How To Create A Cult-Like Following For Your Brand

David:
Alright, welcome to another episode of the How We Solve podcast, where we talk to very smart individuals who have solved hard problems. And today we're talking to Travis Rosbach, if you pronounced in the German Way. He has spent the last 30 years studying his entrepreneurial skills throughout the previous 10 years. He has been proud to introduce sourcing, advising, consulting, public speaking, business coaching to his expertise. And his clients include a wide range of industries, celebrities, individuals leading countries, and he's probably the most interesting man in the world. He's been a pilot, he's been a US merchant, marine boat captain. He's a scuba dive master and instructor and he's a yoga instructor. He's a record practitioner and he's the founder of Hydro Flask, which you probably know, it's like the water bottle with the Cartoon H guy. And this is probably the only product that has sold more than yoga pants in Los Angeles. So you've definitely seen this product. And Travis, super excited to have you on the show.

Travis:
David, thank you for having me. This is such a pleasure.

David:
How We Solve, we always want to solve something and today we want to solve something super cool and it's basically how do you build a cult? Not the drastically how you turn your brand into a cult, maybe not, but how do you learn from propaganda campaigns? How can you apply these things to your marketing?

Travis:
I love this topic. It's one that I don't think it gets enough airplay. So yeah.

David:
So how do you turn your product into a global phenomenon, a water bottle that is literally omnipresent?

Travis:
Yeah, good question. I like the omnipresent too. That really is a big part of it is that's really the ultimate goal I think of building a cult-like following around a brand is having the brand be omnipresent in all of your life and throughout all of your life. I've always been really inquisitive and when starting Hydro Flask, we just started looking at the marketing campaigns of the already achieved cult-like following brands, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, all of the fast food restaurants, on and on and on. Anybody who had already achieved that status, just looking at their propaganda and then putting it into our words and then putting it back out there. And then also, I want to caveat everything with having a really good product, with really good intention, having really good morals and values is always I'd like to convey. That has always been an underlying value,

David:
Especially these days where people vote more with their wallet or their conscious. When people left Uber because of they were not treating people and they're already flocked to Lyft or brands like Patagonia or you have an impact by consuming these products, it becomes much easier. The only thing if you want to do evil things, you have to have something like a CIGA brand or something like this. You maybe can create a cult following around this, but that's not what you're going to do.

Travis:
Yeah, no, you're right. You're absolutely right With the voting, with the dollars and then wearing the badge or wearing the membership, holding or drinking out of or driving the membership badge. Like you see, I belong to the cult of Subaru. I personally belong to the cult of Toyota. That's where I subscribe. And so I wear that as kind of a badge of honor and I'm single right now. And as I look at dating women, I look at the cars they drive and it's like, well, if they drive a Subaru or Toyota, we're probably going to get along pretty well. I understand a lot more of their psyche. I know where they shop theoretically, and typically I know where they shop, I know how they live. I probably know other brands that they're going to be having in their homes and I know how well we can get along as opposed to somebody who drives a vehicle that I'm not really fond of that other brand and I don't really associate with those morals or those values that come from that brand.

David:
Interesting. I never saw it through this lens, but it makes total sense. We want to belong to tribes. It's spill into us and makes it easier for us to recognize if this is somebody that I want to be around or something I want to be part of.

Travis:
I'm here in Bend, Oregon, and we've just got a huge onslaught of people moving here. A lot of them are really cool, A lot of them are not as cool. Just looking at the cars and looking at who is coming. I can see a major shift coming in our area and a lot of that has to go to the brands that they associate with. But I do believe that knowing who your customer is is huge. Who is this person? How old are they? Where do they shop? How do they dress? How do they vote? Where do they work? And the more you can micro specifically hone in on a ideal customer, but then also a realistic customer, I think that you're going to have a much better time getting in front of them. And then like you said earlier, being omnipresent in their life that they read these magazines, these books, these blogs, this social media, these brands. Well then how much easier is it to be omnipresent in their life? With Hydro Flask, we had the monumental task of figuring out, okay, well if you drink water, if you drink liquid, you are now a potential customer. So how do we take everybody and then where do we actually spend that marketing, those dollars and what the branding was a little easier. I knew that we wanted to save plastic, we wanted to help protect the environment. We wanted to help save the world. We wanted to hydrate the masses. We wanted to hydrate everybody's lives. So the branding was a little easier, but then the marketing was a little bit more of a challenge. It was so broad,

David:
And I think it's always with positioning. I had a bunch of people on the show to talk about positioning. I think it's one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to say, okay, I'm just going to focus on this narrow audience because I don't have the gun power to do Super Bowl ads. Who do I really focus on? And by doing this, it's the right thing to do because you want to stand out, but it feels like you're cutting away all this opportunity because everybody you're doing so other could be my customer, but we want 30 year old yoga teachers who whatever. So how narrow did you go in the initial?

Travis:
Initially we were extremely broad. It literally was anybody who drank liquid was a potential customer and it actually worked fairly well. It was the truth. Everybody felt, well, I shouldn't say everybody, but dang near. Everybody felt better after drinking water and becoming hydrated maybe sometimes the first time in their entire life. They started to physically, mentally, emotionally, all other ways feel better from being hydrated. And so that was always my own personal Travis's mission was just to hydrate everybody. And then as we started growing it, the powers that be would come in and say, no, no, Travis, we have to focus on a narrow subsection of humanity in order to expedite the growth through the marketing channels. So we went to the outdoor sporting realm, which made a lot of sense because there had been a couple water bottles before us that had sort of left the market and they were in the sporting good outdoor world. And so it made a lot of sense to start there. I should say the first account was with our friend Trudy at Mountain Supply here in Bend, Oregon. Shout out to Trudy aunt. So she was our first, but she was a family of friends that kind of didn't count. So the second one, which was the big one, was Whole Foods. So found very quickly that the healthy organic food lifestyle shops and businesses were a very good demographic for us as well.

David:
And then the distributions, of course, you always went B two B kind of being in this local supermarket or did you do online sales? What was the main sales channel where you're pushing your product through?

Travis:
In the early very first days, we were direct to consumer up at the Portland Saturday market, we were out the Burnside Bridge, the Max Rail tracks, just SS Slanging water bottles and collecting cash. I mean, it was just literally just throwing bottles at people and collecting money from 'em. And I loved that. I mean, I really got a kick out of it. I enjoy people. I enjoy talking to people and learning about who they are and what they're up to. And it really gave us a good perspective of who our demographic is and was how they responded to these bottles, what questions they had, what colors they liked or didn't like or what we could experiment. And we'd put a little bit of money into a new banner for instance. And then realistically at the end of the day, we'd have a hundred people tell us feedback as opposed to a hundred thousand people who sees a banner who might not resonate. We could get feedback very quickly from something like a banner. So that's how we started. And then we ended up with a fairly good sized world headquarters here in Bend. We started a website and then we picked up sales reps also. So the sales reps started to get us into stores and that really took off. Our sales reps were the ones that really helped. Propag propagate the sales, is that right? Yeah, propagate.

David:
Which year was this by the way?

Travis:
2008. We started slinging bottles 2009, I think we were originally registered as A L L C in Honolulu, and then we came back home to Bend. I'm originally from Oregon and started, I think 2009 was our Bend, L l C. It started L L C, then we went corporation there pretty quick thereafter.

David:
To recap, to build a cult following for your brand, first you figure out who's the ideal demographic and ideally you do this by having direct contact with your customers, talk to people. And once you found those, what do you do then?

Travis:
Well, I was studying what the other cult brands were doing, and while some of what they were doing was not necessarily applicable or obtainable with our budget, I could at least get a feel for how is Zappos doing this? How is Patagonia, how is Red Bull? How is Coca-Cola? How does McDonald's come across, what commercials do they use and how does Red Bull speak and how do people feel when they see Red Bull? And so I used a lot of the other really big brands that were popular, like those popular brands, jour back then that liked and or I admired and didn't necessarily McDonald's, but I admired their marketing and sales and their branding power. And yet again, it goes back to we were good people doing good things, we're doing water bottles, we're not doing something that hopefully it's not going to kill you in the long term. It's not sugar, it's not gross, it's healthy and good. So how could we take all of those big brands and put our own unique voice to that?

David:
You define your brand voice, you define who it's for, and ideally it definitely helps that you do something that's actually good for people, it's good for an environment. You kind of have this feel good thingy that goes with it. I guess defining a really cool mission and vision where employees and customers can buy into. I guess it's a very helpful thing. For example, a friend of mine does Global Brigades where they send students to third world countries and then say you study medicine and you go to Medical brigade and he sends an insane amount. I don't know how it's now called, but you send insane amount of people on these brigades and he had two full-time employees. Everybody else was a volunteer because people really buy into this mission and vision and share this. So if you do something good, people definitely want to share this. And I guess also I'm a big fan of swag and if you have good swag, people like to share good things. People like to talk about things that are good fathers because if I tell you, Hey man, you can eat these berries, they're yummy. Don't eat these, they make you sick and stolen. Each times I rise up in the social view of you because I just provide value to you. So we like doing that, but we need a trigger to talk about this. And Hydro Flask is perfect because this big thing that you run around with people that's like, Hey, what's this? And then people can talk about this, Hey, that's a hydro flask. I guess if you don't have the luxury of selling the physical product, which is swag itself as a software business, I think it's cool if you send out swag that people will actually use in the wild. So you can trigger this conversation like, Hey, what's this that people have the opportunity to share?

Travis:
Absolutely. I completely agree with you David. I had heard a story about, and I don't know if it's true, but I haven't heard that it's not the guy who invented Oakley was watching nascar. And if you look at a TV square or rectangle, I guess they're nowadays, the winner would stand there and all you could see was their head and they'd be interfering and there'd be two heads talking. And his idea was, well, how do I get my brand in this rectangle? How do I get it on that TV screen with the winner? And so he realized, well, if I put my brand right here in between somebody's eyes, you're going to see my brand. So that always was very intriguing to me. How do we get our brand all over omnipresent in your life? And that was not only the water bottle, but then it went into swag, which is stuff we all get. Also, there's swag, which is shit we all get, and those are cheap, ballpoint pin or cheap. They're like, oh, I got a little cheap ruler or tape measure or something. It's like, yeah, that swag swag though is stuff that we're actually going to wear if it's a nice baseball cap or if it's a nice t-shirt and it's good quality and it fits well and it's printed nicely and the brand spent some money on it, then yeah, people absolutely are going to represent your brand. And that was always part of our sort of mission also was let's get our customers to be our salespeople for us also. So the shipping department was always constantly putting out extra stickers in boxes or every once in a while they'd just throw in hats or they'd throw in a t-shirt just randomly I'd go back and we'd put a hundred dollars bill inside just random things that people wouldn't necessarily anticipate getting with just ordering a water bottle. I think that that was always huge. And then as we started going more and more retail, the swag just kind of intensified almost because we really wanted to take care of those sales reps and so we would send out signs and banners and whether they put 'em up in the store as subliminal marketing or conscious marketing or if they even put 'em up. We had a lot of people say that they would see us in the break room or in the back room. They'd put up the banners, which I was always a fan of. Also, I had multiple people tell me that as soon as I walk in the door, the first thing I see is hydro flask and it's like, yep, that's exactly right. You see my banner. As soon as you walk in, you're going to subconsciously be thinking about these bottles throughout the day. And as you go out onto the sales floor, hopefully you'll remember our brand. And then swag also included actually huge promotional deals and actually giving out the bottles to people as well to try to have them help us promote the branding as well.

David:
Yeah, something we did with my last business, which was a content delivery network, what we did is we gave three accounts of the C D N to bloggers to WordPress bloggers, and we asked them to write about this like, Hey, here's cdn. It's going to make your side passers. You're going to rank higher Google if you like it, please write a blog post about this. If you don't like it, you can also trash it on the blog post, but please talk about this. And this worked phenomenally well in terms of just getting exposure to the right audience, even though these bloggers were not our target audience because they didn't spend much money on bandwidths. Were making our money, but bloggers want to blog about something. So we got free exposure from a lot of people and we actually went through cost towards sponsoring and giving product away. We went to Mashable and we told 'em like, Hey guys, we give you the C D N for free. We even buy a banner on your sidebar in return. We want at the bottom accelerate by Ian having this in the tech field was sponsoring an athlete or something like this. So to just associate with the people that your audience likes I guess is also if we add another rule to the how to become a cult brand, I guess with Ian, we are definitely in the WordPress space. We were the player, everybody knew us because we focused on this small niche market and we became omnipresent in there. Every blog we went to the big influencers and pay the money to become affiliates, promoter stuff. So did you do any things like this to promote athletes or people to cut some deals with them?

Travis:
We did. That's awesome. That's spot on, dude. You're absolutely right. That's a great way to, anytime you can get others to help and be like a champion of your product or brand, it's so much more beneficial than trying to pour the money into trying to advertise to their following. Being at Bend, Oregon, we had the luxury of having a lot of snowboarders, a lot of bicyclists, a lot of triathletes, a lot of athletes in general come to train or come to live. We had Olympians and then also with our Hawaiian roots. I mean my partner and I really honestly started Hydro Flask in Oahu, and so we had a lot of surfing connections. We knew some celebrities out in Hawaii in that realm as well. And of course we gave everybody who had a little bit of a following a bottle or two or 10, and they felt better.
I mean, it was the first time they really started drinking water out of something that could maintain the temperature. It wouldn't freeze when they went snowboarding, it wouldn't turn too hot to drink When they went out surfing, they could come back from surfing and they could still drink the water. It wouldn't be too hot. They could go do a triathlon and then get back in their car and they'd have their hot coffee at the end of it or whatever. The stories we were getting back, we just would always try to help them. And then as a result, I mean they started helping us with product placement here and there. We'd sponsor a logo on a jersey or on a jacket or on a snowboard or a skateboard or whatever it happened to be.

David:
Very cool.

Travis:
I really attribute a lot of that to Red Bull. Also, we were very lucky that Red Bull was, they were the cool kids on the block circa oh 8, 0 9. All of their athletes seemed to really, I was going to say drink that proverbial Kool-Aid, which kind of is what it is, and then be huge brand ambassadors and you might not necessarily recognize the athlete, but if they're wearing that Red Bull hat that they're sponsor,

David:
They must be good.

Travis:
They must be good. This is somebody I'm probably wanting to follow or watch their video because I know if they've made the cut to get to the level of wearing that hat, that's somebody I want to keep an eye on. So with Hydro Flask, we did a lot of that as well, was like, what would Red Bull do?

David:
So did you go to the pre-selected Red Bull athletes and just send them swag?

Travis:
Yeah, absolutely. Any address we could get, any promoter, any manager, a lot of word of mouth. We started meeting athletes and celebrities. Product placement was another one. They're product placement agencies that will get you into a gift bag at the Emmy's or the Grammys or the daytime soap opera awards or whatever. All the people who are in attendance go in the back room or afterwards there's a tent set up and there's just rows and rows of tables full of bags. And as a brand, we would show up with product and give to all of the celebrities that would come through. And that was huge too because I've seen quite a few celebrities now walking around with Hydro Flask and mentioning it by name when there's absolutely $0 associated where they've just taken upon themselves to say the name

David:
If it's a good product. As I mentioned before, we want to share this with others, especially if somebody's asked like, Hey, that's Hydro Flask, help me to drink more, like switching to drinking more LA or whatever. No plastic. So if you do something good and if you help, even if your product is good, then people use it. And going back to Swag Spook called Giftology, and the idea is that you always just buy the highest category of the thing that you're gifting. If you give something, always buy the highest grade of whatever's out there. If you buy a cell phone charger, buy the highest, the most expensive one wallet bottle, buy a Hydro Flask, which is high quality water bottle, how much do you go for like 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks

Travis:
Depending on the size.

David:
So if you buy them, let's say a watch of half hundred dollars and you spend 10 x or what you would spend on the water bottle and you give to them, he's probably not going to wear it. He has a Rolex or whatever, so it's going to put this into the drawer or give this to his nephew or whatever. But if you want them to use it, just buy them the highest quality stuff in this category. It doesn't have to be super expensive. It can be 30, 40, 50 bucks, but just the best thing out there.

Travis:
You're absolutely spot on. David, I had that lesson sort of really imparted upon me. I bought a paddleboard for one of my birthday presents a few years ago to myself, and it was a guy here, local stand on liquid I think it was called. And I mean it was an expensive paddleboard. It was a really, I mean it wasn't cheap and I got the paddle and everything else to go with it and I get the bill and I'm like, okay, well I heard that over a thousand dollars I get a free, I was kind of just joking, but that's also my nature is just to try to negotiate more. And he said, yeah, go ahead and go get a t-shirt from the rack. So I went over to the rack and there were 50 different, and I said, well, which one do you want me to take? And he looked at me and he goes, well take the one that you want that you're actually going to wear because if you don't wear it, then it does me no good to give it to you. You're never going to help me out by wearing it. I'm like, oh yeah, dang, that makes really good sense. So I took the one that felt nicest and it fit and I liked the colors and the design and I wore the heck out of it and pretty soon after a few years, there's holes in it and I realized it was a conversation piece for a long time and while nobody may go into stand on liquid and oh, well, Travis was wearing the shirt, that name is at least in their consciousness, even if it's subconscious.

David:
Yeah, brand recognition. What we did with Max City and we had something automated set up with print perfection.com. I think they have a thing where you can set up a swag store, you send them a swag and they sell up an e store and we had an A P I, so somebody buys from us and one month after, if they're still a customer, an email is triggered saying like, Hey, thanks for being a Max customer. Please pick your swag item here, and then they just go to the swag store and they can select whatever, and they kind of sell outwards. It's free. Of course, they could pick one item and we always add some stickers and then you pick the right color, you pick the size, you like whatever to automate. This stuff worked really well for,

Travis:
Oh, that's awesome. It's so cool that we now have that kind of technology and software and businesses doing stuff like that. I mean otherwise, if that didn't exist, I mean that could be a whole department with five people running it, just trying to figure out what color and what size to send to Sarah Smith and Sioux Falls.

David:
Another thing we did with Max, we send out swag bombs to partners. So somebody who's in the same industry or has the same customer as us, we send them a giant package with, I dunno, 50 shirts in, different sizes, whatever, stickers, hats, all kinds of stuff, and just send it to the headquarters and then we'd get Twitter store like, oh, Mexican swag bombs here, everybody rocking the stuff. This was always another thing to just get the name out there and for the right audiences. Right.

Travis:
Wow, that's a great idea. Yeah, we'd have, I think Carrot Mob is what the term is or was they were just starting to come out or flash mobs. What we would do is we would find it started out with family and friends. I mean very, very small group it started out with, but we would have our friends and family contact their local potential sales partners. And so if we knew there was a sporting goods store, some snowboarding store or skateboard shop or whatever kind of business we wanted to get into, we would just kind of set up a calendar for our friends and family to call 'em and ask them like, Hey, do you carry a hydro flask

David:
That's gangster

Travis:
You, don't you? Oh, okay, well I guess we're going to have to go down the street to your competitor and get one, but hey man, thanks anyway. Well five or six of those phone calls and then pretty soon the owner's calling and going, Hey, can we get your bottles? It's like,

David:
That's gangster. That's freaking awesome actually. I love it.

Travis:
And then as we started growing, we'd have people who would ask us like, Hey, is there anything we can do to help you? Actually there is. Every time you go to a store, ask 'em if they sell Hydro Flask and they're going like, why? Well, hopefully we can. And then sure enough, they would call us back and they'd say, Hey, we saw you in the shop. It worked. It did work. Thank you. Here's some free, we appreciate that.

David:
That's really cool actually. I love that. I love guerilla marketing stuff like this.

Travis:
Me too. Yeah, I could go on days about how much I love guerilla marketing without much money. I mean, we didn't have these huge budgets, and so we had to do gangster shit like that.

David:
We bootstrapped as well with these free accounts. It took us, I think four months and then we're number three for the keyword CD and on Google, because we got so many backlinks from all these blocks that we give these free accounts to all our competitors, like how the heck is this possible? That was really cool.

Travis:
Yeah, I think that should be a real big part of startup expenses I think is just giving out free product, free swag, just free, free, just saturate as much as you can and then start to figure out how you can start to collect revenue for what you've done.

David:
And also with the free, especially when you have a software product, what we did is create a founder pricing and we got people in early and it was really dirt cheap, and the idea was that they give us feedback on what we can improve, and if you pay a lot of money, then you don't want the half baked product, but they're okay with being an early adopter and giving us feedback, and so work really well. We kind of really change up the product dramatically. It's completely different thing now with Upco and also people that come in early and they get feedback and they see their feedback as hurt, they really become brand ambassador. It say, Hey, I had input into this. They kind built this emotional connection to this.

Travis:
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And they're more willing to have, not that you'd ever intentionally put out mediocrity or anything subpar, but in case it does happen where, ooh, I don't know that that's the right color or that doesn't quite work just right. Well, to give it out to those initial, the early adopters, they're more willing to roll with the punches with you, like you said, if they say, Hey, this is kind of not cool. Oh yeah, geez, yeah, we kind of wondered and you're right, and now we'll make it cool. Now they feel great because you've now changed and you've upgraded to their recommendation, but then also you don't have to release it all over the place and have your competition tell you that it's not cool. Or start a campaign about how uncool it is. I mean, we would do that with colors alone especially, we'd always have our inner circles that would get the initial color and they would say, I don't like the purple, or, that's a great purple. And we found that interestingly enough, purple tend to be the most difficult color because purple and pink, but mainly purple, there's so many different shades of purple, and we found that people who purple a very specific purple and they don't much like other shades of purple. So that was always the most difficult color.

David:
Actually, before you thought about this, I thought about how did you organize these early adopter groups? Do you just have a mailing list of them or did you have a forum, like a community, like a Facebook group? How did you organize these folks?

Travis:
Yeah, it started with friends, family, people that we knew who were still living in Oahu, still living in the Virgin Islands, people who were out in tropical places. We were asking for photographs, a lot of the snowboarding friends of ours and the ice climbers and had a lot of artists who were from my rock climbing days and the airline pilots that would fly all over the world. And then we'd get somebody who gets a picture of a hydro flask in Turkey and it's just like, Hey, now it kind gives us this international feel that this bottle's in Turkey. And so it was mainly just like our own friends and family to begin with. And then as Facebook started growing and social media started growing and our email campaigns started, MailChimp was starting up around that time, these campaigns, we started building this inner network circle and then we found that there is a saturation point also where you don't want too many of these insiders, then it kind of defeats the point. But we wanted multiple categories of types of people in different industries and different places all around the world to give us feedback.

David:
Cool. It kind makes me wanting to have a physical product again was I've been in the digital services or SaaS, but having a physical product makes it so cool that you can't ask people to take pictures just more especially with social media and Instagram, et cetera.

Travis:
Well, we were running without Photoshop also, we couldn't just take a picture of a bottle and Photoshop it on top of a mountain. We literally to, we drove five hours down to find snow, get a photograph of the bottles in snow, and we'd already got a bunch of pictures from Hot Hawaiian Beach and in the early days it was all straight photography. We couldn't just wing it, but I always think that there's more money in software. You could probably make a lot more money doing that,

David:
Better margins, but wondering what can we do to make this a reality for software products? I guess the easiest thing is to hand out swag, chip swag to people and ask them to take pictures.

Travis:
I'm really a big fan of the golden arches being gold always like unless you're in Sedona, Arizona where they're kind of a turquoise or teal color, their golden arches are always going to be golden. And if you could see those golden arches anywhere on the planet, most people are going to know what there. So I tried to always, with the brands and the businesses, companies that we work with at Tulo Group, we tried to reiterate and reconfirm the fact that anywhere somebody can see your logo the better. So with software, I don't know if you're going to be on Zoom calls or if you're going to be on podcasts or if anybody's going to be able to physically see. Yeah, I'd think about the backdrop. It's like subliminal, subconscious market, even just like a banner in the back that looks like a wall or a backdrop. The virtual backdrops are kind of dodgy. I don't think we've really, I think those can be kind of cheesy and lame, but to have a physical backdrop with your brand on it maybe.

David:
Yeah. So you want to say it's a real aquarium in the background. I'm just kidding.

Travis:
I wish you well. I'm glad it's not. It's a heck of a lot easier that it's not real. But if they start to fight, let me know. A good tap on the glass.

David:
You mentioned the customers you're working with. I think it's a cool way to wrap this up. I really got a lot of ideas out of this. Took a bunch of notes. So you work with companies helping them to bring manufacturing back to the States and also still with some high-end manufacturers in China, but maybe you want to share with the audience what you guys are up to, so maybe you can help one of the other audience member here.

Travis:
Yeah, the Tumalo Group was started to help businesses and brands and just people in general either start an idea or to grow their brand or to grow their business. And one of the ways that we do that is making sure that, I mean, we start at zero, so we start with design engineering and we move up from there, but sourcing from the right factories is a lot of what we do. We're still making a lot of products in China, however, we're also moving a lot of brands back home to the United States, and the Tumalo Group is starting to really expand our American manufacturing, especially even just here in Oregon. Although I say that tomorrow we're going up to Washington to go look at a factory. It's really cool. I've been going to factories for 15 years or so, and now I'm going to more and more factories here in Oregon and in the States, and I just think that's so cool. So we're helping people bring their ideas to reality and even closer to home.

David:
That's very cool. You just didn't want to fly across the world anymore, so it's like I got to fix it.

Travis:
I was one of the last flights out of China actually before they shut it down. I think I was one of the last four flights. Two were already in the air and two had just already pushed back from the gate. That was in 2020, and I was like, I don't know how long it's going to be before I can come back, but we got to do something different and it gets old traveling to China once a month. As much as I love the country, there's some really great people. Awesome stuff going on over there. We're working with Mexico too. I mean, who doesn't want to go to Mexico in February? Yes, please.