What Breakthrough Brands Do Differently with Skullcandy CEO Brian Garofalow

Speaker A: Welcome to Content Disrupted. Bold takes on brand marketing. I'm, um, your host, Dan Baptiste, and together we'll explore what it takes to excel in brand marketing at one of the most exciting and disruptive times in industry history. Welcome to Content Disrupted. As marketers, our goal is fairly simple, to influence people and drive revenue. However, actually executing on that in today's world is complicated. Everything is moving incredibly fast. What made us special in the past is increasingly becoming commoditized. Oh. Uh, and reaching people is hard. So clear differentiation at a brand and business level for both B2B and B2C organizations is more critical than ever. But it's more than just differentiation. How do we create relevance or passion with our target audiences in what's becoming a sea of sameness? To answer that, we have one of the most inspiring business leaders and human beings that I know, Brian Garofalo. BG is a skater, very important. Not ice skater turned marketer and now CEO of skullcandy, one of the companies who created the Headphone category as we know it today. Everything BG touches turns to gold. I've been looking at this man for the past five to ten years and wondering, how does he do it? So. So today we get to find out. Bg, welcome to the show, man.

Speaker B: Hey, Dan, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: One of the things that I've just been really, really impressed by you is how you figured out how to bring brand, culture, lifestyle, and passion together. And I think if you go back to your roots and kind of where you got started, it's important for people to see, because I think that work has made its way through your entire body of work for your entire career. So maybe you could start by talking about Ruka and DC Shoes and kind of how you found yourself in those companies and like, how you went about starting to your philosophy around. Around those elements.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, sounds good. So I think, like, a whole lot of people with similar stories, there's a big dose of right place, right time. So I grew up in Southern California just around the same time that the whole culture of skateboarding was being adopted into mass consumer culture. So not a lot of people were skateboarding. And it was not easy being a skateboarder as a young kid because it was very much a counterculture thing. But you started seeing the idea of skateboarding show in Hollywood and in mass media company advertising, things like that. So started to be a little more accepted. And then really the activity started becoming a real, uh, viable alternative. It was something a lot of kids just wanted to do. And with that comes commerce. So a lot more companies are popping up, a lot more people are turning into professional athletes, a lot more events are happening. So just so happened to find my passion for this. I was terrible at it. But just so happened to find my passion for it and had the opportunity with a uh, growing industry that was also centrally located for the world in Southern California at the time that I was uh, getting out of school. So from there, you know, tailwind of the industry. So I want to say from when I started my career in mid-90s to about the mid-2010s, the global board sports industry went from a fun little idea and hobbies to a uh, $12 billion industry. So with all of that growth comes lots and lots of opportunity.

Speaker A: And what did you learn in experiencing that? I think specifically with a couple of those brands, at least with Ruka, the sort of founder led passion, like really talented creative leaders and then moving that into commerce, into high growth areas. What did you experience as part of that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you look at a balance or a pendulum swing with on one side is creativity and passion and the other side is real pure operational excellence as a consumer goods business. And you've got to have a nice balance of those things. And early on wild west of the board sports industry, just absolute passion reign supreme with really talented people at companies. You mentioned that I had great fortune to work alongside some of those founders like at dc, uh, Shoes and Ruka, where you just latch on to somebody's incredible creativity and leadership with giant tailwind of an industry and a lot of good things are going to happen. But then you might sail a bit into troubled waters and you need a whole lot more of the operational excellence. And then sometimes those are opposing forces. But when you can figure out how to have a great partnership with operating a very efficient business and plugging in the innovation, intuition, creativity of founder led businesses in consumer goods, then amazing things happen and you end up with the Burtons of the world and the Patagonias of the world and the north faces and vans.

Speaker A: And as you started to grow exponentially and you had to introduce operational excellence, which to your point, in a counterculture industry you're like, damn, like we got to do things the right way here. How did you not lose your way from like brand and creativity standpoint as the company got bigger? Because I would assume like it's really easy to harness that when you're small in the community small. But then you go mass market and you quote, unquote, sell out, like how did you not or did you lose yourself at moments, uh, is in going through that process?

Speaker B: I think that's, it's one of those things where I had the great benefit of caring. So from a really early age, skateboarding was just my thing. And it turned into, went from something that was fun to something that I, I really cared about doing and then made a lot of friends with it, learned a lot about music with it, learned a lot about art with it. And these are all things that stick with me today. And also was one of probably a smaller cohort of people that found their path there, but also was classically educated in business school. And so I think that was a benefit for me of being a brand builder and being on the marketing side where usually it's in the early days of the board's word century, there's a little bit of chaos and that's where all the fun was. But also understood like, okay, we have to turn an idea into money or people are going to lose their jobs. So how can we make this happen and stay a little bit on the rails with operating business while also absolutely can never sacrifice extinguishing that flame of passion? That is why we're all here in the first place. So I guess long story short is the balance and saw that from an early age and always knew or I guess had the talent and the pension to be a good operator, but also just loved what I did so much that it was like, let's break a couple rules.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And as you were moving through those motions and kind of hyperscaling those businesses, were there any particular tactics or approaches that worked really well to scale a culture led brand and create relevance for people?

Speaker B: This is really interesting that I talk about quite a bit and it's the soft skills, the eq, the psychology, the sociology. So all of those things for me are about team building, being a great salesperson, which you know a whole lot about. It's not all about selling and getting something from somebody, but it's about how can we go both have a phenomenal outcome and ideally a uh, long term partnership together. So I think this comes down to an example of I see a lot of phenomenally creative people have a lot of excitement around the next idea. And sometimes you've got to let ideas grow. One of those quotes that I love, my job is to plant the seed that will turn into the tree that somebody will get to enjoy the shade of long after I'm gone. So we can't move on to the next idea until we've got the current one fully Mature. So going back to kind of all the soft skills is a lot of times that means having that hard discussion with a creative person of we're staying in this lane and not moving into the next lane until we've got this project executed to the best of our abilities. And if we abandon ship here and move on to the next project, we're not going to get all the return on the investment we've put in and it's going to make us at a loss and we're not going to have the ability to go invest in the next project.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's super important, especially in this climate where it feels like you could change that idea every two weeks and in some ways under pressure too. Right. But this idea of building a philosophy that you commit to and grow over time, that's like yours, right? Like this is your ip, this is who you are, and it creates a moat and also something that attracts people to you. That absent of putting in that work with a level of commitment, you look scattered all over the place. Your business operates like that creative brain that you just described, where it's like, shiny object, shiny object, shiny object. And you're like, whoa, like, how are we influencing the market in the right way? So that's interesting.

Speaker B: Well, look, I think this really all comes down to resource allocation. So I always like to talk about that in three buckets. Time, money and people. And to your point, what can we do today versus 20 years ago? We could do a whole lot more with the same amount of resource because of the tools that are at our fingertips and the depending on the category you're in. For me, it's consumer goods and usually lifestyle brands. We have a much, much higher level of discernment from the consumer who's buying our stuff. They want everything all at once. They want it for the best price, want to be able to buy it wherever, whenever they want from whatever device and delivered immediately. So does that mean we take an idea and develop it over two years and bring it to market absolutely perfectly and focus on one idea today? Absolutely not. So we're likely juggling over a dozen new product introductions with different feature benefit sets at different price points for different distribution channels, all all at the same time. And we might have four products launch at the same month. So how can we do that with the same amount of people on the brand side? A lot of effort.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's probably a good pivot here as you're thinking about what's different today. I do want to hit what was an, uh, interesting in between step with Igloo, which I thought was very cool. Talk about a category that is not totally passion led and didn't have a whole bunch of tailwinds. Obviously YETI came into that category and created some excitement around it. But I think what you did there I loved, which was, how do we take something that feels really commoditized? Like you go into any grocery store retailer and there's 20 of them on a shelf, they're the same color. There's a high utility to it. But how do I introduce culture and passion in starting to lean into some of like the iconic products there and do like really cool things? So maybe you can just quickly describe how you approached the job there at Igloo.

Speaker B: Yeah, look, that was definitely first time in the career where I took the big leap outside of the board sports industry. Wanted to learn more about products, consumers, distribution channels that I wasn't comfortable with. So being comfortable in the uncomfortable also is the. It was the first experience on a leadership team in a private equity owned business. So it was a very interesting experience for me. So really amount of time to go make something happen. I don't want to seem like I'm over my skis here, but I actually looked at it as a pretty easy challenge where it was, oh my gosh, these are products that all the people in really, really cool places and cultures are already using. Like, everybody brings an Igloo cooler to the beach when they're surfing, to the skate park, when they're skating, to the tailgate, opera ski. Like all these types of things, we just got to go tell those stories. So having the benefit of a long career with a big network ahead of that, there's a lot of people that were willing to sign up because it was going to be fun. And we knew that. And then many people don't know this, but it was a pretty significant manufacturing business with about 2 million square feet of manufacturing and operations facilities in Katy, Texas, right outside Houston. And man, just such an incredible operations team there. Gave us silly marketers in California the keys to the kingdom. Go make colors, go use fun materials, go find licensed partners and we'll help you tell your stories. And we could bring an idea to a physical object so fast there with the help of the team. So we got to go tell all these very fun stories and just be the alternative to, you know, you had the $500 cooler brand that wanted you to climb to the top of Mount Everest and quarter a deer and bring it back with the Sherpa to your luxury Mansion. And we were like, go to the backyard and have a party. And is so relatable to so many people. And the Igloo brand, also huge benefit is 92% unaided awareness in the US two out of three households in America have an Igloo product in the house. So such a high level of awareness, but it just didn't mean anything. It was just a utilitarian product. And to have so much awareness and then turn the lights on and make people look at their cooler and be like, oh, that's cool again. And here's a reason to go buy a different color or one with my favorite sports team on it. Things like that were, were just so much fun.

Speaker A: Yeah. And as you started making those changes, how did you make what was the kind of cool or interesting factor, like due to just the variety in the colors in some of the licensing? Because I started seeing all the products you were building, including, I think you turned one into like an 80s style boombox. And I'm like, damn, he did it again. He's like, he took this thing and made it cool again. So, like, if you were to try to find what are the elements to take something like that, commoditized, utilitarian and make it cool, is there a recipe or an approach that you take to find what's true in this company? Map it to like some concoction of things that are cool, interesting or funny and tie to some consumer insight. How do you think about that?

Speaker B: I think it's a pretty complex answer. And I would say that there's fun stuff and boring stuff. Fun stuff is, I think this is a pretty basic one of what are consumers showing you that matters. And usually that's always going to boil down to sport, fashion, music. So those are categories, but what's in them is always going to be different year to year, decade to decade, day to day. So where we partner with the right fashion, being colors or prints or patterns, the right sport, being a celebrity, a team, a league, the right music, doing something with Post Malone at, uh, Posty Fest, who's a musician who loves drinking beer and he's very relatable, like, boom, there's a cooler. Makes sense. And we could do a small amount and tell fun stories. Then you look at who's creating culture and who's consuming culture. You always have to partner with the creators because what's going to come after the creator has a hit, a whole lot of the consumers of that culture. So partnering with the right people that are going to go push culture forward and Innovate and really have intuition to not look at data and say, ooh, red is going to be a hot color next year. But say I like red, so I'm going to make it for me and I'm sure a lot of people are probably going to like that. Okay, so there's the fun stuff, looking at uh, the people and the partners and then what's happening in culture and building a formula that's going to fit with your values and who you are as a brand. Then spit out the other side is going to be the boring stuff like distribution channels. So what does a category look like and how does a business operate? So back to the igloo example. Coolers are big and physically light and expensive to ship and they take a lot of room on the shelf at a physical retail store. So you don't get a lot of optionality when you go look at a cooler aisle. There might be three or four colors, three or four sizes and shapes, that's it. But if you want to give a 1000 of the coolest people the new most fun color collection, the uh, retro inspired that has speakers in it and retro fashion is coming back in vogue from the 90s. You're not going to go find space on the shelves of mass market retailer for that. You have to look at a distribution channel which becomes direct to consumer and then tell the right marketing messages, connect with them at the time of the place that they want and get those products to those people and delivery system that they want. So long story short, before I got there, direct to consumer business was relatively non existent. And if we want to go innovate with product and storytelling and get it to the right people who are going to influence an audience around them, we had to go create a whole new distribution channel and hey, it worked.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think looking at what worked on top of that from a top line is really just like distilling who you are as a brand. And I think that's when as much marketers, if we get too, I guess, product oriented and you get distracted and you start pumping things out and you're like looking at like how do we convert better and what are your channels that are performing and you start to lose yourself and what made you special in the first place and you just start pushing product. So I think what's interesting here, everything from your color strategy, your creator strategy, your distribution strategy, who the culture voices that you're partnering with are all tied together in this central web that tells who am I and why do I matter? And whom do I matter to? And I imagine there's some segmentation, too, that you had to pick. Right? Like, you're not. In that case, you're not going after the White Lotus traveler here. You're kind of coming in and saying, like, we're like the everyday man or woman cooler, and we're here to have fun. And one of the best pieces of video I've ever seen was one that you created at the Retail Expo. And when you're going head to head with yet Yeti, which was so funny, and you had yetis coming in with the Playmate coolers on their shoulder having a party, like, in the backyard, and they open it up and they're all, like, cheering. And I think you close it with 9 out of 10 yetis prefer igloo. Something which was, like, amazing. I loved every second of that.

Speaker B: Yeah, that was the big payoff. 9 out of 10 yetis prefer igloo coolers. And you show the big house party with all the yetis having fun, and then it turns to the neighbor and there's one grumpy yeti that looks over the fence and is like, oh, turn it down, you damn kids. So it's like, yeah, nine out of ten yetis proof. But look, this is going all the way back to the start of our conversation. This is where I had a phenomenal benefit of just working with absolutely incredibly talented creative people. So there. A team over there came up with the idea, had the hilarious session for a couple hours of riffing on what could we do, how could we do it? Uh, how do we bring this to life? Is the other person we might be poking a little fun at going to be really angry. Can we say this at all? All those things. And then again, my job is the. There was green light and then resource allocation and how do we go make this happen when and how we want it to. And one of those things that works so well, here you are today, still talking about it, getting a kick out of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it also goes back to, if we're looking honestly at your career, like, it gets back to the counterculture aspects of, like, how do you go to market and, you know, know who you are and, like, poke your eye at, like, the man or whatever it is. It's like, have some fun. And igloo wasn't doing that before you walked in the door. Right. So I think you work with creative people. But there's also a philosophy here that's really interesting and it matters, right? Because you know why you Matter and to whom you matter to. So let's hop to Skullcandy, right? You're the CEO, first time CEO. Exciting. You're a, uh, uh, marketer turned CEO. So now you're like, we're all rooting for you here. What does the environment look like? What does the business look like? And when you think about a brand like Igloo, who it was almost a category creator, maybe like, I don't want to say lost its way, but became kind of utilitarian, I would look at Skullcandy like it created the category highly passionate brand. When you got there, was it still in that passion, growth, like squarely in the lane, or had it also, like lost its way a little bit from a relevant standpoint?

Speaker B: So the early 2000s, huge tailwind in the board sports industry. And a lot of incredibly talented and creative entrepreneurs. Rick Alden, our founder, one of them, who came up with the idea for Skull Candy and essentially became the first consumer or first consumer electronics business inside specialty board sports retail. And it was like, as skateboarders and surfers and snowboarders, that brand was ours. And music is such an important part of what we do in our daily lives that now we have a brand that says, I'm a board sports person, I'm a skateboarder, surfer, snowboarder, like, we're supporting that. And huge tailwind in the industry. So the brand grew incredibly quickly and put out really great product. The brand went public pretty early, switched CEOs, kind of went a little left of center to be more a technology company or more a broader sporting goods company. Grew a ton, um, had a lot of success, but is now back to being a privately held company again. Wanted to really go return to that consumer thesis and figure out how to build a business around more young and active consumer. So I get back in the door and I think, to answer your question, the culture and the people absolutely, very much, just so incredibly passionate about the culture of board sports, the culture of our consumers, the young and active consumer who's phenomenally excited about their music and the soundtrack of their lives. But between 2000 and 2002 and 2025, the iPhone was invented and an accessory that came along with it, the Chu wanna wireless headsets for earbuds. And all of a sudden you've got a category that didn't exist, turned into a, uh, $20 billion global category of wireless headphones. True, wireless earbuds. And the biggest companies in the world became competitors of Skullcandy. So that is a tough environment. So now how do we go then double down on our brand as our differentiator, but also vastly improve our product offering to find the right product market fit, reestablish, where are the places that we need to be distributing this product? How do we get to them? M what is the right pricing strategy? All while going and rebuilding this. This brand that once was so phenomenally strong with that board sports consumer. That is a very different size of total addressable market for the board sports world today. So lots of little adjustments that cumulatively turn into a very different company today than 20 years ago. But the one thing that's always remained the same, the passion of the people that work here.

Speaker A: Yeah. And now that you have this challenge, obviously you have like a little David versus Goliath of the category. What are some of the approaches that you've taken as CEO to like combat that? I assume, like segmentation and picking your audience is probably one of them. But like, what, how do you do that and how do you, like, get to the roots of why you were a passion based brand in the first place?

Speaker B: So it's pretty easy. Like our story going back to Rick, our founder. This company was born on a chairlift. It's the coolest story. So Rick was on the production event, production company. He was producing an event three miles from our door at the Canyons Ski and Snowboard Resort in Park City. He was riding a chairlift when he had an MP3 player and a mobile phone in his pocket with wired earbuds connected to the MP3 player. And he got a phone call and had an aha moment of oh, I wish I could just switch to the phone. And so the very first Skullcandy product was wired earbuds with a toggle switch and a split jack that could go into two devices. Literally made for a snowboarder riding a chairlift. Like, the story is all there and so phenomenally authentic. And we are the only ones that have that. So anytime there is a tough decision about brand, it's so easy to have that laser focused moment in time of why are we here in the first place? So today are there as many snowboarders and skateboarders and surfers? Yes. But their entire offering of, of what products they can go buy is phenomenally different than it was when Skullcandy came out. So how do we be the absolute best version of Skull Candy and deliver the best product that has the right features, the right benefits, the coolest style, the sense of community that our brand, and only our brand can bring with it at the right price, at the right distribution channel for as many people as possible that we go out and target, which are a little bit younger and active consumers. And the core of that is that board sports community. And then we also target the content creator which is somebody who may be publishing a podcast. And then usually those people in the content creation world again are going to be have a lot in common with the a little bit younger and young at hard and active people. And then we have a third consumer group around gaming. So we have a whole division of gaming products. And at the core of that is your very committed Fortnite player. And then at the very outskirts of that still tends to be a little younger at heart, more active, but could uh, be somebody who is playing mobile games on their mobile device.

Speaker A: How is this showing up in practice as you're thinking about the world going forward? I mean if we're talking about building a culture forward brand, you're thinking about style, you're even like potentially different types of products in different retail environments, whether it's DTC or specialty shops versus Best Buy. Like when you try to actually put this into practice, what does that look like?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a lot of what I call the front of the house product sales and marketing. So product, we've got long, long lead time, product development calendar. We're going to have input from different data sources, we're going to have input from our elt, we're going to have input from people all throughout the business and then a healthy dose of intuition of what does our consumer or what will our consumer need at some point in the future. That goes down to the micro detail of what chipset are we going to use to power the product, this one or that one with different abilities and price points. If we're going to go try and make a very affordable product, or we're going to go try and make the most premium product, then you're going to go over to sales and that's where you get to distribution channels. So oftentimes there are opportunities that are significant to build an exclusive product for an exclusive channel. Sometimes we want to make something available to the broadest global market possible and maybe that means it's skullcandy.com or maybe we want to make a very ubiquitous product that the most channels can benefit from. So we want to make lots and lots of color and then we're going to get over to marketing which is going to be what's the story we want to tell that Is this going to be all about a user benefit? Is this going to Be all about a particular fashion or style or athlete or use case. But all three of those things are really going to be aligned from the onset. When we have an idea on paper before we go allocate any resource to

Speaker A: go start work and how do you choose? So when you think of you mentioned there's a whole universe, the category is massive. In this case, board sports seem logical in the category you mentioned has some pillars like music and fashion. But seemingly as a marketer or business leader, you wanted the largest addressable market. But sometimes that can be a little bit of a fool's errand because you're not specific enough to win anything, especially if you're going against like an Apple or something like that. So how do you start making some of those hard decisions and how narrow do you get when you're focusing on segmentation?

Speaker B: We try and have internally the right balance of what is going to be a brand builder for the long term health of the company and then what is going to be a commercial driver. Where do we know we can go get a specific amount of volume in return to go build the business financially? Now the magic in there is how much of each of those do we do? Or if we have the resource that we can go introduce five new products in one year or 50 new products in one year, we've got to make the right decision of how many do we want to lean a little further towards brand building, which may be more interesting to look at or hear the story of, but uh, they may be smaller quantities versus what do we want to go drive the commercial business that might have a little more to do with feature sets, price points, distribution channels.

Speaker A: And as you're building the business today and you're thinking about getting that message out and connecting with people, are there particular tactics or channels or approaches? Obviously like having a strong brand identity across the entire universe matters. But like are there approaches you've found in today's environment that have been helpful?

Speaker B: Yeah, I really think so. The consumers in the broadest sense have clearly shown us that they are adopting direct to consumer purchasing or distribution channels a whole lot faster than physical retail. So working with our partners anywhere from service providers that are plugged into Shopify, we're a Shopify business with our direct consumer channel to Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, all of them are doing very unique things of how they communicate to an audience, how they deliver a physical product to an audience, and then over on the communication side of how we could go deliver advertising to target consumers. That in of itself is wildly different than it was just five years ago, so it's. Operating a business today is nothing short of exciting.

Speaker A: That's one word for it for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah, you've certainly got to be constantly on your toes. But what I love about that is, look, there's, I have 100% confidence that there will be opportunity tomorrow that I did not know existed today. And ah, usually the people with really sharp and motivated teams that can figure out how to identify what is right for them and then quickly take advantage of the right opportunities to be the first in doing something, you can definitely become a winner.

Speaker A: I think there's some really important elements there that actually allow you to do that in practice that you've done that maybe you haven't kind of verbalized or taken credit for in this conversation, which is one, you know who you are as a brand explicitly, right? Like, you know what you'd say yes to, what you say no to? If I threw you five things in without even hesitating, you would say yes, no, yes, yes, no. Like you know that in really strong cases, the other is having this emotional connection and you care about it. And I've seen the care that you have for the audiences in the community in everything that you do. Like you constantly say, like, how do we take care of the people that choose to buy from us and, and choose to like stamp us into their lifestyle, like they're a skull candy person, like that should be rewarded and cared for and then starting to form that into like a community and being consistent. So if you were to select an influencer or a partner there you're not trying to draft off of their credibility. You're picking them because there's alignment with who you are and what you do. And I think a lot of times people say, oh, like if we can get this influencer, like all of a sudden like people like our stuff and that gets rejected when the brand doesn't match that influencer. And then it's a, uh, very transactional, transparent relationship. And I think what's interesting here is those become the sort of core components of what is a lifestyle brand. But in this world that you just described, where it's like, hey, we need to move fast and hop on things, but in our way, right? And it's very easy to, if you don't have that like foundation, then you become almost back to what we talked about with like that creative brain shiny object syndrome where you're doing 14 different things individually instead of saying like, how do we then build this ecosystem? And part of that is being fast to market with our version of whatever is on trend. And you start doing that, making those decisions quickly and having a team that can back it up. And I think for most businesses, Whether you're a B2B or B2C brand, in this environment, like that's starting to become the reality. So it's not like, oh, because you have a board community, you can become a lifestyle brand and drive passion. Like no, all of us, like we work with Salesforce. Salesforce does that right. They're trying to get in front of like agents. They have a community of salespeople they're investing in, growing them, in driving their professional growth and development. They have events where people are like coming and lining up by that boot to get like stuffed zebras and stuff that, that they can put on their desk. So it's a crazy world, but I think a lot of the elements that you're building here really matter to where brand marketers are going in the future,

Speaker B: which is really cool. I appreciate that. Well, I think I can wrap this up on, on that theme with what you're going to see from us in the future. I think we've made a very solid commitment to be the brand that can bring the absolute best quality sound with also features like the best possible noise canceling, wrap it in the coolest brand, the coolest design and deliver it for prices in the future that are going to blow people's mind of, uh, I never thought I would be able to get that quality for this price. And then the second thing wouldn't be a business podcast today if we didn't talk about AI. So I'm a firm believer that AI will have a significant impact on headphones and headphones will have a significant impact on how we operate our day to day lives in the future. So you think about where we are in the infancy of our ability to interact with personal assistance, something like chat GPT. But what if that was in a headphone as a supercomputer with you wherever you went at all times. And now I can speak any language. I can know every fact about everything in the world. I can think through highly complex problems phenomenally quickly and turn it on, turn off whenever I want.

Speaker A: It's amazing. This world is crazy. I'm glad you're in charge because you also, I can trust that you're going to build something really cool and that's beneficial to me versus some other folks that we won't name. But yeah, I think this has been amazing. Can't wait to see the innovation that's coming out, you kind of teased some innovation. Is any timeline on when we can start seeing some of that stuff in market?

Speaker B: Yeah. Pay attention to Skullcandy on April 16th of this year.

Speaker A: I can't wait. BG this has been tremendous. I think there's universal truths in here for everybody about, hey, know who you are. Be passionate about your consumers. Don't try to boil the ocean and go after everybody. Segmentation is critical if you're going to tailor the brand to your audience and vice versa, and build that, like, symbiotic relationship and really just care about the customer and why you exist in the first place. And keep staying true to that and move really fast, as you said. So starting to pull those things together. Really inspirational man. Thank you. And thanks for all that you do for marketing and business. We appreciate you.

Speaker B: Hey, uh, thanks for your time. I appreciate getting the ability to share my message.

Speaker A: Awesome. Uh, thank you, sir. And can't wait for April 16th.

Speaker B: There we go. We'll talk to you soon.

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