Transcript

Chuck: We knew the marketing insight would really work. So let's make the product align and that is that powerful connection between all the departments and the marketing team. When you can truly collaborate, you'll come up with those insights that, when you bring them into market, will drive your ROI much higher.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects.

Angela: Hello.

Elena: And we're joined by a special guest, the founder and executive chairman of Marketing Architects, and more recently, the founder of Misfits and Machines, Chuck Hengel.

Chuck: Hello. Happy to be here.

Angela: Happy to have ya. It's gonna be good.

Chuck: Must be a slow news day with all the famous people you've had on here recently.

Angela: We have had quite a few of those, but no shade to you though.

Chuck: All right. Well, I'll have to stand on the shoulders of some of the giants and look forward to this.

Elena: No, this wasn't a filler episode. We're very excited to have you.

Chuck: Well, I feel better about that.

Elena: You can feel good about that.

All right. We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. Today, Chuck's joining us to talk about marketing like a challenger brand.

Not every marketer who listens to this show manages a brand that's a category leader, and great marketers know how to do more with less. So any brand that can think and act like a challenger is going to be more successful. Today, we'll discuss why that is, Chuck's experience developing, marketing, and selling brands that were challengers in their categories, and how you can apply challenger principles to grow any brand. But let's start as we always do with a piece of research or an article.

I chose one by Peter Field, and it's titled Challenger Thinking is How Brands Drive Growth. This is part of Eat Big Fish's 20 Years of Challenger Brands series. In the article, he describes how 20 years ago, challenger brands were seen as companies with unique founders or lucky circumstances. But Field's research found that challenger thinking isn't a niche strategy, it's how brands grow.

Today, even global companies embrace the power of building emotional connections rather than just relying on functional benefits. But thanks to the rise of digital advertising and efficiency-driven metrics, many brands now focus on quick wins rather than long-term growth.

Those wins might look great today, but they kill momentum over time. Challenger brands like Aldi succeed because they play the long game. They don't panic over one bad quarter, and they don't sacrifice brand building for immediate results. Field argues that CEOs need to think more like marketers, building bold moves that might not pay off immediately but build real long-term value.

That final takeaway I had to include because I am a marketer talking to two CEOs today, but a good place to start here might be by defining what we mean when we say a brand is a challenger. Because there can be, I think, different definitions depending on who you are. So, Ange, what comes to mind for you when you think of a challenger brand?

Angela: Yeah, I love the question. I would imagine if you asked ten people that question, you'd get ten different answers. It's sort of like, "What's your definition of brand?" So, probably a good place to start.

I have thought of a challenger brand as typically bold, really fast-moving. They shake up an industry. They're really savvy in their use of data and digital tools. They've got smart strategies that really stand out. They focus on finding niche markets and personalizing experiences. They stay really agile. They grow quickly without heavy investments in production or logistics.

But I will say too, that I don't disagree with your point or Peter's point in the article—isn't being a challenger sort of operating with a belief system that just defies conventional thinking?

For example, you've got mountains of data to tell you to spend more on digital. And yet, your belief is that reaching new customers through top-of-funnel marketing is going to drive growth in your business. That's challenger thinking, and you operate by that belief in everything you do.

Elena: I think he'd agree with that, that it's not so much the size of the brand. It's the type of thinking—a philosophy that can help any brand big or small. And it turns out it is the best path forward, no matter the size of your brand. So let's talk more about that, but I want to get to our guest. Thanks again for joining us.

One of the defining traits of a challenger brand is the ability to out-market the competition. And I know that, Chuck, you see marketing as not just a "make it pretty" department, which I know is a phrase that we like, or just a comms function or a logo and some colors. You believe that marketing can and should deliver true business results. So where did that belief originally come from?

Chuck: I did start as a marketing statistician, so I do look at marketing through analytics, but more important than that, my first job—they actually told me on day one, "You're not going to make a marketing decision for five years."

And I'm like, "What? Five years? What do I do?"

And they said, "You need to connect the marketing P&L to every function in our company and understand the leverage that function has to marketing."

I'm like, "Okay." First exercise right after that was they gave me a list of ten products. They said, "Rank these products from bestseller to what you think we're actually doing in market."

And I had it completely wrong. The best product I had was actually the worst, and vice versa. And I quickly learned the value of merchandising. I then later worked on understanding why we have bad debt, why there are returns. I ended up calling hundreds of customers. And to this day, when I talk to marketers, very few actually talk to live customers.

And I learned where some of the data variables were going to need to go to improve our bad debt forecast based on things like small-area variability. Every part of the country was very different. People were very different from me socio-economically. So that hands-on work made a huge difference.

I learned the power of pricing an offer. I saw teams fighting over great offers that they would go to the finance team and go, "We really need to be able to do this to make our marketing work better."

All things that had nothing to do with comms had to do with the infrastructure of the business and the impact on marketing. So I actually left there after two years because I couldn't stand it. I'm like, "I want to make marketing decisions," but the message was clear—marketing is a function of everyone in a company.

Elena: Yeah, and you definitely took that and brought it into eventually the agency that you started, which is Marketing Architects. And you believe in the power of marketing to drive business effects so much that you decided that we would build and market our own products.

The most successful being the HurryCane—we talk about that a bunch on the show. That was the first true brand in walking canes. And then Stuffies, which was also mentioned a few times, which was a very popular children's toy. I want to talk about both of those in a moment, but Ange, I also know that there were a lot of brands and products before, in between, and after those that didn’t succeed.

So I thought it might be more fun to start with what you learned from some of those brands you created and invested in that failed to challenge or change their category.

Chuck: Well, I will say learning hands-on with our own brands was super valuable to the entire agency. You can come to the same conclusions we had through live testing, through educational tracks, marketing effectiveness, the IPA database, and Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.

There’s an unbelievable amount of scientific evidence on how a company can grow through brand and what marketing effectiveness is. What's nice is the task of learning we had was super valuable. For example, we built failure into all our testing. We knew we were going to fail a lot, but we wanted to be strategically failing.

So, for example, if a product wasn’t working, we always took learnings away. The deeper the sales process was on a website—in other words, the number of clicks—if there were too many clicks to get to an order page, we lost a lot of customers. So we quickly figured, "I better start selling on the homepage."

What we ultimately could prove is you have to love the process of marketing more than your product. It didn’t matter what brand we were working on, the process of marketing was very universal amongst all our brands. And it allowed us to try and test a lot of things, find winners, and quickly walk away from losers. But all these first principles, these frameworks, they applied to all of these brands.

So that learning, I think, is something we can apply today to our agency clients because these universal truths do translate. We had an unbelievably large amount of learning beyond that, but that would probably be the biggest learning that I took away.

Angela: I guess Elon would say, "If you’re not failing, you’re not innovating." Like him or hate him, he innovates pretty well. So you gotta do that to get there.

Let’s transition into some of the big wins, and maybe we can start with the HurryCane. The most successful challenger brands tend to have this sharp consumer insight at their core—something they recognize, potentially from talking to customers, that their competitors have overlooked.

What do you feel was that breakthrough insight behind the HurryCane?

Chuck: I love the process of hearing the story of a new customer and how they came to that insight. That’s like, the thing. You’re like, "Wow, how did they think about that?"

So we got to do it for ourselves. I had a friend who’s a local advertising executive, and she had lost both parents within a year. And she was so frustrated by the process of going through that with her parents. She said, "We have to change some things."

And I asked, "What do you mean?"

She said, "Will you come and talk to me about what you do and what I do? And maybe we can join forces." So we said, "Meet me at the Mall of America. We’re going to go on a walk together."

And we spent all day at the Mall of America watching seniors, observing how people age in a live setting. And she explained to me that the whole marketplace for seniors hadn’t changed in a thousand years. Products were gray, products were boring, products were uninspiring. And she found it incredibly hard to help her parents through this rapid aging process.

For example, her dad became incontinent and wouldn’t wear adult diapers because they were like children's diapers. So she, being an artist, drew Superman designs on them and said, "Dad, these are Superman pants." And then he wore them.

Her mom’s favorite color was yellow, but you couldn’t find a single product in yellow that she would have thought was beautiful and that she’d want to use.

She said, "Why did we take color out of senior products?"

And then she said, most importantly, "There are five stages of mobility loss."

I asked, "Well, what does that mean?"

She explained, "The first phase of loss is when you need assistance walking. The fifth phase is death. And there are three stages in between."

I asked, "Why does that matter?"

And she said that first phase of mobility loss is incredibly emotional. People really struggle with that.

She said, "Can you solve that?"

We looked at it and realized that was maybe really simple. That’s when you start to walk with some assistance—a walking cane.

And then we looked at it and said, "Wow, the walking cane is basically just a stick with a handle. It hasn’t changed in a thousand years."

And that was the insight. We said, "Let’s go build something amazing for the first phase of mobility loss."

Angela: I love it—it just gave that empowerment to help maintain an active, independent lifestyle. But to your point, the loss of what’s happening in their old life—this mix of psychological and emotional factors, their pride, their desire for independence, the fear of acknowledging that they’re aging and might need to use a cane—it can feel like a concession to frailty rather than a tool for mobility and confidence.

And I love—well, we all loved—being behind that and seeing what the HurryCane was doing for that audience.

Let’s get into a bit of the advertising strategy behind the HurryCane. In those early days, what was it like marketing the product? Obviously, a lot of excitement. But looking back, what strategic and channel decisions do you think made the biggest impact on the success of the product?

Chuck: I love your statement about the insight being important, and our team was super enthusiastic to solve this problem. And then we did our traditional research.

Is there search happening? What’s the social dialogue happening? Where are people conversing about walking canes?

And there was nothing.

It was complete silence. People were embarrassed to admit that they needed a cane.

So, we knew right away there was no way we could launch this product digitally. There was nothing happening digitally. We had to create all of that.

And I think we got really lucky there.

We had to go to brand building and broad growth marketing techniques—television. That’s the only place we could go to create demand because there was complete silence everywhere else. And that turned out to be an unbelievably smart decision because we quickly had 100 percent share of voice. Things just expanded and grew and grew people attributed all innovation in the walking canes. So that launch through television was a game changer for us.

Elena: So one story that I love about how we advertised the HurryCane that has to do with that TV launch is how the team discovered the audience was even broader than we initially thought, which is, I'm guessing, something that other challenger brands might have to face or adapt to. You know, did the audience change? Do you need to adapt to that?

How did you figure out that a whole other group of customers was also likely to buy the HurryCane? And then what did the team do differently because of that?

Chuck: This is the moment where I learned to hate the word "targeting." We had this amazing product, this incredible insight. When we shot the TV commercials, we had huge crowds around us in the restaurant. People wanted to get a hold of that product. They wanted to buy it. They wanted to use it. Anyone that saw it just got it.And we're like, okay, we're going to target seniors because that's where the market is. And we spent four months with getting zero results on television.

We're like, "What in the world? We show it to people, they love it. We can't get anything going."

And we were ready to almost give up until we had a major airing become available on a weekend during a football game. Specifically, it was a Joe Paterno game, where there was all the controversy around the Penn State game. We knew there’d be huge ratings, but advertisers were afraid to be in the game. So it was brought to me, and they thought I would say no.

And I’m like, "Let’s go for it."

We aired it, and it crashed our website.

The difference was, buying a cane is a conversation amongst people. Mom or Dad aren’t going to make the decision on their own. They’re going to have a conversation with their adult children.

And it blew up the success of the HurryCane.

And that’s where we learned brand fame comes from wide mental availability. The products that are the most famous—like Harley-Davidson—you may never ride it, but everyone knows a Harley. You may never drink Coke or Pepsi, but everyone knows them. I’ve never worn Air Jordans, but everyone knows them.

That is so important. Your non-target awareness, once it’s high, becomes fame.

And this cane became incredibly famous because of that insight.

But truth be told, we started with a very traditional media plan—and we no longer do that. The broader the audience, the more success we see.

Elena: Now, I’d say too, for listeners, once you start looking for HurryCanes, you’ll see them everywhere. They were the first cane to stand on their own.

And there was recently a photo that we were passing around the agency of Warren Buffett using the HurryCane at an investor conference. So how’s that for brand fame—when Warren Buffett’s using it?

But that story about broad reach reminds me of the second product I wanted to talk about. Did Stuffies follow the HurryCane?

Chuck: It did.

Elena: So we learned from the HurryCane, and Stuffies also ended up having a broader audience than we might have initially thought. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Stuffies is, too?

Chuck: Yeah, everyone in the agency knows this is where I really got to know you, Angela.

We had targeted kids, like we should, and we knew not to just target. So we thought, "Well, how do we broaden this?"

And Angela brought the idea to us that the biggest audiences out there are not kids. How do we tap into that?

We learned from our own research that the most enthusiastic buyers were grandmas.

From talking to customers, we found that moms are reluctant buyers. They really don’t want to buy another stuffed animal.

Angela: "We don’t need any more toys in the house!"

Your kids are still at an age where you probably say "no" more than you say "yes."

Chuck: Right, exactly.

So that was a very easy insight to see. We started to test how to broaden this to grandmas, and we actually used radio to build messaging.

We found something that really resonated—it was "Dear Grandma, thanks so much for my Stuffy."

But grandma needed to know that their grandchild would love the product as well.

So we had the children's advertising, but we also had messaging specifically for grandmothers. And then Mom was in between.

So we reached everybody, and it just exploded.

We were the featured product in Target on their main end cap in their toy section during peak season. People really wanted Stuffies because we reached a broad audience—not just kids, but parents and grandparents—with different messages, but all of them understood the potential for kids to love this product and for grandma to love giving it.

On a practical level, that’s where most of the inventory is—in mass media.

So it all just worked incredibly well by thinking very broad.

Angela: And it allowed Stuffies to stand out, too. Because guess what? You weren’t seeing a lot of toy products on Hallmark or Fox News. So talk about share of voice and what you can attain there in the eyes of the grandma, compared to being on DXD, where you see hundreds of toys on a daily basis.

Elena: I’d say one thing that was a little different when we advertised Stuffies versus the HurryCane was that we had a jingle.

"How much stuff can you stuff in a Stuffy till your Stuffy's stuffed enough stuff?"

By the way, I was researching Stuffies the other day just to see old commercials, and people still complain on the internet about how annoying that was.

So it really was quite an earworm—it really stuck in people’s minds.

Did anything else change about the way that you approached advertising Stuffies, based on what you learned from the HurryCane?

Chuck: We were aware we needed broader physical availability earlier.

For the HurryCane, we started as a DTC launch. And when we added retail, it was an "and," not an "or." We just expanded our market.

So we focused on that heavily.

With Stuffies, we launched with broad availability earlier in the process. We went to the New York Toy Show, and we won display of the year.

We said, "We’re going to go big, we’re going to get physical availability," and the retailers loved it because we already had television marketing going.

But we really focused on that.

So yeah, there were definitely learnings that became principles that are foundational to brand building: mental availability, physical availability.

We really built upon those distinctive assets.

The Stuffies were incredibly distinctive. They came with a storybook. They had a surprise inside. They had the seven secret pockets. There was a friendship bracelet available. You could put a heart in the Stuffy.

We had that incredible jingle.

We spent an unbelievable amount of time on the zipper mouth so that it was super cute.

And we wanted every element of that to be distinct, just like the HurryCane was.

The insight on the HurryCane was that we took it to the creative team before we took it to the product team.

We asked, "How do we sell this cane?"

The creative team came over, held the cane in their hand on my desk, slammed it down, and said, "Can you make it do this?"

I asked, "What?"

And they let go of the cane, and it fell over.

They said, "Can you make that cane stand? Because then it’s the cane that stands alone."

And I thought, "Ah."

That was the core insight that really drove the marketing message: "The HurryCane—the cane that stands alone."

That came from marketing, not from product.

Now, the product cost a million dollars to build the functionality into the base to make it stand. Because it needed a spring system. It had to snap back into place.

But we were willing to do that because we knew the marketing insight would really work.

So let's make the product align.

And that is that powerful connection between all the departments and the marketing team. When you can truly collaborate, you'll come up with those insights that, when you bring them into market, will drive your ROI much higher.

Angela: One of my most favorite memories of being at Marketing Architects dealt with one of the challenges in the difference between the HurryCane and the Stuffies with seasonality. It's a toy product. Obviously, there are some big weeks at the end of the year that really matter a lot with the holidays.

And I will never forget—no one who was at Marketing Architects at this time will ever forget—Chuck pulling the entire company together. We had no idea what was going on. But it was the day of the holiday party. We were supposed to have our holiday party. And we were all excited about it, and Chuck had a message. Which was what, Chuck?

Chuck: We were 35,000 orders behind in the warehouse. It was going so well. And if those don’t arrive in time for Christmas, how many unhappy kids are there going to be?

So we were—the Grinch stole Christmas—and we were just going crazy. And the sad thing was, we worked all night. I think we only got like 2,000 items shipped.

It was like—we were busing people out of the city, out to this warehouse to ship. Our IT team was helping improve the efficiency of the warehouse.

But to this day, we all loved being a part of solving that crisis.

Angela: It was so great—such a great moment, trading the dresses for hard hats, just to pack as many Stuffies into boxes as we possibly could.

So these two products couldn't be more different, but it feels like the same sort of challenger principles played a key role in both—things like the power of emotion, having that long-term focus, strong advertising, and category leadership.

So, Chuck, in your view, what are the biggest marketing principles that made HurryCane and Stuffies successful? And what lessons do you think any brand can take from them?

Chuck: That’s a great challenge—to summarize that much learning into one statement.

We actually ran across a term that we liked, and we called it "smashable branding."

We worked so hard to make everything distinct and unique in everything we did. We took the time to do that. And when you orchestrated all of it, it worked incredibly well.

The importance of working across our team in every single functional area was amazingly important. The customer service team was empowered—if there was an issue with getting the wrong Stuffy, they were empowered to send another one out instantly for free.

We protected the customer experience. And what did we do if they got the wrong Stuffy? We’d say, "Donate that to a local charity."

The amount of emotional stories we had! People were like, "What?"

People walking in and donating a Stuffy to a kid in a hospital bed because they got the wrong one?

That was magical.

So all of that, we called "smashable branding."

That comes from the idea that if you smash a Coke bottle and give someone a piece, they’re going to recognize that it’s a Coke bottle.

So, yeah, there are a lot of famous brands out there. But we said, "How do we build brand fame right out of the gates and make sure every decision is orchestrated?"

We were going to launch the cane. We had a million dollars in tooling costs in the cane, and we said, "It’s not good enough."

And we walked away from that because it wasn’t going to be distinct. It wasn’t going to be special.

And we found a new manufacturing partner, and boy, did they nail it. And that worked because we told the manufacturing partner, "Be a partner for us to make this cane amazing."

Instead of working off of specs, they came back a day later. I couldn’t believe what they came back with. It was incredible.

We eventually had to sell that product to a large competitor because we’re not the right home for durable medical equipment.

And they said it was the best manufacturing agreement they’d ever seen.

They’re a billion-dollar company manufacturing thousands of products. And they said, "It’s the best manufacturing agreement because these people became partners of yours."

They gave us better pricing. They gave us better turnaround. They really felt included.

And they were a part of our success.

So that smashable part and having everyone collaborate and work across the entire ecosystem is what I think made these stories stick with people.

Everyone tells these great stories because they really contributed to them. There wasn’t anyone that wasn’t super important to marketing. Every single business function was connected.

Now, was it really easy then to get our CFO to approve these media budgets?

Angela: Oh, absolutely. We had to eat our own dog food.

Chuck: Twenty million in inventory for an agency sitting in a warehouse that all had to be sold in six weeks. Our CFO was in that warehouse running that warehouse for four weeks while we got behind.

So it was really easy to work with him on budgeting because he knew exactly what the success factor was.

He was like, "Yep, I will support this because I know what my role is."

But that’s what I love about working with these challenger brands. They all work like that. They start small, and they all have to collaborate to build something really cool.

I love our large clients as well. But our best large clients? They have incredibly collaborative cultures.

You just have to be. Everyone knows that if you become too functional, things will stop working.

But the people that collaborate and look at marketing as a process that we all contribute to—that’s where the success comes from.

So, that’s why I think people still tell these stories. And they really stick with us.

And then we can really apply these lessons to new marketing challenges.

Elena: One of the statements that I read about when I was preparing for this was what makes a challenger brand. And one of the statements was, "They out-market the competition."

Not necessarily that they’re the biggest or the smallest or the newest.

And I think that those two products are such a great example of out-marketing others.

And like you said, that started from the very beginning of creating them—creating them with marketing in mind. All those marketing principles, they all connect to business principles too, if you follow them.

So that’s great.

One thing I wanted to end with for fun. I asked you earlier about product failures. I was hoping you’d give some examples, but you dodged that question.

And I’m wondering if that’s because some of these products we don’t want to talk about. But every entrepreneur has at least one terrible idea.

And I know that you’ve invested in many.

All right. We’ve tested out a lot of different product ideas. So I’d like to know—what’s a business-related bad idea that you seriously considered before realizing that might have been a bad idea?

Chuck: Out of the thousand bad ideas? I think I have a few.

One that comes to mind is the pants that had such rigid stitching in them that when you walked, it created the need to expend more calories. So they were like weight loss pants.

Angela: Mwah!

Elena: No way.

Chuck: They were so hard to walk in. And boy, when you put those things on and tried to move, you were like, "I can’t even move in these things."

Yeah, is that a good idea? I don’t know.

But most of my experiences are actually saying no to something that would later turn out to be amazing. And that’s really hard.

For example, I remember when an entrepreneur came to me and said, "I’ve got this really new up-and-coming social influencer behind this cosmetics line. Do you want to market that with us?"

And I said, "Well, tell me who it is and what you have."

And it was this new influencer—who was more infamous at this time than famous—Kim Kardashian.

And I was like, "No, no, no, we’re not going to work with Kim Kardashian. She’s too hot to handle."

Well, so I said no.

And I go home that night and ask my wife, "Do you think I made the right decision walking away from working with Kim Kardashian on a cosmetics line?"

She was like, "What? Who wouldn’t want to look like Kim Kardashian?"

And I thought, "Oops."

So I’ve really tried to love everything that comes to us—it’s a bad habit. And thankfully, there are people like Mark Randolph from Netflix who say, "Every bad idea at Netflix was a bad idea until the team made it a good idea."

And so we really use that as an agency—it's not "yes, but," it’s "yes, and."

And I think that’s the spirit of marketing—that we can do a lot to take a product that maybe isn’t going to work and find consumer demand for it.

Marketing is an art, and we are true artists in this space. And there's room for that artistry.

And that’s what I think I’m most excited about—just continuing to be excited about all the stuff that’s out there and figuring out how to market it well.

Elena: Ange, did you have a bad idea you wanted to share?

Angela: Oh, so many.

Elena: I don’t know if you could top the weight loss pants, but...

Angela: I definitely cannot top the weight loss pants or, you know, thousands of probably great ideas that Chuck thought weren’t.

I grew up on the media side, so I thought long and hard about developing our own TV network.

We’d have total ownership of all the content, all the ad space. Like, who could be better at driving viewership than an agency that’s grown up in performance marketing?

Like, we’re experts in gaining attention for commercials—what could we do with actual content?

Terrible idea.

Chuck: I kind of like that idea.

Angela: Yeah, you shouldn’t have said that.

Elena: He’s gonna like it now.

Angela: Whoops, goes the rest of my morning.

Chuck: Yeah.

Elena: Yeah, so mine—I was thinking about this. And my team, we send direct mail campaigns to prospects, usually annually or twice a year. And it’s become a bit of a tradition.

Every year we start brainstorming, "What could we send?"

And we had one idea we really liked for a while.

Our best customers refer to us as kind of a secret weapon. They have us under NDA. They don’t want us to talk about them because they really see us as so important to their business that they don’t want others to know about us.

And so we were like, "Let’s send a secret weapon in the mail."

And we got pretty far thinking about what type of weapon we could send...

Angela: Oh, no.

Elena: ...before realizing we actually can’t do that.

Because no matter how you try to frame that or build it, that is objectively terrifying—to open a direct mail package and even see a fake weapon.

That could have been the end of my Marketing Architects career, actually.

So thank goodness we didn’t do that.

Chuck: Did you catch yourself, or did someone else stop you?

Elena: It definitely wasn’t me. Because when I get excited about something, I’m like, "Let’s do it! Let’s go!"

But sometimes you walk a fine line, though. "Isn’t it too crazy?"

I don’t know. I think that—yes, that was a bad idea.

Angela: We all know—it’s not so easy to speak up.

Oh, there is a very thin line between having unwavering belief and just being absolutely bat-crazy.

Chuck: There’s a reason "strong beliefs, loosely held" is a thing.

Angela: Yeah.

Chuck: All right. Well, we’re going to keep our eye on you a little more moving forward, Elena.

Elena: Yeah. I do have to run all the direct mail stuff by Ange before it officially ships, so someone probably would have caught it.

Angela: Between you and me, though, I don’t know that we’re going to catch a really bad idea because we’re both a little crazy.

Elena: We’ve got that kamikaze in us. We’re like, "Let’s do it."

Chuck: I’m not on the audit and risk management committee for a reason.

Elena: Yeah.

Angela: More of a "test in market" person.

Chuck: Uh-huh.

Angela: "Let’s let the market tell us whether or not that’s a bad idea."

Chuck: Our internal mantra of "do, learn, fix" doesn’t always work well.

Angela: Yeah.

Chuck: Sometimes, it’s "research well, and then do." That’s a better plan.

Angela: Just more boring that way.

Elena: Yeah. Shout-out to our legal team that we now have.

Chuck: Important.

Elena: All right. Awesome place to end. Thanks for joining us.

Angela: Thanks for joining us, Chuck.

Chuck: Thank you, Elena. Thanks, Angela.