Tony Smith from Timber Vaults

Sam: Tony, welcome to Beyond the Inbox. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Tony: Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to talk to you about email automation and email marketing.

Sam: Me too. I want to start by asking you about your background. What inspired you to leave your job in finance and join the ecommerce world with your first startup?

Tony: Yeah, so that's a long journey. It goes way back.

Before, like you mentioned, I joined the world of ecommerce, I got a degree in finance and did that for about 10 years or so, working in private banking and asset management.

During that time period, I just missed building things with my hands, oddly enough. So I started building these wooden canoes and wooden paddleboards in my garage. People started reaching out to ask me to buy them, and I put up a website on Squarespace. Lo and behold, I was off to the races in ecommerce.

That business grew and changed a lot over the years, but that's kind of how I weaseled my way into the ecommerce world.

Sam: One thing I wanted to ask you is—actually, let me run up to this in another way. I was really looking forward to speaking to you because most people I have on the show are either ecommerce founders who started by scratching their own itch, or they are employees of a larger company.

Your background is very interesting in that you bought Timber Vaults. I wanted to ask you a little bit about what that experience was like.

Tony: Yeah, it was fairly interesting. Like I mentioned, I had the other ecommerce business before Timber Vaults came along. It was in a little bit of a different niche. It was in outdoor recreational products—people who wanted to build their own kayaks, paddleboards, and that sort of thing.

It just felt like that business, at least I felt, had been taken as far as I could grow it.

I saw Timber Vaults. The previous owner reached out to a buddy of mine who was on a podcast and asked if he wanted to buy it. It wasn't a good fit for my buddy at the time. My buddy knew that I was interested in acquiring something that had maybe a little bit more of a growth ceiling, so I started kicking the tires on Timber Vaults and pulled the trigger on it.

You asked about the experience there. I think it was fairly quick. The beautiful thing about ecommerce businesses, especially when the inventory is held at a 3PL, is that you get fairly good transparency.

It's easy to get your hands and head around the numbers in the business and what's actually taking place. You talk to the manufacturer, look at Google Analytics, look at the sales data, and match it to Shopify. It's fairly hard to game those numbers, and you're able to back into what the business is worth, essentially, to you.

Sam: One thing you mentioned in our pre-interview—and this is something you've mentioned in other interviews as well, which I thought was quite fascinating—was that you didn't realize the issue with advertising gun products on many platforms.

I wanted to ask you about that. Is that something you're actively trying to work around, or is it something you've realized you can't move forward on at this point?

Tony: Yeah. For people who maybe don't know what Timber Vaults is, I think it makes sense to preface what it is. That will help inform and answer the question regarding the gun products.

Timber Vaults essentially sells concealment furniture. You can think of it as either a mirror or a shelf that you have on your wall. We're adding some additional products in the future, but those are the two staples we have now.

Inside that shelf is effectively a hollow space or a void, and that can only be accessed by either the Bluetooth or RFID-card-access electronic lock that's inside the shelf.

You pull up your phone or swipe your key card in a specific place on the shelf, and out pops a space where you can store something.

When I purchased the business, it was primarily marketed toward the gun niche and people who want to store their guns properly but also maintain fast access to them in the unfortunate event of a home intrusion or something like that.

That's the idea behind the business. I like it and find it appealing largely because, in America, we have a bit of a problem where people just don't store their firearms properly.

Regardless of how you feel about them, there are millions of guns in people's hands in the US. Unfortunately, a lot of people just store them under the mattress, in a nightstand, or on a shelf next to their couch. As you can imagine, that creates a tremendous number of problems.

Kids may inadvertently gain access to the firearms. If a robber breaks in, it's an easy target for them to open the shelf and find a gun.

There's a really big problem, and that was the idea behind the business when I purchased it.

That's a long, rambling way to get back and answer your question, but I think it's important to highlight what the product is a little bit.

When I purchased the business, I did my due diligence and looked at some of the larger platforms—Meta, for example. They explicitly say that you cannot advertise firearms. Clearly, I'm totally okay with that.

But they also explicitly say that you can advertise things like gun safes and gun locks. What we found is that, when you go to advertise our product, because the website mentions guns and we show guns inside the shelf as a storage solution, the algorithms on those platforms automatically reject our ads.

We're able to appeal those, and 50 percent of the time they get approved. But it becomes impossible to effectively A/B test, iterate, and build ads that work correctly.

Even though we are explicitly allowed to advertise our product, and we feel like we're providing a valid service in the interest of public safety, it's impossible for us to reach and engage with our target audience via those platforms.

Sam: Are there any creative ways you've looked at overcoming that? I know you mentioned that you can't show pictures with the gun. Are there any ways around it? What are some of the other brands or competitors doing, if that's something you've considered?

Tony: Sure. We went down an interesting rabbit hole of testing that, talking to the Facebook ad reps, and trying to figure out what we could do.

Inside the shelf, there's effectively a foam insert that the customer cuts out to the shape of their gun when they get it. I want to say quickly that it doesn't have to be a gun. It could be jewelry, documents, or whatever items people want to store. But there's a foam insert in there.

What we tried to do was take all of the guns out of our Facebook marketing and just create an outline of a gun where it would sit in the foam. It was just a black space roughly in the shape of a toy gun, and even those got rejected.

I'm sure there's a way; we just haven't cracked the code on it. We feel there are other low-hanging-fruit opportunities to engage and interact with our customers outside the traditional Facebook marketing platform.

We've placed that on pause for now and are spending those ad dollars elsewhere.

In terms of our competitors, what we've seen some of them doing broadly in the gun space is working with quote-unquote gun influencers. They pay them to create a video of themselves shooting their gun and post it on their personal channel.

It's quite fascinating. I didn't know that world existed, but it does. We've seen that working for some gun-related brands out there. We haven't done that, but maybe it's something we explore in the future. That's a big way brands reach new audiences.

Sam: I want to come back to some of that low-hanging fruit in a moment. But I'm curious: as someone going into this industry, was there a lot you had to learn, or is this something you're learning as you go along?

Tony: Do you mean learning about the gun industry or learning about the nuances of marketing?

Sam: The gun industry in general. You mentioned that you didn't know about gun influencers. I didn't know about gun influencers either. I'm curious how you're informing yourself and the marketing you're doing as you go along.

Tony: Sure. It's interesting. I grew up in Texas, so I did grow up around guns, primarily used for hunting. We would go out and shoot birds with shotguns or use rifles or whatever, and it was kind of a father-son activity. That's my world in the gun space.

I'm currently a gun owner and still hunt. I find that it's a way to connect with nature and a tradition that some people have different qualms about. But there's something about going out and harvesting an animal that you then have to process. You have a lot more respect for the animal than if you just go and buy some ground beef off the shelf.

That's just a nameless cow, and you don't even think of it as a cow. You just think of it as beef, or whatever.

So I would preface it by saying I am a gun owner, I do hunt, and I use guns in that capacity. However, there's a whole different world out there of people who primarily use guns for self-protection.

I'm educating myself in that world by digging in and seeing what's out there, looking at YouTube videos and the creative that's out there, and subscribing to email lists for—I won't say competitors—but adjacent brands, if you will.

I'm really diving into the industry and learning about how firearms manufacturers and firearms-accessory brands market their products. It's been quite fascinating.

Sam: It is interesting when you mention the history behind certain states. I live in Sweden, and most gun owners I know are very much the type of gun owners you're describing, where they hunt once or twice a year and bring home whatever they shoot.

I think that's a really interesting facet of what you're doing. Do you have data on your customers to see which states are most popular? I'm curious whether there's any correlation between gun ownership in certain states and certain types of customers. Is that something you've seen?

Tony: Yeah, we've done some customer surveys, and obviously we have Google Analytics data set up. It may surprise people where people are buying our concealment furniture.

Again, we don't have transparency into what the end user is storing in it. The assumption is that it's a firearm, but we know with certainty that isn't always the case.

Some might think that you would see the majority of these being purchased in rural, really gun-friendly states. But we see a lot of the volume going to higher-density, larger cities that may have higher-crime problems in their states.

That leads me to believe that a large percentage of the customers buying them are using them because of fear around personal safety and self-protection.

That gun owner may have a completely valid point if they're in a high-crime environment. They want to be a responsible gun owner and store their guns safely so that access is restricted for other family members and intruders in their home, but they also want to maintain quick access in the event that they do have a home intrusion or something.

Sam: I think this is a good segue into something you mentioned in another interview. You said, "I plan on two brands selling the same product. There's Timber Vaults focused on guns, and then there's an everything-else category."

How is that going for you with the everything-else category, and what's the update on that?

Tony: Yeah. When I bought this brand, one of the things I saw as a tremendous opportunity was that it's a really cool product. It's almost like something James Bond would have in his house. But again, it was specifically marketed toward the gun niche.

I think a lot of homeowners or renters have items in their houses that they just don't want visibly out and about, and that they may want to store safely.

The thinking is to create a separate brand that markets to the non-gun-owner niche that wants to store whatever item that might be. It could be prescription medication. It could be recreational substances. It could be a passport, jewelry, adult toys—whatever it is.

There are novelty items or things you don't want your neighbor to come over, see on your coffee table, and say, "What the hell is that?" But you may want access to them.

We do plan on launching that brand. We've been rebuilding our supply chain to prepare and be able to meet that demand as it comes online.

It'll be launching later this year, but we haven't officially made that public or launched it yet. But it's definitely coming.

Sam: We've talked already about Facebook. One thing I wanted to ask you about—or rather, something that came up in our pre-interview, which I thought was very interesting—was how you're using Ahrefs to build links and how SEO is a big marketing channel for you.

I put the website into Ahrefs before this interview and saw some really interesting keywords you're ranking for. They were very much high-search-volume, low-keyword-difficulty keywords.

Are you actively going after some of these keywords? I won't mention what they are, just in case some of your competitors are listening. Or are you ranking organically at this point for some of them?

Tony: We're just looking for new channels to reach new customers. We started going out and seeing where there are high-volume, low-keyword-difficulty opportunities.

We started creating blog content around those to target them and bring that inbound traffic into our website. I'm very grateful that we're starting to see meaningful traffic from that and real results in terms of revenue for the brand.

We're actively positioning ourselves to target some of those keywords. We'll continue to blog and create content around them, as well as do backlink outreach, bolster our presence on the web, and bring more of that inbound traffic in.

Sam: What backlink-building strategy is working most well for you right now?

Tony: I'm not an expert in that field. There's someone on my team who helps with that.

What we've been doing is reaching out to other accessory brands that we find out there. It could be that we find them through a podcast, or it could just be a product we come across.

We reach out and say, "This is a really cool product. This is what we're doing, and this is what you're doing. Would you be interested in creating a blog post about us? We'll do a blog-post exchange and do the exact same thing."

We'll even do, once a quarter or once every six weeks, a favorite-brands blog post or email blast and get them some traffic.

It doesn't really cost us anything other than time. We've seen that doing it manually has yielded results for us.

Sam: When you're writing blog posts on the website and targeting some of these keywords, is the conversion goal to capture those visitors and convert them into email subscribers, or are you going for a one-time sale right away?

Tony: I think it depends on where they are in the funnel.

If it's somebody who is aware that this product exists—which a lot of people just have never heard of before—and they're searching for the specific product, obviously they're a much warmer lead. We want to capture them and try to get that sale as quickly as possible because they probably have an acute need or want for the product at that point in time.

Others may have stumbled across it through another keyword search, another email blast, or something we're featured in. The idea there is to get that lead or email and warm them up over time—to educate them on the product, how it works, and be there when they're thinking about a Father's Day gift, a Christmas gift, a birthday gift, personal safety, or somebody they know who is thinking about those things.

We just want to be top of mind when the time is right for them to make that purchase.

Sam: What email automations do you have set up on the backend right now? What's working for you?

Tony: We do some of the standard automations, if you will. We have an email popup capture. As a user, I dislike popups very much, but as a brand owner, they work, so we do them.

We capture the email there and warm them up through a welcome series that educates them on the product and tries to get them to look at the products.

From there, we have other automations built out and integrated with Shopify. If they abandon a cart—say they put something in the cart and don't purchase—that's a much warmer lead, so we're a little more aggressive in that cart-abandonment flow to try to get them to convert and make the purchase sooner rather than later.

Then there are other flows around browse abandonment and sunset flows for somebody who has been on our email list but isn't active. They aren't opening our emails, and they aren't visiting the website. We don't want to keep paying for those people, so we'll sunset them over a period of time.

Those are the main core ones we have built out.

Sam: You mentioned seasonality. I can see on the website now that you have a Memorial Day sale. Are you sending seasonal campaigns? Do you have a weekly newsletter that goes out? What does that look like?

Tony: We do have a couple of weekly newsletters that we try to send.

We try to send a product-focused email once a week, and then once a week we try to send a completely non-product-related email. That's effectively an educational piece of content for a gun owner.

I mentioned earlier that there are gun influencers out there. There are a lot of YouTube firearms trainers and instructors who do almost a play-by-play or breakdown of what happens in an active-shooter situation.

It's kind of amazing, with all the closed-circuit cameras, Nest cameras, and things that are out there, the amount and types of videos that are available of actual home invasions taking place.

What these firearms experts will do is break down what's happening, what the homeowner is doing, and how to think about it.

Once a week, we'll share some of that content to educate people in the firearms niche so that they can be better gun owners and think about gun safety better.

We try to do one product email, one educational email, and then a periodic email around sharing either something from our blog or other brands we found that we're trying to promote through backlinks.

Sam: How do you think about lifecycle marketing? Let's say someone makes a purchase within the first 30 days and they're still on your email list. What does it look like three to six months from that?

Are you hoping they'll make a smaller purchase or maybe buy something for a friend? I'm curious how that factors in.

Tony: As of right now, we don't have great add-on products, if that makes sense.

We do have a fair number of people who go on to buy a second product. Maybe they have a second home, want one in a different location in their house, or want one for the office.

We see a fair number of people buying more than one, but the majority of people come and buy only one of the items.

What we want to work on in the future is building out a standardized referral process and referral campaign because word of mouth in these smaller niches can be one of the most powerful marketing channels.

Actively fanning the flames of that referral process would really benefit us.

Sam: Are there any other marketing channels that aren't very much top of mind for you now that you would like to go more into in the future?

Tony: As of now, Google and YouTube again don't allow the promotion of guns and firearms, but they have allowed us to market our products there.

We're spending some of the ad dollars that we originally thought we would spend on Meta in the Google and YouTube worlds.

We'll continue to work on building out the funnels there with search campaigns and then more of the top-of-funnel discovery phase with YouTube campaigns. We'll continue to spend ad dollars there.

But far and away, email is our best, best, best channel.

Sam: What are some of the ways you're incorporating feedback over time as your product gets better and you have more offers?

Is it you personally reading these emails? I've spoken to other founders who are still going through the DMs and emails and trying to glean those insights. Is that something you're very hands-on with as well?

Tony: Yeah. We've done customer-service surveys to ask both prospective people on our email list what's missing and what they want, as well as asking customers who have purchased.

It has definitely informed how we message and think about the product. But it's also informed some of the product enhancements we're rolling out now.

I'm actually in a hotel now visiting a manufacturer because we're making some tweaks to the product. So that's actually a very timely question.

Sam: One thing I wanted to ask you as we start to wrap up the interview is: what do you believe the future of ecommerce is in general, and how do you think Timber Vaults can stay ahead of the curve?

Tony: That's a good question.

I think there's an increasing requirement for almost professionalization in the ecommerce world. I think it's much harder now for someone to say, "Hey, I want to start selling whatever widget it is," throw up a site, start getting traffic, and make money at it.

I think that is still possible, but it has become increasingly difficult. With a higher cost to acquire a customer, more systems out there, and a steeper learning curve, I think people who have been in ecommerce for some time, really know the ins and outs of a lot of these systems, can hire well, and can build a team around it will continue to succeed and thrive.

We've come through some challenging years with supply-chain issues, COVID causing a big ramp-up, and then things really coming down in the last year, with people shutting down and moving away from ecommerce.

But I am optimistic about the space, especially for people who are more professional in the space, or at least think about it professionally.

I think having brands that are very niche is also beneficial. There's a lot of opportunity there.

Sam: I've really enjoyed listening to your story, Tony, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the future of the brand and how it continues to evolve. Where can our listeners go to learn more about Timber Vaults?