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Creating a market | Launching a DTC sport (with Chris Meade, Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer of Crossnet)

Creating a market | Launching a DTC sport (with Chris Meade, Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer of Crossnet)

FromDTC POD: How The Best Brands Are Built


Creating a market | Launching a DTC sport (with Chris Meade, Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer of Crossnet)

FromDTC POD: How The Best Brands Are Built

ratings:
Length:
54 minutes
Released:
Dec 29, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

4:47 - The night CROSSNET was inventedChris and his friends were throwing ideas for a product invention at the wall to see if anything stuck when someone mentioned four-way volleyball.“ESPN was on in the background. Not sure if that motivated it or not, but Mike wrote down four-way beach volleyball. Mike’s one of our other co-founders, grew up playing soccer and basketball. Four-way volleyball net. And we're like, yeah, no shit. That'd be sick. Jumped on Google, and nobody had done it before. And right now it was like four in the morning, you're in your hometown farm town. It’s cool, and nobody does it, and we’re like, this is it. That's the game. So we went to bed and then the next morning we woke up, went to Walmart, got two badminton nets, cut up the center, staked them on the side of my mom's garden shed. Texted all the boys, like yo come over. And we just started making a game in the backyard, like you did when you're 12 years old.”7:47 - Building a brandChris had previously worked with his friend and brother on a startup during college. He knew that when creating his own company, he wanted to create a true brand.“I graduated with a film degree $100,000 in debt. And I was making like 40 grand a year. It wasn't sustainable. So I couldn't go home and focus on e-commerce. So I left. And my brother invented the GLUNT, which is the glass blunt, which is famous, probably the most famous glass blunt that went on for like millions of dollars in sales. It was really, really successful. And I gave up on the cane and I could have gotten involved in that. So when I started CROSSNET, I'm not giving up. I don't care how long this is going to take. It's going to work, just stay patient. So that was the e-commerce history kind of to set us up for good success because I knew I did not want to drop ship this thing. I wanted to form a brand.”12:53 - Balancing Uber and CROSSNETChris was still working in sales at Uber when he moved to Miami, juggling both his full-time job and experimenting with CROSSNET.“We started getting the proof of concept down. We had 50 units coming to the States, started selling them. And people started to take interest a little bit. I went to my boss [at Uber Eats] and I said, Hey, I don't know if I’m making the right move, but I’ve got a damn good idea. I'm going to move to Miami in two weeks. You'd either let me work remote—and this was before COVID. This is before everything—I was like, either let me work remote because this job is easy as hell and I can do it from my apartment, or I'm done. And he was so cool. And he's like, yeah, go work remote and lead the team. And I had a team of 12 people reporting to me. I led the team for six months working remote in Miami, on the beach playing CROSSNET during the day and answering emails from my phone for Uber.”16:08 - When your product is your billboardBy setting up live games in Miami and elsewhere, Chris and his team got an incredible amount of exposure that was better than any billboard.“What ended up happening was we go to the beach every day and set up the net. Get there at nine o'clock. And 20 minutes in we’d have everybody looking at us, every single person at that beach was staring at us taking photos. It was like a billboard, but it was just our product. I always say it's really hard to market a product that nobody gets to see, unless it's just one on one. When I set up a CROSSNET, hundreds of people see it. So people would start playing. I would film ads on my phone and go home and run Facebook ads at night. Eventually what would happen was you'd be on vacation in Colorado. You'd go home. And you sell nothing in Denver. And all of a sudden we started getting sales with Denver. And I'm like, oh shit, you must be out there playing, right. So it just started snowballing. We had 50 out, and then 250, and now there's 100,000 out there. So when summer comes, it's just that perfect storm.”21:14 - The first factoryAfter nailing down a prototype, Chris and the team went
Released:
Dec 29, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

DTC POD is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. We cover everything for starting, growing, and optimizing eCommerce stores and DTC (or D2C) brands. We talk with founders, marketers, platforms, creators and marketing & growth agencies to cover topics like brand building, social media, influencer marketing, website conversion, paid media, Facebook ads, consumer trends, email marketing, and more. If you work in B2C marketing or for an eCommerce store or DTC brand, this podcast is for you.