And when you click on them and you go to their website, their websites have advertising. So we have started the process of reaching out. We’re hiring a digital advertising specialist to manage this process, because this will take a lot more work than just giving Facebook $200,000. Now instead of giving Facebook $200,000, we’re going to have to give 40 different platforms $5,000 to drive business. But we intend to do this in the segments where we know we’re speaking to our demographic. One of the things that’s kind of interesting about this is Facebook was sort of like crack. It was easy and it was somewhat effective and it was hard for us to get off. But we recognized that over time, it was becoming less effective. So even when the sessions fell off dramatically, when our sessions went from 26,000 to 12,000, we did not see a significant drop off in sales.
As I said, our sales for the quarter were off less than 1%, and we are still seeing a much, much higher conversion rate than we did when we were advertising on Meta. So, we knew the effectiveness of Meta was waning. And we think it’s waning — was waning for two reasons. One, we were unable to really focus our ads as precisely as we had been in the past. As Apple has started to provide less personal information about its customers, it has become more difficult to really slice their customer base demographically. We think that by going after these specific platforms that cater to our customer base, we’re able to do two things. One, we’re able to replicate, in total, the number of views that we’re getting. But more importantly, we’ll be able to do it — geared to the specific demographics that we know are interested in Byrna.
So, as I said, we will keep people apprised of our success going forward. We don’t have enough information at this point.
David North: Yes. This is the main reason for our withdrawing guidance, because this is uncharted territory. And really what you’re asking about is what will the results be, what will the uptick in sales be and what would the return on advertising dollars be? We don’t know. We’ll tell you as it goes.
Bryan Ganz: But we’ll know soon.
Jim McIlree: And as far as, David, your discussion about gross margin, that obviously assumes some mix shift away from direct to consumer. Does that have a big impact on your prediction that gross margin improve modestly over the next couple of quarters? Or are we seeing two things happen: one, we’re getting rid of the old inventory, but we’re getting hit by the change in the mix?
David North: The main thing I’m looking at is just what’s the cost of the old inventory is going to be going at. I haven’t done a lot to predict what will the change in the mix be for the same reason why we’re not providing guidance. It’s hard to predict what the mix will be over the next couple of quarters. Over the longer term, what we see happening with the dealer sales, that I expect to be a long term trend that will — the dealer sales will gradually form a greater percentage of our overall revenues. And yes, over the longer term, that will have a dampening effect on our gross margin percentage. That’s longer term and I really…
Bryan Ganz: David, if I can just interrupt. But not as much as you would think. So with these Side Hustle dealers and with these Premier Dealers, we are not working through rep groups, so we are not building in the margin of the reps. We are not working through distributors, so we’re not building in the margin of the distributors. These are the highest margin dealer sales, the Side Hustle business and the premier dealers. So we think that, yes, the change in mix will have some impact, but not as great as just substituting our current dealer margins for our current DTC margins.
