From Market Stall to £25M: How Valentte Built an 8-Figure eCommerce Brand with Luke Bream

Speaker A: If you go back 20 years, free Internet. Then information was the preserve of big companies. Then the Internet came along and the real skill set was about search. Could you search and find the correct information? Now with AI, everybody has the information. So now it's about speed of execution. Can you figure out what to execute on and can you do it faster than anybody else?

Speaker B: It's the E Commerce Master Plan podcast here to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e commerce business. Cutting through the hype to bring you inspiration and advice from the e commerce sector and beyond. Here's your host, Chloe Thomas. Hello and um, welcome. It's great to have you here. Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests. A huge thanks to Adam Pearce from Blend for suggesting we get in touch with today's guest guest. Thank you, Adam. In this episode we are talking to a brand that are already on eight figures. Talking to their founder and CEO about how they've got to their eight figure total and how they are going to get to a, uh, nine figure total. We are also getting into how they are approaching AI. We're getting into their plan or his plan. Theories on whether you should outsource, source your ads or not, what it takes to grow. We're talking about whether or not you should have fulfillment in house, whether or not you should have manufacturing in house. It's a really, really inspiring, interesting episode. There's lots of nuggets of cool little stuff you could implement straight away, but also a lot of big picture stuff to get you thinking. So I think you're going to enjoy this one. I'd be very surprised if you don't. Please, please, please make sure you listen to the end of the episode because my guest top tips are just as good as the rest of the interview.

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Speaker B: And now to introduce our, uh, special guest. Luke Bream is the chief executive and co founder at Valente Sellers of organic skincare and HM Home fragrance. Founded on a market stall in 2011, they now do £25 million a year via their WooCommerce store and some on Amazon. Hello, Luke.

Speaker A: Hello, hello. Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Very cool to have you on the show. And congrats on going from market stall to 25 million in what, 15 years?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think really you have to consider that though as being in two stages. For 10 years of that we were tiny. We were doing 500,000 a year and we're trading from market stalls. And then Covid came along and uh, five years later we were 50 times bigger. Uh, so we had the most extraordinary growth from, early, uh, 2020 onwards.

Speaker B: Crazy time. And it's mad how much success can come out of a constraint.

Speaker A: Yeah, I look back and actually think we were exceptionally lucky through that phase. The business was just at the right point. We had an online business, but it was pretty small at that time. We were probably doing about, uh, 10,000 a year through our website and we didn't have much money. And the UK government put in a Bounce Back loan where we could have £50,000 and we'd never had £50,000 before in the bank and all the consumer shows that we were doing were canceled. And we took the business online and we took the bounce Back loan and put it into Facebook ads. The first week we spent a thousand pounds. By the end of that first year we spent nearly a million pounds on Facebook and we never looked back from that. And we just went through an extraordinary series of growth over the next five years and constantly having to reinvent ourselves both. We're a physical business as well. We have to, we manufacture the product, we do our own fulfillment, we develop the products in house, uh, and we do all our marketing in house. So there was a colossal element of learning there of, uh, you know, financial implications of I own the business 100%. And going that through that growth was, uh, very challenging financially. And also from a learning perspective, as we've scaled, you encounter different challenges and we're facing those again now as we as we figure out how to go from our aim over the next two or three years is to get to 100 million in sales. And unlocking how we do that is a very significantly different, different challenge. The skills that got us to 25 million were scrappy and sort of top down management where I'm so I'm generally doing all the figuring out and then I'm telling the team, go and do this. This is, this is the answer, this is the solution doesn't work. Uh, including agency at peak we've got more than 200 staff and you can't run the business like that at that scale. So it's a very different thing that we're going through at the moment as we prepare bring in very experienced senior leadership to help and really unlock who know what good looks like and also who know what a much bigger business actually looks like. And they bring that expertise and systems in. And that's really helped us over the last six months.

Speaker B: Nice loads for us to get into there. But um, before we do, Luke, going through that shift from or you know all the shifts you've gone through, I suppose as you've been growing the business I often think, you know there's or there's a cohort of thought that you're as a person you have a sweet spot of business growth. You know some people are great at the scrappies, some people are great at Ah, the 1 to 5 or the 5 to 20 or the you know, wherever those breaks are, are. But then you, occasionally you come across people who just love the constant changing nature of the business. How have you, you personally as one of the leaders in the business found making those big old changes in how you do things.

Speaker A: I think the truth of the matter is you identify a very real problem when you describe there. And I think I watched uh, Leila Hormozy talk about exactly that, that most businesses cap out at uh, somewhere between $3 million and $30 million depending on the industry they're in and the skill set of the founders. Very few businesses break through that because it requires an order of magnitude change in the founder's ability and the job that they do. And uh, I think the first thing is for me it's been uh, I'm fascinated by learning and it's about recognizing what the key constraint within the business is at any one time. And when I think about my working day, I work insane hours but doesn't most people who are leading businesses. But that's a choice and I'm probably spending six or eight hours of My day learning, um, and I'm learning at uh, whatever. The limit of uh, the business is knowledge, trying to figure out what the next stage is. And I think for me the most recent phase of that has been understanding that I needed to bring people in who were better than me, who were specialists rather than generalists and business. We earn the right to get bigger. And as an individual leader, I earn the right to stay the leader in the business. You know, so if I don't continue to grow, either the business stalls or I have to replace myself. So I, I take the view all the time that I have to continually be at the front leaning and understanding how I need to grow. Because if I don't grow my skill set, uh, my knowledge, my understanding of the market, my understanding of what leadership's required, the business stops. You know, it always caps out of the leader's ability to do the job.

Speaker B: So true. And I guess the, the other side of that for me is, you know, did you always have the desire to make it as big as you could? Because I think some people would have stayed at that, that, that original small level because they were happy with it and they had no desire to go bigger. So for you as the desire always

Speaker A: been there and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs of all different sizes and they talk or uh, come to me talking about growth and I always say, is that what you actually want? Because it's super important that people are clear and honest with themselves about the scale, what they're actually trying to build. Because not everyone wants that next stage. And actually you can harm your business quite a lot if you overgrow the business beyond what you personally either have the skill to run or want to run. So coming back to myself, I always wanted to build a global business. You know, from the time I was at school I wanted to build a billion pound business. And you know, that ambition has never gone away. It's getting ever more realistic. Sure, I'm in a big M, global marketplace. I mean we think we can do 100 million from just inside the UK, which massively reduces complexity. My current site, we can do 2 to 300 million. We've got capacity for that there, so. But I always wanted to build that business and for me I don't do it for the money. It's an intellectual challenge. Am I good enough? Am I, am I, do I have the ability? I look round at uh, business leaders around the world who I look up to and respect and admire and I ask myself Constantly, um, am I as good as them? Can I be better than them? And it's not about money, like, it's just can I unlock the challenge, Can I solve the problems that are uh, faced each stage? So for me it's an intellectual challenge as much as anything else.

Speaker B: That's such a clear answer. Uh, and um, what I suspect a lot of our audience are resonating with how you see it and also resonating with your, you don't have to grow if you don't want to grow point. Um, so I love that. Let's talk about the kind of the brass tacks about the business, the facts about the business. You said, um, you've got that growth target within the uk. So you purely UK based and selling only to the UK at the moment, more or less.

Speaker A: We have a small business in Ireland, uh, so we're direct to consumer. We manufacture everything in house and we have a small Amazon business as well. But it's not massive, uh, and it's more born out of reducing complexity because I think growing a business is hard enough as it is and why tackle multiple fronts at the same time? So we have very much taken the view that we can do that size business in the uk, so why fight on more fronts than we need to? So yeah, I think, I think, yeah, that's where we sit. And then obviously like the American market for our uh, in our category is you know, probably 10 times the size of the UK could even be 20 times the size of the UK the home fragrance market there. So you know, and, and the Middle east as well is growing really fast in that space as well. So there's huge opportunity for us, but it requires a different, you know, it feels like that's a different, a slightly different challenge. Why, why try that challenge when I, when I've got enough on my plate figuring out uh, the stage that, the stage that we're at and, and I think coming back to something I said, you we earn the right to get bigger. What I've come to realize is growing sales is actually relatively easy. If you are uh, you know, reasonably capable at uh, Facebook ads, or you've got all short form content, or you've got a skill set about driving traffic, growing sales, you can do great sales. Not having the wheels fall off your business during growth either financially, you lose control operationally, you don't figure out how to manage big teams or delegate properly and so on is super challenging. Uh, and I think that becomes the crux of the challenge, uh, as you get bigger and certainly it's been like that for us.

Speaker B: I think too many businesses try and go global earlier for the sake of going global. Whereas there's so much growth potential. If there's enough growth potential in your home market, why make life more difficult?

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And that's not, that's not fashionable or trendy. You know, uh, they, everyone thinks it's easier to go global. I don't, I don't think it is. I think it just massively increases complexity. And I mean my business specifically is more complex than most when we're choosing to develop our own products, manufacture them, fulfill them, uh, do the marketing. So why add to that?

Speaker B: Yeah, and you mentioned that you had um, 200 odd people in the team and you're doing the manufacturing, et cetera in house. How do those people divide across the functions of the business? And is there anything you're choosing to outsource?

Speaker A: We've got about 20 in our marketing team and then probably six or eight on a technical side, developers and that kind of thing. And then all the rest are split almost 50, 50 between fulfillment, um, and uh, manufacturing.

Speaker B: Plenty of square foot then.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think we've got, we've got two buildings side by side. We've got about 40,000 square foot of space between the two buildings. So yeah, a reasonable, reasonable amount of space. Now uh, we didn't have, I mean you know we started or as I said we started on a market store and making products at home through Covid. Just leading up to Covid we had a single, we were trading from a, an old dairy farm, uh, and a small unit. I think we had about 1500 square feet. And then as we started to scale during COVID we kept adding units on, on this farm. Then we took another building and we were splitting our operations that they were ten miles apart and about three and a half years ago we moved into the site we're in now. But you underestimate the cost of that. It was colossal. And they were brand new build and they didn't have fencing around them. You don't have alarm systems, you don't have, they don't do the floor properly. There's no, you go into a new build, they're 13 meters high, they don't put lights in, they just give you a fuse board on the wal. That was not for the faint hearted. And that's really been the case over the last couple of two or three years where you've got colossal levels of investment going on physically in equipment because we're manufacturing in people. You uh, need Better and better quality of people coming into the business. And ultimately, and don't forget, you still got to acquire customers. So you're advertising to acquire customers, which is the challenge of every consumer facing business. How do you do that either at break even profitably, whatever your model is, or going to trade for a few months to get your money back, but it's figuring out the mechanics of that are challenging.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, doing your own manufacturing is that blessing and curse, isn't it? You have complete control over your supply chain, but it can become a constraint to growth depending on how you're running it.

Speaker A: There are strengths and weaknesses, uh, of it and I think the key strength of it is that a reduction in working capital from a stock perspective because we can manufacture product in the morning and send it out to a customer in the afternoon. So that gives us immense flexibility. We can make in very small batches, which allows us to test a lot of things. Uh, the downside is you've got added complexity. I came from a manufacturing background, so I understood manufacturing and operations pretty well. So that did make life a bit easier and was a more natural fit for us to go down that route. I think as I look forward in the business, when I think about what the next three or four years looks like, then I think it's about reducing complexity. So, you know, you begin to think about whether you should be outsourcing fulfillment rather than doing it in house. I think, you know, ultimately you have to look at where the most value is added in the business. So the most value is added around marketing. So you're never going to outsource. You're never going to outsource marketing. But wrapping and packing and shipping orders adds the least value. I would have said, um, it's a very commoditized operation for someone to do that and particularly lends itself to, as we start to look to go international, then we outsource wrapping and packing in the UK first to understand that before we then go and do it, um, overseas. So I would imagine that's the travel and we would continue to manufacture and we would just use the extra space to increase manufacturing capacity and then you

Speaker B: don't have to do another move, which is exactly that. A huge distraction of cash and manpower and everything else. So yeah, you mentioned there that you wouldn't ever outsource the marketing. So is all your marketing done in house? Uh, everybody running the Facebook ads, the emails, everything?

Speaker A: 100%. Uh, we have periodically used agencies to acquire skills and learn things, but I'm not a fan of the agency model. And to be honest, what we do now, if we need advice is we typically use, we find experts in that and we use them more like consultants and mentors. So we might have them for two hours a week and myself or my team will dip in and out of that resource. But we're still in implement ourselves because we take the view that marketing is a core competence. And you know, you take ads for example, uh, you know, you cannot build a direct to consumer business without being world class at ads. You know, I just don't, I just don't think it's possible. And you can't learn that if you're outsourcing that to an agency. You need to be, you need to be doing that in house, in the team and building the people. Um, you know, ads are so important. I've got 10 people in my ads team. Email's a hugely important channel. I mean the thing that we've always concentrated on, and I suppose it comes back to thinking about a spear rather than a sort of scattergun approach. We have tried to become experts at a very limited number of things. So we were very poor, for instance, on social media. We didn't give it any time. We basically concentrated on ads and email. And we've got very high retention of customers. 80% of our transactions are returning customers. 20% of customers come in and make a second purchase within 30 days. And we normally cap out at about 65% of customers will turn into repeat buyers. So we can be pretty confident about acquiring customers and doing that. So we want to do that in house. And ultimately for me, that's the big challenge, that's the unlock, that's the interesting bit. And I spend my time working on whatever I consider to be the hardest challenge in the business. So I'm always working at the cutting edge of the business, the cutting edge, the sort of edge of my knowledge and the business's knowledge. But I suppose my skill set is knowledge acquisition, sorting through thousands and thousands of pieces of information to, to glean what the really key thing is. And um, and I spend a huge amount of my time benchmarking and modeling what the best companies in the world are doing. I think what's interesting about the time we live in at the moment is that if you go back 20 years pre Internet, then information was the preserve of big companies. And it was, there was a motor, it was walled garden, you couldn't get that information. Then the Internet came along and the real skill set that underpins success was about search. Could you search and Find the correct information. And then the last few years that's all turned on its head and it's been about AI and about execution. Now with AI, everybody has the information. You have only got to search into chat, GQP or Claude and you have got the knowledge now to do it. So now it's about speed of execution. Can you figure out what to execute on, um, and can you do it faster than anybody else? So I think it's a very exciting time.

Speaker B: It is a very exciting time. And I'm going to pick your brains on AI shortly. But before we do that, I want to come back to something you said about the marketing and the ads and that keeping it all in house, you've got the knowledge in house. One of the things which, as the ad platforms are evolving and how the algorithms are evolving that I've been thinking about is that businesses which get to your size when the ad success is so down to matching the creative with the target audience's desires and the audience that are going to buy the product. That creative bit is really hard to outsource. You know, ad ad ad agencies made sense when it was the targeting. Targeting 10 is easy to outsource the creative part. I think any business who's got a, you know, a sizable marketing team and the budget for it, it makes so little sense to have someone else running your ads. And um, friends of mine who are running ad agencies, please don't hate me for this, but is that one of the reasons you think it's ever more important is because that, uh, that, yeah, that importance of the creative, they cannot

Speaker A: understand the messaging and they also the agency model I think is currently broken. Because if you think, even if you go back three months ago, it wasn't untypical to see ad accounts. A busy ad account might have 300 ad account, 300 ads in it, 400 ads. The average might have had 50 or 60 ads. You know, I looked at an ad account Recently, I had 25,000 ads in it. You know, it's, there's a step change and it go are the days where an agency can come back and say, look, we're going to give you 20 new ads a month or we're going to give you 50 new ads a month. It just doesn't work like that anymore. You know, you've got to create quality ads and you need thousands of them. So there's a melting pot between concept work. You know, how do you unlock the Persona or the avatar with angles to actually create the right messaging? How do you unlock the ad types and have an understanding about creative diversity. And then how do you do that on steroids in enormous volume? Ads now are entirely. Before it was about the technical aspects of running your account with structure and things like, it's not really about that anymore. It is about nailing creative and iterating and understanding. I think the biggest takeaway for us now on ads is really understanding what is a good ad. So can your team unpick a good ad, recognize it, and then recognize why that's a good ad and then build on that?

Speaker B: Yeah. Then roll out 10 or 20 iterations based on that to really capitalize on that audience?

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%.

Speaker B: So, uh, coming back to AI, uh, I'm assuming you've been testing a whole load of stuff with AI, both internally and for external purposes. Any wins or tips you're willing to share?

Speaker A: I think the first thing I would say is probably the most valuable thing we did was to employ someone, an AI person. So we have physically got someone in the business. Uh, he did his first degree in Mumbai in AI, then he came over and did a master's at Manchester in AI and then spaced a year working for an American company, uh, in AI. And then he joined us. And the only young guy, super bright and that was a real step change in our, um, understanding of AI, how to do it. He was just in the building, you know, and he's so important to business. He is in the next door office for me and he's in and out like, you know, those are junior member staff. He's almost reporting directly to me, uh, because I think that's so important, that thing. And then the other thing is, is to understand, I think with AI that AI does not mean full automation, not even remotely. The technology is just not there. And I don't think it ever will be. So the way that we look at AI, you still need a strategy person sitting there thinking about AI, and you still need a creative person sitting and thinking about AI. And what the technology now allows you to do is it magnifies everything, so you get 10 times the volume out. But you still need the intelligence behind it. It's not there. You can't just leave it on its own and do it. I suppose if you think about creative guardrails that um, when you're thinking about say ads specifically using AI, but we use it in email as well. But you have to close the eyes of your brand managers, um, and your brand team for a while and you just have to accept that you're going to make Content that really is off brand because you have to remove the guardrails to allow the team who's using it to create content and learn and iterate and so on. And then what we found was then we could gradually bring the guardrails back in place as we understood the technology better. So it's an iteration, but you have to accept in the first instance that you're going to produce content you don't love, but you need to go through that process of iteration and learning. So that was one really interesting fact. I think the other thing to learn is that, and this is quite a hard, like if you're used to controlling something. One of the things that we've realized this probably relates more to ads than AI, but we've realized is that we can't actually pick the winners. So you can put 10 ads in front of me even though I've spent millions of pounds on ads and I basically cannot pick the winner from them. And what we've come to realize is it's better to almost automate that decision making process. So we're generating ads and then we are not second guessing them. And I spoke to a founder of a, um, French founder of an AI platform that had got very fast growth. They had grown in nine months from zero to 20 million a year. And uh, that annual run rate on their figures. And uh, he said what was underpinning that when they first started running their own ads they were uh, writing the scripts themselves, checking it all and so on. And what they realized was they couldn't pick the winners. And they started completely automating that process and everything just went live. And they let the algorithm decide what the winning ads was and that was infinitely more successful than trying to um, pre select it. So AI is a very interesting space. We're fascinated by it. It's tough. It needs strong leadership from someone you know at uh, the top of the business has got to embrace AI and really want it to be there. There's a fair amount of resistance from people within the specialist subjects. So I think you think graphic design, you could think video editors, you could think creative strategists in, in ads, you know, copywriters and whatever, uh, else they are, uh, resistance to it because they see it as a threat to the job. It changes their, their workflows and so on and, and it needs some senior in the business to drive through the change and also provide a level of reassurance that this doesn't mean job losses, it just means, it actually means increased productivity. Um, but that needs A senior leader to manage that process.

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Speaker C: knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done,

Speaker B: It's time for the top tips round. Okay. I love this section because it gives me and our listener some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level. Luke, are you ready for the top tips?

Speaker A: I am.

Speaker B: Excellent. The book Top Tip. If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you Recommend?

Speaker A: Alex Hormozy's $100 million offers. If you're in E commerce, that is the most sensational book. And you'll read it. It's super short and you'll read it in three or four hours.

Speaker B: I've never heard of that one. What's it, what does it get into? Can you give us any spoilers?

Speaker A: Alex Hormozi is a, um, uh, I think he cut his chops or built his business, first of all in gyms, teaching gym owners how to run their businesses. Now he's just got into Guinness World Records for doing, uh, $100 million in sales over a long weekend. And essentially he unpicks how to construct a world class offer. And essentially you can think of the premise of the book is how to create an offer that people feel stupid to say no to. We read the book. I then got my team to read the book and then I told them to go and create an offer. And I genuinely promise this is true. Uh, we put that offer live and overnight we added £200,000 a week to our sales. It was like we turned Christmas on and that just stayed at that level. It caused us colossal problems in the middle of last year as a consequence. But, uh, what he says in that book works without question, and we're living proof of that from ourselves last year.

Speaker B: Well, anyone who didn't want it the first time you mentioned it definitely wants it now. So could you just please repeat the name of the book and ah, the author.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's by Alex Hormozi and it's called $100 million offers.

Speaker B: There we go. Proof everybody for this week's book. Top tip. Um, the traffic. Top tip. Which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn't get the press it deserves?

Speaker A: Oh, dear. I'd be torn between email and ads. Um, and I think, I think it's about ads and everyone knows it's about ads, but I think the key thing about ads is about new customer acquisition. You must split. We spend a tiny budget on getting our own customers back on returning customers. So figuring out how to acquire new customers on ads is the holy grail and should occupy 99.9% of every founder's time.

Speaker B: Simple as that or not simple as that.

Speaker A: Uh, or not simple.

Speaker B: Yeah, but that's, you know, definitely to focus on, um, the tool. Top tip. Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plugin, a phone app, or just a way of working. Is there a cool little tool you use that makes you and your team more efficient from day to day?

Speaker A: Notion, without question. So, uh, one of the things that we use notion for, we have, uh, an ideas wiki. And every single time I consume a colossal amount of information, every single time I find something, uh, I will put playbooks into there. And now we have got thousands and thousands of pieces of content in that notion. It's got a fantastic AI tool. You can go in and say, tell me about landing pages, tell me about, uh, video sales letters. And it will give you, because it's all curated, because it's our content. And then every two or three days I send my team, we call it the Valente newspaper, and I send them all the things that I've added to there. It gives them a created list and it'll be pre, uh, think this is relating to ads, this is email, uh, this is personnel, um, this is to do with mindset and so on, because I add every single thing that I'm interested and I think is valuable into there. And then my team, I share that with the whole business and they've all got access to it, they can add to it, but it's mostly me doing it. And, um, they can then see an evolution of what I'm learning at the time and they can dip into the things that are relevant to their job or where their interest lies. And to be honest, we've been doing that about six months. And I wish I'd been doing that for 30 years. I'm 52 now and I've forgotten more than I've ever learned. This sort of thing, you know. And I look back and how many thousands of notebooks have I had over the years? Written notes? And then you lose them and you never go back to them. Now with AI, it's all available. So I've got the entire knowledge I've acquired over the last six months at my fingertips. And my team can have it as well. And I wish I'd known that 30 years ago.

Speaker B: Oh, that's such a brilliant use of notion. Love that. And a great way of kind of creating like a company library of knowledge that isn't SOPs. It's the level above that. Love that. The carbon top tip. What's your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an E commerce store?

Speaker A: So we've got. I don't know if it reduce our carbon footprint, but funny story, we had Fortnum and Masons come and see us because they wanted us to manufacture some product for them. And uh, five uh, of their buyers came up, visited the factory and the thing they were most excited about and they took pictures of it was our recycling system. So out the back of uh, uh, one of our fulfillment warehouses warehouse, uh, we have all these uh, bailing machines. Uh, so one, one, one does it for plastics and the other one big, big machine. It's probably about the size of three large pallets, I suppose, something like that. And uh, that bails up the cardboard. So we've gone from a situation where, you know, we were spending thousands of pounds each month having our rubbish taken away to now we get a lorry collection. Every week or so they come in and they collect a full lorry load of cardboard that's all being bailed up. We sell that to the recycling thing. And it's so it. We make a small m, you know, from it. But it's turned a big cost for us into uh, something that's now not costing us any money and is doing a bit for what we can do to, for recycling and so on. So, and, and Fortnums were incredibly excited about that and they took loads of pictures. They took the bit of these, these, these bales, they were piled like three or four high, this big area and so on. So it's a nice thing that we can do and it's. And I think that's where a sensible use of um, of technology and um, and so on. I don't understand why all companies don't do it. It's crazy. It's not, it's not. And you sell the cardboard and presumably

Speaker B: it's a much easier way to manage all that waste. All those waste items when they're compressed into a lovely tidy bale as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's in a bale. They end up, um. I suppose the bales are about the size of a pallet, maybe a little bit smaller than a pallet. Um, and they stack and yes, makes it super easy and they can sit outside, it doesn't matter if they get wet. So yeah, I really recommend that as a, as a solution to.

Speaker B: Love that one. We've never had that before and I think it's brilliant. Um, Luke, before we say goodbye though, could you please let the listeners know where they can find you and your business on the web and social.

Speaker A: Yeah. So you'll get the uh, website's Valente.com and you will also find me on LinkedIn. So you'll just find me as Luke Bream on LinkedIn or on Instagram as well. I think I'm Luke Bream. Uh, Luke Bream. Valente, I think something like that.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Luke, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been absolutely fascinating talking to you and I wish you all the luck in the world getting to your uh, nine figure target in the next few years. I'm sure it's going to be a fascinating journey but thank you so much for being here.

Speaker A: Ah, thank you. I've loved it. Really interesting interview. Thank you very much.

Speaker B: Fascinating getting to chat with Luke there. Ah. Um, let me know if you'd like me to get him back in a year or so's time to find out how that growth plan is going. Such clear work that he does in his role as the leader of the business, understanding where he wants it to go, what they're going to be good at, where his role as a leader is in terms of shaping and building the business and solving those business problems, but in a really practical way. Plus some, some lots of really cool tips, but a lot to get you thinking in that one. Um, I think I'll be thinking about this chat with Luke for a good few weeks to come, if not longer. I hope you've enjoyed it too. To get your hands on the notes from the episode, including those top tips and the things we mentioned, head over to ecommercemasterplan.com you can also use the short link ecmp.info the number of this episode to go there as well. When you get to the website, you can add yourself to our email list. Go on, please do it. Get yourself on our email list. We'd love to have you join us. And if you like this episode then, um, well, my notes say I'm to tell you to check out episode 531, which was one of our most popular episodes of 2025 with the brilliant Jamie cookie hair care. I'm also gonna recommend that you have a listen to the episode that's just a couple before this one that we did a what would you do episode with Richard Chappell X of Gymshark where he is talking about how you grow a business from eight figures to nine figures, which is the journey that Luke's about to go on. And if you listen to those two episodes back to back, I think we can safely say it will be a real surprise if Luke and his team don't get get to that point. So that's the what would you do episode with Rich Chappell at, uh, episode 286. Just a couple of episodes before this one. And if you're on, um, Woocommerce and want to Hear some other WooCommerce stories, then head to ecmp.info woocommerce for all our episodes with Woocommerce people. Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode that you do of the E Commerce master plan podcast. We love to have you listening in. I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help E commerce business owners to succeed and thrive with their businesses, including including progressing along the path to net zero. So if you know someone this show can help, please tell them to listen to the ecommerce Master plan podcast. I hope you have a great week and don't forget to keep optimizing. Thank you for listening to the E Commerce master plan podcast. Find out more@ecommercemasterplan.com podcast.

Speaker C: Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, uh, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners, lights about to fail, filters ready to clog h vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-Grainger. Click grainger. Or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.