June 21, 2024 • 45 mins
Gordon and Ger are joined by Paul Sherratt, CEO and Founder of gloveglu, to talk about making goalkeeping gloves grippy and sticky. Is it cheating? (No, it isn't.) Is it innovative? (Yes, it absolutely is.)
You'll learn how Paul came up with the idea, what went into developing gloveglu, and how he used the power of a teenage TikTok producer to tap into a global market for a product that didn't exist before.
Paul also talks candidly about balancing a multitude of sales channels, including marketplaces (Amazon alert!) and retailers.
A gloveglu product is sold every two-and-a-half minutes somewhere in the world. Listen to hear the whole gripping tale.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, Ger suggests the two-person production team may have gained some weight...
There's like seven people in front of me here.
Our guest has to ask his own questions:
(00:21):
Who is Paul Sherratt, who are gloveglu and what's this creepy stuff?
Ger remembers the time he was bitten by a radioactive leprechaun:
And a really interesting side effect of that was...
Middle-aged men talk about social media:
What is this TikTok you talk of?
And Gordon auditions to be the next Bond villain.
(00:43):
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
You're very welcome to another episode of Functional & Fabulous.
(01:05):
Today we're delighted to welcome Paul Sheeratt, who's been in ecommerce since 1999, which makes him nearly more experienced, actually more experienced, full stop, than the bold Gordon himself.
He's worked in the sports sector for almost his entire career, originally with sweatband.com in the days of Lycos, Excite and Ask Jeeves.
But now he's the CEO of gloveglu, a 10-year-old overnight success, which he founded almost as a side hustle because he had such an itch to scratch when it came to goalkeeper gloves.
(01:35):
gloveglu is the world's first goalkeeper glove grip spray and has gained cult status internationally among pros, influencers and amateur keepers.
Its products are sold in over 54 countries and one gloveglu product is sold around the world every two minutes and 30 seconds, which is a hell of a stat.
Paul, it's great to have you here today.
Great to be here, thanks guys.
(01:56):
Yeah, great introduction.
And welcome to the podcast, Paul.
And I'm going to try and avoid this turning into a giant trip down memory lane with Ask Jeeves, Lycos and stories of Excite and AOL and dial-up modems.
I don't think anybody is probably going to be interested in that other than you and I.
(02:19):
And I also want to say, Ger, I think saying the grippy gloveglu alliteration there was pretty impressive.
I thought it was gripping.
It was excellent, it was indeed.
Yeah, no, I agree with you, Gordon.
I don't think we want to go back to 1999.
I think you've got to be of a certain age to remember everything that happened in and around the dot-com boom, the dot-com bubble as it was then.
(02:44):
Yeah, I think we came a long way and almost nowhere at all, really.
You know, we've managed to make mistakes faster.
That's true, that's true.
But tell us about...
Sorry, okay...
I was going to say, we now make those mistakes on a mobile phone.
But anyway, you were about to ask, Ger...
(03:04):
Well, what I was wondering is, tell us about gloveglu.
As a non-sport person, explain to us where it all came from and how you got the idea.
So it all came from...
I've had, actually now, 30 years in sporting goods and I had a business in the kind of early to mid-naughties that was really working with predominantly European-based sports brands, sports businesses.
(03:31):
And I had a team of sales guys covering the UK and Ireland selling in sports shops.
And the kind of the gig was that the brand would ship direct from a warehouse in Europe into a sports retailer.
We would be the front-end sales and marketing, customer care, finance side of the business.
That gave us the opportunity to push the entire product range from these brands into the UK and Irish markets.
(03:51):
And one of my core clients was a goalkeeping brand, a German goalkeeping brand called Uhlsport.
So I got to know...
I worked with those guys for 10, 11 years.
I got to know the goalkeeping world really, really well from pro-level, premiership keepers, et cetera, et cetera, right down to kind of grassroots.
And one of the discussions that we always had in the global product meetings were all about making latex grippy.
(04:14):
So the palms of goalkeeping gloves are made of latex.
And kind of the super innovation is all about can you create the grippiest latex?
And that was always the chat, which is all well and good.
But the reality is if you spend even up to £150 on a pair of goalkeeping gloves, then the latex is super grippy, but it's really, really soft.
If you spend £10, then the latex really isn't very grippy at all, but it's super hard and lasts a long time.
(04:38):
So the brainwave of the idea was...
And I was with a friend of mine in the car.
I can tell exactly where it was.
It's not far from here.
It's a place called Wick Hill between Stow-on-the-Wold and Burton-on-the-Wolds.
Sorry, in Burford.
Where all good ideas are born, I understand.
Literally, it was a light bulb moment.
And I turned to Glenn and said, because we were just talking about goalkeeping products.
(05:02):
And I said, you know what?
Like, everybody talks about latex.
Like, imagine if there was a product that you could apply to any level of goalkeeping gloves to make them grippy?
So if you bought a £40 pair of gloves that weren't very grippy, but you could make them grippy, wouldn't that be cool?
Or the other thing is, because the latex is soft in more expensive gloves, it wears away.
(05:23):
So you lose the grip.
So wouldn't it be cool if there was something you could apply to your goalkeeping gloves to make them grippy?
So that was the seed of the idea in 2011.
And I had a friend of mine who was a chemist and I approached him and went, look, this is the idea.
What do you think?
Do you think you can make it happen?
(05:44):
And cut a long story short, six, seven, eight months of sampling, different stickiness, grippiness, and so on and so forth.
Does it work?
Doesn't it work?
What can we do?
We got there.
Super excited.
This is fantastic.
Ah, hang on a minute.
I got a real problem here.
It's highly flammable.
(06:05):
Jeez, we can't do anything with that.
We can't sell it around the world.
We can't ship it.
Okay, so we've now got the benchmark.
We know where we're at.
Can we find a more friendly version of this product that we can ship, that we can sell globally?
And it took another six, seven months to get to that point where we finally ended up with a water-based product, latex friendly, et cetera, et cetera.
(06:28):
And took our first order in July, 2012.
So we're now 12 months, even 12 years, perhaps, into the journey.
In July, 2012, were you thinking, okay, this is it now?
We'll be rocking it in about six months' time.
No, it's a real strange one.
So actually, so the obvious guys to go to because A, they're UK-based.
(06:51):
B, they were an Allsport customer of mine.
It was a company called Just Keepers.
They're based in the Midlands, based in Leicester.
I know the guys really well.
And I went to see Dave and Ian and I said, guys, I think I've got this product.
And we all went, yeah, logic.
Yeah, it kind of makes sense.
It makes sense.
The unknown was, A, would people buy it?
But B, would they continually buy it?
(07:12):
Would they get it?
Would they buy into it?
Would it work?
Would there be these repeat purchases?
Or would it be a one-off?
Oh, do you know what?
It's a bit of a faff applying this grippy stuff.
So that was the real unknown.
So the first two or three weeks, I was probably on the phone with the guys at Just Keepers every couple of days going, hey, how's sell through?
(07:33):
How's it looking?
And luckily, it became evident pretty quickly that, well, hang on, this is working.
This is selling through.
What, you want more?
You want another order?
And then, yeah, it went from there.
Can I ask just a very dumb question?
But it feels like that's cheating to have very grippy gloves.
(07:55):
I mean, I'm just curious.
You wouldn't be the first person to ask said question, Ger.
So here's the thing.
In the rules of association football, there is nothing that says you cannot apply anything to your goalkeeping gloves to make them grippy, first and foremost.
Secondly, actually, what we're really trying to do is if you buy a new pair of goalkeeping gloves and you pull them apart, you kind of get this just subtle grippy feeling with a new latex palm.
(08:25):
That's really what we're trying to get back to is getting to that nice grippy feel.
So we're doing it in a different way, but fundamentally all that time, effort, energy that the mega brands, the big brands in this marketplace spend on R&D in terms of developing the grippiest latex.
We're doing the same thing.
We're just coming at it from a totally different perspective.
(08:46):
So it's not illegal.
It can be applied, perfectly legal all over the world.
Yeah, but it's not an uncommon question.
Long may it last.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and it's kind of funny because when you mentioned that grippy feeling, it's like you're nearly delivering the new car smell kind of a thing on a continuous basis.
Does it feel like that for goalkeepers?
(09:07):
Absolutely, it does.
There is that warm, cosy feeling when a goalkeeper opens a new pair of gloves and puts them on and they just do that grippy thing.
So yes, absolutely.
If we can get them back to that feeling, that's great.
How do the glove manufacturers and the glove brands feel about this?
(09:27):
Because I'm going to guess that this prolongs the life of a pair of goalkeeper gloves.
Is there any conflict there for those guys?
So I think there's a couple of things.
First and foremost, what happens, most goalkeepers, you have a pair of match gloves.
When those match gloves become worn, they become your training gloves and you buy another pair of match gloves.
(09:50):
And so the cycle continues.
So the question that we got asked certainly initially from some of the retailers was, well, hang on, does this mean I'm going to sell less goalkeeping gloves?
Because as you rightly say, they're going to last longer.
Well, the reality is that cycle stays the same.
(10:11):
But what it means is back PG, pre-gloveglu, your training gloves would wear away.
The integrity of the glove was fine.
The backhand was good.
The glove was great.
They just weren't very grippy.
The keepers kind of put up with it.
And they bought a new pair of match gloves.
Now those training gloves, you can make them grippy again.
(10:34):
The reality is you still buy a new pair of match gloves.
So that cycle hasn't really changed.
When it comes to glove manufacturers, the interesting move is, so we created this category that didn't exist before, which is goalkeeping glove care.
The first product was products to make your gloves grippy, then stop them smelling, keep them clean and so on.
(10:54):
What's happened in the last couple of years is that the bigger, the big-selling goalkeeping glove brands have obviously seen the business that we're doing and have started to bring out their own grip sprays.
So they're now embracing it and kind of going, okay, this happens.
This is now integral to what it means to be a goalkeeper.
(11:19):
And probably you have a bottle of gloveglu in your bag.
That's probably underlined by the fact that we now sell one gloveglu product around the world every two and a half minutes.
So there's a lot of gloveglu products in the world.
There's a lot of goalkeepers going to their training sessions, going to their matches with a bottle of gloveglu in their glove bag or in their pocket.
(11:40):
So I think the glove manufacturers have now recognised, actually, as an incremental business opportunity for them.
It is not going to take away from sales of their new, shiny, wonderful gloves, but maybe it adds some incremental business for them, and then maybe they should embrace it.
That's really interesting because I think we've got a classic story of somebody that isn't in the direct industry looking at a problem slightly differently, and actually creating a category and then the broader industry then following behind it.
(12:12):
We've seen that in loads of other places.
So you started off selling it in a wholesale.
When did you launch a direct business, and what's been the cycle? Or what was the cycle from selling in your first batch into launching your direct business?
(12:34):
So because of my longevity in the sporting goods industry, I was very lucky early doors to be able to tap a lot of global contacts to increase distribution, i.e. my business at the time and, bear in mind at the time when I launched gloveglu it was very much a side gig, and my business at the time was working with global brands out of their European headquarters.
(12:59):
So brands like McDavid, which is a US sports brand, or Uhlsport I talked about, or Spalding basketball, or IRONMAN products, IRONMAN insoles and so on and so forth.
So I would sit in international sales meetings alongside lots of other partners of those brands from all over the world, and over time had built personal relationships with them.
So it was relatively easy first and foremost from a B2B wholesale point of view for me to pick up the phone and speak to whoever in whatever country and say, hey, listen, you kind of know the market really well.
(13:29):
I've got this product.
Do you fancy taking it on?
So first and foremost, that was an obvious low free early play for me to start to get some penetration and some distribution.
So that gave us the global footprint probably way, way quicker than a startup brand that wouldn't have those contacts and those relationships.
So what does that mean?
(13:50):
And that meant that the DTC play was a little bit secondary, really, because also going back 10, 12 years, the challenges that lay in front of brands then, in terms of effectively selling in opposition to their retail partners, were very, very different challenges than we face today.
(14:13):
So there was a reluctance and a reticence from a number of retail partners about 12 years ago, 10 years ago for brands to sell direct.
Now clearly what's happened in the last 10, and you look at Nike and Addy 10 years ago, maybe less than 20% of their global business was DTC.
You look where we are now and it's 65, 70% and above.
(14:35):
The model's completely changed.
Every brand does it.
It's accepted and it happens.
So DTC was a later play for us.
We launched a very clunky, clunky WooCommerce gloveglu.com site, which I love going back to in the Google, that time machine, and going back and looking at how bad this site was.
(15:01):
Probably, I would say 2014, probably 10 years ago, didn't really do any business.
Wasn't particularly functional.
Probably 2015 or 2016...
We had a guy on YouTube did a, did a video about how to make your goalkeeping gloves grippy, and he used our product, and he used super glue, and he used some other bits and pieces, and we suddenly got a load of traffic and realised, you know, we're really not maximizing this.
(15:34):
Where have all these orders come from onto this really pretty appalling site?
So started to look a little bit at what the DTC play would be.
But even now, it's less than 15% of our global business.
We recognise it needs to be a lot higher than that.
The rest is split between marketplaces, i.e. Amazon and, and the aforementioned kind of B2B wholesale distribution site.
(15:58):
So we probably... bear in mind that we're 12 years old...
You could argue we're late to the party from a, from a direct-to-consumer perspective, whereas probably if we were starting up now, forgetting whether I've got experience or not and contacts, that the kind of usual play is DTC first and then, hey, if we can pick up some wholesale distribution, great, great second.
(16:23):
So we're probably, yeah, we've done it in an alternative way.
But DTC is growing really, really rapidly for us and will become, I think, within the next three to five years will be kind of a third, a third, a third sort of third DTC, a third global distribution and third marketplaces, probably.
When you say marketplaces, are you referring to the websites that your retail partners have or are you looking at Amazon particularly?
(16:53):
Predominantly Amazon.
Amazon is a big, big play for us.
Amazon.com in the US, big market.
We've just, we came out of EU post-Brexit.
We've just started to go back in there and that's really scaling quite rapidly.
And we've just changed our relationship with Amazon in the UK from a vendor relationship to an FBA relationship.
(17:16):
So predominantly Amazon, a little bit of eBay.
We're looking at other channels.
We got approached by Not on the High Street.
Q4, okayay, we are a bit gifty.
I think that's a bit too periphery for us.
OnBuy we're looking at.
So I think that, you know, even Decathlon has a marketplace.
Walmart has a marketplace.
(17:36):
So I think that there are opportunities for us there.
And then even I would include TikTok shops in that.
We were on TikTok Shop a couple of years ago.
We came off it.
We're going back into that.
So I would group all of those under what we would internally call marketplaces.
So those third-party platforms really where we have an opportunity to connect with the end consumer.
(17:57):
Tell us a little bit about working with Amazon in general.
You know, so your DTC, it's kind of a perfect product and brand to, you know, that's the received wisdom is that this is the type of product and brand that you want to bring onto Amazon marketplaces.
How do you find it?
Do we like it?
(18:17):
Do we prefer if it was different slightly?
How do we, how do we, what do we think of it?
Inviting the controversy there.
I'm very aware.
Obviously, we're not looking for the salacious gossip.
But it is a challenge.
It's a challenge.
It's the big A.
You know, we over here in Ireland now, just to set a bit of context, Amazon will have a Amazon.ie website for the first time in Ireland.
(18:44):
We have a very large and spacious Amazon warehouse just outside Dublin.
The retailers of Ireland are quite nervous,
it's fair to say.
So there's quite a bit of chat about it at the moment.
But just from your point of view, because whatever about retailers on Amazon, DTC and Amazon is kind of, you know, some would say a match made in heaven.
(19:06):
Tell us more.
I think first and foremost, the numbers are really exciting.
I mean, there's some big, big numbers that you can generate through that platform because of the eyeballs.
So particularly, you know, you look at the US, we've been in the US for 10 years.
It's a good marketplace for us.
Our business is predominantly based on soccer specialty.
(19:28):
Although we've just picked up Dick's Sporting Goods.
So the biggest sports retailer in the world is now, or will shortly be listing gloveglu products.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Amazon is a beast.
As we all know, the Amazon search bar from a US perspective is used more than the Google search bar.
So if people are looking to purchase products, arguably their first point of contact will be Amazon and they look for product within Amazon.
(19:54):
And that US culture of, you know, getting that product next day, Amazon Prime, et cetera, is a hugely compelling proposition.
And therefore, it makes sense for us to be on that platform.
The challenges are deep and wide.
I'll try and list some of them as they come into my head.
(20:15):
So first and foremost, some of the challenges we have faced is the multi-territory cross-selling.
So if we're working with distributors across the world, across the globe, across Europe, and to try and manage the process whereby our distributors are not undermined by somebody from another country, undercutting their prices and so on and so forth, is sometimes difficult.
(20:41):
Those challenges are no different, you could argue, than they are in ecommerce generally, you know, with cross-border selling and so on and so forth.
We probably didn't help that situation initially by selling to sports wholesalers in the UK, who then were selling on to third-party retailers, who then were listing products within Amazon Marketplace.
(21:05):
So in certain territories, UK being one of those, we saw some quite aggressive erosion of retail price points.
Not great for anybody, really, not great for brand positioning and so on and so forth.
So we've addressed that and continue to address that.
The, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, in the UK, if I take that as an example, we've moved from a vendor relationship, a traditional wholesale relationship, some big juicy orders coming in, we ship into them, Amazon sell them themselves.
(21:33):
Again, the issue with that is if we had third-party sellers discounting the price on Amazon, Amazon, of course, compete with them.
So you see continued retail price point erosion because Amazon are buying the product and selling it and they're prepared to take a really skinny margin.
So that doesn't help our traditional retail partners.
So we've come away from vendor back to FBA, where we can effectively control, in inverted commas, the retail price point.
(22:01):
I certainly have more control.
We recognise that the platform is changing and that as a brand, we need to make sure that our presence is absolutely exemplary.
And what does that mean?
That means that our Amazon stores look super, super great, that all of our listings are A plus, that there's content in there, there's video in there, there's information in there, there's descriptions in there.
(22:24):
So to do that, we need to basically own those listings.
So we're seeing this transition from, really, we want to be in a position where we own those listings.
We're not overly excited about third-party sellers effectively competing with us on Amazon.
But again, it's really, really difficult to control that.
(22:45):
Less so in the US because of our map pricing policy and therefore people will respect the RRP because of map pricing in the US.
So in other parts of the world, it's harder.
And then you just got the day-to-day, oh, this has fallen over or the product name throughout Europe or just on the UK platform is now in German.
(23:12):
Why is it in German?
Why isn't it in English?
Well, we're not quite sure where it's pulling the description from.
Well, Amazon's not quite sure where it's pulling the description from.
Where have these images appeared from?
Why is there suddenly a new ASIN appeared that's our same product, but where's that come from?
Where's this competition coming from that's nicked all of our images and is trying to pretend to be us?
(23:38):
So it's rewarding, although arguably the net margins aren't as exciting as the headline pitch.
It's challenging and it requires daily management to maintain your position, maintain your listings, maintain your buy box, making sure the brand looks as we want it to look and all of those challenges.
(24:06):
The good news for us is it is an element of our sales mix, not all of our sales mix.
And I know a number of brands, particularly in my sector, where it's 95% Amazon and you kind of go, yeah, that's a lot of eggs.
Yeah, I think that represents a huge amount of risk if you've got all of your business within one channel and it's quite interesting to hear that you've got a third, a third, a third across marketplaces, direct and wholesale.
(24:41):
And to me, it sounds like this has developed somewhat organically, rather than 10 years ago you were like, right, okay, we're having our big channel strategy meeting and we're going to set up selective distribution, DTC, and we're going to have our relationships across the marketplaces.
(25:01):
But I'm guessing 10 years ago, the priority was, like, how do you talk to that very specific customer?
Because I think the product's quite, well, it's very targeted.
It's not just people who play football, but it's people who are goalkeepers.
And we've chatted about this in the past.
(25:22):
So do you think having that level of specific targeting for a specific type of customer has been advantageous for the product?
100%.
I mean, I think we are, we've created a category that didn't exist before.
We are clear on who our customer is.
(25:42):
They are called a goalkeeper.
And therefore for us to drill deep into the goalkeeping community, the football or soccer goalkeeping community, has allowed us to really, to get to the position that we're in now.
(26:02):
You go back to the market, you go back to the kind of, was it a strategic decision in and around marketplaces?
And these things, you think how everything has changed in 10 years.
So it was a deliberate, it has been in recent years, a deliberate attempt to continue to maintain our presence in football goalkeeping.
Some of it came down, came from some COVID lockdown, naval-gazing, which the business plan in 2018, 2019 was to take this grippy spray and to start selling it into other glove-wearing sports around the world, baseball, American football, hockey, et cetera, et cetera.
(26:40):
The time I had during COVID was, okay, let's just have a look at the business, where we are now in 2020.
We had a global business.
It was predominantly B2B wholesale.
We had customers that were taking five lines, six lines, 10 lines.
So option A was to go to the baseball market with one grippy spray and say to the baseball market, hey, we've got this grippy gloveglu spray in baseball.
(27:10):
Do you want it?
Well, first and foremost, they'll have never have heard a gloveglu because we've done no grounding, nothing in the baseball community.
And secondly, maybe, maybe we're lucky and they list it.
They list one product.
Option B was to spend lockdown and some of the bounce back loans and the money that we were lucky that we got in terms of government support, actually in MPD and in going, okay, let's come out of lockdown with 20 new lines.
(27:34):
And maybe our existing customers go from buying five lines from us to 10 lines.
So hang on a minute, option B potentially allows me to double the business.
Option A is like a flipping hard slog, and who is Paul Sherratt, and who are gloveglu, and what's this grippy stuff?
So option B continues to be the primary route.
(27:56):
And why wouldn't it be?
Because we're continuing to evolve and grow as a business.
Interestingly, and I wouldn't have seen this coming.
What option B has also given us is yes, we've penetrate, we've penetrated deeply and globally into the football goalkeeping space.
(28:18):
The big change now is we are in the process of moving from our base being in soccer specialty and goalkeeping stores to being embraced by the sports multiples.
So we're starting to get listings in Dick's Sporting Goods and Rebel Sports and XXL and Options Sports and so on and so forth.
(28:39):
So all of these sports multiples around the world, funnily enough, post-COVID have recognised that they need, they should have a bigger base of products in the accessory side, the upsell cross-sell side.
Why?
Because the margins are great.
There's no close out.
There's no seasonality.
It's just about NOS.
(28:59):
It's not about our fantastic intake margin.
Hang on a minute.
The pink boot is now being replaced by the blue boot.
We've got to sell out the pink boot and now the exit margin is no good.
Oh, we've just bought another, we've just bought a load more blue boots.
Oh, we've only got 12 weeks to sell it.
And so the multiples are embracing this accessories category, I think globally in a way that they didn't historically, which means that even if they're offering goalkeeping, it's not particularly strong or wide, it literally becomes a numbers game for them.
(29:33):
So for every 10 pairs of goalkeeping gloves that they sell, as long as they present a gloveglu product in front of the customer, whether it's online or in store, then they'll sell one in 10, two in 10, three in 10 products.
And then it's just replen and then it's simple for them.
And they love that.
So that's the bit we didn't see, didn't see coming.
But yeah, it's kind of, concentrating on the goalkeeping niches has taken us to that point.
(29:59):
Yeah, it's really interesting.
I don't know what the metaphor is.
I can't remember, but it's kind of along the lines of, you know, if everybody's trying to put pipes into for plumbing, you know, be the guy selling the bolts or be, you know, the bits that everybody absolutely has to have.
I was wondering because, you know, so you've got, let's say of the three channels, you have your DTC, the Amazon marketplaces and the warehouse, the wholesaling.
(30:24):
Two of those channels don't give you an awful lot of opportunity to do customer retention marketing.
How do you approach that?
So obviously you had this navel-gazing moment.
You're thinking, okay, I'm going to expand the range.
I'm going to sell to my existing customer base or those customers who are buying this product already.
These other lines.
What was your next thought in terms of how you were going to market that?
(30:46):
Because we have a goalkeeping community.
Where does that goalkeeping community live?
Social media is all about community.
So the obvious low fruit was social media.
So we played at it for a while.
And probably the game-changing moment was two years ago.
(31:10):
So 2022, my son, my youngest son at the time, who was probably 15, said, Dad, I really think gloveglu should be on TikTok.
And I was a 52-year-old going, what is this TikTok you talk of?
What is this Ticketytock thing?
(31:30):
I don't know what you mean.
I've heard it's just for kids.
No, no, Dad, we really should do this.
So I said, okay, all right, let's, we'll do it together.
We'll do it.
What about...
Let's film.
You know, he'd already played it.
He'd spent six, nine months playing on this platform, and literally reposting stuff, and had built an audience of 300,000 followers.
(31:54):
So he kind of knew the platform.
He knew what he was doing.
He knew some of the shortcuts way back when, when even perhaps the algorithms weren't as sophisticated then as they are now.
So he said, fine, we'll do that.
We'll, every Saturday morning...
We'll get together.
We'll film.
We'll film some content.
And you can, you can, you're close to it.
You can see the trends.
(32:14):
We can jump on the trends.
We can do a lot of stuff.
And, and you can post it through the week.
So we started, we started that TikTok journey pretty early, really, in terms of, you know, TikTok again, two, three years ago is not what it is now in terms of, in terms of, kind of the reach and the... it wasn't in the psyche.
It was a kid's thing.
(32:35):
Very quickly, we gained a huge amount of traction and very quickly, we grew that audience.
Very quickly, within the first few months, we had videos that were hitting 20, 30, 40, even 70 million views.
And so what's happened is the TikTok platform is now 860, 870,000 followers.
We've used the same short strategy in YouTube, and that's now hitting 180,000 subscribers.
(33:00):
It's also boosted Instagram, which is 55, 60,000 subscribers.
So the community play via social has been really, really important in, in pushing the brand presence and brand exposure to the point where anybody that's on TikTok, probably... it's a bit anecdotal, but people I meet are like, oh, you're that grippy thing.
(33:25):
I've seen that because it's just, 70 million eyeballs on one post is, is a lot of people.
So that's, that's the key. That's been...
...the key element.
That's been a key element for us.
The other thing, and just just as an aside, so that's on the DTC side.
What I hadn't anticipated is when you're getting eyeballs like that, the global reach that it has.
(33:50):
So what has resulted, what TikTok has resulted in is...
A guy in Peru who owns who owns a sports shop reaching out and saying, hey, we'd love to stock your product because he's seen the TikTok.
Then the number two retailer in Peru, and the number three retailer in Peru, see that the number one's stocking it, and then they want to stock it.
So we've built, we've added to our global distribution from a wholesale point of view by having these little pockets where somebody somewhere in Greece or Peru or Bolivia or wherever it is, has seen our social activity and reached out to then stock the product from a wholesale point of view.
(34:27):
So yeah, TikTok isn't...
Social media is not just a B2C driver for us.
It's been a really interesting B2B driver as well.
It's fascinating you were there so early on.
B2B social media is not just LinkedIn.
I think one of the things that we can be very guilty of is thinking, oh, if it's business, it's, it's a business social network.
(34:49):
But of course, everybody's on TikTok.
Everyone's on Instagram.
Everyone's on a multitude of social media platforms.
And I think one of the things I'm really hearing is that throughout the whole lifespan of the business, you've actually made lots of adjustments based on what's happening around you.
(35:11):
And that could be really interesting for people listening who are thinking of starting a brand or they're trying to get growth from a brand that they're working on.
And being aware of what's happening around them sounds like it's something that you just really have to roll with.
(35:33):
And I'm just being conscious of time here.
I'd be really keen to say, like, Paul, you've had a really successful 10 years, an overnight success that's taken 10 years, as you say yourself.
But what is the advice that you would give to somebody that's actually starting out or in early stage at the moment?
(35:57):
You just outlined it.
And it's one word.
Sorry...
No, no, no.
It's one word.
It's listen.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean, okay, from a B2C point of view, you've got to listen.
You've got to listen to the market.
You've got to stay really close to the marketplace.
You've got to listen to what the consumer is wanting and demanding, and how that's changing.
(36:19):
And it is changing on a regular, regular basis.
So you've got to make sure that you're delivering the products to the end consumer that they really want.
You can't lock yourself in a room and go, oh, I'm a genius.
So I'm like, yes, the consumer definitely wants this.
And you go out and launch this product and you completely miss the mark.
So listen to the customers.
And that's not just listening to the end consumer.
(36:41):
A huge, huge part of our business from a B2B perspective is listening to our customers in each and every one of the markets that we're in.
So my partner, my B2B partner in Japan is going to have some slightly different demands than my B2B partner in Australia or in Korea or wherever they are.
(37:05):
Now, if we can react to those demands and deliver back to him what he's asking for, i.e. what his customer is asking for, we've got a huge opportunity to really continue to resonate in that marketplace and grow the business in the marketplace.
We take the opposite approach.
And Gordon, you will know this because you'll have seen this with brands you've worked with over the years, and I still see this with brands.
(37:29):
The opposite approach is, no, no, no, Mr. Japan distributor, this is our product.
We can't change it.
This is it.
This is the message.
You know, that's the key point.
It's listen.
Well, I think overall, it's been a fascinating story all over one little bottle of grippy stuff.
So thanks a million, Paul.
(37:50):
It's been great having you here.
Thanks for sharing your experience and your opinions and thoughts.
We've really enjoyed it.
Gordon?
Yeah, I've learned tons.
But the same theme coming through from everybody that we talked to is focus on the customer, react to what the customer wants, and ultimately success will be yours.
(38:15):
Yeah, I think that's it.
It doesn't matter what industry you're in, the same rules apply.
Thanks so much, Paul.
Thanks for sharing the story with us.
It's really been great.
Thank you very much.
Gordon, live and direct from, where are you this week, Gordon?
Hong Kong?
Yeah, I'm still in Shenzhen.
It's still hot.
It's still sticky.
It's still like living in the future.
(38:36):
I'm still amazed at the pace that things move out here.
It's such an inspiring place to be.
Well, thanks so much for checking back in with Ireland.
You know, it's also inspiring.
You know, I do have a bit of studio rage, though.
I am missing being in the studio.
The craic is mighty here.
(38:57):
Between you and Roger and Elaine, and then me 9,000 miles away.
Yeah, exactly.
So what did you make of the grippy spray?
I think the grippy spray in and of itself is super interesting.
But I think what's more interesting is the customer story and, really, how over time they've had to flex and respond to what their customers have really wanted.
(39:28):
And I think it's really pertinent that we've got Amazon about to launch their Irish online store.
And we've got a lot of trepidation by retailers.
We've got a lot of trepidation by brands.
And one of the messages I think I took away from Paul there was that this is going to happen whether you like it or not.
(39:50):
And you need to find a way to work with that because if your customer wants to shop on Amazon, then you need to work out how to be present with your customer.
Or if you can't be present with your customer on Amazon, you've got to give them a good enough reason not to be.
And I think that's really worth exploring.
(40:11):
I thought it was interesting.
There was a couple of things.
One is the number of times Paul said, and the really interesting side-effect of that was, or something we didn't expect that happened because of that was, you know, that kind of a thing where it's obviously, you only notice those side effects if, as he said, you're listening and you're watching and you're proactively managing your presence and that sort of thing.
(40:39):
The other interesting thing, which is worth calling out, we didn't really mention it, but, you know, when you are, let's say, in bed with Amazon, for want of a better word, you have to really be proactive.
And, you know, it's a busy, busy channel to be involved in.
You have to proactively manage it.
You've got to continuously watch for what's going on.
You know, if you switch off for even a week or so, you could find yourself in, kicked off the platform even, in some situations.
(41:06):
So it's not to be underestimated.
You know, it is lots and lots of eyeballs, but they're a strict taskmaster.
You know, you have to keep an eye on it.
Oh, it's far from fire and forget as a channel, isn't it?
It's not just you're putting it live.
You're actively managing it.
I think it's very interesting that Paul moves from a vendor relationship into a third-party FBA relationship.
(41:32):
I think the other thing that I'm going to kind of take away from this is that the use of all of the different channels that he has, like, I'm sure it wasn't a strategic move to try and win retailers in Peru, but TikTok made that happen.
And that was another interesting side-effect of doing the right thing.
(41:54):
So you've got, I suppose, I'm kind of bouncing around between subjects there.
Yeah, Amazon absolutely needs to be managed if you're in there, and it's not something that you can neglect, as with all of the channels that you have.
And then you've got back to this theme of interesting side-effects or interesting impacts that you didn't think were going to happen.
(42:16):
And I think that's just a wonderful story, but all linked back to understanding who their customer is, what their customer wants, and then delivering that to them.
Yeah, I felt as well the community-building is kind of instructive.
I know we didn't spend an awful lot of time on it and it was nearly accidental in some ways through the TikTok setup.
(42:40):
But I was really expecting, when I asked that question, that we were going to end up talking about how to build up a subscriber based on DTC and that sort of thing.
And that took a completely different turn from what I was expecting, you know.
Basically, we built an incredible community on TikTok, and that fed into a community on Instagram and on the YouTube Shorts.
(43:06):
And now we're getting in front of potential retailers in Peru and that sort of thing.
It's actually quite interesting in its own right.
Wasn't what I was expecting.
I was kind of thinking, are we going to be looking at email marketing into our DTC to try and sell our one-time purchasers into subscription purchases and that sort of thing.
(43:27):
So, really, really interesting as well.
Do you think, out of curiosity...
It's never as modular though, is it, as that?
So it's never as mechanical as if I do this, this, this and this will happen.
It's always squiggly.
And I love that the B2B thing came up.
Online B2B marketing is just not done on LinkedIn.
(43:49):
It's done everywhere.
And that's how you can get attention as a brand.
And I love that because people are in different modes when they're in different situations.
And it's great to see that kind of coming through.
It's interesting, like one of the areas I would have enjoyed speaking about, if time permitted, was just how he finds the CEO element of the job now and also the manufacturer element of the job, you know.
(44:20):
Not only is he now involved in, let's say, sports ecommerce, but also a manufacturer, a brand and now running the company and all of that kind of thing.
So there's quite a lot of hats being worn in this.
I'm sure he loves supply chain.
Who doesn't?
I kind of didn't quite expect to have so much to talk about in the realm of gloveglu and grippy spray, but it's another interesting kind of one where we didn't even cover like the fact that, you know, what it's like to own a category, to start your own category and then be the category king in that category.
(44:57):
So there was so much that we could have done or spoken about, but it was great to have that chat.
Gordon, thanks very much.
It's been a pleasure as always.
Thanks a million, Ger.
Loved every second.
Thank you.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, Ger suggests the two-person production team may have gained some weight...
There's like seven people in front of me here.
Our guest has to ask his own questions:
(00:21):
Who is Paul Sherratt, who are gloveglu and what's this creepy stuff?
Ger remembers the time he was bitten by a radioactive leprechaun:
And a really interesting side effect of that was...
Middle-aged men talk about social media:
What is this TikTok you talk of?
And Gordon auditions to be the next Bond villain.
(00:43):
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
You're very welcome to another episode of Functional & Fabulous.
(01:05):
Today we're delighted to welcome Paul Sheeratt, who's been in ecommerce since 1999, which makes him nearly more experienced, actually more experienced, full stop, than the bold Gordon himself.
He's worked in the sports sector for almost his entire career, originally with sweatband.com in the days of Lycos, Excite and Ask Jeeves.
But now he's the CEO of gloveglu, a 10-year-old overnight success, which he founded almost as a side hustle because he had such an itch to scratch when it came to goalkeeper gloves.
(01:35):
gloveglu is the world's first goalkeeper glove grip spray and has gained cult status internationally among pros, influencers and amateur keepers.
Its products are sold in over 54 countries and one gloveglu product is sold around the world every two minutes and 30 seconds, which is a hell of a stat.
Paul, it's great to have you here today.
Great to be here, thanks guys.
(01:56):
Yeah, great introduction.
And welcome to the podcast, Paul.
And I'm going to try and avoid this turning into a giant trip down memory lane with Ask Jeeves, Lycos and stories of Excite and AOL and dial-up modems.
I don't think anybody is probably going to be interested in that other than you and I.
(02:19):
And I also want to say, Ger, I think saying the grippy gloveglu alliteration there was pretty impressive.
I thought it was gripping.
It was excellent, it was indeed.
Yeah, no, I agree with you, Gordon.
I don't think we want to go back to 1999.
I think you've got to be of a certain age to remember everything that happened in and around the dot-com boom, the dot-com bubble as it was then.
(02:44):
Yeah, I think we came a long way and almost nowhere at all, really.
You know, we've managed to make mistakes faster.
That's true, that's true.
But tell us about...
Sorry, okay...
I was going to say, we now make those mistakes on a mobile phone.
But anyway, you were about to ask, Ger...
(03:04):
Well, what I was wondering is, tell us about gloveglu.
As a non-sport person, explain to us where it all came from and how you got the idea.
So it all came from...
I've had, actually now, 30 years in sporting goods and I had a business in the kind of early to mid-naughties that was really working with predominantly European-based sports brands, sports businesses.
(03:31):
And I had a team of sales guys covering the UK and Ireland selling in sports shops.
And the kind of the gig was that the brand would ship direct from a warehouse in Europe into a sports retailer.
We would be the front-end sales and marketing, customer care, finance side of the business.
That gave us the opportunity to push the entire product range from these brands into the UK and Irish markets.
(03:51):
And one of my core clients was a goalkeeping brand, a German goalkeeping brand called Uhlsport.
So I got to know...
I worked with those guys for 10, 11 years.
I got to know the goalkeeping world really, really well from pro-level, premiership keepers, et cetera, et cetera, right down to kind of grassroots.
And one of the discussions that we always had in the global product meetings were all about making latex grippy.
(04:14):
So the palms of goalkeeping gloves are made of latex.
And kind of the super innovation is all about can you create the grippiest latex?
And that was always the chat, which is all well and good.
But the reality is if you spend even up to £150 on a pair of goalkeeping gloves, then the latex is super grippy, but it's really, really soft.
If you spend £10, then the latex really isn't very grippy at all, but it's super hard and lasts a long time.
(04:38):
So the brainwave of the idea was...
And I was with a friend of mine in the car.
I can tell exactly where it was.
It's not far from here.
It's a place called Wick Hill between Stow-on-the-Wold and Burton-on-the-Wolds.
Sorry, in Burford.
Where all good ideas are born, I understand.
Literally, it was a light bulb moment.
And I turned to Glenn and said, because we were just talking about goalkeeping products.
(05:02):
And I said, you know what?
Like, everybody talks about latex.
Like, imagine if there was a product that you could apply to any level of goalkeeping gloves to make them grippy?
So if you bought a £40 pair of gloves that weren't very grippy, but you could make them grippy, wouldn't that be cool?
Or the other thing is, because the latex is soft in more expensive gloves, it wears away.
(05:23):
So you lose the grip.
So wouldn't it be cool if there was something you could apply to your goalkeeping gloves to make them grippy?
So that was the seed of the idea in 2011.
And I had a friend of mine who was a chemist and I approached him and went, look, this is the idea.
What do you think?
Do you think you can make it happen?
(05:44):
And cut a long story short, six, seven, eight months of sampling, different stickiness, grippiness, and so on and so forth.
Does it work?
Doesn't it work?
What can we do?
We got there.
Super excited.
This is fantastic.
Ah, hang on a minute.
I got a real problem here.
It's highly flammable.
(06:05):
Jeez, we can't do anything with that.
We can't sell it around the world.
We can't ship it.
Okay, so we've now got the benchmark.
We know where we're at.
Can we find a more friendly version of this product that we can ship, that we can sell globally?
And it took another six, seven months to get to that point where we finally ended up with a water-based product, latex friendly, et cetera, et cetera.
(06:28):
And took our first order in July, 2012.
So we're now 12 months, even 12 years, perhaps, into the journey.
In July, 2012, were you thinking, okay, this is it now?
We'll be rocking it in about six months' time.
No, it's a real strange one.
So actually, so the obvious guys to go to because A, they're UK-based.
(06:51):
B, they were an Allsport customer of mine.
It was a company called Just Keepers.
They're based in the Midlands, based in Leicester.
I know the guys really well.
And I went to see Dave and Ian and I said, guys, I think I've got this product.
And we all went, yeah, logic.
Yeah, it kind of makes sense.
It makes sense.
The unknown was, A, would people buy it?
But B, would they continually buy it?
(07:12):
Would they get it?
Would they buy into it?
Would it work?
Would there be these repeat purchases?
Or would it be a one-off?
Oh, do you know what?
It's a bit of a faff applying this grippy stuff.
So that was the real unknown.
So the first two or three weeks, I was probably on the phone with the guys at Just Keepers every couple of days going, hey, how's sell through?
(07:33):
How's it looking?
And luckily, it became evident pretty quickly that, well, hang on, this is working.
This is selling through.
What, you want more?
You want another order?
And then, yeah, it went from there.
Can I ask just a very dumb question?
But it feels like that's cheating to have very grippy gloves.
(07:55):
I mean, I'm just curious.
You wouldn't be the first person to ask said question, Ger.
So here's the thing.
In the rules of association football, there is nothing that says you cannot apply anything to your goalkeeping gloves to make them grippy, first and foremost.
Secondly, actually, what we're really trying to do is if you buy a new pair of goalkeeping gloves and you pull them apart, you kind of get this just subtle grippy feeling with a new latex palm.
(08:25):
That's really what we're trying to get back to is getting to that nice grippy feel.
So we're doing it in a different way, but fundamentally all that time, effort, energy that the mega brands, the big brands in this marketplace spend on R&D in terms of developing the grippiest latex.
We're doing the same thing.
We're just coming at it from a totally different perspective.
(08:46):
So it's not illegal.
It can be applied, perfectly legal all over the world.
Yeah, but it's not an uncommon question.
Long may it last.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and it's kind of funny because when you mentioned that grippy feeling, it's like you're nearly delivering the new car smell kind of a thing on a continuous basis.
Does it feel like that for goalkeepers?
(09:07):
Absolutely, it does.
There is that warm, cosy feeling when a goalkeeper opens a new pair of gloves and puts them on and they just do that grippy thing.
So yes, absolutely.
If we can get them back to that feeling, that's great.
How do the glove manufacturers and the glove brands feel about this?
(09:27):
Because I'm going to guess that this prolongs the life of a pair of goalkeeper gloves.
Is there any conflict there for those guys?
So I think there's a couple of things.
First and foremost, what happens, most goalkeepers, you have a pair of match gloves.
When those match gloves become worn, they become your training gloves and you buy another pair of match gloves.
(09:50):
And so the cycle continues.
So the question that we got asked certainly initially from some of the retailers was, well, hang on, does this mean I'm going to sell less goalkeeping gloves?
Because as you rightly say, they're going to last longer.
Well, the reality is that cycle stays the same.
(10:11):
But what it means is back PG, pre-gloveglu, your training gloves would wear away.
The integrity of the glove was fine.
The backhand was good.
The glove was great.
They just weren't very grippy.
The keepers kind of put up with it.
And they bought a new pair of match gloves.
Now those training gloves, you can make them grippy again.
(10:34):
The reality is you still buy a new pair of match gloves.
So that cycle hasn't really changed.
When it comes to glove manufacturers, the interesting move is, so we created this category that didn't exist before, which is goalkeeping glove care.
The first product was products to make your gloves grippy, then stop them smelling, keep them clean and so on.
(10:54):
What's happened in the last couple of years is that the bigger, the big-selling goalkeeping glove brands have obviously seen the business that we're doing and have started to bring out their own grip sprays.
So they're now embracing it and kind of going, okay, this happens.
This is now integral to what it means to be a goalkeeper.
(11:19):
And probably you have a bottle of gloveglu in your bag.
That's probably underlined by the fact that we now sell one gloveglu product around the world every two and a half minutes.
So there's a lot of gloveglu products in the world.
There's a lot of goalkeepers going to their training sessions, going to their matches with a bottle of gloveglu in their glove bag or in their pocket.
(11:40):
So I think the glove manufacturers have now recognised, actually, as an incremental business opportunity for them.
It is not going to take away from sales of their new, shiny, wonderful gloves, but maybe it adds some incremental business for them, and then maybe they should embrace it.
That's really interesting because I think we've got a classic story of somebody that isn't in the direct industry looking at a problem slightly differently, and actually creating a category and then the broader industry then following behind it.
(12:12):
We've seen that in loads of other places.
So you started off selling it in a wholesale.
When did you launch a direct business, and what's been the cycle? Or what was the cycle from selling in your first batch into launching your direct business?
(12:34):
So because of my longevity in the sporting goods industry, I was very lucky early doors to be able to tap a lot of global contacts to increase distribution, i.e. my business at the time and, bear in mind at the time when I launched gloveglu it was very much a side gig, and my business at the time was working with global brands out of their European headquarters.
(12:59):
So brands like McDavid, which is a US sports brand, or Uhlsport I talked about, or Spalding basketball, or IRONMAN products, IRONMAN insoles and so on and so forth.
So I would sit in international sales meetings alongside lots of other partners of those brands from all over the world, and over time had built personal relationships with them.
So it was relatively easy first and foremost from a B2B wholesale point of view for me to pick up the phone and speak to whoever in whatever country and say, hey, listen, you kind of know the market really well.
(13:29):
I've got this product.
Do you fancy taking it on?
So first and foremost, that was an obvious low free early play for me to start to get some penetration and some distribution.
So that gave us the global footprint probably way, way quicker than a startup brand that wouldn't have those contacts and those relationships.
So what does that mean?
(13:50):
And that meant that the DTC play was a little bit secondary, really, because also going back 10, 12 years, the challenges that lay in front of brands then, in terms of effectively selling in opposition to their retail partners, were very, very different challenges than we face today.
(14:13):
So there was a reluctance and a reticence from a number of retail partners about 12 years ago, 10 years ago for brands to sell direct.
Now clearly what's happened in the last 10, and you look at Nike and Addy 10 years ago, maybe less than 20% of their global business was DTC.
You look where we are now and it's 65, 70% and above.
(14:35):
The model's completely changed.
Every brand does it.
It's accepted and it happens.
So DTC was a later play for us.
We launched a very clunky, clunky WooCommerce gloveglu.com site, which I love going back to in the Google, that time machine, and going back and looking at how bad this site was.
(15:01):
Probably, I would say 2014, probably 10 years ago, didn't really do any business.
Wasn't particularly functional.
Probably 2015 or 2016...
We had a guy on YouTube did a, did a video about how to make your goalkeeping gloves grippy, and he used our product, and he used super glue, and he used some other bits and pieces, and we suddenly got a load of traffic and realised, you know, we're really not maximizing this.
(15:34):
Where have all these orders come from onto this really pretty appalling site?
So started to look a little bit at what the DTC play would be.
But even now, it's less than 15% of our global business.
We recognise it needs to be a lot higher than that.
The rest is split between marketplaces, i.e. Amazon and, and the aforementioned kind of B2B wholesale distribution site.
(15:58):
So we probably... bear in mind that we're 12 years old...
You could argue we're late to the party from a, from a direct-to-consumer perspective, whereas probably if we were starting up now, forgetting whether I've got experience or not and contacts, that the kind of usual play is DTC first and then, hey, if we can pick up some wholesale distribution, great, great second.
(16:23):
So we're probably, yeah, we've done it in an alternative way.
But DTC is growing really, really rapidly for us and will become, I think, within the next three to five years will be kind of a third, a third, a third sort of third DTC, a third global distribution and third marketplaces, probably.
When you say marketplaces, are you referring to the websites that your retail partners have or are you looking at Amazon particularly?
(16:53):
Predominantly Amazon.
Amazon is a big, big play for us.
Amazon.com in the US, big market.
We've just, we came out of EU post-Brexit.
We've just started to go back in there and that's really scaling quite rapidly.
And we've just changed our relationship with Amazon in the UK from a vendor relationship to an FBA relationship.
(17:16):
So predominantly Amazon, a little bit of eBay.
We're looking at other channels.
We got approached by Not on the High Street.
Q4, okayay, we are a bit gifty.
I think that's a bit too periphery for us.
OnBuy we're looking at.
So I think that, you know, even Decathlon has a marketplace.
Walmart has a marketplace.
(17:36):
So I think that there are opportunities for us there.
And then even I would include TikTok shops in that.
We were on TikTok Shop a couple of years ago.
We came off it.
We're going back into that.
So I would group all of those under what we would internally call marketplaces.
So those third-party platforms really where we have an opportunity to connect with the end consumer.
(17:57):
Tell us a little bit about working with Amazon in general.
You know, so your DTC, it's kind of a perfect product and brand to, you know, that's the received wisdom is that this is the type of product and brand that you want to bring onto Amazon marketplaces.
How do you find it?
Do we like it?
(18:17):
Do we prefer if it was different slightly?
How do we, how do we, what do we think of it?
Inviting the controversy there.
I'm very aware.
Obviously, we're not looking for the salacious gossip.
But it is a challenge.
It's a challenge.
It's the big A.
You know, we over here in Ireland now, just to set a bit of context, Amazon will have a Amazon.ie website for the first time in Ireland.
(18:44):
We have a very large and spacious Amazon warehouse just outside Dublin.
The retailers of Ireland are quite nervous,
it's fair to say.
So there's quite a bit of chat about it at the moment.
But just from your point of view, because whatever about retailers on Amazon, DTC and Amazon is kind of, you know, some would say a match made in heaven.
(19:06):
Tell us more.
I think first and foremost, the numbers are really exciting.
I mean, there's some big, big numbers that you can generate through that platform because of the eyeballs.
So particularly, you know, you look at the US, we've been in the US for 10 years.
It's a good marketplace for us.
Our business is predominantly based on soccer specialty.
(19:28):
Although we've just picked up Dick's Sporting Goods.
So the biggest sports retailer in the world is now, or will shortly be listing gloveglu products.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Amazon is a beast.
As we all know, the Amazon search bar from a US perspective is used more than the Google search bar.
So if people are looking to purchase products, arguably their first point of contact will be Amazon and they look for product within Amazon.
(19:54):
And that US culture of, you know, getting that product next day, Amazon Prime, et cetera, is a hugely compelling proposition.
And therefore, it makes sense for us to be on that platform.
The challenges are deep and wide.
I'll try and list some of them as they come into my head.
(20:15):
So first and foremost, some of the challenges we have faced is the multi-territory cross-selling.
So if we're working with distributors across the world, across the globe, across Europe, and to try and manage the process whereby our distributors are not undermined by somebody from another country, undercutting their prices and so on and so forth, is sometimes difficult.
(20:41):
Those challenges are no different, you could argue, than they are in ecommerce generally, you know, with cross-border selling and so on and so forth.
We probably didn't help that situation initially by selling to sports wholesalers in the UK, who then were selling on to third-party retailers, who then were listing products within Amazon Marketplace.
(21:05):
So in certain territories, UK being one of those, we saw some quite aggressive erosion of retail price points.
Not great for anybody, really, not great for brand positioning and so on and so forth.
So we've addressed that and continue to address that.
The, as I said, as I mentioned earlier, in the UK, if I take that as an example, we've moved from a vendor relationship, a traditional wholesale relationship, some big juicy orders coming in, we ship into them, Amazon sell them themselves.
(21:33):
Again, the issue with that is if we had third-party sellers discounting the price on Amazon, Amazon, of course, compete with them.
So you see continued retail price point erosion because Amazon are buying the product and selling it and they're prepared to take a really skinny margin.
So that doesn't help our traditional retail partners.
So we've come away from vendor back to FBA, where we can effectively control, in inverted commas, the retail price point.
(22:01):
I certainly have more control.
We recognise that the platform is changing and that as a brand, we need to make sure that our presence is absolutely exemplary.
And what does that mean?
That means that our Amazon stores look super, super great, that all of our listings are A plus, that there's content in there, there's video in there, there's information in there, there's descriptions in there.
(22:24):
So to do that, we need to basically own those listings.
So we're seeing this transition from, really, we want to be in a position where we own those listings.
We're not overly excited about third-party sellers effectively competing with us on Amazon.
But again, it's really, really difficult to control that.
(22:45):
Less so in the US because of our map pricing policy and therefore people will respect the RRP because of map pricing in the US.
So in other parts of the world, it's harder.
And then you just got the day-to-day, oh, this has fallen over or the product name throughout Europe or just on the UK platform is now in German.
(23:12):
Why is it in German?
Why isn't it in English?
Well, we're not quite sure where it's pulling the description from.
Well, Amazon's not quite sure where it's pulling the description from.
Where have these images appeared from?
Why is there suddenly a new ASIN appeared that's our same product, but where's that come from?
Where's this competition coming from that's nicked all of our images and is trying to pretend to be us?
(23:38):
So it's rewarding, although arguably the net margins aren't as exciting as the headline pitch.
It's challenging and it requires daily management to maintain your position, maintain your listings, maintain your buy box, making sure the brand looks as we want it to look and all of those challenges.
(24:06):
The good news for us is it is an element of our sales mix, not all of our sales mix.
And I know a number of brands, particularly in my sector, where it's 95% Amazon and you kind of go, yeah, that's a lot of eggs.
Yeah, I think that represents a huge amount of risk if you've got all of your business within one channel and it's quite interesting to hear that you've got a third, a third, a third across marketplaces, direct and wholesale.
(24:41):
And to me, it sounds like this has developed somewhat organically, rather than 10 years ago you were like, right, okay, we're having our big channel strategy meeting and we're going to set up selective distribution, DTC, and we're going to have our relationships across the marketplaces.
(25:01):
But I'm guessing 10 years ago, the priority was, like, how do you talk to that very specific customer?
Because I think the product's quite, well, it's very targeted.
It's not just people who play football, but it's people who are goalkeepers.
And we've chatted about this in the past.
(25:22):
So do you think having that level of specific targeting for a specific type of customer has been advantageous for the product?
100%.
I mean, I think we are, we've created a category that didn't exist before.
We are clear on who our customer is.
(25:42):
They are called a goalkeeper.
And therefore for us to drill deep into the goalkeeping community, the football or soccer goalkeeping community, has allowed us to really, to get to the position that we're in now.
(26:02):
You go back to the market, you go back to the kind of, was it a strategic decision in and around marketplaces?
And these things, you think how everything has changed in 10 years.
So it was a deliberate, it has been in recent years, a deliberate attempt to continue to maintain our presence in football goalkeeping.
Some of it came down, came from some COVID lockdown, naval-gazing, which the business plan in 2018, 2019 was to take this grippy spray and to start selling it into other glove-wearing sports around the world, baseball, American football, hockey, et cetera, et cetera.
(26:40):
The time I had during COVID was, okay, let's just have a look at the business, where we are now in 2020.
We had a global business.
It was predominantly B2B wholesale.
We had customers that were taking five lines, six lines, 10 lines.
So option A was to go to the baseball market with one grippy spray and say to the baseball market, hey, we've got this grippy gloveglu spray in baseball.
(27:10):
Do you want it?
Well, first and foremost, they'll have never have heard a gloveglu because we've done no grounding, nothing in the baseball community.
And secondly, maybe, maybe we're lucky and they list it.
They list one product.
Option B was to spend lockdown and some of the bounce back loans and the money that we were lucky that we got in terms of government support, actually in MPD and in going, okay, let's come out of lockdown with 20 new lines.
(27:34):
And maybe our existing customers go from buying five lines from us to 10 lines.
So hang on a minute, option B potentially allows me to double the business.
Option A is like a flipping hard slog, and who is Paul Sherratt, and who are gloveglu, and what's this grippy stuff?
So option B continues to be the primary route.
(27:56):
And why wouldn't it be?
Because we're continuing to evolve and grow as a business.
Interestingly, and I wouldn't have seen this coming.
What option B has also given us is yes, we've penetrate, we've penetrated deeply and globally into the football goalkeeping space.
(28:18):
The big change now is we are in the process of moving from our base being in soccer specialty and goalkeeping stores to being embraced by the sports multiples.
So we're starting to get listings in Dick's Sporting Goods and Rebel Sports and XXL and Options Sports and so on and so forth.
(28:39):
So all of these sports multiples around the world, funnily enough, post-COVID have recognised that they need, they should have a bigger base of products in the accessory side, the upsell cross-sell side.
Why?
Because the margins are great.
There's no close out.
There's no seasonality.
It's just about NOS.
(28:59):
It's not about our fantastic intake margin.
Hang on a minute.
The pink boot is now being replaced by the blue boot.
We've got to sell out the pink boot and now the exit margin is no good.
Oh, we've just bought another, we've just bought a load more blue boots.
Oh, we've only got 12 weeks to sell it.
And so the multiples are embracing this accessories category, I think globally in a way that they didn't historically, which means that even if they're offering goalkeeping, it's not particularly strong or wide, it literally becomes a numbers game for them.
(29:33):
So for every 10 pairs of goalkeeping gloves that they sell, as long as they present a gloveglu product in front of the customer, whether it's online or in store, then they'll sell one in 10, two in 10, three in 10 products.
And then it's just replen and then it's simple for them.
And they love that.
So that's the bit we didn't see, didn't see coming.
But yeah, it's kind of, concentrating on the goalkeeping niches has taken us to that point.
(29:59):
Yeah, it's really interesting.
I don't know what the metaphor is.
I can't remember, but it's kind of along the lines of, you know, if everybody's trying to put pipes into for plumbing, you know, be the guy selling the bolts or be, you know, the bits that everybody absolutely has to have.
I was wondering because, you know, so you've got, let's say of the three channels, you have your DTC, the Amazon marketplaces and the warehouse, the wholesaling.
(30:24):
Two of those channels don't give you an awful lot of opportunity to do customer retention marketing.
How do you approach that?
So obviously you had this navel-gazing moment.
You're thinking, okay, I'm going to expand the range.
I'm going to sell to my existing customer base or those customers who are buying this product already.
These other lines.
What was your next thought in terms of how you were going to market that?
(30:46):
Because we have a goalkeeping community.
Where does that goalkeeping community live?
Social media is all about community.
So the obvious low fruit was social media.
So we played at it for a while.
And probably the game-changing moment was two years ago.
(31:10):
So 2022, my son, my youngest son at the time, who was probably 15, said, Dad, I really think gloveglu should be on TikTok.
And I was a 52-year-old going, what is this TikTok you talk of?
What is this Ticketytock thing?
(31:30):
I don't know what you mean.
I've heard it's just for kids.
No, no, Dad, we really should do this.
So I said, okay, all right, let's, we'll do it together.
We'll do it.
What about...
Let's film.
You know, he'd already played it.
He'd spent six, nine months playing on this platform, and literally reposting stuff, and had built an audience of 300,000 followers.
(31:54):
So he kind of knew the platform.
He knew what he was doing.
He knew some of the shortcuts way back when, when even perhaps the algorithms weren't as sophisticated then as they are now.
So he said, fine, we'll do that.
We'll, every Saturday morning...
We'll get together.
We'll film.
We'll film some content.
And you can, you can, you're close to it.
You can see the trends.
(32:14):
We can jump on the trends.
We can do a lot of stuff.
And, and you can post it through the week.
So we started, we started that TikTok journey pretty early, really, in terms of, you know, TikTok again, two, three years ago is not what it is now in terms of, in terms of, kind of the reach and the... it wasn't in the psyche.
It was a kid's thing.
(32:35):
Very quickly, we gained a huge amount of traction and very quickly, we grew that audience.
Very quickly, within the first few months, we had videos that were hitting 20, 30, 40, even 70 million views.
And so what's happened is the TikTok platform is now 860, 870,000 followers.
We've used the same short strategy in YouTube, and that's now hitting 180,000 subscribers.
(33:00):
It's also boosted Instagram, which is 55, 60,000 subscribers.
So the community play via social has been really, really important in, in pushing the brand presence and brand exposure to the point where anybody that's on TikTok, probably... it's a bit anecdotal, but people I meet are like, oh, you're that grippy thing.
(33:25):
I've seen that because it's just, 70 million eyeballs on one post is, is a lot of people.
So that's, that's the key. That's been...
...the key element.
That's been a key element for us.
The other thing, and just just as an aside, so that's on the DTC side.
What I hadn't anticipated is when you're getting eyeballs like that, the global reach that it has.
(33:50):
So what has resulted, what TikTok has resulted in is...
A guy in Peru who owns who owns a sports shop reaching out and saying, hey, we'd love to stock your product because he's seen the TikTok.
Then the number two retailer in Peru, and the number three retailer in Peru, see that the number one's stocking it, and then they want to stock it.
So we've built, we've added to our global distribution from a wholesale point of view by having these little pockets where somebody somewhere in Greece or Peru or Bolivia or wherever it is, has seen our social activity and reached out to then stock the product from a wholesale point of view.
(34:27):
So yeah, TikTok isn't...
Social media is not just a B2C driver for us.
It's been a really interesting B2B driver as well.
It's fascinating you were there so early on.
B2B social media is not just LinkedIn.
I think one of the things that we can be very guilty of is thinking, oh, if it's business, it's, it's a business social network.
(34:49):
But of course, everybody's on TikTok.
Everyone's on Instagram.
Everyone's on a multitude of social media platforms.
And I think one of the things I'm really hearing is that throughout the whole lifespan of the business, you've actually made lots of adjustments based on what's happening around you.
(35:11):
And that could be really interesting for people listening who are thinking of starting a brand or they're trying to get growth from a brand that they're working on.
And being aware of what's happening around them sounds like it's something that you just really have to roll with.
(35:33):
And I'm just being conscious of time here.
I'd be really keen to say, like, Paul, you've had a really successful 10 years, an overnight success that's taken 10 years, as you say yourself.
But what is the advice that you would give to somebody that's actually starting out or in early stage at the moment?
(35:57):
You just outlined it.
And it's one word.
Sorry...
No, no, no.
It's one word.
It's listen.
And what do I mean by that?
I mean, okay, from a B2C point of view, you've got to listen.
You've got to listen to the market.
You've got to stay really close to the marketplace.
You've got to listen to what the consumer is wanting and demanding, and how that's changing.
(36:19):
And it is changing on a regular, regular basis.
So you've got to make sure that you're delivering the products to the end consumer that they really want.
You can't lock yourself in a room and go, oh, I'm a genius.
So I'm like, yes, the consumer definitely wants this.
And you go out and launch this product and you completely miss the mark.
So listen to the customers.
And that's not just listening to the end consumer.
(36:41):
A huge, huge part of our business from a B2B perspective is listening to our customers in each and every one of the markets that we're in.
So my partner, my B2B partner in Japan is going to have some slightly different demands than my B2B partner in Australia or in Korea or wherever they are.
(37:05):
Now, if we can react to those demands and deliver back to him what he's asking for, i.e. what his customer is asking for, we've got a huge opportunity to really continue to resonate in that marketplace and grow the business in the marketplace.
We take the opposite approach.
And Gordon, you will know this because you'll have seen this with brands you've worked with over the years, and I still see this with brands.
(37:29):
The opposite approach is, no, no, no, Mr. Japan distributor, this is our product.
We can't change it.
This is it.
This is the message.
You know, that's the key point.
It's listen.
Well, I think overall, it's been a fascinating story all over one little bottle of grippy stuff.
So thanks a million, Paul.
(37:50):
It's been great having you here.
Thanks for sharing your experience and your opinions and thoughts.
We've really enjoyed it.
Gordon?
Yeah, I've learned tons.
But the same theme coming through from everybody that we talked to is focus on the customer, react to what the customer wants, and ultimately success will be yours.
(38:15):
Yeah, I think that's it.
It doesn't matter what industry you're in, the same rules apply.
Thanks so much, Paul.
Thanks for sharing the story with us.
It's really been great.
Thank you very much.
Gordon, live and direct from, where are you this week, Gordon?
Hong Kong?
Yeah, I'm still in Shenzhen.
It's still hot.
It's still sticky.
It's still like living in the future.
(38:36):
I'm still amazed at the pace that things move out here.
It's such an inspiring place to be.
Well, thanks so much for checking back in with Ireland.
You know, it's also inspiring.
You know, I do have a bit of studio rage, though.
I am missing being in the studio.
The craic is mighty here.
(38:57):
Between you and Roger and Elaine, and then me 9,000 miles away.
Yeah, exactly.
So what did you make of the grippy spray?
I think the grippy spray in and of itself is super interesting.
But I think what's more interesting is the customer story and, really, how over time they've had to flex and respond to what their customers have really wanted.
(39:28):
And I think it's really pertinent that we've got Amazon about to launch their Irish online store.
And we've got a lot of trepidation by retailers.
We've got a lot of trepidation by brands.
And one of the messages I think I took away from Paul there was that this is going to happen whether you like it or not.
(39:50):
And you need to find a way to work with that because if your customer wants to shop on Amazon, then you need to work out how to be present with your customer.
Or if you can't be present with your customer on Amazon, you've got to give them a good enough reason not to be.
And I think that's really worth exploring.
(40:11):
I thought it was interesting.
There was a couple of things.
One is the number of times Paul said, and the really interesting side-effect of that was, or something we didn't expect that happened because of that was, you know, that kind of a thing where it's obviously, you only notice those side effects if, as he said, you're listening and you're watching and you're proactively managing your presence and that sort of thing.
(40:39):
The other interesting thing, which is worth calling out, we didn't really mention it, but, you know, when you are, let's say, in bed with Amazon, for want of a better word, you have to really be proactive.
And, you know, it's a busy, busy channel to be involved in.
You have to proactively manage it.
You've got to continuously watch for what's going on.
You know, if you switch off for even a week or so, you could find yourself in, kicked off the platform even, in some situations.
(41:06):
So it's not to be underestimated.
You know, it is lots and lots of eyeballs, but they're a strict taskmaster.
You know, you have to keep an eye on it.
Oh, it's far from fire and forget as a channel, isn't it?
It's not just you're putting it live.
You're actively managing it.
I think it's very interesting that Paul moves from a vendor relationship into a third-party FBA relationship.
(41:32):
I think the other thing that I'm going to kind of take away from this is that the use of all of the different channels that he has, like, I'm sure it wasn't a strategic move to try and win retailers in Peru, but TikTok made that happen.
And that was another interesting side-effect of doing the right thing.
(41:54):
So you've got, I suppose, I'm kind of bouncing around between subjects there.
Yeah, Amazon absolutely needs to be managed if you're in there, and it's not something that you can neglect, as with all of the channels that you have.
And then you've got back to this theme of interesting side-effects or interesting impacts that you didn't think were going to happen.
(42:16):
And I think that's just a wonderful story, but all linked back to understanding who their customer is, what their customer wants, and then delivering that to them.
Yeah, I felt as well the community-building is kind of instructive.
I know we didn't spend an awful lot of time on it and it was nearly accidental in some ways through the TikTok setup.
(42:40):
But I was really expecting, when I asked that question, that we were going to end up talking about how to build up a subscriber based on DTC and that sort of thing.
And that took a completely different turn from what I was expecting, you know.
Basically, we built an incredible community on TikTok, and that fed into a community on Instagram and on the YouTube Shorts.
(43:06):
And now we're getting in front of potential retailers in Peru and that sort of thing.
It's actually quite interesting in its own right.
Wasn't what I was expecting.
I was kind of thinking, are we going to be looking at email marketing into our DTC to try and sell our one-time purchasers into subscription purchases and that sort of thing.
(43:27):
So, really, really interesting as well.
Do you think, out of curiosity...
It's never as modular though, is it, as that?
So it's never as mechanical as if I do this, this, this and this will happen.
It's always squiggly.
And I love that the B2B thing came up.
Online B2B marketing is just not done on LinkedIn.
(43:49):
It's done everywhere.
And that's how you can get attention as a brand.
And I love that because people are in different modes when they're in different situations.
And it's great to see that kind of coming through.
It's interesting, like one of the areas I would have enjoyed speaking about, if time permitted, was just how he finds the CEO element of the job now and also the manufacturer element of the job, you know.
(44:20):
Not only is he now involved in, let's say, sports ecommerce, but also a manufacturer, a brand and now running the company and all of that kind of thing.
So there's quite a lot of hats being worn in this.
I'm sure he loves supply chain.
Who doesn't?
I kind of didn't quite expect to have so much to talk about in the realm of gloveglu and grippy spray, but it's another interesting kind of one where we didn't even cover like the fact that, you know, what it's like to own a category, to start your own category and then be the category king in that category.
(44:57):
So there was so much that we could have done or spoken about, but it was great to have that chat.
Gordon, thanks very much.
It's been a pleasure as always.
Thanks a million, Ger.
Loved every second.
Thank you.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.