 I think e-commerce sites really need to think about how they can do better. Like, there's many that just think text and specs, like, here's my product, here's my spec. But people need more than that to sort of say, I want that. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, and we have a great show lined up for you today. We've got Paul Hostelli, who oversees the sales and marketing and business development at Docking Drawer on the show with us today. I'm really excited to have Paul on the show with us, because as you all know, like one of our monos, our main tagline, is we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. And Paul has a really interesting story, and Docking Drawer, and how they sell and market to the space is really, really unique. So Paul, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited to be here and to share our story. That's cool. And Paul, you live in San Francisco. Is that right? Correct. The office and myself. We're here in the Bay Area, which really we're here because of our roots into Silicon Valley, which is what our business was before Docking Drawer started. Oh, very cool. So for our listeners, tell us a little about Docking Drawer, a little about yourself, and we can dive in to talk about how you all sell and market in a little bit of the unique situation, how your business has grown. Perfect. Yeah. I mean, Docking Drawer is clearly one of those products that you just said to yourself, why didn't I think of that, right? It solves a problem that everybody has in a safe and legal manner. And so it really stemmed from the owner of the company, Scott Dickey, was doing a remodel with his wife. And his wife asked for in-door outlets and being an electrical engineer. And in the semiconductor space, he said, sure, no problem. And he thought he was having an easy Saturday and he learned that there was no such thing and this product didn't exist. And so he set forth to build one and being an electrical engineer, very focused on safety. He built one with integrated safety features. It was really beautiful. And his wife said, well, you should sell these. And that's really where the Docking Drawer story begins. And Scott quickly, three weeks before K-Bus in Las Vegas, put a prototype together, put a boot together, contacted me and said, let's go to Vegas and talk about Docking Drawer and see what happens. Let's go to Vegas. Yeah, let's go to Vegas and go to Vegas with a friend. And it was a great experience and just the welcoming that we got being in the back of the hall next to the trash cans and bathroom was just overwhelming and really gave us a lot of energy and excitement to continue on to build more products and to make this into a really good, really a full effort around Docking Drawer. To expand upon Scott's business, his prior business was in the semiconductor industry. They made temperature and humidity control chambers. So his expertise was in temperature, safety, design, engineering. And it just so happens that a chamber has instrumentation and technology that slides in and out of these environments on racks, which then give us all of that cable movement technology that we needed to make a consumer product. And that's how Docking Drawer started. I came along to help out because my background is in design. I have a degree in industrial design. I've been living sales and marketing lifestyle for many years in the printing industry. I worked at Heidelberg, which is a market leader in offset and digital printing. And then went on to work at Xerox and led their new digital printing initiative there in the Western region. And then I ended my printing career working for HP, selling both cut sheet and wide format digital printing technologies. And so I've done a lot of sales and marketing very much into technology. And it was a really good marriage of my skill set with Scott's product development and his technical background to really give us a go at marketing Docking Drawer to all the different use cases, which are very broad. You know, I'm looking at your site right now. And one thing I like about it is, and for listeners, it's worth checking out their sites, DockingDrawer.com. You immediately see a video and you're in a meal, you go, oh, okay, that's exactly what it does. The problem is very apparent. Like what the problem that you're solving and if I'm wrong, you've got different ways of creating outlets inside of a drawer. So if you're plugging in, let's say your iPad or even a toaster or something like that, it does that. And I love it because it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. Clearly I know what the problem is. Clearly you have a solution. And then you quickly educate me on why I should buy and why your practice is better. Who do you market to? So that took a while for us to figure out, right? Because, you know, when you have a new product, you know, first mover product, so there's nothing been, there's nothing in the market currently like DockingDrawer. So we have to educate the market about our solution. We took us some time to figure out exactly who our best customers were and to figure out how a sales cycle occurs in this industry, right? Because it has a long duration. There's many influencers in the sales cycle. There's different purchasing paths. So it's quite a spider web of a problem to figure out. And so we started with technical selling because we came from a technical background, right? You know, we knew all about milliamps and voltages and clearances and so we really spoke quite well to a project planner or cabinet designer or somebody working in a layout. We spoke wonders to them. But then we figured out that they aren't the ones who are buying the outlet or putting the outlet in the project, right? They're doing what the customer is asking them to do, which could be like a kitchen designer. And then we figured out, okay, so a kitchen designer has a lot of influence and then we figured out that a homeowner or the end user has more influence. So we're on like a three-prong marketing strategy. One is to the homeowner that we want them to know about our product because now in the marketplace, every drawer has a purpose unlike when my parents did their kitchen and it's just drawers and they looked at what color of the kitchen was and that was it. Now there's an oil drawer. There's a spice drawer. There's a silverware drawer and what kitchen is not going to have a place to keep technology with a docking drawer. And so we speak to that audience and then we make project planning super simple for anybody who is technical and our spec book is extremely detailed. All of our information is public facing. So our DXF and step files, so you can pull this into two or three project planning programs. Our electrical certifications are all public facing. So we make the technical journey very, very simple. So you're marketing to the homeowner who then creates pull through to let's say the cabinet installer or the designer or somebody like that. Is that right? We do and we do and we do it in a really unique way. If you go to the Wayback Machine, if you ever done that on all the websites in the back, if you look at our Wayback Machine of our site, it was all like measurements and rulers and really, really technical in the beginning. And now you look at our site and it's all beautiful visuals of applications like you mentioned the video when we come on site and you scroll down and you'll see like the kitchen application of bathroom in an office. And we we figured out quickly that we needed imagery to sell our products and we figured out how difficult it was to get imagery and how expensive it was. And so I was looking for inspiration and how to accelerate this process and the automated that we get constant flow of imagery to tell and share our stories with different customers. So I was with my daughter one day in San Francisco in Haydashbury and Haydashbury is really famous for used clothing stores. And so we were shopping in one of these used clothing thrift stores. I was doing what dads do when their daughters are shopping and I was sitting in the dad's chair and sort of looking through this store and they had a counter that had pricing behind it. So sort of like a fast food restaurant where there's a counter to people working in a priceless behind them and a line out the door of people with garbage bags of clothing. And I was like, I cannot believe that these people are just sitting here and people are coming to them with clothing basically bringing inventory for their store that they then put on the floor to me sell and make money. And I was like, I would love to have this type of model with Docking Dwarf but with photos. And so that was our inspiration for our first generation what we call photo buying. And so we buy photos from customers and we have a full on our website that says get up to $500 and we basically will give customers more money than they paid for the outlet. In exchange for photos of their project. No way. So hold on. Yes. Okay. So this is really really smart because like every manufacturer we talk to, I don't know anybody unless they're they've got a huge internal team that does this struggles with photos. You you pay them for photography. Do they know that in advance? Like do they know that before they purchase? We are not shy with our messaging. So on our website it says get up to $500. It explains our program on the order confirmation when they order from Docking Dwarf. It's in the order confirmation on the box. Whether they buy from us or one of our distribution partners before they open the box, they have to cut through a label that says you can make up the $500 by taking pictures of what you're going to do with this outlet. It has a QR code that will scan and go and explain the program. It is everywhere and anywhere that we talk about Docking Dwarf. We'll talk about our photo buying efforts. We're getting right now about 250 to 300 photos a month coming in and now we're starting to get testimonial videos. We're starting to get use case videos like how the arms work and things like that. And so that was the first phase of our what we called photo buying, which now we call into our visual shopping. And so what we do is we buy photos and on May 1st we're launching our visual shopping experience. So when you go to Docking Dwarf, you can just click on a room and it's going to say the kitchens and it will say the kitchen islands, kitchens with a narrow drawer, kitchen pull-out drawer, like all the different applications and it's going to have customer photos showing those applications and it's going to have the customer story. It's going to say here's Paul's kitchen and here's his Docking Dwarf. It's located under the microwave and this is how we installed it and blah, blah, blah. It's all in there making it easy for us to tell the Docking Dwarf story to anybody that's thinking about adding Docking Dwarf to their projects, whether it's in a residential application, commercial application, like we're in clothing retail stores now because when you're checking out, it's called a cash wrap. We're in a lot of different cash wraps and a lot of different retail stores now. So that is our whole visual shopping journey that's driven by our photo buying that helps us to market to the specifier, which is where the conversation started, right? So we buy, we get homeowners and now homeowners become advocates because they go, check this out. I got a Docking Dwarf. I sent them a picture. They sent me money. I love it and you should get one in your project. So we get some viral list out of it as well. It's perfect and it is such a great program that my team made me a trophy and I keep it on my desk every day. Photo buying, Paul. The creator of photo buying. That's what they, oh my gosh. Okay. So my big question here is why to what percentage of people to buy actually partake in this, you know, money back offer? Not enough. Not enough. It's amazing that more and more people don't take us up on our offer and it's because you're basically giving away your product for free. Like that's what I'm thinking like, man, if you have a large portion of this, let's say you have, you know, single digits, even five or 10%, but if you had a large portion, it's like, how do you run a profitable business if you're just giving, you're able to give more money than what your product costs. You know, it doesn't sound like you're running that problem, but it's really interesting. No, we're not getting enough submissions and we constantly tell people that we're not getting enough submissions. And I'm guilty of it myself. I mean, I just recently redid my kitchen and it's a process that is stressful. I mean, it's just disruptive to have your kitchen out of your house or your bathroom out non-functioning and you just want to get it up and running and be able to cook in your kitchen again. And so people sort of forget about it, but the people that don't forget about it get rewarded. I'm not kidding. I'm 100% going to do this. I'm going to after this, after this podcast, I'm going to buy this and somehow install it either in my kitchen or my bathroom and take pictures and I mean, this is really interesting. Everybody's always asking me for free products and I'm more than happy to send free products. So like friends and things like that. And it also solved that problem for me. Like you just buy it and send photos and I'll send it back. So it's made this whole program is really changed how we market and how we go to market. Like we just had a submission the other day. I had no idea that a docking drawer would be used to create a canning drawer. So a canning drawer has a lot of lids and they're always all over the place. And now this drawer is all organized with all the lids. It has the vacuum sealer which is then plugged into the docking drawer and the person's loves that this isn't on their counter and they can make their juice and they vacuum seal it and they store it and they love it. Docking drawer, no idea that was an application for docking drawer. And that's because of our photo buying. So yeah, you said something a minute ago. I think that's important as you said and you've been doing this for how long have we been doing this? Like this program. This is our eighth year, eight years for docking drawer photo buying. I think we're getting close to the two year mark now. And you still don't have enough photos? No. So that as a marketer and a person that likes data, that makes me think, well, you have to be tracking some way like the more photos you have, the better the story you can tell, the more the impact your conversion rate is a way that you're justifying the spend in some capacity. Like how are you looking at the numbers behind? Yeah, we can continue to give away our product for free at basically no cost or no profit in exchange for these photos. Like how are you measuring the effectiveness of this campaign? There's a lot of ways to measure it. I mean, number one, there's a cost to get photos. So we know what a professional photo costs and they're not cheap. And then when you ask for professional photo rights to use in campaigns or websites and things like that, the cost continues to go up. And so there's a big cost there and it's and it's only a single application, single story. We know that there is also a cost to create social media content and we know how important our awareness, developing awareness in social media, whether it's in Pinterest or Instagram specifically, that's very visual. We know that cost as well. And we also know the cost of communicating with our customers and how valuable it is to communicate with our customers visually. So when a customer will call in and say, I'm the first person in the world that wants to make a canning drawer, we say, no, you're not. Here's a canning drawer and this is how it's laid out. And this is like some of the things they learned about their canning drawer. And if you want to talk to them, well, you should talk to them. And so that's highly valuable too. And when you add up the cost to acquire a photo, let's say we buy a story at $250. It's really not that expensive and the value that we extract from it is extremely high. I'm even thinking too, what you're doing, I'm curious to know if you thought about this way. It's it's really like long tail approach to content. Like you just mentioned the canning drawer example, like how many people search for like an electrical canning drawer on Pinterest, for example? Probably not a ton. I can tell you how many people look for storage solutions for CPAP machines that include an electrical outlet and a drawer. That's incredible. Massive, it is massive. I cannot, you know, this is another thing. This isn't, I can't contribute this to photo buying, but we figured out that CPAP machines are unwieldy and people want to store them in ways next to their bedside that don't overtake the bedroom and docking drawer is a great way to add a power source for CPAP machines. And we do a lot of CPAP furniture. That's brilliant. I mean, it's it's content. It's market research. It's the long tail approach to if we move more in e-commerce. Paul, you mentioned this to me before we start recording. E-commerce is a pretty big part of how you all acquire customers. How does that work? And what's what's your philosophy for, you know, acquiring customers? And then I think you mentioned this before. I don't want to steal your thunder, but you want to acquire them and then you want them to forget you or something. What did you say? Yeah. Yeah, we have we have an interesting sales strategy. So again, we figured out that because docking drawer is a first mover product, right? So there's no other product like docking drawer that education is really the value that docking drawer adds to the process. And so when the cabinet company might inquire about sourcing from docking drawer, really what our job is to educate them. We want to educate them how to specify docking drawer. We want to educate them about our tools, especially our spec book. Our spec book is the one stop shop that has every technical detail in there any technical question project planning question you can ask it should be in our spec book and it is not it will be added. I mean, it's really a painstaking process that we go to keep that up to date. And so interaction wise, like if we acquire a customer, our job we feel is to educate them and to get them excited about docking drawer and just to understand how easy it is to add a docking drawer into a project and really take the unknowns out of the conversation. That's where we add our value to the cabinet maker trying to source docking drawer outlets. Then after that, you know, we might help out in another project. You know, maybe first one's a kitchen, the second one's a bathroom. There's a couple of questions about GFCI or USBC and what power delivery means and what should I get for my customer. But then after that, we really stop adding value because we're not a fantastic distribution company. I mean, yes, we can stick a box and stick it into a truck, but there's people that do that much better than we do. Especially for a bigger cabinet company that needs like PO references and things like that or not. That's not our strength. So we really focus on marketing efforts to educate specifiers to make sure that project planners have all the technical details that they need to know. We want to have great first interactions with Docking Drawer. We want to have great experiences and then if you don't source from us and our partners are better at it than we are, then that's just fine. We're off trying to educate more people about Docking Drawer, whether it's here. You know, we're also doing business in the UK, in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Europe. So we have a lot of people to educate about what we're doing in our solutions. Yeah, I'm looking at your site and it appears like you're an e-commerce first company, but just listening to you talk, it's more like you're an education first company. And if you educate, people are going to buy it. However, it's easiest for them, which is a really smart approach. I would like to hear from you, Paul, like the eight years you all have existed, how have you seen e-commerce in our industry change and where do you see it going? You know, e-commerce is really interesting. It's a daily thought, right? You can't go through a day without thinking about your marketing strategy and e-commerce strategy. And I think for me, it took us a long time to get to where we are today and our values are is we want to be authentic. And that also ties back into our photo buying. We share authentic projects. These aren't Photoshop projects. These aren't some studio. We want to be authentic in our communication. We want to be transparent, right? We want to be as easy to contact as you want to be to get a hold of us. If that's a phone call, a chat, an email, a text. I mean, we have every option for communicating us available because whether it's day or night, we want to help. You might talk to me. You might talk to the owner of the company. You might talk to somebody on our on my team. We really want to help. And so we see like e-commerce and how e-commerce moves forward. I think people have choices where they want to spend their time. And I think you need to make that time like it's almost like a dinner party. Right? We want to be the house that you want to come to and hang out and have drinks. And so you'll notice that a lot of e-commerce companies they don't think like that because like the first thing you do to get there is like some pop up offer or something like that. And yes, we are a little guilty of that, but we don't do like the offer right when you get there. Right? We want to have you time to get to know us and things like that. But if you're heading out the door, we might just say, Hey, you know, before you leave, can we send you some information? Which I think is fair. I mean, I think that's a fair way to introduce yourself. Yeah, a little excellent. That's fine. But what we're really focused on is making sure that we have a great authentic customer experience in our e-commerce journey. If you look at the effort and detail that we go to like just our photos on the product page and it gives you like everything you need is right there. And if it's not there, it's a click away. And I think e-commerce sites really need to think about how they can do better. Like there's many that just think text and specs. Like here's my product. Here's my spec. But people need more than that to sort of say I want that. And so we think about those other things that people want and include those in our e-commerce experiences. One of the things that we really figured out is that people would ask sort of like when I buy this, what am I getting? And so we're like, that's a really good question. And so we took inspiration from the sporting industry and backpacks in particular. So we were looking for a way to communicate. We found backpacks. We found backpack videos where basically somebody demonstrates like everything about a backpack because it has a zipper, it has a this and it holds this and it holds a water thing and a lot of things going on in a backpack. And so we basically copied sort of their strategy and made our own video and we call it an unboxing video. So it shows you what's in the box, photo buying cards in the box, by the way, it shows you the product, how the lean of the arms are included, the cords included, the cover plates and screws, all the screws are included, like everything he needs in this box ready to go. And so I think it's important to have these great customer experiences to make them comfortable to do business with you. Well, the other thing you're hitting on here too, Paul, is that with e-commerce and the thing I like about it is all these little marginal improvements you can not only make them, but you can track them and to go, okay, how did that impact conversion rate? How did that impact or AOV or average order volume? How did people actually, you know, end up completing a transaction more? It's like a bunch of small, you know, 5-10% marginal improvements has a big impact on bottom line. It begins to compound and cascade and the benefit to you is you and all on the process you learn more and more about your customer too. Like you mentioned that one example of like, well, what's included in the box? So figuring those things out, you intrinsically know, well, like our customer doesn't know what's going to happen here. Whereas a lot of manufacturers struggle with a lot of these questions because they don't get the direct feedback that you're getting because you're doing e-commerce. Right? Yep. Another thing that we're doing to get to know our customers is we have a self-service quiz on our site. And so we want customers to find their products in a way that they're comfortable with. And so on our website, you can take a quiz just ask you, you know, what the type of the drawer is. That's where our conversation starts. We have four drawer types, whether it's a shallow drawer, like you would find in a kitchen, a tall drawer, like in a vanity, a narrow drawer, also like a vanity or a vertical drawer. And then how many things do you want to charge? How many things do you want to connect? Some little details and then I'll give you a recommendation saying based on these inputs, this is what you should get. And during that process, we get to know who they are if they're a homeowner, they're a cabinet maker, electrician. So we get to know our customer better. We can have a better conversation with them just a little bit of detail. And we know the metrics too. We know that quiz submissions are going up. So photo buying submissions are, you know, at a good rate for us and then quiz submissions are increasing greatly. So you talk about those small incremental wins. Quiz submissions are really an incremental win for us in the last quarter. Is there anyone out there that you look at and go like that's the company you want to be like when you look at your e-commerce strategy? Paul, is there anybody that you get a lot of inspiration from? That's a really good question because I I look for similar stories in different use cases. Like, for example, the implementation of our quiz to docking drawer came from another industry that actually came from the apparel industry. And so it was a company that was selling hopefully I'll say this correctly, but bras. I mean, their specialty was bras and finding the right bra for the woman that was trying to purchase a bra. And so we thought about that process, right? Because everybody's different and every had different criteria to very personal decision and docking drawer has some of those things, right? We have a lot of variations and a lot of things that need to happen and we figured if that they can find success in submissions for their use case and we can as well. So we did that. But when it comes to finding like one site that is like, oh, I really want to be like them. It's really tough because there's a big collection of sites like in certain verticals that are always consistent, right? Supplements are consistent. Apparel is consistent. Hardware is variety, right? So different hardware has different ways of approaching. Some are not as e-commerce focused. Some are more like catalog focused. Some are focused on just telling you about a product. We're trying to tell you about not only our product but how it really can be changing. Like like I said, I've I've never had a docking drawer until like a couple of years ago. Then I finally got one in my kitchen. I could not my daughter especially cannot spend a day without a docking drawer. It's got it's it's just part of our lifestyle now. It's hard to find a site that really sort of checks every box and says they're doing it right. But I do know that I think docking drawers looking for inspiration in different markets to tell our story and to do it authentically. And I think there's I think now is the best time in marketing ever to communicate directly with an audience. There's so many tools to do it. I mean, look at here's a podcast where we can communicate. We can communicate through quizzes. We can communicate through advertising. We communicate. There's so many ways to have a relationship with customers. This is really exciting. This mean there's there's so many good sites. There's a wallet site out there. That's really good. Yeah, there's a lot of them out there. That's great. I can't think of one though. That's perfect. You know, it's okay. I mean, it's funny as you're talking about it. I'm thinking through sites I've used recently and there's things that stand out from each site that they do really well. Like I was I mentioned this. I don't know. Maybe a year or two ago. One site that I think it does a great job is Omaha Stakes and like their upsells and cross sells and how they do that. And granted, there's something steak and crab cakes. So it's like hard not to go. Yeah, I definitely want crab cakes with my steak. But you like their their process for how they incentivize you is really smart. And I like what you're saying about going outside of the building product space to get inspiration. Because oftentimes we get very insular. You know, so that's really smart. That could be docking doors secret weapon is that both Scott and myself did not come from the building product space. We come from he comes from the semiconductor industry. I come from the printing industry. So maybe maybe that's why we've always like we sold capital equipment, both of us in a consultative manner, which always is a conversation with the end user. Which was then ultimately fulfilled by the manufacturer. And so maybe that's why docking door is the way it is today. It's great. This show has been awesome. I can't thank you enough for coming on your wealth of knowledge and hearing about e-commerce as well as how you all are creating content in a way that I think a lot of manufacturers are going shoot like we should totally be doing that. It's been really, really helpful. If someone wants to connect with you and reach out, what's the best way for them to do that, Paul? I'm easy to find. So you can reach out to me directly at docking drawer. I'm on the about page and the contact us page. Or you can email me directly. My email is simply Paul at docking drawer dot com. That's great. Paul, man, again, thank you so much again for coming on the show. This has been great. And for our listeners, if you do it this content, check us out at venue dot com slash podcast to subscribe and get more until next time. I'm Zach Williams. Thanks everybody.