This year, Portland Leather Goods will …
- Manufacture 100k items a week
- Launch 10 new retail locations
- Generate $200M in revenue
And today, its CEO reveals three hard-won lessons on the only two words guiding its growth.
👜 Curtis Matsko with why + how to become “marketing first”
💰 Connor MacDonald on the buying moment you’re ignoring
🗞️ Five biggest headlines from last week in consumer news
Plus, one last hurrah — with a super-sized opportunity — to show your support.
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Connor MacDonald
CMO, Ridge
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Skyrocket AOV With Targeted, Friction-Free Upsells
There are a few key moments when people are primed to buy more …
- During the holidays
- While impulse-shopping
- Right after completing a purchase
Let’s focus on the last point because it’s the one I see ecommerce brands ignore the most.
When a customer has already committed to buying from you, they’re still in the buying mindset. You’ve done the hard part of getting them to know, like, and trust you.
Now, you just need to show them a perfect complementary offer to boost your AOV. That’s the power of post-purchase upselling. It’s not about being pushy; it’s about being relevant.
With AfterSell, post-purchase upsells become a seamless part of the customer journey. Tailored suggestions feel like a natural extension of their purchase. This increases product discovery, drives revenue, and enhances the overall experience.
Don’t leave money on the table. Give post-purchase upsells a shot. We use AfterSell at Ridge. In fact, all three of the Marketing Operator brands use it.
More importantly, your bottom line will thank you.
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Curtis Matsko
CEO, Portland Leather Goods
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How & Why You Must Become “Marketing First”
From $500,000 at art festivals in 2016 to $4,000,000 on Etsy in 2019 … from $160M through Shopify last year to a fifth of a billion ($200M) by the end of 2025 …
HOLY SHIT, right? How’d we do it? Two words have guided us.
Portland Leather Goods is a MARKETING FIRST company. We’ve built every area of our business on a fundamental question:
What can MARKETING do to sell …
The right products at the right time at the right price? And how will that scale us to the moon with loads of profit?
But it hasn’t always been like that.
I had to learn three lessons the hard way — which is pretty typical for me — about what marketing first isn’t.
- NOT your story
- NOT your feelings
- NOT your products
1. NOT Your Story
When I started Portland Leather Goods ten years ago, I had no idea the story I wanted to tell didn’t matter.
Back then, we were riding the artisan wave: “We’re so cool because we make shit in our garage!”
That was our whole story. It was my story.
As we grew, we even spent a fortune buying a building in Portland, making it fancy. We put up big glass walls so people coming to shop could see the workers in the back.
You know where those glass walls are today? Gone! We knocked them down. Just regular old walls in a regular old outlet store — unless you count our unicorn, Pixie.
Why? Because we realized something huge:
We’re not the story. Our customers are the story. That’s the biggest change we’ve ever made.
Our Insiders Facebook group is the best embodiment of this truth — 150k strong. We’re accepting hundreds of posts a day, getting thousands of reactions. When we post a video? Within a couple of hours, it has 50,000 views.
Six times a year, we do over a million dollars in less than an hour. LESS THAN ONE HOUR!
$6.5M a year, and you can only buy if you’re in that group.
Why does it work? Because if you go shopping and the person selling to you says, “You look good in that,” you don’t believe them. But if your FRIEND says it? You’re sold.
We don’t have to sell. We let the people who love our bags do that for us.
Customers are the heroes. Not me. Not our artisans. The story has to be about all the people who get our bags …
And cannot live without them.
2. NOT Your Feelings
For the record, all company areas are important and must continue to improve. But marketing is the most important.
While we’ve always kept this in mind, we’ve toned it down over the years. This is because (some time ago) employees in customer service, design, logistics, accounting, production, and many other departments were upset when I said …
“The marketing team is more important, which is why they make more money and always will.”
HR meetings and other managers exploded.
“You can't say that,” they told me.
“Why?” I asked.
“They get upset. For example, customer service works hard and knows more about our customers than anyone.”
I held my tongue, but I wanted to scream:
“Customer service talks to 2% of the customers, the ones with complaints. They’re delusional.
“Marketing knows who bought, why they bought, what they bought, the motivations behind the clicks, and the results of hundreds of A/B tests over the years.
“We also know how to spend $40 million a year in ad dollars to continue growing this company.”
But I didn’t say it. Like a parent with a favorite child, I could never speak it out loud.
No more. The line is drawn. I am who I am, and my identity is tied to the company. Marketing has been the key to our scaling and success, and marketing first is the lens through which we must view everything, both at the beginning and the end.
I won’t hide that fact to protect the fragile egos of employees in so-called “non-marketing” areas or anyone else.
Can we get the cost of goods (COG) down to a desirable level? Does this have the potential to be a hero product? Is it a customer acquisition cost (CAC) winning product or an existing customer LTV and profit maker?
When our designers come to me now, I’ve trained them (sweetly mostly) to never ask, “Do you like it?”
Instead, they need to tell me:
- How much will it cost to produce?
- What are the sales projections?
- Why this product instead of another?
- What are we missing on the website?
- Who’s the avatar we’re selling to?
Take our recent Koala Sling launch. We knew it would be a hit — from the name to the pricing to everything about it.
We estimated 5-10x what most launches do; we still had to slow down because we ran out. We’ll spend $5-10M on ads this year for it because we’ve seen the patterns for a decade.
3. NOT Your Products
This concept might be even clearer when you realize that I own the largest leather bag production facility in North America. We make over 100,000 items every week in León, Mexico.
But here’s the thing …
We are not a manufacturing company. We are a marketing company.
All told, we’re going to spend $35-40M on Google and Meta this year. The math works. We don’t have to be clever.
We buy traffic at a profit. We know our customer acquisition costs. We know our retention rates.
You throw that bowling ball right down the middle. As long as you hit the headpin a little bit, you’ll get 7 to 9 out of that thing.
I’ve met with 20 different companies in the last 30-40 days who are in trouble. You know what they all have in common? They don’t understand their marketing side.
Without that, I’d still be the coolest guy in Sellwood, out in Portland, making bags in my garage.
I can be even more pointed …
Recently, I met an old friend for lunch. He owns the best leather boot manufacturing business in all of Mexico.
He’s kind, smart, and honest. He’s the man behind the design and production of Tecovas boots — along with half a dozen other brands you’d recognize.
He said to me, “Curtis, you’re a marketing guy. I want to sell my boots directly to the US market. I can make the absolute best boots at the best price. All you have to do is help me sell them.”
“Oh, that’s all?” I responded, “With respect, you can’t afford me.”
He countered, “I’m willing to give you part of the company.”
“Not enough,” I replied.
“How about half the company?” he asked.
My answer was still no.
Even with half the company — with them handling the sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics — the marketing piece is more than half of the work. And definitely more than half the value.
Production is tough, but you can find it anywhere in the world.
Great marketing is harder. It’s rare.
You must commit to marketing-first philosophy every single hour of every single day if you want to succeed at the highest levels.
Or, at least, that’s what I believe.
Curtis Matsko is the founder and CEO of Portland Leather Goods — a self-confessed walking paradox who (13 years ago) was 90% dead and the biggest loser you could ever meet. If you don’t already, follow him on LinkedIn.
Bonus Episode: Tariffs
Big Business, Big Challenges: Mastering Resource Management
Onboarding: How to Get the Best Out of Your New Hire From Day One
Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s five biggest consumer-news headlines.
1. Refresh Gum Secures $2M: NOSH
Refresh Gum, a new player in the better-for-you gum category, raised $2M in a seed funding round led by Santatera Capital. Founded in 2022 by Ryan Stafford, Refresh Gum uses sustainably harvested tree sap instead of polyvinyl acetate (i.e., synthetic plastic). Santatera Capital is also an investor in Little Sesame, Mezcla, Tia Lupita Foods, and Wildwonder.
2. L’Oreal Backs Jacquemus, Signs Long-Term Beauty Partnership: The Industry
Global beauty giant L’Oreal took a minority stake in Jacquemus and signed a long-term beauty partnership with the Parisian fashion label. Together, the two firms will co-develop a range of luxury beauty products and fragrances that will likely hit the market in two years.
Founded in 2009 by Simon Porte Jacquemus, the company generated €270M in 2023, up from €100M in 2021.
3. Hershey Profit Surges Thanks to Commodity Trading Unit: Twitter
Hershey’s Q4 net sales increased 8.7% to over $2.8B, but more impressively its Q4 net income surged 130% year-over-year. This was largely due to Hershey Trading GmbH, its secretive commodities trading unit in Zug, Switzerland. Virtual Executive Officer broke down how Hershey likely pulled it off.
4. UPTIME Energy Acquires Cold Brew Manufacturer: LinkedIn
UPTIME Energy, a California-based purveyor of clean energy drinks and supplements, has acquired RISE Brewing Co., a Connecticut-based manufacturer of nitro cold-brew products. Terms weren’t disclosed, but the deal will likely enable both brands to compete better in their respective categories.
5. Liquid Death Pulls Plug on the UK: Grocery Gazette
Liquid Death, the canned water brand that hit a valuation of $1.4B last year, is pulling the plug on its UK operation due to weakening sales and supply chain changes.
Liquid Death shifted manufacturing from Europe to the US fairly recently and, according to NIQ, did just £2M in sales for the 52 weeks ending on September 7th, 2024.
Finally, let’s hear it one more time for HexClad’s staggeringly genius Super Bowl commercial.
DTC social exploded yesterday …
With congratulations and a groundswell of support.
If you haven’t, go throw Jason Panzer + Connor Rolain some love of your own!
Or just hit reply, and I’ll pass it along!
With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓 Executive Editor
PS (Disclaimer): Special thanks to AfterSell for sponsoring this week’s newsletter.
