In this episode, we discuss with Troy Goldhammer building luxury products.
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the LA business podcast, a form for business owners and senior executives to share the experiences about the elements that drive their success. Your host is Robert Brill, CEO of brillmedia.co an inc 500 company. Delivering the power of hyper-local advertising. Robert writes for Forbes, inc. And add trade publications. Our goal is to bring you the stories about successes and failures of people who are making big things happen in marketing, entrepreneurship, and management.
Robert Brill: [00:00:37] Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the LA business podcast, today our guest is Troy Goldhammer, CEO and founder of Aeon Gold. Troy, tell us a little bit about yourself and thanks for being here.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:00:49] Hi, Robert, thank you for having me. My name’s Troy Goldhammer I’m the CEO founder of Aeon Gold. We are based out of San Antonio, Texas, and we are the design manufacturer and seller of the Lagio product line, which includes our flagship product, the lagio lap desk, as well as multiple accessories
Robert Brill: [00:01:12] Very cool. So tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve been in business for a long time. Like how did you get to the point where you’re creating and manufacturing allowed desk and we’ll get into that later, but tell us about your background.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:01:25] Absolutely. I grew up in South Dakota, upon graduation from high school, I went to the United States military Academy at West point, graduating with a degree in engineering. I graduated from there, went into the army as a infantry Lieutenant, and then into special operations, special forces. I was a special forces officer at Fort Bragg. I got injured and got out of the military in 1998 and went into my career in business, joining a small technology company. Initially out of the military, I got invited to a join a venture capital firm out of Austin, Texas. Joined them in the venture capital days, back in the early .com days, simultaneously went back to the university of Texas to get my MBA, at the post graduation from my MBA. We were right in the .com crash era, and so the founders of the venture capital firm, or I should say principles, senior partners in the firm decided that they were going to roll up the firm.
[00:02:27] We were no longer going to be able to raise another fund. We had gone through our first fund under the venture capital firm and, we were starting to begin our harvest on the companies that were out there. We did a great job, we didn’t invest in any .com, thankfully we did all hard tech and we had a good positive IRR, but the writing was on the wall. So, I ended up, at that same time meeting my then to be wife. We moved to Hawaii where I took on a consulting role with Booz Allen Hamilton, a large, both commercial and defense consulting company based out of McLean, Virginia. I traveled around the world as a consultant for Booz Allen.
[00:03:06]We ultimately had the most successful office out of all of Booz Allen worldwide with the most profitable offices there. We had our children, we ended up wanting to take a look at our lifestyle though. Living in Hawaii was awesome. I never got to see it because I was traveling as a consultant a hundred percent of the time, and so we kind of made the decision to come back to the mainland and, I got recruited to join a company here in San Antonio, led that company as chief operating officer and then recruited to an aerospace company up in Austin, Texas, where I was at for the previous seven years prior to launching or founding Aeon Gold,
[00:03:48] At that aerospace company we were designing, engineering, and manufacturing products for both commercial and defense aerospace, as well as for other major industries like oil and gas and other heavy industries for some of the technologies that we designed and developed. At that time, I had a good friend that was a relationship where he was the primary owner of some very unique technology that I was able to sell into a major command within the military for getting some dollars for investments to take that product for the military market and then having some commercial spin out applications for it.
[00:04:33] Unfortunately, that person was not able to join us and unfortunately that founder was part of the key to some of the technology that we were going to bring to the market when he could not join us for contractual reasons. The other founders, we came together and worked on some ideas to found another company where we would self fund the other company. We had raised some capital to bring it to market young. Aeon Gold is a self-funded startup operation that we, had really the aha moment in early, or I should say late 2017 and the founding in 2018 of creating a digital lifestyle company, focused on consumer products for people that are working from and around their homes, on their digital devices.
[00:05:21] We’re all doing it more and more often today and, part of the aha moment came when my wife was working on the couch with her laptop sitting there working with a little breakfast tray as her mouse pad, so I said, let me get on Amazon, take a look and find something for you. As I searched Amazon and couldn’t find anything, I saw all these products that really were kind of utilitarian, very low cost cheaply made, cheaply designed, not very functional, and we wanted to think about something that was very different. It wasn’t the cost that was really the issue to us, it was more about the design and functionality that bothered me the most. So I went back to the other founders and I said, Hey, let’s take a look at this. There might be something here that we might be able to do something with.
[00:06:12] So we did a lot of the extensive market research, taking a look at where the market is, and as we looked at that marketplace, it is just cluttered with a lot of low cost cheap product out there that people are buying and using today.
Robert Brill: [00:06:30] So, what exactly are you selling?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:06:33] We’ve got our flagship product which is the Lagio lap desk. The lagio lap desk is a high end lap desk designed for the digital lifestyle of the new consumers and the lap desk design. I came from an aerospace company and so I’m a guy that has built products for commercial aircraft, as well as defense jets and other aircraft, as well as other things, I’m an engineer by trade.
Robert Brill: [00:07:01] So basically, this is a situation where you’re sitting on the couch. You don’t want to have the laptop in your lap, so you have a couch desk?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:07:09] It is a couch desk, it is a premium high-end lap desk, couch desk. There’s nothing else like it on the market. Part of our idea with it is really to bring a platform strategy to the lap desk, so you can add accessory products onto it. So we’ve got some really great premium Bluetooth speakers, we have some comfort webbing that we source material out of New Zealand. You know, a lot of the lap desk you see are kind of the standard beanbag bottom cushions that allows the lap desk to kind of sit or rest on the legs. Well we’ve got this beautiful wool that comes out of New Zealand. It’s just absolutely luxurious. We’ve got an led light that we can plug up the three led lights into our desk. We’ve got power bank batteries so that you can power your digital devices. It’s actually in the desk itself, or you can take it out and carry that power bank with you wherever you go.
Robert Brill: [00:08:15] So that sounds really interesting. So you started the business in 2017.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:08:20] The ideas were in 2017 and the founding was in 2018.
Robert Brill: [00:08:24] Got it. And so how have you grown the business? Like how do you get people to take seriously the fact that number one, you need a lap desk, and number two, represent the quality in the equation there.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:08:39] Yeah, absolutely. It took us a long time to get to where we are today. Quite honestly, when we looked at the project, we thought we could design, build, test, and then ultimately manufacture the product within a year. It took us over two years to get to the point where we were actually beginning to recieve and to inventory our products. That took a lot of time because of the multiple iterations of design and testing, and then engineering, and then back to redesign as we designed for manufacturing, it took us until just a few months ago.
[00:09:14] We started launching the product as commercially available for sale, in January-February of 2020, we’re currently in our own website, aeongold.com, but then we’re also on multiple retailers out there that have already picked us up. We’re also advertising on Facebook, Instagram, most of the social media, not all the social media yet, just because we’re a small company and it takes time and money to put any real presence out there on everything.
Robert Brill: [00:09:42] What do you find is working out of all the things that you’re doing? What do you find is the key driver for your business?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:09:50] For us, what we’ve identified is kind of that core demographic or market set of people that are really using their laptops and digital devices more and more from home. Although the iPad and tablet market is a very interesting market to us. What a lot of people are using our lap desk for is both that work and play aspect. In fact, that’s where the Lagio name comes from. It’s the combination of two Italian words that I’ll probably butcher it, but ‘vai a lavorare’ for meaning to work, ‘giocare’ meaning to play, that’s Lagio.
[00:10:27]We want this desk as our flagship product to be something that you can sit down and work on the spreadsheet with and do your at home finance and then switch over and watch a Netflix or Amazon movie or whatever it is that you want to do from social media to, you know, communicating with your friends and family all the while, having this great device because of the very ergonomic and comfortable nature of it. Plus it looks good, feels good, and we’ve identified that those people out there that are really using their devices on a very consistent basis want something better than that average lap desk. Lap desks are very popular. They have a pretty strong community out there, but the majority of them are in that very low cost utilitarian price range, and we’re not, we’re at a higher price point because all of our design and materials and function and features and ultimately the value of the lap desk itself.
Robert Brill: [00:11:30] What’s the price point on this?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:11:32] So right now the full retail price is 249, but we’re running a special right now for 179 on the desk. We have some bundling packages, like we’ve got some essential packages where we’ve got a couple of the accessory items that are available bundled with the desk, and that’s the power bank battery, and the Bluetooth speakers. Those are the two most popular of the accessory items. We have a total of six, and we have a number of other accessories that are in the pipeline to be coming out. So your desk will be able to grow or add functions and features in the near future, depending on what your requirements are.
Robert Brill: [00:12:10] So are you guys running the advertising in house or do you have an agency doing it?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:12:15] No, we’ve got an agency here with us. We’ve got a small advertising agency, they run the majority of our advertising. I’ve got some great visual teams for developing the ads and doing the photo shoots and video and other elements on the creative side. Then the ad agency handles all the direct marketing and advertising for us.
Robert Brill: [00:12:39] Amazing. How did you go about choosing an ad agency?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:12:43] So we actually went through a couple different agencies. We started out, on a Kickstarter campaign, and so we focused in on using an agency that was familiar with the Kickstarter audiences and they did a great job for us. But they weren’t necessarily that longterm team, and we also wanted to get somebody that was local to us so that we could spend hands on time as a new company or a young company, even though the founders we’ve all been around the block, it wasn’t our first rodeo. We all wanted to have that local presence so that we could talk and have creative meetings with them and, you know, spend that time really learning and dialing in what our advertising requirements were going to be.
Robert Brill: [00:13:24] Nice. So was it primarily based on relationships?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:13:29] That’s how we ultimately found this agency was through relationships and, you know, we have worked across a large, large number of people that are in our kind of sphere of influence, if you want to call it that and that kind of networking, finding out who’s going to be the right fit for us. They have been a great team for us, they are super excited, they’re young, they’re creative, they have a great deal of experience in the kind of the consumer product realm, and it really helps us so that we can really get that message out there in a way that makes sense for the eon gold team and the lagio product line
Robert Brill: [00:14:11] So let me ask you this. Do you ingest in any way advertising data to help your business get a little smarter, a lot smarter about what you’re offering? Like what kind of information are you finding from your advertising campaign that goes back into the business?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:14:30] I am a huge consumer of data, but as a person that came from outside the consumer product realm, there is just an enormous amount of information that we are still getting our arms around. That’s why having that advertising team that has been around the block and looked at the data and understands the benchmarks and really understanding where we need to be as a company, where we need to invest further was something very important to us.
[00:14:58] In fact, we had a call with an entrepreneur who’s been in consumer products for his entire career, and he really focuses that, and that was very helpful because we keep reaching out. Some people call me all the time asking for help on various projects.
[00:15:18]I’m a former venture capitalist as well as led a couple of different companies and so I help entrepreneurs all the time and I’m always reaching out to other entrepreneurs. It is a great community as entrepreneurs, we’re really all looking out at some level for success for each other because it’s a holistic community. We really kind of work together at some level to help each other learn the best practices and ultimately be successful in whatever it is that we’re doing. I try to do that both, giving and receiving information from entrepreneurs that are out there.
Robert Brill: [00:15:53] Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the principles that we talk about with our clients when we run advertising and marketing campaigns is really to focus in on creating a testing framework. Right? We want to know the platforms, the creative messaging, the price points, the offered, whatever the thing is. We want to understand what the customer likes and, you know, advertising in 2020 is a real time focus group, right? Like you don’t actually need to run a focus group. You can run ads and the engagement, the click through rate, and the sales rates will tell you what the customers want.
[00:16:26] I see this all the time. Like, One of the tools that we look at is moat, and you can just look at any advertisers running banner ads and like HP, for example, they’re totally testing like a few different offers, right? Is a 10% off a smarter thing, or is a smarter thing a 20% off? Or the Smarter thing is free shipping? Which thing is the most interesting to the consumer? And then if you check a couple of months later, you can actually then go back and identify what the winner was. Cause you can see the new creative that they’re running. It’s interesting stuff. So who’s within your organization? Like how do you have it set up within your organization for managing the advertising agency? Usually there’s a client at the brand. I don’t know how big your organization is. Like, do you have, are you a small group, a large group.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:17:15] Yeah. So we’re a small group. We’ve got four of the original founders that were pulled together. Really it’s down to more three working, you know, a significant amount of time. One that obviously is still working now in his full time job, but besides that we’ve got design, Engineers, mechanical engineers and other people up in Austin, Texas, we’re physically in San Antonio, Texas. We’ve got manufacturing going on in places in China, Tennessee, New Zealand, and eventually what we’re working on right now, a big thrust for what we want to do in 2021 is actually move assembly and manufacturing to the United States.
[00:17:56] It’s really important to everybody here on the team that we’ve become a US based manufacturer. I think we could bring quite a few jobs here into the local community, as well as have that USA based, talent to really deliver on that quality that we’re looking for as a new company. What we had to really focus in on was how do we get this product to market so that we can effectively sell it and become profitable so that we can move on to the next phases of life as a startup, especially since we have not gone out to raise any capital outside of ourselves.
Robert Brill: [00:18:31] Sure. So, so I’m curious. How do you have it setup to manage the advertising? So the larger the organization, you have grand managers and people who are exclusively spending their time with the advertising agency. I imagine a smaller organization, the person who’s managing the advertising agency were three or four or 10 other halves, what’s the role of the person who manages that and how. How is their time dispersed and how are their responsibilities dispersed?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:19:04] Yeah. So I’ve taken on a larger portion of that. The one founder that I was talking to you about, he cannot spend because of his, let’s call it ‘full time job’, it takes him away from what we were having him do as a brand manager, he comes from a brand management background. He was a marketing manager for many, many years. In fact, he worked for me in a previous life. and I brought him on board because I wanted that talent to have him available for developing those relationships and managing the advertising agency and other creative teams that we have on board.
[00:19:41] Unfortunately his time is pooled so I’ve taken on a large amount of that responsibility as we grow the business, that’s going to be somebody that’s going to be one of those near first hires. If he cannot switch over or decides not to, you know, as one of the cofounders, he has certain vested interest in the company succeeding. So he would certainly want to, but obviously as a young company there are many considerations that you have to think about before you leave that really secure longterm employment that you might already have. That’s a big decision, it’s not something you take lightly. You take that seriously. I encourage anybody as you’re thinking about, you know, that risk reward scenario. Yes, there is a big upside, but there’s a lot of risk associated with being an entrepreneur.
Robert Brill: [00:20:34] There is, you know, so here’s my question, right? If you’re talking to someone else who has a product or service that they’re bringing to market and they need an advertising agency and they also need to pay attention to manufacturing and logistics and supply chain and all these other things, how do you ensure that you’re getting the best out of an ad agency?
[00:20:57] You know, like segmenting your times. Like I know as an entrepreneur, like if I’m working on our website, because that’s not what we do, we do media buying, not websites. Any website stuff that I’ll do it, it’ll be for myself. My mind is very different when I’m focusing on websites, and when I’m looking at data when I’m writing something. How do you organize yourself that way?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:21:22] One of the things I’ve learned to love as an entrepreneur, rather than an executive within a company that had people working for me, as an entrepreneur, you have to wear all those different hats, and one of the things I’ve found to love is I love being on the creative side, at least a portion of my time. It’s something that I’ve really had to do throughout my career. You know, I came up more through management side of the house, and so it was much more around strategy and finance and operations than it was truly on the pure marketing side.
[00:21:56] Although I did a lot of work in the kind of, let’s call it business development roles, as an executive within other companies. Oftentimes the executives were the top salespeople or the closers for the company because he had the background, you understood the full capacity of whatever company that you were working with him as an entrepreneur. You know, we really do wear a lot of hats. I think you characterize that absolutely correct. You have to be able to put on that creative hat and think about ‘what is the next marketing campaign, what are we looking to achieve with it? What are the metrics that we want to measure against it to see if it was effective or not?’
[00:22:34] Sales is one thing, but you know, there’s so many other elements to what we’re trying to do as a company. We’re not trying to have a one hit wonder, we want to build a great company. Part of that vision of building that lifestyle company, that consumer product company that has a brand that resonates well beyond me and the founding team is building that brand.
[00:22:57] How do we measure that and how do we get those metrics that will make any sense this young in a company, and so we spend a lot of time on the creative side. I try to segment that time each day, I spend a certain amount of time in the marketing or creative realm. I’ve got a great chief operating officer working for me that, he is just passionate about, the supply chain and logistics, manufacturing, fulfillment, customer interactions on the back end when a customer has questions, and as we grow that team and all of that, he is handling all of that logistical side of the house or operation side of the house.
[00:23:37] That takes a big burden off myself, and so for me I can spend more time on the finance strategy and marketing. Those are kind of my three big bucket areas. There’s more, but, you know, as an entrepreneur, if you think you have a plan and you’ve laid out in detail the thousand points and tasks associated with it, we’ll just take that plan and triple it because we went into a very deep dive planning prior to building the Lazo product line. I can tell you, even as experienced executives across all of our experiences, we all miss many many different things as a startup company, and that was a big learning point for all of us.
Robert Brill: [00:24:27] So can you dive into that? What are the learning points? What should a startup or an entrepreneur or a small organization think about as they’re launching?
Troy Goldhammer: [00:24:38] Well, I think number one is being realistic on timelines. I told you upfront when we kind of launched about two major priorities, I said I want to be into cashflow in one year and I wanted to be profitable in two. That was within a certain amount of budget that I had set aside too, to launch the company. What it turned out to be was we were two years to cash flow and we probably won’t be profitable for another two years. Our budget was at least two to three times off of what my original budget was.
[00:25:17] So I’ve invested or we’ve invested a significantly higher amount in the startup of the company. Right out of the gate, if you’re going to get into manufacturing, if you want to be a manufacturer and understanding the cash flows around being a manufacturer, because you will spend, a significant amount of your capital up front doing design and engineering, and then you’ve got lay out money for manufacturing, and then you’re going to receive that product, and then you got to sell it. If you look at that timeline of cashflow associated with it, you gotta be prepared to sit on X amount of money for much longer than what we had expected as we’re kind of launching. Now we’re growing the business, the business is going great. We’re getting worldwide attention. Initially, we thought that we could ship and fulfill worldwide. But what we have found out is no, we need to pull this back because, our logistics tail and logistics cost was significantly higher than our expectation or budget estimates were from the beginning.
[00:26:26] That was a very big learning curve for all of us, because all of us came actually from manufacturing. All of our logistics was already in place. So we manage the logistics supply chain that had a known pathway, and we could predict fairly precisely what our expenses were going to be based on whatever it was that we were manufacturing for this company. We did not hit the Mark on that, and that’s something that we needed to, and we’re going back and readjusting. In fact, that’s part of the drive, and for 2021 to become an assembly and manufacturing here in the U S is to streamline our logistics and supply chain.
Robert Brill: [00:27:12] Tell us a little bit about how the COVID-19 situation has affected your business with sales and supply chain.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:27:18] Absolutely as we started getting indications about the COVID challenges coming out of China, we put a deliberate plan in place that allowed us to ensure that we had all of the products being manufactured. We have a number of factories in China that we’re working with to manufacture our products. We put that plan in place in order to get ahead of what was the impending shutdown that appeared to be likely, it also happened to be coincided with the Chinese new year. If you’re familiar with China during the Chinese new year, the majority of the country shuts down for about two weeks to a month, depending on the location and those people that are wherever they’re working at.
[00:28:04] Many of the manufacturing centers located around Shinzen and other places, they go back to their home provinces, and that’s what happened in China. All the people dispersed out to their home provinces. And that’s why there is a lot of the big factories you look at Apple or Microsoft or IBM or others that manufactured there, they were impacted significantly. For us, we had our supply chain in place. We were already moving forward to get our products in country, as well as into some of our other warehouses around the world. What we saw when the U S started to do their shut down, we had an almost immediate effect on our sales.
[00:28:45] It went from, you know, fairly strong sales to, probably one tenth or even less than that of sales at the moment when people really started realizing that we were shutting down our economy. As we started to evaluate what was happening, many of the companies were operating remotely, work from home strategy.
[00:29:05] Well, that actually played right into what the lagio product line is all about, our work in play strategy on the lagio lap desk. So we started redoing our marketing campaigns to reflect that work from home. As well as offering incentives and discounts for those workers affected by the COVID-19 shutdowns.
[00:29:30] So we started ramping sales back up again, but we’re still not to pre-virus COVID shutdown levels yet. One of them I think has to do with many people have lost their jobs. Many people are working from home, but may be thinking, okay, this is only temporary and I should be going back to the office soon, as well as, you know, what’s the future look like.
[00:29:55]We’re hopeful that, you know, as the economy opens back up again and we get a handle on, you know, what’s going on with the virus itself, we will get back to somewhat level of normalcy. I hope for both the United States and around the world, we have customers who are from around the world that do come to us.
[00:30:15] Originally I spoke briefly before we had an international strategy of supporting and supplying out of the United States internationally, but the supply chain and logistics of that made it really unattractive and unaffordable for both the consumer and for us. We had offered a lot of incentives and it just wasn’t working out, so we’re working on those international strategies now putting partners in place in those regions internationally, that will be kind of our puzzle logistics, warehousing fulfillment, as well as possibly our sales agents in the regions as well.
Robert Brill: [00:30:49] So it’s interesting Troy, I wonder, have you thought about or aspire in any way to sell B2B? Like for example, like Facebook and Google, right?Companies aren’t going to require people to come back to work, so sell to a Facebook supply chain person, order a thousand of these, get a bulk discount, send it to your employees.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:31:10] Absolutely matter of fact, I was out at the Facebook campus as well as the Google campus late last year in 2019 to visit with some of their executives about using, now this was pre COVID-19 activities, but our product, if you look at the new way of these large corporate campuses, they have these large areas where they are working in kind of collaborative areas.
[00:31:35] They work from couches to beanbags chairs, to you know, name the type of location that they try to make these large campuses as a friendly and open and collaborative as possible. Our desks are uniquely situated for those types of scenarios, as well as using them as incentives for workers who, take Facebook as an example or Google or any of the large companies really. It’s not to name just those, but they have some level of expectations of people putting the hours in whether they’re at the house or on the campus. So using these as employee incentives, your 10 year or your five year gift as an incentive, and so we’re getting some traction in that market.
[00:32:23] The challenge that we have right now in particular is because we have accessories associated with the product. They don’t want to put these on corporate campuses until we can ensure that their accessories aren’t going to walk away without the desk.
[00:32:40] In other words, the Bluetooth speakers walking away, cause you can use the Bluetooth speakers independent of the desk. They’re awesome, I use them all over the house and our customers, they show us pictures or send us pictures of them out by the pool or up on their deck or in their kitchen or in their bedroom. When they just want to listen to music and they’re not necessarily using the desk.
[00:33:02] So that was one of the items of designthat actually came up, as we look at version 2.0 We’ve got a lot of products in the mix right now, but having some, let’s call it a slightly lower level product where the accessory products aren’t necessarily something that you can detach and move, but will be permanent to the desk itself. We’ve got some really cool designs that we’re excited to share, hopefully later this year.
Robert Brill: [00:33:31] So that actually leads into my next question. What does the rest of the year look like for you? I mean, I imagine plans have changed a little bit, sounds like you’re going really aggressive or at least steady with your marketing. Just as an aside, we put out our social marketing guide and one of the things that we found in the research is that companies, if they have cash reserves that they can stand to not recoup on those marketing expenses for six to 12 months, the companies who do market during an economic downturn have a massive opportunity to come back stronger than they were ever before. It sounds like you guys are definitely heeding that research.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:34:17] We are ramping marketing at the same time as we’ve got product development going on, as well as we’ve got to get manufacturing restarted, because we’ve got just a volume of orders, and we’ve got to make sure that we don’t run out of stock, and supply chains, you know, we’re still dependent on China and you know, we’ve got great partners there and they’re ready to go. We’re pretty close to ready to go. we’ve got to time that effectively so that we don’t stock out. And as a young company, that’s almost a death nail. It won’t be quite a death nail, but we don’t want to get there. We don’t want to do that, and so that’s where my chief operating officer, he’s attuned to that very, very closely looking at, timelines for what it takes to build transport, fulfill, get those all into the warehouses, wherever that might be. It’s a long period of time. That’s one of the things that is for those people that are thinking about getting into manufacturing.
[00:35:18] But what the beauty of getting into software is you don’t have those, you know, I come from a kind of an enterprise side and in some of the companies where we had both hardware and software and software is beautiful because you can build it once and keep iterating it, but you’re not dependent on these long supply chains and tying up cash,for an extended amount of time as you build those products.
[00:35:42] For us, we’re the future looks really good. We’re we’re growing or our channel strategies and looking at our international strategies, we’ve got new products that we’re excited to bring to market, not only the accessories and other things associated with our flagship products, but. Yeah. If you look at our vision statement for digital lifestyle enhancing the digital lifestyle, we have a wide breadth of things that we can bring to market.
[00:36:12] And it’s just kind of an exciting world because you know, the society and consumers in general have adapted to the digital lifestyle already. What we’re doing is just taking advantage of that and bringing some uniquely designed, highly developed, beautiful products, that are fairly unique to the market at some level.
Robert Brill: [00:36:34] Yeah. The benefit of mixed use workspaces we work in, I think this COVID situation may actually be a savior for where we were and the fact that I think a lot of commercial renters are just not going to go back and may use mixed spaces and your product seems like it would be a perfect setup for that.
Troy Goldhammer: [00:36:56] We were having that discussion just a month ago. I was saying, I’m glad I’m not into commercial real estate quite honestly right now, because these large companies are all seeing that they have opportunity to lower their operating costs, their overhead by having people effectively work from home.
[00:37:14] People are really responding to it and they’re maintaining that work life balance, and they’re able to be effective at their job even though they’re not in the office. A lot of these companies, we’ve got local companies here in Austin and other places where they’re not going to bring their employees back to the big corporate campus.
[00:37:35] They’re gonna allow them to continue to telework and only have a smaller presence where they might need to bring them in for certain things. And then they can have conference room or other facilities that they can use for that. So we are certainly looking to take advantage of that for sure.
Robert Brill: [00:37:51] I learned a lot about your business and it was really cool. I think our folks, you know, our listeners are really thinking about growing and scaling businesses. And so I think they’re going to get a lot out of this interview. I really appreciate your time.
[00:38:02] Thank you for listening to this episode of the LA business podcast. If you like what we’re doing on this podcast, please consider subscribing on Apple or Google play. Leaving a five star review and sharing with your friends. If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for a guest you’d like to hear on this podcast, please email me Robert at Brillmedia.co Thank you. Have a fantastic day.
