Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:58
So yeah, it’s interesting. You know, there’s a virality to it, right? Obviously in a certain setting, I’m curious if you discovered something and then you went deep into a niche, because when you’re saying this, it gives me all sorts of ideas, like you mentioned, country club. Oh, we can contact all the country clubs. And that makes sense across the nation.
You mentioned investment banks. Okay. You mentioned I mean softball team or whatever. There’s leagues. Was there something that you just like, oh, we’re going to double down and just go into this and start.
I’m curious how you — if there’s any point where you’re like, yeah, we’re going to double down on this niche.
Fred Meyers: 16:36
Yeah. So niches Marketing to niches is expensive because you pay a premium for the locality of it. Whereas if you put an ad in The New Yorker, a national magazine, Wall Street Journal. You know, you get a discount for the lack of the lack of specificity.
So. I thought, like you’re suggesting like it’d be really easy to. Market to these verticals, as we call them these days. But it turns out that the price to put an ad in a vertical for like investment banks.
You know where you get $20,000. Investment banks getting it is the same cost is to put an ad in the Wall Street Journal that three Million people get so and it’s a numbers game you know, is Popeil and Sugarman will tell you, you know, you got to get the message out. Niche, niche product like niche stuff is hard to market. So you need to get it out in front of as many people as you can.
And you know, you talk about when people are doing cold calling, you know, the ones that are good at it know that, you know, I know I need to make ten calls and the 11th call I’m going to get a yes on. So, you know, every no that I get gets me closer to my yes. But when you’re doing direct marketing, you know, you get all 999 of those rejections in an instant and you get the yes at the same instant, too. So when I saw the number of orders we were getting from the broader marketing spectrum compared to the narrower one, that kind of got me more focused on the general market. And even to this day, you know, we always try to look for trends in our customer base and stuff.
And every time we kind of say, okay, we’re going to figure out who our customers are when we do an analysis fit or whatever. You know, what are the biggest group of customers we have? This has been true for 40 years, has always been other.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:03
So what’s that mean?
Fred Meyers: 19:05
Just other is people that aren’t easily categorized.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:08
Yeah.
Fred Meyers: 19:09
So you know, but the thing that that holds them all together is, you know, they’re small businesses. The thing that we always did starting off was make kept our order minimum size very low. So there’s a very low barrier to entry. Understood the importance of building that trust, you know, with the customer from the beginning about delivering. And if you don’t deliver, be accountable.
If there’s a problem. But the thing that ties everybody together basically is, you know, these are entrepreneurs. They’re running small businesses, small, medium-sized businesses. And, you know, our experiences of our lives are all kind of very similar. And I’ll tell anybody who will listen, including our we call the folks that deal with customers here our customer experience team because they’re like trying to optimize the customer experience that you guys don’t have any idea how lucky you are, because we are dealing with the absolute best customer base in the world, the owners of small, medium sized businesses in the United States.
These are guys and women, men and women, all kinds of people that have, you know, put everything they had on the line to try to make their businesses succeed. And for the most part, they’re succeeding. And they love what they do, and they understand what we do. And I think we’ve been successful because we talk the same language. We’ve been able to establish relationships based on a common language that we speak.
When a mistake gets made, you know, you own it and everybody understands. It’s not the end of the world. You move on it, particularly if you’re prepared to be accountable for it, which we always are. And it’s been amazing to, you know, I’ve got people that I’ve been working with for 20, 30 years.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:14
But I want to dig into one thing you said there. You know, obviously the things that you think about, you know, when people could check out the site to just see it in action. Right. You’re thinking about what’s the best offer we can give. What’s the best guarantee we can give?
You’re thinking about the customer experience a lot, so I’d love to hear some examples of feedback you got in some of the improvements. Because, you know, even at your stage, being in business for decades, you’re still always working to improve the customer experience, which is great. What are some of the things along the way that you got feedback on that helped improve the customer experience and journey?
Fred Meyers: 21:58
So one of the challenges that I had starting the business was there. You know, it’s kind of at the early days of computers and there was starting to be some software that was being written to scale businesses to track orders and things. But this was all for kind of linear kind of data, like a SKU purchased. Shipped. There was nothing where you could take an image and combine it with a SKU and track it through a system.
So early on, I got into software development and there was nothing that I personally could do myself, but I, I found the people who could do it, and we were building programs on dBASE, on the computers that were first coming out and figuring out how to attach logos. And so the power of maintaining control of your data and, you know, tracking orders through the system became obvious to me from a very early stage. And as we have gotten bigger and better over the time, over time, the ability to share an ordered journey with a customer in real time, where your order is and what’s happening with it, and what stage is that when it’s going to ship, predict when it’s going to ship. As we’ve gotten better and better at that, that’s really improved the customer experience, because the most frustrating thing that a customer can experience is when they kind of lose control. And they don’t have any idea what’s going on.
Nobody’s calling them back. They think they’ve lost their money. So whatever we can do to kind of keep the customer in the loop as to what’s going on with their order and project in real time, the more in control they feel, and also the more confident they are that if something goes off the rails or there’s a little problem that, like I’ve been saying, you know, we own it and we’re accountable for it. So you still use.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:29
You use a custom right now or site, or do you use kind of back end with like Magento or one of these?
Fred Meyers: 24:36
Yeah, this is all this is all custom.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:39
Custom.
Fred Meyers: 24:39
Stuff ourselves. We got a team of eight full-time developers on staff. It’s an amazing group of people. You know, I’ll tell you one thing, you know, like, it’s a little unique about me. And the way we run the business is, as you know, technology became a bigger and bigger part of what was required to kind of be in business and do well in business.
And these kind of renegade coders started imposing their lifestyle on organizations. It was kind of contrary the anti-social kind of disposition of these guys. And it was mostly guys at this point, was kind of ran contrary to the way I believe you should build a team and the value of working together cooperatively and positively and all that stuff. And I had had a guy running my technology team, you know, 20 years ago. And, you know, we were looking for people.
And he would always say, listen, you got to give these guys some slack. They’re just not like normal people. Don’t expect them to be nice. Don’t expect them to be patient with users. That just doesn’t happen.
And I said, no, I don’t, I don’t buy that. You know, I need — I think we can find people there to do those jobs that care about the people they work with. They’re going to care about the customers. They’re not going to be completely selfish people. And, you know, over time, we’ve been able to build a team, technology team that is like incredibly supportive of the users, our other employees that, you know, obviously aren’t as skilled as they are on this stuff.
And I think it’s been a real competitive advantage for us because all this stuff that you see, we have complete control over and we, we, we change it and tweak it as we need to. You talked about offers. It’s pretty complicated to have a site where the offers are dynamic and can change all the time. So if you click on that deals button, you’ll see above the custom, the word custom. You know, these are like you can choose any of these different promotions.
And you know, you put a load a bunch of stuff in your cart and then you kind of can go and shop on the deals and see where you get the best price. And you know, that was a pretty big development there as far as I know. There’s not another company in selling on the internet where you can do something like this functionality. Like this.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:27
I have a question About product expansion. Right. You started with shirts and.
Fred Meyers: 27:34
Yeah, white and navy. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:36
I’m curious what the evolution was like with that. And because I am when I look at this, Fred, I’m sweating because, I mean, if I want to click into one of these things. But it is crazy how much customization, right? I mean, this is from there’s enough logistics involved in just sending something in the mail and getting it from the warehouse and putting it in, and then you’re customizing it. But like I click on this, it’s like now there’s like 17 different colors.
There’s five different sizes. It’s insane. Yeah. And if you have a logo, did you just want like a glutton for punishment. Let’s like put more like product opportunities.
I mean, what was that evolution like of the products?
Fred Meyers: 28:28
So you’re looking at the site as a new customer, so you don’t have a logo in there yet. But if you had a logo in there and let’s say your logo had, you know, four colors in it, and you looked in all those shirt colors over there, we’ve got software built so that if you want to put a green logo on a white shirt and a white logo on a green shirt, and like, if you’ve got like a recognize within your.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:55
Logo, color of the logos and then only shows you those options type of thing.
Fred Meyers: 28:59
Well, it doesn’t do it that way. You’ve got complete control over it. But so you could have a six, you could have a six colored logo, you could buy seven different colored shirts. So that’s 56 potential color combinations, custom customization on that product. So just to give you an example of how complicated it gets to be.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:23
And but then you’re adding more products, right? I mean, you’re adding I mean, you start with shirts and the bags. There’s towels, there’s dress shirts, there’s polos, there’s.
Fred Meyers: 29:33
Hats.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:34
There’s drinkware. That’s all. Why, what was that? What did that look like? You know. Yes.
Fred Meyers: 29:41
So it’s a funny question. So. If first product was basically a dead knockoff of the Lacoste shirt without the alligator on it. And without going into too many, too much detail, the thing that really made that alligator shirt a great shirt is that it was made from this two-ply yarn, which is. Very specialized.
It’s a difficult process because you have to twist the single narrow yarns together. But it’s obvious. Like why that would be stronger — stronger and more durable. And because there’s actually more of the cotton exposed to your skin is softer product as well. But, you know, America is great about a lot of things.
But, you know, generally, you know, there’s an opportunity to do a little cheaper and get a similar kind of result. They do it. So when I really dug in it, dug into it, and realized why this French product, which was coming over to America, was so good, it was because of this yarn that nobody was really selling in the United States because it was too expensive and everything. But I found a guy, you know, I found a guy in North Carolina that could do it. It was a long, involved process, and.
My shirts were just as good as the original cast shirts. And, you know, the amazing innovation that Ralph. Ralph, Ralph, Ralph, Ralph Lauren ad, and I hope he’s sitting here listening to us now talk. Is that. Is that he realized you could use that cheaper yarn to make your shirt.
And he used a little bit of a different fabric that was a little softer. But what he said, what he realized was like Lacoste at that time was it was white, navy and red, I think. And he said, I’m going to do this in 26 colors. And it was like the NBC Peacock opening up. But the quality of the shirt wasn’t built to last in the same way.
So yeah, for me, it started with the white in the Navy shirt, and eventually I got a little bored with just selling shirts. And my next product was actually a shorts where they were cotton shorts. I found some nice fabric, and I found a guy in garment district in New York that could make the shorts. Make shorts for me. Which, you know, was a completely stupid product extension. And. But I like this fabric so much. You know, after the shorts, I found a guy in new Jersey that could make umbrellas for me with the same material. So it went from shorts to from shirts to shorts to umbrellas.
So there’s no I don’t know how I stayed in business. I mean, it’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:57
Just it’s crazy. Talk about the umbrellas for a second. You didn’t think of it because you got an interesting order for umbrellas at one point.
Fred Meyers: 33:10
Yeah, you just never know. Like, you know, the umbrellas weren’t really doing that. Great. But the great thing about being in business. And if you got entrepreneurs out there, I’m sure they’ll tell you the same story is you wake up in the morning and you just never know what’s going to happen.
And one morning I got in the office and I get this call this guy with a funny French sounding accent saying, I don’t remember the name of the country, but he’s calling from this little country and Africa and the, the president of this country is running for re-election, and he wanted to get a thousand umbrellas with his face printed on them. And I thought, well, that’s an interesting way to start the day. And, you know, you never know if you’re serious or not. But I said, okay, send over the artwork and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll get started on it. And so I got a DHL envelope the next day with a picture of the sky and his palace.
Sitting on his throne, sitting on his throne or whatever. He was wearing a suit. Name was Omar Bongo, I think, and I, like the name of the country is going to come to me, but. So I went to get the artwork set up for him and I said, okay, we’ve got the sample ready for you. I’ll send it to you.
How do you want me to send it to you? And Africa. And he said, no, no, no, don’t send it to me. You’re in New York, right? I said, yeah, I’m in New York.
And I was at the time. He said, my guy is he’s going to be in, he’s going to fly over to JFK and he’s going to take a look at the sample and he’ll prove it for you. And I said, you mean he’s going to fly over here just to look at this umbrella? He says, yeah, it’s not a problem. He you know, he doesn’t have anything to do.
So meet flight, you know. Air France Flight 278 at JFK at 4:00 on Saturday. And you’ll get the approval. And sure enough, you know, I’m over there. I’m at the gate, and this guy comes off in an impeccably dressed, blue suit, starched shirt and says, Fred?
I said, yeah. He says, you got the umbrella. I said, yeah, I said, let’s take a look. And he opened it up and says, oh, it looks great. So do you mind if I take it back to the president?
And His Excellency said, please be my guest. And the next day, two days as a Saturday, Monday they wired like $40,000 into my account, and we made and shipped the orders. So it was crazy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:06
Is this him?
Fred Meyers: 36:06
It was a crazy thing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:07
Is this him? That’s what it looks like.
Fred Meyers: 36:13
Yeah. What’s the country? Gabonese. Yeah. Gabon.
Gabon. Yeah. I still have one of those. I still have one of those umbrellas in my garage. Actually, I’m afraid to read that. I’m afraid to read that. Story, though, because I. Exactly. Well, this is this is Wikipedia.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:30
So there’s a lot of stuff on his life here, but He might have done.
Fred Meyers: 36:35
Or anything.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:36
And I think yeah, maybe you just apply that you have no. No hold you accountable for anything someone did who ordered your product. That’d be a scary thing.
Fred Meyers: 36:47
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But no, it’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:50
Just an interesting use case. And the product line going from shirts to shorts to umbrellas and beyond.
Fred Meyers: 36:59
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:00
It’s you know, so a couple of things I just want to highlight. We talk about offers guarantees customer experience like you thought about not just from you know the delivery perspective. Also just building on a software team to help the user experience on the, you know, even very, very early on before people were thinking about it, having the user experience online be great. I do want to hit on, you know, we talked about the operation. I mean, the logistics of this is crazy, right?
There’s so many moving pieces. You’re also you’ve expanded locations. What are some of the challenges you’ve overcome from the operational logistics? I mean, we’re talking from a dorm room into what you have now, which is kind of locations all over the country.
Fred Meyers: 37:53
So scaling obviously is a big challenge, particularly when you’ve got product, because product takes up a lot of space and costs a lot of money. We’ve been able to like I talked about the two ply yarn, you know, the early on I was buying yarn from a yarn spinner and sending it to a knitter, and then it was going to a dyer and finisher and then to cut and sew. And I had to tell the cut and sew guy, okay, I need so many small and medium, large, extra-large. I mean, it was a wow. It was — really we were never very good at it.
And we always had either too much or too little product. But, you know, over time we’ve been able to kind of simplify and simplify and simplify and we’ve got relationships with vendors now that are able to we’re linked with and we’re able to send orders as they come in on our website in real time. They actually pick them on an order basis and their facility and ship them to us, ready to go onto the machine. So before that, we had a warehouse, a big 40,000 square foot warehouse that was full of this product. And, you know, we would whatever we would pick out of the warehouse in a day, we would place an order to replenish the warehouse.
So we had guys running up and down the aisles trying to pick boxes, and that’s all gone now. So that need for all that warehouse space is gone now also. And. It was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:36
This allows you to do a Little bit more, you know, just custom related stuff but like not hold tons of inventory. Right.
Fred Meyers: 39:48
Exactly.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:49
You’re I mean, you have To build up good partners over time, right? I mean. That’s absolutely what you, what you have to do.
Fred Meyers: 39:57
Yeah. And, you know, that kind of goes back to the old school philosophy of, at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships. And, you know, relationships are all about trust. And I’ll tell you a quick story about. Kind of a pivotal, pivotal moment in my career, which was, you know, we never really had any trouble growing the business. There are challenges in the early stages were always more about delivering orders because, like you say, logistics are complicated.
And that kind of changed in 2008, 2009. It was kind of like the with that recession that really kind of slammed the door on the old analogue economy. And but the new digital marketplaces hadn’t quite yet replaced The New Yorker magazine, The Wall Street Journal, as marketplaces. And we became really frustrated in trying to grow the business. And at that point, and for a couple of years, tried a lot of different things, didn’t work.
And I’m going to try to keep the story kind of short here. But one afternoon, 2014 you know, was really frustrated. Was really tough week and swimming some laps and trying to, you know, work out the frustrations swimming and swimming. I think I’m about to turn 50 or something and thinking, why aren’t we doing better? Why aren’t we doing better?
Why aren’t we doing better? Kind of at the rhythm of the stroke. Then all of a sudden I hit the wall and with my hand on my head and I said, we’re not doing better because we aren’t better. We’re. We’re actually performing to our abilities, our capabilities.
And it made me realize how much just kind of hope was such a fundamental strategy that businesses have about, you know, how they’re going to do. And then it was like, okay, so how do you get better? And getting better starts with the people in your organization. So imagine an organization with all great people you know, no brilliant jerks, as they say. And so, you know, how do you even begin to do that?
So you have to kind of create a profile of what a great employee is. And we created these four P’s around that, which is that somebody is principled positive. Proactive and productive. So that’s kind of the filter. But then on top of that we you know, the company started changing.
We started the quality of the people. The energy started improving. Then we had to come up with a philosophy of management and leadership to corral all these great people, to make sure everybody was on the same page and really did deep dive into what great leadership really looks like. and came up with this insight that really the core of great leadership, because you can be an effective leader and a bad leader. You know, you can get results and stuff, but that’s not really great leadership.
Great leadership is, you know, all the things we all agree upon is about bringing people together. But the center of it, the core of it is an ability to form relationships, develop great relationships with people up and down, you know, all different kinds of people in all different walks of life. And those relationships are the basis of trust. And you can’t have trust in an organization if you don’t have great relationships through that organization. And an organization is not just your team, it’s your customers, it’s your vendors.
And it all starts with the relationships, which is the basis of trust. And this is what we’re trying to do with our customers and everybody we work with.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:08
No, Fred, thanks for sharing that. I love that question is how do we get better?
Fred Meyers: 44:12
How do we get better?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:13
And the four P’s. And that’s really instructive. It’s a great reminder. So thank you for sharing that. I have one last question.
Okay. Before I ask it, I want to point people to queensboro.com. If you’ve been watching the video, you’ve seen the site, you can check it out. And they have some amazing deals on there, obviously. So check those out too.
The no brainer offer. Even with the guarantee, I didn’t even realize it was a guarantee. But that’s even better. But the last question is just about a story we were talking about before we hit record about, you know, someone passed away and I don’t know why you were the person they called.
Fred Meyers: 45:01
Yeah. So. Our mission, which also came out of a kind of that 2014 epiphany, is. We’re trying to help people share who they are with the world. And this is kind of ironic thing about this particular use case, but. We want to be we want to be partners with people and, and expressing themselves and, and becoming the, the people who they want to be and who they feel like they are.
But we’ve developed a lot of great relationships with customers over the years, and people really, they love the shirts. As we talk about, you know, great quality shirt, the logo on it, you know, magic happens. And this call that you’re referring to came in late afternoon on Friday. from a woman who was, you know, audibly upset. And she said, Fred, you know, I need a favor from you.
My father has been a customer of yours for 20 years. And for the last 20 years, the only shirts that he ever wore were the shirts she made from him with our farm logo on it. They had a farm in Stamford, Connecticut, and my dad had a great life, but he passed this morning and we were going through his instructions. And on the top of his list was I must be buried in a brand new Queensboro tuxedo shirt. And she said, the funeral’s on Monday.
Can you possibly help us out? And you know, I was brought to tears by this story, and I still get a little emotional even thinking about it, that a product could have such an impact on a customer that they would do that as a last request.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:15
All right. Totally. No. Thanks for sharing that.
Fred Meyers: 47:19
It’s a testament to that. Yeah, it’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:21
A testament to the relationship and the product. And I want to just point people to queensboro.com. And Fred, thanks for sharing some of your journey, your lessons with us. So I appreciate it. And we’ll see everyone next time.
Fred, thanks so much.
Fred Meyers: 47:39
Thanks. Yeah. Have a great, great day.
