Anna Glaessgen: Great, thanks, that’s really helpful. Another one for me, great to hear how strong Chubbies did in the year. Would it be possible to put a finer point on that, the level of growth they saw?
Chris Metz: So, Anna, it’s something that as we look towards the future, one of the things that we want to do for our analyst and investor community is to try to create some more transparency between our two businesses, Chubbies and Stove. And I think you’ll see more of that as we go forward here. We’re still getting our minds around reporting and how we want to do that. But suffice it to say that this is one of the better performing apparel brands out there. And we’re excited about — I’m excited about what I see. I mean, I like everything from the leadership down through the team, the capabilities, how they connect with the consumer, the following that they have from the consumer. And when I first walked in, I was thinking, okay, this is a young male audience.
And what I’m learning is, this is an audience that stretches from kind of late teens to late 40s and beyond. So it’s a big swath of the male audience. And they’re so excited about our — about the brand. And you can see it in social media following. I can see it as I walk some of the retail footprint that we’re putting in place. I can see it as we go through some of our core strategic retail customers who are merchandising and showing it in a very, very prominent way. So you’ll start to see us break out a little bit more and share some of the results that we’re seeing in this business going forward.
Anna Glaessgen: Great, looking forward to it. Thanks.
Chris Metz: Thanks, Anna.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brian McNamara with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, Brian.
Brian McNamara: Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking our questions. First off, I mean, Solo Stove had a viral marketing campaign in Q4 that didn’t deliver immediate sales results. I’m curious if you took any positives away from it in terms of building brand awareness and would you expect it to have an impact on sales this year? And in particular, will that celebrity endorsement continue or has that ended with the change in the marketing agency?
Chris Metz: Well, it’s a good — it’s a very good question. It’s something that we studied very deeply. And what I can tell you about the fourth quarter is that the efforts that you’re talking about, the marketing efforts, did go viral. And we got a lot of brand awareness. And it’s what I would call top-of-the-funnel marketing, right? So we’re really showing our brand to new consumers for the first time. What happens is, in key selling seasons like Q4, you want to be spending more of your marketing dollars towards the bottom of the funnel. So think of the top of the funnel as brand awareness, the middle of the funnel as kind of brand consideration. And as you work down to the bottom of the funnel, it’s brand conversion. And so you want to be spending across the full funnel throughout the entire year, but you really want to be converting in key selling season.
So although we created brand awareness with that campaign, it wasn’t linked in any way to our website. So if you went to our website, you wouldn’t see any connection to it. We didn’t have a full product offering that connected back to that campaign. We didn’t roll it as much into our email and re-marketing efforts. So I think the learning is that great creative, great brand awareness. Now we need to take a step back and say, okay, where do we go from here? There’s a lot of great ideas that the team is thinking about, but we’re not going to do a ready, fire, aim. We’re going to do it at the right time, we’re going to take advantage of who we think is a terrific spokesperson that has a wonderful following that fits well with the Solo Stove brand and we just need to partner in a better way and we need to be more effective in the way that we communicate and convert that consumer.
But the brand awareness was outstanding, which will help us long term.
Brian McNamara: Great, that’s helpful. Secondly, Chris, when you took the job, I’m sure you had some expectations regarding the job you were undertaking and the work required to ride the ship. Now, two months in, I’m curious what has surprised you, both good and bad, relative to your initial expectations? What are you most excited about and what keeps you up at night? Thank you.
Chris Metz: Yeah, so what’s excited me the most is, one, we’ve got a really energized and excited workforce. We’ve got great facilities that attract great people and attract a lot of our customers to visit. So we have a great showcase brand and a workforce that is really, really engaged in the product that we market and sell. I would say secondly, the brand affinity, so when you think about the net promoter score and you think about the following of our brand, it’s one of the best brands out there. People love our brand, they want to buy our brand, and so that is — it’s confirmed to me that this is the right foundation to strengthen and build upon. Now, what surprised me a bit is that, one is we didn’t have — we had good partners from a marketing standpoint that helped us early on.
I mean, they’ve got great capabilities, but as we start to grow and we start to expand our audience through different channels and different means, we really need to partner with people that understand full funnel marketing. We also need to strengthen our bench. We need to bring in talent and it starts at the top. Great people attract great people. So if you look at the team that I’ve begun to assemble in my first 60 days, we’ve hired a Chief Financial Officer. We’ve hired a Chief Growth Officer. We’ve hired a Head of Brand Marketing and Consumer Insights. We’ve hired a Head of People. So we started to really build out the leadership team. Now each of these great leaders in turn are starting to go build out their organizations as well. So now what keeps me up at night is just the commitments that we make to you all and that I make to the Board.
