically the US moves on shipping boxes, right? It's all you see a courier vans on the streets most of the time, whereas London in particular, when we talk about UK, you really are talking about London and a couple of the other major cities like edinburgh, but London is the main one. Look, it's a big tourist market. There, like, delivery, like next day delivery matters. And you can pull it off over there because it's quite a consolidated marketplace. But, yeah, they're not as trigger happy. There's so much legacy in their retail. They're not in a rush. Londoners are not in a rush. Absolutely.

And I feel like in the US, so much of the culture is driven by just consumption, consumption, consumption. Whereas in Europe, in the UK, they'll consume, but they're just more thoughtful, but they're not like, let me buy something and then if I don't like it, throw it out. They're like, Let me make the right decision and buy it. And if it's great, everyone's going to buy it, but we're not just going to buy throw it out. Yeah.

Look, I'm not going to pretend to know the market just yet, but in our research, the ecommerce is a big thing over there. It's growing, it's definitely a thing, but they're not as return friendly.

Which is a good thing, especially for you guys. When you're dealing with shipping around some bigger boxes, that's a great thing to have. And then, kind of as we wrap up here, are there any other exciting things going on in the business? I know launching into new markets, obviously a huge one, but are there any other things you're excited about? Whether it's any other things you guys are doing locally, in retail, or any other channels you're selling on, or any other product lines you're developing, what are just some other things on your mind at the moment?

Yeah, look, we're excited to launch into the UK as the next big step for us. The beautiful thing about luggage and some D to see brands, some data C categories, is that you don't need Tja compliance, you don't need to change the product per region. We're quite fortunate in that this category, the product, is global from day one. So for us, it's all about finding the resources in the headspace to be able to go, let's go and take it to this region. Let's go and launch that. We are partnering with a premium retailer in Hong Kong as a way of trialing, something new for us. And so that's an experiment. Again, Richard and myself are still very much the scrappy founders that started the business, in the sense that we're very much hands on and we very much love experimenting with things. And so when it comes to some of the new product that we've got coming up, for instance, we've got a beautiful canvas bag that we've just launched, which is more on the cheaper side of things. But because it's machine washable, because it looks gorgeous and it's the right color set, the right hardware, this thing has gone gangbusters. So now we're like, all right, let's keep it within this, let's keep doing this framework. This kind of product category is really working we should double down on that. And so experimenting with products and new markets and new things is just what we love doing. It's very rare that you can find yourself in a business that's growing, that you feel creatively fulfilled, and that you know that it's in a category that you find quite sexy and enjoyable to be in. We're extremely fortunate to do that. So it makes sense as a travel business to be able to travel and see the world and grow the brand, get more and more people to know what July means.

No, that's awesome. And just as we wrap up here, where can our listeners connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn? Twitter? Where can we find more about you and the brand as well?

Yeah, connect with us all over the place from a July perspective. July.com and at July across all socials for myself, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at 8th ath or on LinkedIn, as, 8th and Diaspora.

Real quick, how did you get the domain July? When did that happen in the business cycle? Was that like the first thing you had, July.com, or did you raise some money and then get that domain?

The first thing that we did was get at July on Instagram and anything below five characters actually has to be released by meta themselves. So it's not something that you can just buy or register. And so nobody was using it. We're quite lucky we were able to get it through some contacts. So from that point on, it was like great, we secured agile across all socials, which is extremely rare. And then the.com we were using getjuly for a long time and mainly because we recall dropbox, early days dropboxes, get, dropbox.com. They were one of the first to use the get. We were happy with that, but then obviously we got the money. Actually, one of the first purchases we did when we got the raise was to purchase the.com and this was pre COVID. So pre COVID actually domains were I mean, they were expensive, but they weren't crazy. And post COVID now because obviously ecommerce has boomed for a bigger audience who probably wasn't as ecommerce got it. Domain names have actually gone up in price so that in this day and age to do the same purchase again would actually be unfavorable. But back then it was quite cool. So it's quite cool to have all those assets, I think, to be able to say the.com and at July on everything. Yes, exactly.

That's a big one. When you shouted out, you're like July. That's a flex. I love it. Anyway, congrats on all the growth. We're excited to keep up with you and excited to check in as you continue to expand in all the different markets.

Thanks for I appreciate it and thanks for having me on the podcast.

Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed this episode of Dtcpod. If you enjoyed. The show. We'd love your support. A rating and a review would go a long way as we continue to host the Best Builders in DTC and beyond. Follow and subscribe to the show and make sure to check out our show notes where you can find our socials and weekly newsletter. Visit us on Dtcpod.com to join our founder community and access resources from every episode. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed this episode of Dtcpod. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love your support. A rating and review would go a long way as we continue to host the Best Builders in DTC and beyond. Follow and subscribe to the show and make sure to check out our show notes where you can find our socials and weekly newsletter. Visit us on Dtcpod.com to join our founder community and access resources from every episode.