April Already?! | From Start To Finish

0:00In there welcome to Nick's Boots start to finish podcast. I'm Shilohman. I've got Lucas or Lucas. Lucas? You don't take the L, right? Oh, okay. Yeah. Never take L's. I like that. Yeah, there you go. Well, you didn't like being the big L, so. Welcome to the show. I've got some updates. What did we hear earlier this week, Lucas, about the 1925 last size expansion? Oh, yeah. Last are on their way, right? They're just going to be entering through customs right now. Yep. Yep. So we've got last for the 1925 widths from B to double F and everything in between on their way. So. Big

1:00size expansion, expansion there for the 1925. Yep. We'd like to get that get that going more. So that's exciting. So you'll see more, you know, 1925 options. Ivan's I have been a popular request. And so speaking of Ivan's that's an alder. That's an alder. But it's kind of like an Ivan except. Okay. So this is the boot of the month. Yes. Okay. This the bottom. The boot of the month. So essentially an alder pattern on a 360 stitch down. Cut top kind of like the MH64. Oh, yeah. But in a 360. So it's a lot more lightweight. Probably as close as we can get currently to like a sneaker. But it's the Minotaur Bullhide. Okay. So super tough. Yeah. I mean, some Minotaur something to be aware of is it quite as pebbled as like a law or our Yellowstone from Horween. And so you don't get quite as much texture, especially when it's lasted. It kind of pulls it out a little bit. But this is super thick. It's bullhide and it's still got that kind of flexibility from the pebbling process. So it's nice and supple. But yeah.

2:17Highly recommend. Yeah. Okay. It's nice to it's soft like the law. Yeah. So it's got the pebbling bullhides to protect some variation there. But it's a cool new option. Yeah. Essentially precreased with the shrinking. I think the biggest thing that's happened in the last week is probably our patina showcase tool. This is calling it an Instagram. I don't know how long that will last. I just I just did that for April fools. I switched it back to boot gallery this morning. Okay. Because I assume we don't want to deal with no Instagram getting getting lawyers involved. But you know, would be cool to have a better name on boot gallery though. Yeah. So we can think there's some patina gallery or yeah, I don't know. But essentially it's a boot gallery for customers to be able to submit their photos. So right now I think we have around 50 submissions all from customers who have worn their boots.

3:28You know, a lot of brand new photos along with, you know, photos of boots from, you know, five plus years ago. Yeah. So this will be like a kind of an ongoing thing. So we'll have an email flow. Obviously. So you'll get, you know, if you buy a boot, you'll get an email from us, you know, six months or maybe a year after you. Your boots shipped and we'll be like, hey, do you mind sending us, you know, submitting some photos of what they look like now and you'll, you will get like a $10 coupon towards a future order. For like, you know, especially accessories, counties, places, something like that. Or of course, you can, you know, put that towards a boot. But yeah, so please check that out. We'd love to see your, you know, see your photos. We've talked about it a little bit on the Reddit. And then we'll continue to push that and see you may see some emails just if you're subscribed to the list asking you, hey, like if you don't mind, you know, yeah, submit some photos there, you know, we're trying to integrate that into the purchasing process and make it easier for people to see like, what are all these lovers going to look like when they get them and be, you know, over time.

4:34Yeah, so yeah, pretty cool. You can filter by product. Yeah, I was thinking about it. Once we get enough photos on here, I know we've been getting a lot of requests for like a virtual boot builder. If there's enough photos and enough variation, you could almost get kind of like a virtual boot builder effect going. Like, if there is a spec in there, that is what you were looking for. If you pick the leather, the last, the height, the outsole, toe style and something matches all those things, boom, that's what that boot looks like. Yeah, and I think, you know, I don't exactly what the cost structure would look like on this, but it seems like good use case for like may I tool or something like that because like for April fools, there was a post on our sub from a really funny guy. And basically used AI to swap out one shaft being smooth and one shaft being rough out as kind of a joke like, ha ha, we did this.

5:37We did not, we would never do that. That was a generated, but this guy's gotten pretty good at basically making, you know, image generators create. Very realistic photos of what things will look like changing certain things, whether that's a lot of color, you know, what? I was just to the point where I had to add a reddit flare that said April fools, right, because we were getting actual comments of people like, how do they ship this out? I saw you in the comments like, we didn't, this is fake, please. Yeah, it's April fools. I know, and like when people do that, I'm like, he's gonna get picked up by some, yeah, LLM. There was also that one post about like, Nick's was, you sold the company. Right. Then there was the private equity joke. That was hilarious. I was like, yeah, I did private equities all over custom boot companies that are hard to scale and have the size of like three or four McDonald's franchises.

6:39So yeah, I mean, but I do think that could be an interesting use case, especially if you could have it only reference like those photos, right? Or photos from our website. That could be an interesting way to visualize what things would look like, you know, making all those changes. It seems like a good tool, because like if you look at our, like if we, you know, so the previous way to do this was with like, a rendering tool. It was cost prohibitive, because everyone wants like a revenue sharing agreement on the sales that go through their, their render tool. And that's like, that would be like most of our sales probably. So, so that was kind of a non starter, but like, we have, I think literally six billion possible skew combinations with all the options that we have. So obviously not feasible to really have photographic representation of everything. So yeah, this might be a good compromise on how to kind of bridge that gap.

7:40Yeah, I'm excited. I think there's a lot of cool things we can do with this gallery. Another cool feature is as your uploading photos, you tag which boot product it is. And now when you go to that product page, there's a section that says like customers from photos or, well, photos from customers. Are you okay? I think I just had a stroke or something burning toast photos from customers. And yeah, it shows all the boot gallery photos that apply to that. Yeah, that's awesome. So we've been talking through how we can maybe use like the next boots lineup, maybe do one for small leather goods. Lots of cool things we can do with this. Yeah, let's, gosh, let's get, let's get more people submitting this. It's almost like a little, you know, next social media. You can comment and like stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, this was originally the thought behind this was like, well, we're like, I don't know.

8:40I think we're half to maybe more of all the photos on patina project, you know. And if you don't know, patina project is the app that is used by the patina thunderdown through stitch down. You know, where people who are very dedicated take photos of their boots each month. And so it's a great way to accumulate product photography. And so we are like, well, like most of, you know, we're most of the content on there, a lot of it anyway, more than any other brand, which is kind of crazy. But I was like, well, how do we, how do we have this on the site? And so they reached out to me and they were like, oh, we're going to try and build this tool that you can put on to your website. And it'll pull in all the photos of a patina project. But Tyler, despite you being the primary content generator for our enterprise and the main sponsor of the competition that generates all the content for our enterprise.

9:44They decided that we were too big to start with and they don't want it to be any issues. And so that is not moving forward. And so I was like, well, I can just buy this cool tool and basically have the same functionality. So does seem like the AI apocalypse may be beginning for all these little niche SaaS providers. We'll see. I don't know. Well, that's what's happening, right? Yeah. Like all these software companies are getting hammered because you can just go into cloud, ask it for a prompt, put it into base 44 and it'll pop out like basically the same functionality. Interesting times, interesting times. But anyway, yeah, I was amazed that we basically have the same functionality for like it was super cheap. Yeah. What a time to be alive. So anyway, you can basically get the same functionality on our site now, which is cool. Obviously, there's not quite as much volume there, but we'll be working to populate that very rapidly with your help to your customer.

10:45We hope we hope you will help us out with that. Yeah, any any thoughts or feedback on it? We'd love to hear it. I know there's a couple notes when we first launched it and I've made those changes. So now on the photos, which says the leather name right on the photo, you don't have to click into it, which I think is great idea. Anything else, you know, I can add more filters. I can remove filters. We can there's a lot we can do with this. So cool. All right, guys. Well, we hope you have a wonderful Tuesday and that your... Gosh, April. It's almost May. No, no, no. It's crazy. Yeah. Time flies. Quarter the way through the year. Yep. But I hope you had a good first quarter and that you had all of your goals, especially revenue and profitability. Yes. Yes. Most important things. And we will talk to you later for a while. Bye.