in January of 2020 the world completely changed 2020 is now the deadliest year in US history School shut down work went remote shopping in person became a risk a wild world of short video content 11 months later Tik Tok became the most downloaded app in the world over a billion people spending their time in this new world scrolling consuming President Biden today leading an urgent push on covid relief 3 months after that President Joe Biden passed a 1 9 trillion stimulus Bill all of this creating the perfect storm for a smalltown Wisconsin kid and his
girlfriend to build a million doll sneaker Empire all right Hayden introduce yourself to people my name is Hayden I'm one of the largest Tik Tok resellers in the world how much money do you make every year $1.2 million per year man all on Tik Tok all on Tik Tok so what is the business actually look like we post a bunch of content and then we hop on live for about 2 to 3 hours a day um and then it slowly picks up every time we go live we just get more and more people in there
they get to ask to see specific shoes they love to see our orders being packaged on live people love to order on live and watch it being packaged on pack orders on live yeah if we have if we have time we we we always love it everyone loves it and then next day shipping too people love us for next day shipping once we package it on live at night it's out in the morning so how many orders will you do on like a one specific live uh I would say on average uh it depends per
day obviously but I would say average aage 20 to 30 orders alive so what separates you from a bunch of other resellers the biggest thing that separates us is our customer relationship we build rapport with our customers we care about our customers even though we get a lot of sales we we take the time and we invest our time into building a relationship a long lasting one where we can probably say our return to customer R is over 60% that's crazy we have a large following base almost 300,000 I would conly say 80% were contributed
by lives and they follow us through lives wow so most of the followers are coming from the lives yeah absolutely wow it didn't happen overnight though we've been doing this like I said for 4 years straight we were running it just a low-key account and then we really took off once my girlfriend started um managing it she's coming from an industry thrifting and Clos where um that type of thing was already being done and she was simply able to kind of relate it to sneakers and put it in the sneaker space he actually came out
with doing fly kicks together but we were on like a like a stereotypical hike and she she stopped and like what if we do this together what type of customer are you actually selling to moms moms who moms left to shop they have some disposable income as well as they can buy for their husbands and their kids moms yep really y so you're on Tik Tok live and it's just a bunch of moms you'd be surprised on the amount of u older aged people on Tik Tok and so 30% margin that's pretty impressive how are
you guys pricing these shoes we like to say it's a mix of market price and supply and demand because we don't have a a 30,000 uh pair Warehouse we have to uh we don't have as much inventory so we price it because it we know it sells out a day of us posting it so we have to prices it pretty competitively so the person who wants it the most will get it however I do want to kind of shift into a more um affordable and uh have a wide variety of shoes where uh customers will
be even more happy to be able to shout with us so right now like let's say a shoe goes for $120 on stockx that's the ask maybe after everything it's $50 how much would you sell for we would sell it from 150 to 180 I like to price uh either matching after fees on apps or up to $30 more just because uh I try to stay a little bit competitive but if I give more value I think I could add a little bit more to getting shipped out next day so that's like a big one
plus they know where it's coming from versus like stock scat they don't necessarily know we have a face to the business uh they see it it's a personalized shopping experience that's what I like to say yeah so you're selling for $230 Overstock ass plus fees y do your customers know they can get it for cheaper on stockx I would say a majority do it's not like we're uh taking advantage of uh the information the information Gap it's really they truly believe in the value that they're being provided and they're willing to pay it s a
sneakers as a service yeah that's what it is the way I see it right now with Market being down I think it's wiping out a lot of the smaller resellers who don't really know what they're doing and it's really consolidating the market where there's going to be just a few really big players and then all the small guys are kind of getting wiped out do you see the same thing happening with the market absolutely the past six to a year I've seen more people liquidate and exit more than I've ever seen it in the past
it's not scary actually I see it as the opposite I see as it's a confidence Builder as seeing people are trying to get out of the game that just gives me and everyone else still in it more opportunity yeah so do you want to do sneakers forever this is like your your long term ideally yes this is a true passion this is long term for me mhm and you're in college right now right yeah one semester left my girlfriend has one year left and we're still uh still being able to manage it all with this
that's crazy how do you balance school and then running a business that's making $330,000 profit per month it's very difficult it's usually when we're not in school we're working and vice versa why why stay in school college was worth it um I was able to slowly grow the business and learn the long and hard way uh being able to be in school kind of separated time so it was more of a slow growth where I'm able to learn the good things learn the bad things about a business and especially mine yeah I think that's very
important is just controlled growth yeah you don't want to grow too quick and then realize you're you're screwed in the year of one bad month and it all falls apart um tell me more about the progression so how did you start on Tik Tok and how did you get to where you are today it was a it was a true passion project like we went in with no expectations we went out actually just thinking this was a hobby like uh let's see what we can do with this and slowly and slowly it just started building
out and it just came so natural where we're at now Hayden it sounds like a almost to perfect of a journey has there any ever been anything bad that's happened the biggest lowest point was last summer we have our store like I said and we live about like 40 minutes away from the store so um living at home for the summer we had a commute um not every day but it was many times a week and it got really exhausting and then our live stream feature was just very uh I think it was Shadow band
and we were just reaching like very minimal people we were really questioning whether we should keep doing this because we didn't know if it was going to bounce back or not do you think that's the main risk is that it's just a single sales Channel Absolut get shut down by Tik Tok at any point this super hypocritical because for the past four years I've almost been leveraging all my time and everything into one sales Channel I'm a huge advocate for being able to diversify and I've slowly learned that within the past few months of like
trying to build something out where I don't have to depend on that it's very scary like having to rely on one and I would not recommend it I mean we see that with Amazon now all these accounts are getting like Section 3 is getting shut down deactivated more than ever yeah it's scary do you ever deal with Fakes from these sellers uh occasionally uh once in a blue moon but I've really uh that's the reason why I do go to these people they're very trustworthy they've been doing this for a while and I can trust
them the most for these things but as far as everything over $500 I try to aim uh I do check checks just to give extra confirmation for the customers knowing that if they're spending that much um they're good all right so live streams right y I feel like it's this reputation where people are getting on and and uh if you're watching this I love you this is not a jab um people get on these live streams and they're like this is the shoe this is the shoe this is the shoe buy the shoe buy the
shoe buy the shoe is that how you do it I would describe Our Lives as more of a Q&A and being able to just like a FaceTime with customers uh Cindy actually uh refers to it as a FaceTime with customers and that's a great way of describing it you hop on get to chat with a lot of the returning people and then also get new people in there they ask questions uh we answer them if they want to see a shoe we'll show it off um and then there's enough comments where people ask where to
buy then we direct them to our website but it's never shop shop shop it's more about people ask than we tell them how many times are you going live a week every other day um if not hopefully yeah four to five times a week it is very very taxing uh very exhausting um on the the body and mind you really have to go in with the right mindset um being able to entertain a bunch of viewers at a time so uh the only hold back is just uh being able to just mentally do it how
many hours at a time uh I would typically say two minimum up to 4 hours no more than that it just all based on how the live goes so if we're really crammed uh we're going to stay on if it's really popping we'll stay on but if it's a low-key chill one we'll get what we need to get done and then we'll be off in an hour or two how do you get back to where you are today showing up uh there's no turning point it was just con it was just consistently showing up even
if I didn't get it so luckily within I would say it was four months of being shadowbanned and getting very minimal views it's a long time yeah on lives and uh posts were all Shadow band and those four months were very rough but we kept showing up and luckily it just turned back uh it started picking up more and more and we started getting a bit more motivated once we saw that when you're on your downsides and you're your lowest points you think of things that you'll never think of when you're doing well and that
kind of took us out of the box and we started implementing um higher quality content we started interacting with people more on lives we thought we were doing well but we started doing it more we ended up even incre we even bought a a premium Wi-Fi router um we were on like the bass version so we try to even boost our internet connection try everything and surprisingly the internet connection within a week of us putting paying two times the amount it it went back I'm not going to say it's because of that but both of
us are convinced we we pay like $40 a month for a Wi-Fi router we paid 90 now and it it almost happened instantly so maybe that was a down thing like we never know but that might be it so Hayden I know as well social media is a long grind it's tough seeing the numbers go up and down you make a video you think is going to hit and then it gets like zero views yeah talk about your social media growth how did you get your first thousand followers then how did you get your first
100,000 kind of crazy it was the first summer of us doing it it probably took us three 3 months to go from a th000 to 100,000 from 1,000 to 100,000 6 months how about 0 to 1,000 0 1,000 6 months wow and that 6 months is a that's tough right cuz you're you're not getting reinforced by the we had two shelves literally two shelves of IM and we were selling the yeah that amount of shoes and we were selling the same amount of the amount of inventory we have now compared to then it was a
wild time like I said Co um we really um took advantage of that opportunity the biggest exponential growth we've ever had and nothing will be like that ever again um but I'm glad we capitalize on that now it's just been slow growth um week on week month on month so when you first started on Tik Tok was it just like the past product you talk about just making content or were you like okay I want to get customers I want to make this a business couldn't be farther from the truth it was truly just a
passion posting what you want we if you look at our old content it is truly just you will believe me when I say we just posted like the most random sneaker content the last thing I'm on our minds was how can we get customers from this I never enjoyed making content really like it's always just been the content helps the business so I got to make the content it's never been like how want like I really like [Music] I hate this you no I I get it social media is tough they think it's all sunshines
and rainbows but it is a long grind I wouldn't recommend if anyone was thinking about it it is a tough business it's a very tough business so when did you guys realize that Tik Tok can actually make you guys money selling shoes right away once we started doing lives was actually on vacation in Arizona when Sydney's first live uh blew up I'm out for dinner and I get back from dinner and we have like 50 orders on Shopify and I'm I'm like Sydney what's going on and she said like live live I was so overwhelmed
cuz at that time like I said we only had like a shelf of inventory so we basically got cleared out the next day I'm having to like buy shoes and get them sent out to her so she can replant as fast as possible it was a stressful vacation but like it's a Memory that I will never forget within like the the first 2 months of us us having a website we were doing 50k on uh a month just on Shopify social media and sneaker reseller that's like the combination that people hate the most um do
you do you deal with any like hate on the internet and how do you manage that for the amount of um reach we get I would like we get zero To None it is truly like but once we do like we like ah dang but we get it once in a blue moon our community is priceless I would say our community that we built or is the most valuable thing that we have in our business uh so compared to everything we probably get one of the the least amount of hate uh for being resellers and
being on social media it's fascinating there's going to be some comments in this one I'll bet you why sneakers specifically sneakers it's just a way of life for me uh shoes are kind of a unique thing where people uh gain some sort of confidence and it kind of you can build a personality around it you that's something that I haven't heard a lot but a lot of customers have told me that they feel a different way wearing a new pair of sneakers mhm but purely just from a business standpoint don't you think you'd be better
off in another category yeah uh people are always skeptical about uh sneakers and the downfall of it uh resellers are used to the co era where everything was just too easy you could just flip something for $50 any anywhere any place but it's if you're looking at a long-term thing it could uh it could really open up a new possibility of being the largest in the game where nobody's really taking it seriously nobody's thinking the longevity of it and it's just uh not thinking quick money but if you can build something out now and retain
all this uh large customer base uh I see it uh as something that's kind to make an upturn and something that can be really sustainable [Music]
