Exploring Steady Growth in DTC with Fred Perotta (Tortuga Backpacks)

Kristen: 

Hey, Fred, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about Tortuga Backpacks?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yes, thanks for having me. So we started the company in 2010, and it was kind of a [inaudible] story. So my co-founder Jeremy and I went on a trip to Europe, a backpacking trip, kind of realized the shortcomings with the bags we took on that trip and came back and thought we could do better and ended up starting the company the next year.

Fred Perrotta: 

So now we help people avoid the cost and the hassle of checking luggage by making carry-on sized travel backpacks. So basically, the people you may think of as a backpacker traveling across Europe, Southeast Asia, whatever, are typically carrying a hiking bag and instead we make bags that are made for traveling rather than for hiking.

Kristen: 

Yeah, and I'm from Colorado, and so I have a lot of experience in kind of technical gear and hiking backpacks, and that's a whole mess of an industry to even try and figure out and hiking nonetheless, to go into the traveling aspect with it, which is the unique take you guys had, and I read a bit about kind of the backstory of Tortuga. Can you share with the customers kind of the struggles you guys went through to figure out kind of finding the best kind of product and making the right thing that you guys felt really proud of?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, so we went on this trip, had the idea in 2009, which in retrospect now that's kind of when the first direct to consumer companies were starting. Now, I got Bonobos, and Everlane some of those were getting started around then. I didn't know of them.

Fred Perrotta: 

So we were basically operating from the book, The Four Hour Workweek and trying to follow what was kind of a blueprint laid out in that book, and then we felt we had a good idea for a product and kind of target customer and category. So we're trying to kind of combine those two together but neither of us knew anything about making products. So it was basically trial and error for years. But I guess even till today, there's still some trial and error but starting out, we found the designer online on a kind of an Elance or Upwork, whatever was the site back in those days, got something designed pretty quickly and felt like oh, we're really moving along. We've got this figured out so fast, and then we started trying to actually make the production and sample, and that was the hard part.

Fred Perrotta: 

So we went through a lot of trial and error. We made our first sample in China, which is one of pretty much two countries where most bags, especially more technical ones are made. First sample as a disaster. We're trying to do this remotely through a language barrier. We didn't know the factories we're working with. It was just sort of making every mistake in the book. Eventually, we may our first round of bags in the US. I mean, 100 bags down the Long Beach. But even working with a US supplier, no language barrier, but we have plenty of other problems.

Fred Perrotta: 

They make their money off of working with a lot of government contracts, making bags, [inaudible] for military and government. So they didn't really care about us. Two people with no money trying to figure things out. So in retrospect, that was as much on us as on them. So, we kind of made every mistake in the book. Eventually, we found a good industrial design firm that helped us create what ended up being V2 of our products, and they had some connections in Asia with factories, so ended up going through them through referrals and eventually found the factory. We've been through a couple now, over the years, but kind of keep leveling up from that initial attempt at trial and error.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I love this story, because a lot of times I feel we have brands come on here who kind of have these really quick success stories of they find a product or the founder has an idea, very much you do, you guys did, you found a problem, you really saw there wasn't a solution out there, and then we talked to a lot of brands who kind of just have this the product comes and then customer experience comes and retention comes and it kind of just starts to flow naturally. You guys had a unique area of obstacle that, I'm guessing really taught you a lot about not only really the business, but also kind of your core customers because as I read, you guys had this set of 100 backpacks that was, it was good, but maybe not exactly really what you wanted.

Kristen: 

It's definitely not where Tortuga is today, and then learning how to kind of sell those to customers and then learn from that experience, and learn to hone into who really were your best customers. Do you think that through that experience, you learned a lot not just about kind of the business side but actually about the customers on the other side that you were trying to reach?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, this wasn't intentional, certainly, but we kind of ended up figuring out what we have right with the product in the original idea and where we needed to level up, and I guess some of that was intuitive. But the very first version of the bag like you alluded to was, well, it was ugly. We were still kind of redesigning and sampling and we got to this point, because we're bootstrapped and we put some money in where we were either going to order these 100 bags or we're going to keep sampling and not have enough money to place an order. So at a certain point, we just had to go for a place the order, the bags are not perfect, they were very boxy kind of wasn't the shade of green we were going for, the logo was too big, all these shortcomings, right?

Kristen: 

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Fred Perrotta: 

We were starting out. We had our Shopify site, but this was before the theme store even existed.

Kristen: 

Oh, yeah.

Fred Perrotta: 

So we've got this janky site. We've got an ugly product. So, sometimes now you'll see a direct to consumer brand launch, and it's like maybe the product isn't really anything new but they've got this great brand and story and all that stuff. It's wrapped in a great package. We had we were wrapped in a terrible package. So we didn't have any of that to coast on or make up for any shortcoming. So what we found were most people would bounce when they got to the site or saw the product, but the people who would actually buy it, they loved it. They saw the same design for shortcomings with it that we did, but they would say, we'd get really positive reviews.

Fred Perrotta: 

We only were selling a few bags a month but when we'd get a review, people are, oh, I've been looking for something this forever. I'm always traveling with this kind of bag and didn't it for these reasons, and it reinforced everything we thought about the product and the category and what the ideal product would be. We weren't executing it well enough but that gave us enough confidence and assurance but we shouldn't give up just because we sold three bags this month, we're onto something, we can get there. We don't know how to get there yet, but there is some correct version of this product that we could get to.

Kristen: 

Yeah, and I really think that the most powerful thing, oftentimes is finding that need that people have versus you can have an absolute amazing product, the most amazing branding but if it's not really something that people truly need in a very deep way and connect to in a deep way, you might do pretty good but there's something missing there, and this is why I was excited to have you tell the story is because I think what you guys really were able to pull out of this was, yes, our product is not there, but the space is there and this experience is needed for customers and this is a product that honestly I'm saying this from experience, I've been going through a search for new luggage for carry-on luggage, it's not really that comment of a product.

Kristen: 

It's not really out there. It hasn't been mass marketed by a huge brand necessarily. So you guys had this unique opportunity where, yes, it was a struggle with the product itself but you found something really special, you found this kind of niche engaged community that were looking for something that actually helped them in a much nicer way than the bags that are out there now.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, we have the right value prop and the right idea. It's pretty much everything with the execution was not right yet. But yeah, it was enough to keep going, and we were lucky that I guess this was still pretty early, even by the time we we're launching the V2 of the product to look much better, that's when we started to see some more backpacks and more stuff happening on Kickstarter, which wasn't really happening in our early days, starting to see more of the direct to consumer boom starting. So we were just so early and probably must have fallen under the radar that we had a little bit more time to figure this stuff out versus now.

Fred Perrotta: 

Some of the brands whether it's Kickstarter or a more of a VC funded brand, they come out of the gate and they at least look fully formed, behind the scenes, they feel there's a lot of work to do but I mean, look how good the V1 of all these brands launching now are even if they're launching on Kickstarter, and yeah, we were not set up to compete then but it was early enough that we had some time to iterate and figure some stuff out.

Kristen: 

Yeah, and so moving forward into this. This is an interesting topic to me, because in the nature of kind of travel backpacks, it's a higher priced item. It's not something that you really expect to buy again, at least in any sort of short timeframe, unless you're a really, really avid traveler. So how do you guys think about customer retention when you have this kind of product?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, it certainly works definitely for us. We're much closer to say a Casper or a Wave, obviously, being a luggage brand where we have that higher price point on a first order, and if we do it well you don't need another backpack or at least not for a few years until you get the one top grade or just want something new or get sick of it or whatever. So, yeah, we've got some challenges that way.

Fred Perrotta: 

So we don't think, for us retention isn't like, okay, we get the first purchase, and then we sell you whatever, new clothing every season the same way a clothing brand or something might. We don't think about it the way a subscription brand would where you're trying to engage and keep everyone happy every month, so they keep renewing or don't cancel. So, for us, we use content a lot, and it's kind of, I guess a lot of it happens even before the first purchase, right? So for us, we're thinking about acquiring people, even if they aren't customers yet, and then retaining them, and then hopefully that first purchase at least is somewhere along that journey.

Fred Perrotta: 

So content marketing is really big for us, and we use that to kind of engage people, even if they're a reader or a subscriber or a follower initially, and then the purchase is just another step in that journey later on. So, just to go back to kind of a more common direct to consumer playbook. You see now it's run ads, acquire the customer through the ad, and then they're on your email list or retargeting, whatever it is to retain them for subsequent purchases. For us, we're kind of acquiring, quote unquote, people with content typically early on, and then over time, hopefully, we either sell them on a bag because they really what we're doing or they're following us for a while and then they've got a big trip coming up and they went upgrade their luggage or they have something from another brand and it finally broke down and they're ready to get a new one.

Fred Perrotta: 

So, yeah, we have kind of those product side challenges, and then the other part is we're generally going to sell someone a bag before a big trip. It's not something where, like clothing, you might just buy it seasonally or something, for us we also need that person to take a trip. If they find us and they love it, but they're not a taking trip for six months, they're probably not going to buy it for six months, and we need some way to foster that relationship in the meantime.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I love how you put it, really you guys look at it as you're acquiring an audience via content and then retaining them as customers. It's such a progressive way to really look at it and understanding that and I think it really comes down to understanding how your customers purchase, the purchasing behavior, the decision making, the psychology behind your products, and really understanding that the journey to buy like something this isn't quite the same as say buying just a t-shirt or a new lotion.

Kristen: 

It's not a quick decision. It's going to take time and often time there's something in the customer's life that changes that then kind of sparks that conversion, and they're going to go, oh, I'm going on this trip. I need new luggage, and then they're going to go looking and you guys are getting really ahead of that and saying, hey, if we can get in front of them before they start making that purchase decision, and they're there with us as an audience, and they what we're doing, and they believe in our values, then when the time comes, most likely, they're then going to convert because the relationship is really already been made there.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, that's kind of the ideal outcome. I always site this because I love this example but we had a customer email me one time and she said, I've been following your blog for a while and loved the recommendations and packing list and all this stuff, and I was thinking, I just wish this company would make a backpack and then I realized that you do, and I was like that is the perfect customer journey. It's like, I site that one all the time.

Fred Perrotta: 

Obviously, we should have probably been more explicit about that maybe in that person's case, but yeah, you kind of want to balance building that the trust from that customer because you're the expert in this thing, or you've helped them with other problems like packing gear, whatever, in our case, and then when it comes time for them to get some new luggage, they don't even think about it or shop around. Of course, they would buy it from Tortuga.

Kristen: 

Yeah, the brand affinity has really been built up. So how do you guys with travel being such a large topic that you can really talk about in content and I know this is something that a lot of other DTC brands and a lot of the listeners struggle with is thinking about content marketing can seem really intimidating. So when you have a topic as wide as travel, how did you guys start to figure out what kinds of content to come up?

Fred Perrotta: 

Another example of trial and error. So when we started back in the day, I kind of thought we were trying to set up kind of a passive income, sort of automated four hour workweek sort of business. So, we thought, okay, well, we'll run some ads on travel backpack, carry-on backpack, the obvious kind of words you do. We'll run that traffic to the site, people will buy and great, we'll just, off to the races. And before starting the company, I had worked at Google, and then freelanced all doing performance ad stuff.

Fred Perrotta: 

So I knew Google and then later Facebook kind of inside out. So it just seemed like oh, obviously, this will work, and then it turns out that with a high price point and a product that was ugly at the time, paying money for those ads did not work. So I had to learn something new. So we tried a little bit of everything. Part of that was starting to blog and this was kind of probably the heyday of travel blogs, right? Where there's like, now maybe people are more on Instagram than travel blogging, but at the time tons of travel bloggers, everyone trying to get into it, get three trips, just a big spike in content out there.

Fred Perrotta: 

So when we started, I was doing most of the blogging and kind of writing about a little bit of everything, different destinations, packing stuff, just all over the map, and then what we found was when we read about destinations everyone else was writing about that so much harder to kind of break through and build that following especially when people tended to like individual bloggers, certain person, maybe they like certain activities, or they write about food in the cities and you kind of follow a personality versus, we didn't have the brand as dialed in, and we were companies, so people weren't as into it. But what they were into was packing advice even though that sounds the most boring topic you can imagine in some ways.

Fred Perrotta: 

People actually want to know like what do I bring to this destination versus that one? Should I bring a second pair of shoes? Should I just bring one pair?? What should that pair be? All the stuff but if you don't travel a ton, maybe you're just uncertain about them and you kind of don't know what to do, and if you do travel a lot, then you often nerd out about this stuff, or you have like, oh, I always bring these shoes on my trip and tell all my friends.

Fred Perrotta: 

So over time, we kind of figured out what people were interested in hearing from us, and that was, now I described it as, what to bring and how to pack it. So now we write a lot about what's the best stuff to bring, whether that's clothes, other gear, whatever, and then how to pack it. So that might be packing lists by destination or weather or situation. That can also be stuff as simple as like, hey, if you're bringing something heavier like shoes, pack those in the middle of your bag, because it's better for weight distribution, and that's kind of super nerdy stuff where you want to make your bag comfortable, you want to know how to pack more in it. Should I roll? Should I fold? All these kind of stuff. That's what we cover and it was just through trying a little bit of everything and looking for any kind of traction we would find.

Kristen: 

Yeah, for one, I did not know that you should put your shoes in the middle of your bag. I always put them in the very bottom of my bag, and now I'm just hitting my forehead like of course, of course that weighs the entire bag down. I need to go follow you guys's blog for sure because I am the epitome of an over packer. I work from home so therefore I wear the same three sweatpants and five t-shirts all week long, and yet when I go on a two day trip I'm like but what if, but what if that's this time I wear this pair of jeans that I've never once before worn, and I will definitely bring that.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, everyone's mentality you kind of, it goes out the window regardless of how you craft or think about stuff or whatever at home. Once you start traveling, I feel people end up on one end of the spectrum or the other. One is just like where you just described, right? Well, I don't know, I might need formal wear, who knows what's going to come up on this trip, and now you bring everything. And then the other end are people who are super extreme and they're like I'll bring one extra pair of underwear, and a toothbrush and that's all I need. That's all I need. Why would you ever need more than a trash bag to travel?

Kristen: 

This is my husband, who we will go somewhere and he brings one pair of jeans and I bring four pairs of jeans, and he's like, well, I mean, if they rip, I'll just go buy another pair of jeans, I guess, and he is so strict about packing and I'm always impressed and jealous with the way he's able to do it. Curious too if you kind of, how much does the content that you guys have built up, how much, how big of an arm of your business really is this? You talked a lot about it in the acquisition side and in getting people in. Is it also really big in kind of community and customer retention and really driving these deeper relationships?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, we use it for kind of a full lifecycle. So content for us, we have a lot of the stuff I described a minute ago on the blog that's like a lot of that is made to solve people's problems but it's also because that's what people are searching for that's kind of SEO driven, that we try to make it good content, of course. Then there's also part of it that's more typically hosted on our store or website itself. We think of it as info pages, but can be a little bit more informational and can also be part of that journey.

Fred Perrotta: 

So some of that is just different steps from the funnel. So you're looking for something vaguely about what to bring to Europe versus later in the funnel, maybe you're looking for what's the carry-on dimensions for some specific airline. But then we also use that content, especially the store stuff, even after someone purchases. So typically, someone will come to us, they'll buy one of our bigger bags, a big carry-on size backpack. So when they do, we'll send them few emails and reuse some of that content either from the store to the blog, so that they can get the most out of their bags.

Fred Perrotta: 

So that might be from the stuff we talked about a minute ago like the packing list that might be, how to pack the bag, that sort of thing. So whether or not you've seen that before, you're kind of getting a, if you think about it like a user manual. You're buying this technical bag so it's good to make sure people are getting the most out of it and feel like, hey, we sold it to you, but here's how to be successful with it. Here's the instruction manual, and then down the road, when it comes time to also try to sell them on maybe some accessories, second purchases then we can also use that content. So rather than just an email that feels like hey, you bought a backpack. So once you buy this day pack too.

Fred Perrotta: 

We'll still be, we can be educating them on, hey, here's why we made this other product that actually works really well with what you bought. So, yeah, it's a sales message, and we're trying to accomplish that. But we're also doing it by showing them why it makes sense, and hopefully showing them, hey, here's another problem people encounter when they travel, and we can solve it for you, and here's how that would work. So, yeah, we use 20s content really broadly, we use it from everything from like the very first touch kind of acquisition to mid funnel to after purchase to upsell later. We're trying to use it for pretty much every stage of the whole life cycle.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I mean, you just summarized my love for content. I'm a content marketer at heart, and so I have this really deep connection to content and how it can go from, when I started my career, I was just blogging, I was the very top funnel blogger, and now I'm working in customer retention in everything and I can really see how to me I have this connection with content that it can do so much in the lifecycle of a customer, and to hear you say, and I want to point this out to the listeners especially, if you're thinking about investing in content, it's not just a one sided play. It's not just content for acquisition or content for this. A blog post can be so much more than one blog post.

Kristen: 

Kind of you're saying, Fred, you can write a blog post that works for acquisition but also can then work on customer success and customer retention, and then even upselling. There's so much you can do with content because when you really wrap around your sales with this valuable content and actually helpful advice, it makes the conversion a lot easier, and so I really wanted to highlight that and congratulate you guys on how successful and how much work you've put into content. It's really exciting to see from a DTC brand. I think it's a little bit new for brands to be focusing so much on content, and so I love to see it.

Kristen: 

Something else I wanted to ask you about was you guys's use of luggage stacks and the works with section on your products. This is something that I really, really love because I just gave this advice to someone who's running a furniture store. I went and I looked at it and me and my husband are thinking about redecorating our living room, and I went, and I loved the look of their couches, but we want a couch and a chair, and I came back to him and I said, hey, look, something that could be really useful is if you were to build out some guides on products that go really well together, because I want to buy this in a full set, because this is a big investment.

Kristen: 

This is something that I'd be thinking about, and I think it's very similar with purchases and kind of the luggage sector is sometimes when customers come in there, they're looking for these bigger purchases, and maybe they're actually ready to buy more than one thing, and you guys do a really good job of kind of leaning into this in a way that's not just, it doesn't feel on the site you're trying to get the most out of someone's money but you're actually trying to help them find the best kind of stack or luggage stack or things that will work with what they're buying. Can you kind of dig into this strategy and the system you guys have set up for that?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, I guess, in the last answer, I didn't mention that we also use a lot of this content. Some are on the product page, but a lot is linked from the product page. So as you're looking at, you want to keep it efficient in terms of how much information's there, but then there's plenty of links to see, oh, well, what is this fabric about? You click that and get a whole page about it. Why are these bags made in Asia? Well, we'll explain why we do what we do, and yeah, part of that is also educating the customer telling the story of why these different products work together and not just like, hey, why don't you buy two more things and then you'll get free shipping?

Fred Perrotta: 

Well, here are some other things that you might want to buy because they all work together, and for us, it's a bit I always think of it as, how it's explained when say, men buy a suit, right? You go into the store to buy a suit, that's the highest price point item, you decide on your suit, and then maybe the salesperson is well, if you buy a suit today, we also this deal on ties. You can also grab a shirt and some socks. There's the upsell stuff there.

Fred Perrotta: 

So for us, people are typically finding us, they're seeing the most value in the travel backpacks that's kind of the big flagship product. So they're coming, they're checking that out, and then we've tried doing this in a couple ways, which I can break down, but we basically want to show them, hey, here are the accessories. Here's the rest of this collection. We made this all to work together. Here's why this works with the backpack and if you're this kind of traveler, you might want this one. If you're this kind, you might want that product.

Fred Perrotta: 

So we've done that. We used to product pages that were kind of bundles on the site. You see that with some brands. Now we're doing it as a little bit more of, kind of sequentially. So you'd see the travel backpack, you read through the product page, maybe add it to your cart, and then there are kind of two points where we look at showing you what accessories might work with it. So one is, like you were mentioning on the product page, the section that says works with, you can click the whole drop down and see, okay, I'm looking at this backpack. Oh, here's some packing cubes if I want to be super organized, here's a day pack that I can actually pack inside the bag, and then when I get to my destination, I can pull it out and use that when I'm out [inaudible].

Fred Perrotta: 

So that's one point where we do it. So that used to be kind of at the bottom of the page, more of like, hey, why don't you also check these out sort of section but turns out, no one gets to the bottom of the page. So we're just wasting that space. So we moved them up and kind of made it an optional drop down, and then we repeat this with that same process in the shopping cart. So regardless if a few looked at that section on the product page or not, when you add the backpack to your cart, you'll get kInd of the similar sort of pop up at the bottom of the cart, come slides in from the side of the window and it'll show you the same thing again like, hey, here's the cubes. People like these and then we give people a discount if they bundle those.

Fred Perrotta: 

So you see the backpack a full price if you're in the mini cart, you see the cubes think that's a great idea you add those in, then you'll get this kind of a small discount on both products when you buy them together. So that lets us of course are trying to make this package that makes sense to a person, solves multiple problems and then from the business side, because we're dependent on that first purchase like we talked about earlier, stuff with a, have a bigger first purchase, increase that order value there, sell someone all these things up front together, and then makes it an easier decision for them to make if they already decided like, hey, I checked out the backpack. I love it, added it to my cart, then you're adding another 30 bucks or whatever for the cubes doesn't seem as daunting, right?

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Fred Perrotta: 

If you're buying a $200 backpack. So a little bit easier to add that $30 then than as a second purchase, and yeah, it all feels kind of natural and sequential and you're making one small decision at a time as opposed to hey, do you want to buy this five product bundle all together? It's very expensive when you add them all up. So yeah, that's kind of another part of it, where we've always tried to make, we have a limited landscape of products, and there's some education. They're a little complicated. So we always want it to be you make kind of one decision at a time, right?

Fred Perrotta: 

So we can show you, hey, we have three different collections. These are kind of the difference. This one has a laptop sleeve, this one doesn't. This one's more adjustable, whatever the points of comparison are. So you kind of figure out all right, this collection's for me and which size do I want? Then, do I want to add these cubes? It's kind of one simpler question at a time as opposed to here's 200 products on one page, either pick at random or open all the tabs.

Kristen: 

Yeah, yeah. And I love this because I think it really highlights you guys's focus on the customer journey, and really understanding that when people make decisions, that we don't really make decisions like a massive, okay, I'm going to go buy a backpack and everything else I need for packing. Really this deep understanding of the psychology of purchasing behavior that you have to nudge a customer along kind of one step at a time, all while building trust along those steps so that they're not ever really getting weary, and they're saying, when I was going and looking at it this morning, and when I was going through it was you see the works with section, you see that come in and it just, it feels it really does make sense and it's a natural next decision versus trying to buy every little piece of the book on one page and having this big price come up.

Kristen: 

It's a really powerful thing I think you guys are doing by stepping it out for the customer, and also on top of that, it does kind of encourage the customer to engage more with the brand and read more of the content and stay on the site a little bit longer and get to know it a little bit more, and to really wrap it all the way around. I think that there's a really important part of this, that because you guys have focused so much on content, that when someone does come in and they're ready to buy a backpack, there's so much trust built up in the value that you guys provide to customers that when they go and they see these add-ons in the cart, it's a pretty no brainer decision because $30 like you said doesn't seem that much. But when you trust the brand, it seems almost nothing then.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, that's a great way to put it that you're kind of lowering those potential barriers or objections, all the stuff you do is objection handling as a store or anyone filling anything that we can kind of do that. You don't have to put that all on the product page or the checkout or whatever, if you're doing that work upfront through, in our case, content over it might be a month, it might be six months, someone's been following.

Fred Perrotta: 

You have this, you kind of open up that window way more and give yourself some more opportunities. I mean, you also have more opportunity to lose them if it's over a longer time. But conversely, you also have more opportunity to build that trust so that like we've talked about once it's time to buy, it's a no brainer, or in our case we write a lot about gear on our blog and recommend different clothes and travel toiletry stuff that. So by the time someone buys luggage from us, they might have read a bunch of those posts and bought five other things from total other brands just because we recommended. They trust us.

Fred Perrotta: 

So when it comes time to spend money on luggage, of course they're going to buy it from us, right? They trusted us. We've recommended other companies for them to buy stuff from. So, of course, if they've read those recommendations, bought that stuff, then when it's time for luggage, it's kind of a no brainer, and we're always sort of thinking about that, I guess you could say that's the brand side of it a little bit where of course, in any product category, if you're successful, there's going to be a cheap version on Amazon, there's going to be copycats, competitors, whatever, right? We're not the only travel backpack that exists.

Fred Perrotta: 

So how can you build that trust and relationship with someone so that when it comes time to make the decision, in some ways, there's no decision to be made. They're just going to come to you. We've done well in the past with people who to research which was me when I was looking for a bag for that trip I told you about at the top.

Kristen: 

Yeah, yeah.

Fred Perrotta: 

I'm like, we do well with the people who want to open 20 tabs and make a spreadsheet, that is the thing about every bag and the size and the features and whatever and that's great.

Kristen: 

Yeah, so that is my husband.

Fred Perrotta: 

We want to be able, of course to be stacked side by side with every other brand and be the choice. But we also want to be able to capture those customers who are just like all right, what's the best one? Someone tell me which one to buy? I don't want to open the tabs. I don't want to make a spreadsheet. I just want to know what's the best brand. We want to also be the default recommendation there.

Kristen: 

Yeah, yeah, I love it, and I have to ask from a personal experience because like you said, you used to be really deep into performance marketing. So really the paid ad side of things, and I'm impressed with your thought process and the way you look at the brand side of things. In eCommerce in DTC it seems there is kind of this battle between performance marketing and brand marketing, and there's this chasm that keeps us really separate, and I believe it's starting to come closer because everyone's really starting to understand that long term relationships and retention are where it's at, and so everything from the ad to the purchase has to be really congruent.

Kristen: 

So I'm curious what it was like for you to have to kind of transition from a very performance mindset, kind of into this mix and even leaning almost heavier onto the brand recognition side of it?

Fred Perrotta: 

It's definitely been a journey, and especially one we're still trying to figure out and work. Yeah, I appreciate you saying such nice things. I still feel, oh, there's so much more we need to be doing with, social hasn't really been as huge a part of that journey as it probably should be and we'd to get to community. We have people who are passionate about the product, but we don't do enough in community. I still feel there's so much more to do. But yeah, it's been kind of an evolution over time where, when we were starting out, I'm like I don't know, more of a logical thinker. It's coming from performance marketing.

Fred Perrotta: 

Anything I had to learn, I was trying to learn from a book, copywriting or whatever. So, I always felt when like it was basically my co-founder and I doing everything, it was always hyper logical or trying to not talk people into a purchase, but a little bit is okay, it has this feature, which has this benefit, that is very much in that world, and I understood the brand and that stuff had value, but I had no way to wrap my head around there, or it didn't come intuitively, I just didn't know how to get there.

Fred Perrotta: 

So as we started to build a team it was something I wanted to be mindful of and not just get stuck in one world. So there's something we did specifically look for in some of our early hires, even people who weren't necessarily brand marketers or anything. So for example, our industrial designer who's one of our first hires, he had previously run a bad company and they were very, they sold bags because people were into the brand and the style was cool, and it wasn't as, we have these 10 features as Tortuga [inaudible] or when we we're looking to update our website with kind of the V3 of the products in 2016, we we're looking at some agencies for a while, and then as we started looking at cost thinking about what we needed, we ended up deciding we were going to hire someone to do kind of design a dev at that time in house so that we could hone more of that experience, build the website and brand and all that stuff that we had aspired to.

Fred Perrotta: 

Even early on, obviously, we knew like I said that our products are good enough, the website wasn't good enough, we had high aspirations even through the first couple iterations of the product when we didn't have the money or ability to realize them. And then, other direct to consumer brands are coming out and just raising the bar farther and farther up. That gap between where we were and our ambitions kind of got a little bigger and bigger. So, yeah, we tried to bring in people who we thought could help us get there, and yeah, actually we probably went too far in that direction when we did the reboot. And yeah, we had always talked about kind of make the products more, I think back then we probably said more premium and it wasn't necessarily just a price thing, but we wanted them to look better. We wanted someone to look at it and be I don't care about the features. That bag's cool, I want that bag, and the same thing with the website and stuff.

Fred Perrotta: 

But as we started hiring people, we kind of relaunched basically everything about the business in 2016, and we actually pushed too far into like we had too many lifestyle photos versus product photos. We just tried to push too much on the exciting, inspirational kind of lifestyley stuff, especially from website and product photos and stuff, and we did it all at once. So people were just like, this is cool but where's this pocket? I don't understand how this relates to that. Where is the price of this, and we were just like, this is one of those kind of head flapping moments when our ambition kind of won out over on or kind of beat out what customers wanted and what they expected from us also just from the previous years and kind of had to backtrack and find that happy medium between the two.

Kristen: 

Yeah. I love how many stories you have of you guys trying something and looking at it and saying, okay, it's not really the feedback we want, and then going back and adjusting. It's something that I think a lot of DTC brands we see in the news, you just see the successes, you see the unicorns who have everything perfect, and so it's really inspiring to hear a brand that's gone through different iterations of things and tested and had to learn kind of the perfect fit for the brand. That's super cool, I also do want to really highlight that you brought up something so, so important.

Kristen: 

You did say that you are not supernaturally intuitive about brand marketing, I'm going to disagree with you on that, and say that you are extremely intuitive on it. The way you're talking is, I mean, you're saying everything that I say to people. So I know that you've got the intuition down. But then beyond that, just the dedication you guys had when hiring to saying, okay, we've got this logical side of it, we've got kind of the performance marketing background here. We need to hire people who can help us with the experience and the brand side.

Kristen: 

That's so important on customer retention, and something that I think gets swept under the rug a lot is a lot of brands struggle to focus on retention because it doesn't come from the top down. And so it's just, to me as a retention nerd and someone who just loves this hearing from the co-founder of such a brand that I hold in such high regard saying, from the very get go, you saw that and you saw, hey, this needs to be part of the brand, this needs to be part of the team focus, and then you hired for it is a really, really powerful sentiment, and I think where a lot of brands are going to have to start looking into when they're building teams and building processes is, can you put it all in the light of customer retention and customer experience?

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, well, thank you for saying that. It's, yeah, I always want to like it's a tough balance, right? Where you want to lean into your strengths and not spend all of your time trying to fix weaknesses, right?

Kristen: 

Yeah.

Fred Perrotta: 

You're going to have so many ways. So better to be really good at your strength, but also at the same time, you can or I can personally see, I know where some of my blind spots are, I know where I'm weaker or just not as knowledgeable about or whatever. So those are the times so it's great to be alright, this is my shortcoming. Let's look for someone who it is a strength for and then I don't have to worry about making a [inaudible] weakness because on that as a team, we'll have it covered.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I love that. So I do have to ask, you obviously have traveled quite a bit around the world, do you have a favorite place you have visited? And I know this is a difficult question. It's like asking a parent their favorite child or asking me my favorite dog. Asking a traveler their favorite city is impossible to answer, but do you have any cool stories or any places you're like you guys got to go here.

Fred Perrotta: 

But some of this question, people just want one answer, the name of one place but a place, so sit down, I'll give you the situation and then they ask you for every situation. But yeah, for me, it becomes a little unfair, because it's always the places that I've gotten to spend more time that then it's sort of, I guess you fall in love with a little more you just feel you have a deeper connection to.

Fred Perrotta:

So one of my favorites is Lisbon. I've been twice just sort of coincidentally. Been there twice now. We did a retreat there. So I've really fond memories of Lisbon, great food. I lived in the Bay Area reminds me a little bit of San Francisco because it's kind of silly and on the water. Very busy from a tourist perspective, but probably a little better than some of the bigger cities in Europe. I was also, in my previous job, there were some travel opportunities that I took advantage of, let's be honest.

Kristen:

As you should.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, trying to max it out. I got to go Sydney, Australia for three months.

Kristen: 

Oh, cool.

Fred Perrotta: 

So it's kind of near and dear to my heart. It's also on the water. Feels a little bit more like a city in a beach town kind of mash together. So, yeah. Now it's wherever I've spent time or the other thing that kind of makes some places special are just if you went with a really good group of friends or you had a great trip with your partner or now with Tortuga it's like some of the places we've had are retreats. Just end up being, they feel a little bit special because you spent a week there with people you really like but hardly ever get to see in person very much because we're remote. So, yeah, sometimes the places you end up recommending are not as much about the place but about the experience you had there.

Kristen: 

Yep, yep, and I love that, and I actually feel that has a really meta connection back to the podcast oftentimes, the products we choose are the ones that we have the best experiences with. Sorry listeners, I had to do it.

Kristen: 

I have more questions for you on this. Living in Sydney. This is something I really want to go to Sydney. My husband is scared of Australia because of crazy animals, which I understand but I'm also the person who wants to go on an Africa Safari and I want to see the craziest animals possible. Did you experience any weird creature things while you were living in Sydney?

Fred Perrotta: 

Weird creature things, no. I didn't get to deal with any, I know they have some giant spiders and crazy stuff.

Kristen: 

Yeah. I've seen those.

Fred Perrotta: 

Got to see some kangaroos in the wild which people think that's very exotic but down there they're just so not entertained at all by kangaroo. They're like a deer or something.

Kristen: 

Yeah like your koala, yeah.

Fred Perrotta: 

Everywhere, they're a nuisance. Yeah, no one cares. So, that was kind of a fun one. I was really looking forward to, I wanted to check out the koalas. Like you always see the pictures of people holding koalas there but it turns out that you can only do that in certain states of Australia or territories, whatever they call them. So the New South Wales where Sydney is we went to the zoo but in that State you're not allowed to hold them. So they're flawless. They eat Eucalyptus and then sleep all day. So the picture of me with the Koalas is like, it looks like I killed them and hung them from a tree next to me because they're just totally passed out just hanging from the tree.

Kristen: 

Just having the time of their life.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, I'm glad I got to see them up close, but the photo doesn't really do it much justice.

Kristen: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I remember I think it was last year. It's funny. I used to work with a bunch of people who lived in Sydney. So I have kind of a strange connection to the city and I've always wanted to visit, videotape it, I've always wanted to visit Sydney. I got multiple words stuck in my head there at one time. It's something I saw, I think it was last year though. It was on the news, and it was a picture of a snake that had crawled up someone's toilet in Australia and was coiled in the toilet bowl, and that is one of those pictures that for some reason has stuck in my head, and every time I go to the bathroom, I think about it.

Kristen: 

Anytime I talk about Australia I'm like, I want to go but what if there's snakes in the toilet? So I'm glad to hear that you never had snakes in your toilet.

Fred Perrotta: 

Yeah, check the toilet for snakes. Check your boots for spiders. Yeah, check everything.

Kristen: 

Yeah, yeah, I'm still going to go but I'm going to be scared the whole time.

Fred Perrotta: 

I think the cities are okay. It's once you start getting more out into the bush that things get crazier.

Kristen:

Yeah. So before I wrap up with questions, just one more location question. How did you guys pick Tortuga as the name for the backpacks?

Fred Perrotta: 

So that was actually one of the first things we figured out. So we wanted to convey, the original idea was all about international and long term travel. So we liked the idea of a foreign word or a foreign language word because it kind of conveys international and worldly and stuff, and then to Tortuga is Spanish for turtle, for those who don't know, and then we also liked the idea of a turtle because it's kind of it's got everything it needs on his back, so. And then down the line, it turns out that turtle was a good spirit animal for us, because we've talked about for the whole time here. Everything we've done has been kind of slow, steady, figured out. We've always been the tortoise and the hare. So it ended up being a good spirit animal for us.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I love it. Really when I think of Tortuga I always think of Pirates of The Caribbean. It's one of my favorite movie series of all times and they always go and rage and pillage and in Tortuga and so that's when I see it, it gives me that worldly image in my head which I know you guys were going after and you really hit on it so well with the name and I just had to ask if there was maybe some crazy story in Tortuga but I do like that you've brought it around to spirit animal because that makes total sense.

Kristen: 

So just wrapping up, you gave us an example of a good customer story, but can you tell us one of your, I'm sure some of your customers have gone and done some crazy things with your backpacks kind of on their backs. Do you have a favorite customer story from building out Tortuga?

Fred Perrotta: 

Oh, wow. Yeah, we've been lucky to have a lot like we had a guy go to over 100 countries with his bag.

Kristen: 

Wow.

Fred Perrotta: 

Just putting up crazy. I don't even know how you go to that many. Just putting up crazy numbers. Some of my favorites are when we, a lot of our first customers when we had this kind of an ugly product where people who had experienced the same pain point we had, but for years, so we had a lot of older travelers, say, middle aged, retirees, older than you would think for like, people think of backpacking as college kids.

Fred Perrotta: 

So I love every time I hear from someone who's 70 something years old and they don't want a suitcase, they got the backpack, they're using the hip straps, they're still comfortable on them, and they're like, I'm still out here. I'm still traveling. I got all kinds of time. I'm retired and I love it, I love the product. So those are the fun ones when it's not the stereotype that you might have in your head of who a backpacker is.

Kristen: 

Yeah, I love that and really helping people kind of continue their dreams lifelong is such an inspirational cool thing. What's something that's really surprised you as you've grown the brand of?

Fred Perrotta: 

Well, like I said from the trial and error, pretty much everything. At some point we've had something wrong. But yeah, I think the thing that's been kind of fun and surprising in some ways is we started from this idea of four hour workweeks, kind of automated passive income kind of business, and at every step of the way, every time there's been an inflection point, we've just kind of decided to go for it and be more ambitious and try to build something bigger and better products and more impactful and kind of go for it, and that has sort of been, I guess, surprising to me as I look back and think about where we started.

Fred Perrotta: 

So yeah, it's been kind of a cool journey to find that sort of unfolding in front of us and to find ourselves continually making that same decision to go for it, build a team, level up a product, make some new product line. So that kind of surprised me, but it's been cool to feel like we had that decision to make and we can decide based on what was best for us.

Kristen: 

Yeah, it sounds you guys were almost a little bit, not hesitant it's not the right word but a little bit, careful as you entered this space and found so much joy in building the brand and we're almost surprised by the customers and hearing the stories and all this stuff, and surprised by how much you guys really cared about it, and I think that's such an interesting story to see how you guys went from all these struggles and went through obstacles and then found out, hey, we thought this was going to be a passive income thing, and now this is our life and this is really fun and we have all these customers who care about the product, and that to me is such a rich founder story. To go from where you guys did to where you guys are now and to be surprised by that journey is a really special thing and that's why I'm so glad that you were able to get on the podcast this year.

Kristen: 

Last question before we wrap up, And this is a big question for you guys, I know for sure But if you could imagine three to five years in the future, where do you see Tortuga going?

Fred Perrotta:

Yeah, I think it'll be another one of those inflection points like I mentioned a minute ago. We've got a bunch of bets. We always think about new stuff as kind of like that's our hypotheses or something. We've got a bunch of those that we're kind of are all working on at the same time.

Fred Perrotta: 

So next thing for us is kind of expanding into more, this will actually help with retention, curiously enough, but expanding into more of the second bag, personal item type bag. So it's not all I've got my one big bag and that's what I use on my long trips, but getting into, hey, to be realistic. Some people want to carry a suitcase, but they want a nice backpack that goes with it, and then getting into some new categories business travel, adventure travel. We've got, of course more ideas than time or bandwidth as it always goes. But yeah, we've got a bunch of those that we want to get into, and then we see other problems outside of just carrying luggage that we think we can help solve for customers. So eventually, maybe you'll see a whole other product lines from us.

Kristen: 

Ooooh, I'm excited. Thank you so much for coming on this show, Fred. This was such an amazing and insightful conversation. I really appreciate you sharing so much with us.

Fred Perrotta: 

Of course, thanks for having me. It was fun.