January 14, 2025 • 36 mins
On this episode of Butternomics, Brandon Butler chats with TJ Bennett, CEO of Sole Play, about transforming a sneaker boutique into a community-driven movement. TJ shares his journey from corporate life to business ownership, how Sole Play leverages culture and partnerships to impact mental health awareness, financial literacy, and gaming, and the importance of intentional marketing, building a strong team, and creating a purpose-driven brand that resonates with sneakerheads and everyday customers alike.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everybody thinks you have to be just a legit entrepreneurial, right,
and that's like you just going out starting your own
business and you grow up whatever. But there's also an
entrepreneur route, try to Patrick Bick dave Man. I got
that term from him. It's like you can go into
a smaller business as an employee, grow that business exponentially
and then go back to the owners and say, hey, look,
(00:21):
you know I've grown these visions, I got the relationships,
et cetera, et cetera. You know, I want equity in
the company. Just give me equity in the company, and
if you're doing your job, they'll give it to you.
If not, you know, they'll just throw you to the side.
But typically they do though, you know, and I didn't
have to do that with you know, my partners. It
was you know, they just saw it and gave it
to me. But again, this is a route that some
people can't go into, John to be a business owner.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Everybody, welcome to another episode of button On. I'm your host,
Brandan Butler, and today we got another special guest up
in the studio, my guy, the CEO of soul Play, TJ.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Bennett, j hig doing Man I'm doing pretty good. Man.
How about yourself, I'm good man. It's good to see
you out.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Here, man, to see you, And I'm honest. I'm pretty
sure people say this all the time and get on
the pot, but I'm super honored to be here because
I love which Even before we met, I was watching
from a far of everything that she was doing for Atlanta,
the culture of Atlanta, and I've always admired it. So
thank you for even having me on the podcast. Man,
looking forward to a great conversation.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Oh TJ Man, lookow Man, I appreciate it. First of all.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I appreciate it. You know you're doing the work too, man.
I mean, you know, we've collaborated on a few things.
I've done some stuff at you know, some of your
locations before. Man, how's everything going, Man?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Everything is going good man. You know again, going into
Q four, you know things are you know, things are
catching up, I would say, because Q three was a
little shaky for us.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah, and I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I don't know if it's just the market just in
general and in retail, but it was a little shaky.
But going in the fourth quarter, things are picking up great, man.
So everything is going good for now. So we're just
trying to close out strong.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Now. For those that don't know what is soul play,
Oh okay, so this is what I really do, man.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I always tell people soul Play is the community impact store,
right first and foremost. So what we do is we
leverage our brand influence and our partnerships to you know,
help impact communities that we serve on a daily basis. Right,
he was, okay, well, look how are you impact in
these communities? All right, Well, it's three things that we
typically focus on. We focused on mental health awareness, financial literacy,
(02:18):
stem slash gaming, and these three things. Because again, when
I was growing up, you know, in Phoenix City, Alabama,
shotut of Phoenix City City, we didn't.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Have access to those things. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
We didn't talk about mental health awareness, we didn't talk
about financial literacy. I didn't learn about that stuff until
I was, you know, grown. So I said, okay, look
now we have all these shoes that the coach in
the community rocks with, right, so how can we use
that and leverage that again just to impact the community.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
So that's the ways that we that we typically do it. Man.
We draw them in with the sneakers. We love fashion,
we love sneakers.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
We draw them in with that, and then we give
them the education on the financial literacy, mental health awareness,
stam gaming on the back end.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So so they come in and trying to buy some
some j's, Yeah, and they walk out with all kind
of information everything.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
There you go there, you're going out the cater location.
You have to state of the art gaming facility. So
not only do we talk about it, we actually show
you and again great the access point you know.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
So yeah, man, you've done a lot of stuff. But
I remember the Nike event up there. You know, there's
other activations up there.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
The other location is in Alabama's in Phoenix. Where is
it that It's in Dothan, Alabama? So, like, what's the
difference between the two stores, Like, is that of the
stores it the same thing? Does it have like the
gaming aspect to it too, or is that more than
the one out here?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
No, So the Doting location and the Lawrenceville location they
have actual bar in it, so it's more of a
social social vibe there. You got a bar out there,
man on shot take a shot with us. But but yeah,
so in the Decatur location again has the state of
the art gaming facility, no alcohol and nothing like that.
But it's a dope it's a dope spot. But you
gotta come out to Lawrenceville, man, check it out.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, gotta check it out, man.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
So when people come in and they and they're trying
to get these shoes, like, what are some of the
programs that y'all have in place to like give them
information about financial literacy and some of the other things.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
So the biggest thing we do is say, if we have,
you know, a hot shoe coming out. I don't want
to name a brand, but say we have a hot
shoe coming out, and one of the things to give
you early access to the shoe is say, hey, look,
you have to come to this financial literacy workshop. And
a lot of people might say, okay, well look the
only reason they're coming is to get the shoe.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah, true enough, right.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
But the people that you would know that's like, Okay,
this person just really wanted you. They ain't really interested
in the knowledge and nothing like that. Those would be
the ones that come up to us afterwards and be like, Yo,
look I really appreciate y'all doing this. It was super dope.
When you're gonna have the next ones like just thank you,
thank you, thank you. So it's super effective on how
we do things, even though it might not look like
it from the outside looking in.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So yeah, okay, I didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Okay, I see I see the model now, Yeah, I
see the model now. Now, like, how did you get
into the shoe game?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Man? How did you get started? Man? That's a long story.
I hope we got time, but no.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So when I was an undergrad man, my undergrad part
of grad school, I worked at a place called Stepping Style.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
This was in Troy, Alabama.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Super small and first of all, Troy is small within itself, right,
but it's a small sneaker store, and it was like
the only sneaker store there. And I worked from the
Bennie business partner now own and then, and he used
to tell me all the time that, hey, look, you know,
whenever you you know, he said, whenever. I in a
few years, I'm going to open a store in Atlanta
called soul Play, and then you're gonna run for me
(05:15):
one day. And again, I'm an undergrad, so I'm like, okay, cool, whatever,
But in my mind I'm thinking, look, I'm gonna go corporate.
I'm gonna go to grad school, I'm finna lead this behind.
I ain't thinking nothing else about it, because people tell
you stuff all the time. Right, Yeah, So I left
went corporate, got fired from my first corporate job at
Coca Cola, went to another company called Snyder's Land, and
that was actually based in Atlanta. So when I got
the job out here, that's when he was building out
(05:38):
soul Play. And this is the one in Lawrenceville. And
I was battling with Snyders because the work life balance
was like super horrible. Coming from Coca Cola, it was cake.
Got to Snyder's Lance. I was driving the truck, selling
in the product merchandise, I was doing everything, and when
the Coca it was all divided. So I said, hey, look,
I said, you building out soul play. You know how
(05:59):
much can you what to pay me to do this
full time? He shot me a decent I mean, it
wasn't great, but I was like, you know what, let
me I'm just going hit and route when let's do it.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
So I did it.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Hated it, right, So I hated it because you know,
corporate will definitely put you on the comfort zone because
you're getting a steady paycheck. You you your four one
K's and all that stuff is taken care of. You
ain't gotta really worry about too much becoming more an
entrepreneur entrepreneur route, it's stuff that you got to just
take care on yourself. And I get I was just
one foot in the corporate world, like do I need
(06:28):
to go back to corporate? Do I need to stay
over here? And I had one foot in soul play?
Do I need to stay soul play? So that's what
really was just had my mind boggle like crazy. So
I was like, look, I just woke up one there.
I said, look, I'm just going to go one hundred
percent in soul play. I'm gonna learn as much as
I possibly hand of my business, the shoe game, market,
in building relationships, et cetera. And I'm just gonna focus
on soul play. So I did that, and man shit,
(06:51):
it it took off. We took off. We went from
one store to now we have three stores. One in
Dowton wanted Decatter, Jordan, of course want Lawrence, but Georgia
and they've seen the growth and aget in mind you,
I'm just a store manager at this point, but they've
seen the amount of energy and effort that I put
into it, and they offered me equality in the business
and I became my owner. Oh man, that's still man,
Yeah yeah, And that's what I tell people, Man, you
(07:13):
don't have to always everybody thinks you have to be
just a legit entrepreneurial, right, and that's like you just
going out starting your own business and you grow it whatever.
But there's also an entrepreneur route. Shout out to Patrick
Bick David Man. I got that term from him. It's
like you can go into a smaller business as an employee,
grow that business exponentially, and then go back to the
(07:34):
owners and say, hey, look, you know I've grown these business,
I got the relationships, et cetera, et cetera. You know,
I want equity in the company. Just give me equity
in the company, and if you're doing your job, they'll
give it to you. If not, you know, they'll just
throw you.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
To the side.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
But the typically they do though. You know, I didn't
have to do that with you know, my partners. It was
you know, they just saw it and gave it to me.
But again, this is a route that some people can't
go into to be a business owner.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
No, man, look that's super familiar. I mean that's how
I got started with you know, like even you know,
a lot of I've told this story before, but you know,
when I started Butter, I was working at a marketing
agency and I came over there as the head of
technology and project management. You know, my background is computer
science and web development and app development all that stuff,
and you know, we had this little side project that
we were kind of working on. We had this idea that,
(08:17):
you know, there should be a media company that's tied
in the culture, but it was still kind of becoming
some things, and it was kind of a little side project,
and through a couple of different things, it started happening.
I ended up kind of taking the project over. And
when I took it over, I remember seeing like the opportunity.
I was like, you know, this could be something big.
But I was always concerned about, you know, putting so
much in my because I knew it was going to
take a lot of my work and my reputation and like,
(08:40):
you know, my credibility to kind of build that thing up.
So I was always kind of hesitant in the beginning
about like putting that much into something I didn't really own.
But you know, it kind of started growing, and I
had those conversations, yeah, you know, with the CEO at
that time of that agency that I was working for,
and you know, eventually I was able to when I
got ready to leave, I was able to basically negotiate,
you know, full ownership of the platform, got all my
(09:00):
IP you know, and it's like a totally different situation now, right,
And so you know, the beautiful part about that was like, yeah,
we were able to build something kind of incubated, and
that was something that I kind of struggled with in
full transparency. When I was getting ready to leave, I
was like, man, I don't want to leave this thing
that I built, because everybody knows that I built it,
and I don't want people thinking that, you know, I
was some kind of puppet or some kind of shill,
(09:21):
because like everything I did I did authentically. But I
just said, you know, if if I leave, I don't
have any control over what this thing becomes, and people
are going to still associate it with me, for sure.
And so I fought really hard. I fought really hard,
you know, to kind of go through that process of
acquiring you know, butter and full so that I can
kind of continue to run it and do the things
it needs to do. And like look at now now
(09:41):
we're on this podcast, not these things are happening right.
So to your point, if you're providing that kind of value,
there are definitely you know, non traditional routes to entrepreneurship,
I think to your point, like everybody really gets caught
up in I got to get it out the mud.
Start from zero shit, Like sometimes it's nice starting air.
It's nice to start with a chair, sit down, especially
if you can like see the opportunity right. So, and
(10:03):
then the other part about that it's interesting is because
you had a chance to do that, you got to
learn more about how the business runs. You know, it's
almost like you kind of got a you know, almost
like an NBA in this specific kind of business by
working behind the scenes and growing into that. Like how
do you think that helped you, you know, continue to
make the store successful and grow.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Man, it helps tremendously because again, you know, and the
thing with me, and I'm just gonna be transparent, I've
never been a big reader until I got into business, right,
And like you said, you know, it's it's like you
get your own NBA and after you read so many
business books from so many different CEOs and whatnot. You know,
you understand that business is pretty much the same. It's
(10:41):
the same formula. It's just the different industries and different
languages pertaining to So the car industry is going to
have a different language, the shoot inustry is gonna have
different linane. But the formula's success, I feel like it's
the exact same. And and again with me being that
that leading the charge with soul play and you know
everything ultimately, you know, I always put it on myself,
even if it's not on me, I always put it
on myself and feel like it's my responsibility to push
(11:02):
the business forward. And again that constant learning about business,
and you know, just for every evolving as a person. Man,
it's critical, it's critical for business success.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Man. What are some of the biggest business lesters You've learned?
Speaker 1 (11:27):
The number one business less I've learned is that you
need a solid team. Yeah, you definitely need a solid
team around you because a lot of people might feel
like they might know everything and have all the answers,
but a lot of times, you know, we don't. You know,
and I understand where my strong points are and I
understand where my weaknesses are. So I make sure wherever
I'm weak I you know, tap in with people. I
work with people that you know, are stronger where I'm
(11:48):
weak at. So that was probably the number one thing
that I've I've realized, you know.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
What, man, let's let's double click it on that.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Okay, talking offline about some of the things you had
to grow, you know, and and you were talking about
how much y'all are benefiting from doing more stuff around
you know, marketing and automation and stuff like that, that
we're gonna started talking about social just like, what's been
your experience as you've started putting money into marketing? Because
I always look at marketing for a business it's almost
like a game, right, It's almost like a jukebox in
(12:14):
a sense, like once you kind of figure out how
it works and you know what you're selling, it's almost
like I know, if I put this much money in,
I'll get this much money out.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
You know.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Has that kind of been your experience that you've been
doing some of these things?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I would say as of late within the past six months,
I would say yes, because we've been more intentional about
our marketing. You know, we typically we used to just okay,
post on social media, to social media, be on Instagram, Twitter,
and just let that be pretty much it. But now
it's okay, look, how do we and I always think
like what if Twitter shuts down, what if Instagram shuts down?
(12:46):
How do we continue to stay in contact and build
a relationship with our community? And that's when we just
lean into you know, SMS marketing, email marketing and things
like that. And now I'm starting to see, okay, this
email might cost me. This is just hypotheticals, right, Yeah,
it's email campaign probably cost me two hundred bucks. And
out of the two hundred boks that it cost to
send it out to our consumers, we brought in four
(13:07):
thousand and five thousand whatever you can. So that that's
when you say, okay, like this really works, you know.
So now with me getting super intention and hyper focus
on that level of marketing, and now, of course you
know we're gonna contain the post on social media, but
just that little SMS and email is like our top
focus right now.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, well, you know, SMS is good, especially nowadays. I
think the stats somewhere around people open like eighty to
ninety percent of like every text message, right so you
think about it was also funny it is too. It's
like with a lot of you know, younger folks, I'm
kind of doing the air quotes right now. You know,
I'm a little bit older than the young folks. But
you know, it's interesting when I talk to people, they'll
stay such like I don't have a computer or I
(13:44):
don't use my email. Like I've noticed that a lot
when I talk to when I say young people, like
people in their twenties, and they're not.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
It was interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I remember I was talking to this one young lady
and she was talking about she had to send a
resume to somebody, and I said, okay, well you know,
you know fill it out whooped, whoop, and then you know,
open up your laptop and email it. She was like, well,
I don't have a laptop. And I was like, I
don't know, you're like twenty seven, Like do you not
have a laptop? And then she responded I'm not in college.
And it made me think for a second, it was
(14:10):
like wow, Like and the way I look at those
kind of things is I'm like, okay, I recognize that
truth that maybe I didn't see from my perspective. So
that means that there's a lot of people that literally
just look at this and they really and truly do
use this cell phone for everything, right, and they don't
think about I need a laptop for certain things. And
this is a couple of years ago, so I can
only imagine what it is now. So you know, my
(14:32):
guests would be you know, on the on the SMS side,
you're probably getting a lot more engagement on that because
even on the email side, the email side is good,
but email typically those like people that a little bit older,
like people that have the check have a reason to
check their email, right, Like if y'all seeing any difference
in those two areas, like email versus text, is one
like that better?
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, you know we we're probably right at a forty
five open rate.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
It's good. It's with email, yeah, and I believe.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
It, like, like you said, sixty to seventy percent, maybe
even eighty with with SMS. But the thing with SMS
is the amount of time it takes to get to
that seventy and eighty percent quicker versus you know, we
shoot emails. It takes a day, day and a half
to get to that forty to fifty percent. Yeah, So
like you to your point like it is, you're absolutely
right because a lot of people don't. People check email,
but it's not as you know, when you got that
(15:19):
phone man, you're on it twenty four to seven. So
your SMS is definitely you know, has been our bread
winning for sure.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Have you ever heard of ab testing before? Av I
have not.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
So what ab testing is is this is something that
you can do in your email, right. What ab testing
is is a lot of times you're sending out one
email to a group of people. So what you're trying
to do, what you're trying to basically appeal one message
to a large amount of folks. One of the hardest
things do in email is actually write the subject line
because that's what gets people to actually open the email up.
So there's lots of different tricks and strategy you can
use and like open up your subject lines, you know
(15:49):
what I mean. I remember I sent one out a
couple of weeks ago for a contest. It was like
do you want free tickets to this concert? And like
that was phone that was all it was. It was like,
well what free tickets to what? And it was like
you click it. It was like okay, well in this contest
for Chase to win. Right, But like that you can
see how that, like you know, drives engagement rate. So
what ab testing allows you to do is it allows
(16:10):
you to basically create multiple headlines or multiple subject lines.
At a minimum. You can also create multiple different emails
if you want to. But like you literally create a
subject line that says, hey, ladies, open this, another one
that says hey, fellas, open this. Another one says hey
at aliens, open this. Because what you'll find is that
the closer you can make the email feel personal to
(16:32):
a person, like, the more you engagement you'll get with it. So,
like one trick you could do on the email marketing
side is to try something like ab testing a little bit.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
There's ways to get crazy with it. I'm not saying
get crazy and I think we've sorry to cut you off. Yeah,
we might be doing that. I just didn't know the terminology.
Don't hold that against me.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
So we'll do like an exclusive drop limited edition because again,
most of the people that would send a message to
are you know, sneakerheads and fashion people, right, yeah, so
always around again, limit edition, early access new Nike Kobe Bryant. Really,
you know what I'm saying things that you know that
again that'll oh, let me go ahead and see what's
going on. We're going and get this shoot so to
(17:11):
a certain extent, Yeah, we're dibbling and dabbling in a
little bit.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
So what a lot of brands will do is they'll
they'll literally say, again, say you got make it up
a thousand people your email marketing database. Right, They'll take
seventy five of those people and they'll email, you know,
twenty five groups one subject line, twenty five the next,
and then twenty five the next, and they'll use that
information to say, Okay, this one performed the best. So
(17:34):
we're gonna now send out email number two to the
entire audience now, because now we have data that says,
out of these three different ones that we came up with, like,
this is the one that got the most engagement open rate.
So now the way that we can increase our open
rate is by then using that one that the tests
at the best to send it out to our whole audience.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Again, I'm just telling you, I love that. No, no, no,
that's great information though.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
That's definitely so if I have, like you said, one
thousand I got email subscribers it'll send out eight hundred
subject line to this, I mean, send the subject line
to this eight hundred in this subject line to this
two hundred, and based off the data, it'll show you
which one is.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
The yeah, which one, which one had the highest like
open engage rate and things like that. Because there's a
couple of things you want to test on emails. One
it's engagement so I'm sorry, it's click through rate. So
the first thing is like open rate or clickbo open rate,
like who even opened the email up right? The next
thing is click rate if again, if I remember correctly,
I think click through rates on average like one to
two percent, you know what I mean. But again, to
(18:33):
have like a you know, forty fifty percent open rate
that shows that people are opening the email, right, so
like you get them to open the email the next party.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
So that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
That's all these things work together, right, you come up
with And that's where I think, like things like chat,
GBT and AI are great for Like now all of
a sudden, you can idy eight fifty different subject lines.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And that's why I was about to ask you, you
do you leverage chat GPT to help with those subject lines?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
And things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
The trick with that stuff though, is that you have
to train it. So I think but a lot of
people don't understand when it comes to AI and tools
like chat gbts. They think that you just type in
give me some subject lines and it just spits the
stuff out. What you actually need to do is you
actually need to train it first. So what you'll actually
do is you'll go in. You can either you know,
you can do anything. You can go Google search and say,
you know, type in Google find me the top one
(19:19):
hundred highest engagement driving subject lines, right, and then you
open up chat GP and you say, look, you give
it a job. So there's a whole framework you can
kind of do with this thing, but you basically tell it.
You be like, okay, in this thread, this is what
you do. So in this thread, you are a email
subject line writer and you write amazing email subject lines
and you're an amazing copywriter, and you know all the
(19:40):
strategies and tricks on how to do it. And what
I'm also going to do is I'm going to feed
you here's one hundred really you know, subject lines that
are tested to already work really well. Okay, so now
you understand chat GBT what you are. You understand in
this thread you're email subject line writer and you're the
best person's ever done it. You also understand here's a
hundred examples of subject lines.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Right now.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Let me tell you about my business. My business soul play,
it does this, it does that. These are the things
we kind of have. This is our value proposition boom.
Then this is what we're selling. You train it, you
give it all that information. Then you say, based off
of that and what I want to accomplish, Now, write
me twenty subject lines that I can use for email.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
You see what I'm saying being very granular with like
just getting down to it, like to the t.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
The best prompt on average is seven hundred and nine
hundred words. I think a lot of people don't realize that,
like the best prompts need to be about seven hundred
and nine hundred words. Now, what's good about this is,
you know on chat GIBT is you can actually talk
to it and they'll transcribe it. So when I say
seven hundred words, I'm not saying you have the types
seven hundred words you can speak.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
You literally open up.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
It's a little microphone icons you get a little microphone
icon and then you just talk and then you just
tell it everything I just told you, and you say,
this is what I want you to do. Here's who
you are, here's the background, here's how you do it.
So you want to just talk to it for a minute,
five minutes, doesn't matter. You give as much background infas
you want to give it. Then you say, now, I'm
going to also give you some more information. Information I'm
going to give you now is information about my brand.
(21:01):
Here's my website, here's my about us page. You know,
here's what we're trying to sell, right like, And then
you say, based off all that stuff, now give me
something tailored to me, because if not, it's just all
all that stuff does it basically just predicts what the
next word is going to be. And so if you
don't give it a lot of good information on the
way in, it's hard to predict what the next word
(21:22):
is going to be randomly because you didn't train it.
But when you look at AI like a trainer or
like an assistant, and you take the time and I
have about it, I'm I have about one hundred different
you know, chechid threads and stuff that I do but
I do it like that. I literally spend the first
half training it and telling it, this is what you're for.
I have one just for my emails, because you know,
after grad school, I hated writing long emails, right, So
(21:45):
what I did was I went and found a bunch
of emails that I've written over the years that I
just liked. I felt like they were very clear, concise,
they had my voice and tone in it. And I said,
you are Brandon's email writer. And so the first thing
I'm going to do, you write all my emails. What
I'm going to do is I'm going to write in
a couple of bullet points or a couple of lines.
I want you to then write an email and my
voice in tone. Let me tell you what my voice
in tone is. Here are ten examples of emails that
(22:08):
I've written over the years, and you can literally just
screenshot it because now it does image text recognitions, so
you ain't got to copy and paste and stuff. You
just screenshot it and just dump it in and just
throw it in. It'll go back and read the emails
and just say, Okay, I now write like Brandon. Then
when I want to send an email, I just write, Hey, Hey, y'all,
this this and this boop and just put it in it.
It's out just like just like a whole paragraph, like
(22:29):
I just wrote it, I go through, I copy edited.
I'm like, wow, Like that's how you use these tools
to scale this stuff up really quickly. So that I
was just saying, like, you know, I think when it
comes to I think it's amazing that y'all doing that
kind of stuff. I'm just I like to talk about
this stuff too, So you know, I'm just throwing out
some free game on you know, how you can one
(22:49):
drive up your engagement rates on emails by you know,
specifically tweaking and testing different subject lines that get people
to open it, and that you can use like AI
to help you do that kind of stuff. The next
part about it is when you get people to open it.
Are you familiar with like funnels and all that kind
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yeah, I believe, So let me let me let you
dive into it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Well, no, it's the same thing, right, Like think about
a funnel, Like at the top you have a big
kind of opening and you're putting people in it, and
it's people kind of go through the funnel. You just
segment it out, you kind of segment them out or
there they're showing like different levels of interest, right, so
kind of ideas at the top of the funnel, maybe
there's like some kind of high level interest. As they
move through, they get closer and closer to hopefully actually buying.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Right, And then that's one of the things that we
try to do.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Right, It's like, Okay, we have a pool of people
that have purchased, a pool of people that have opened,
and a pool of people, like you said, they just
might be interested in and we try to not even
try we send different level of email to each one.
That's what the people that just open it, Okay, they
don't trust us enough, so like how can we tell
them a little bit more about soul play and build
that trust and convert them into a person that actually buys,
(23:52):
and then the person that buys will send you know,
new exclusive product, different sales, et cetera. So we definitely
try to, you know, communicate differently to each group of
people that we having our email threats.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
You know, that's one side. So that's the email and
the text message and stuff. On the social side, we
were talking about that too, So you're are you all
doing like social art.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
That's not that's where we get we can we can
definitely be a little bit better at and we've been
talking about it internally because again now we've just been
posting pictures just showing everything that we got going on,
any events, new arrivals, et cetera, et cetera. But we're
definitely leaning into Okay, how can we create a stronger
marketing campaign with our social media?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to social
you know, one of the things I've just learned, even
with running Butter, is just one you just want to be,
you know, kind of culturally relevant where it makes sense. So,
I know, I think, what's so amazing about this kind
of stuff, y'all? Do you do stuff with shoes and cold?
Like shoes are you know, everybody's wearing you know, shoes now,
everybody's wearing nice nowadays, Like it's a part of culture.
You see them on TV. You see people, you know,
(25:03):
celebrities doing it, they wearing them with suits and all
that kind of stuff. So there's one way to kind
of showcase it on that side. You know, I think
what you what you want to kind of do on
social is you just want to kind of get that
first position in people's minds, right of Like if I
want to go get some shoes, why do I want
to go pick you all over a you know, a
corporate store or something like that. I can't call it
no corporate stores, but like the corporate store somewhere right.
(25:25):
And I think you all can offer like such a
community feel and some other elements you can like lean
into that part you can showcase.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The biggest piece of advice that I would give you
about social especially if you which you have what you have,
which is a thing you can show off, is to
document it. I think where a lot of people overthink
social in my opinion as somebody that makes a whole
lot of social content every day for the last couple
of years. If you have a business, just like document
(25:53):
doing business, just like show what happens in there. You
don't have to create something with you know that's like
super edited and has scripts. You can mix that stuff in, yeah,
for sure. But I think what you can get away
with is you can just find ways to be like yo,
like have somebody again, I even look at you stuff
like have somebody just hold up a shoot and just
review it.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, And we do that.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, we we try
to focus when I say we can do better with
social media market it's more like ads and things like that.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
So one of the biggest things that we try to
do is just build community. Right.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
We try to build a and focus on a niche
community because right now, you know, we're big in the
game and this game ecosystem as a whole, so gaming, anime, streaming,
et cetera. So now we's like, okay, look, how can
we lean into this community, tell the stories of this
community in a way that intertwines with our product, right
and hopefully you know, the goal is, Okay, this this
(26:43):
sole play is for me. That's what we want this
community to look at soul play ads and then they
create enough energy and enough emotion behind it, then you know,
we get to this tipping point and then overflood us
out to the masses. So that's been our number one
strategy with you know, again, just growing and building our community,
just being there for these people when list in the
gaming ecosystem and then helping they lift us up, you know,
(27:04):
in their community to create a tipping point to you know,
to bleed out to you know, the masses of the world.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
One of the good things too that I noticed on
Instagram when Instagram ads lately is the added a new
feature where you can promote your content directly to your followers,
people that have engaged with your page, which is interesting.
So that's when I think it's helpful a lot of
times because you'll get people to engage with it. Everybody
follows you for a different reason.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
One of the things that I even did in the
early days of butter is I actually asked people why
they followed us. That's good, you know, Like so I
would even say yeah, so I would even say too.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
That's where you can also use some of that you know,
that email and that text message too, right, is like
put a survey on into some of that stuff and
be like, yo, fill this out for free, find all
a gifertificate or something like that or whatever it is
off you know, because data is I mean, it's always
if not, you're just making stuff up. And I think
that's what the hard part is for me personally, is
like being like, all right, what do I know? Like
what are the facts versus what am I just assuming
(27:54):
about my audience?
Speaker 1 (27:55):
But again, the best thing right again with you is
that you you know, the community that you're serving. Yeah, right,
and that's you know the culture of Atlanta. And that's
that's the point with us. When we first started out again,
you know, it's just been growing and learning, right, we
would just like, okay, look, we're marketing to everybody. We
just want people to come in and buy shoes and
buy clothes. So now it's like, okay, look we got
to tone it down and be again just more intentional
(28:17):
about you know, the things that we communicat and how
we communicate our product and again specifically to which community.
And again that's something we just recently figured out to
do and now we're just again trying to grow it.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm just you know, I'm just
always brainstorming. Man.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I just I always think, like I think about moments too, right,
Like I think about winter moments that people need shoes.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Who was important? You know, like back to school?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Like is there but is there like custom specific content
you could do not only to talk to kids, but
to the people that are like the parents, you know.
I think that's like as a parent, you know what
I mean, I don't want my daughter coming to meet
and just be like, Dad, buy me this shoe.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
I mean, she's gonna do it.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
But like, I think it would also be interesting to
be fun if I saw marketing from a you know,
a shoe store or shoe you know, shoe outlet or whatever,
peril brand like kind of marketing and me as a
parent and being like, you know, you know what your
kids look whack?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
They mean? That would actually you know, like that actually
be interesting?
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Man, Like I could you know, I just think about it,
gain like what are moments as of you know, who
are the people that actually have the money and spending it?
You know, and I get there are the collectors and
there's all, but I bet you there's a lot of
parents that are buying their kids shoes too. Of course,
I wonder what kind of you know, marketing and what
kind of information they would want to see from soul Player,
and it'll be more engaged.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
And we get a lot of of course, you know,
especially in our downtown to cater but all of our location,
we get a lot of parents, and so that'll be good,
you know, something to ask like what would you like
to see from a sneakable too that to speak to
you that will excite you enough to Okay, look, when
I'm buying my kids shoes, I'm going to sole play.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
So that's that's all that. Yeah, especially when your kids
feet growing all the day. Time I bought myself some shoes,
he just grew up them things like a month and
a half. Man, I was like, bro, you out here
fronting me out man, this is crazy. Man. So what's
it been like? Man, how's the journey been overall?
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Man? To be honest, I went through and like I
told you before, when I first started, man, I was
you know, depressed, stress, didn't know what I really wanted
to do to you know, trying to find my way
to finding my way and finding my purpose within what
I'm doing. And now it's you know, man, I wake
up happy every day to go to work. It's not
even worked to me, man, I work. I work all
(30:19):
day every day. It's just my life at this point.
And I used to always hear you know, a lot
of you know CEOs entrepreneurs. You know, I always say
there's no work life balance, and I didn't really understand,
you know, what it meant.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
But now I do.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
There is no work life balance. It's just you know,
work is my life and life is work, and of
course I got family. I take time for family and
kids and things like that. I'm not slacking there. But
you know again, it's I wake up every day excited,
motivated to go after it. Man.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
So it's been good. It's been good.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Y'all have done some like dope partnerships of brands like
Teching and some other folks like yeah, what else you
got to get coming up next?
Speaker 1 (30:52):
The biggest thing we got coming up next, and it's
it's actually going to be in twenty twenty five after
we wrap up this fourth quarter. We actually have a
Converse collaboration with Naruto. So the Converse has a Aruto
collaboration with about four or five different styles. So we're
gonna partner with them and do something very similar to
what we did with the Technics, but we're gonna do
that with Naruto. Man, that's gonna be it's gonna be
(31:13):
big because anime, I'm not sure if you're fai with anime,
and but the anime community man, and and and even
from a cultural standpoint, now it's like it's it's it's
super big. It's super dope. And shout out to Trap
Sushi with true.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
You know, they they do. They do a lot of
things to just highlight the culture in anime.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
And I remember when I was growing up, you know,
an anime kid, especially black, you know anime black kids.
You know, we kind of you know, we kind of
picked them day. We're just kind of to theyself, you
know what I mean. I'm very emo. God, none wrong
with that, None wrong with it. But now it's you know,
it's it's definitely like culturally relevant. And I guess you
would say cool to to proudly be an anime fan.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
And I love to see it. And again, I'm just
happy to be a part of that.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
You know, what's what's the something about the sneaker industry
that would surprise people?
Speaker 1 (32:03):
What's something about the sneaker industry that would surprise people
like y'all?
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Y'all really be having three pairs of them shoes and
them drops, don't you? Yah all?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
We do though, and a lot of times we do,
like you know, because we and people think we just
got hundreds and hundreds and units and the start. No,
it's like it's all allocated, it's all strategical place in
different stores, and the amount that you get in each
store might vary, right, So we might get a smaller
quantity and then this store over here might get a
bigger quantity, or vice versa, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
So, and I get it. You know, people do get mad,
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
You know y'all just posted this and I got here,
y'all sold out in thirty It'd be like that sometimes.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
So but yeah, it's it's it's all allocations. I want
people to know. It's alligate. Every store doesn't get everything
quantity and style. So so yeah, that stuff. Man, what
do you what do you see the soul Play brand
evolving to in the next couple of years. Oh?
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Man, Again, it's just being super impactful, you know, even
bigg than you know, Atlanta or not bigger than that line,
just growing outside of the line and create more impacts.
So even right now we're in the process of building
out in es sports labs at the MLK Aquatic Center.
But as far as some wreck, you know, and again
on the surface is gaming, right, but with that is
(33:17):
crazy technology and we're also going to be bringing in
with the course partnership, it helps with parts of Wreck,
bringing in certification programs and that might be through Microsoft,
that might be through Google. So you know, kids that
might not want to go to traditional education route by
going to a four year college, you can still go here,
get your certification in Google, Microsoft, and still get you know,
a great paying job out of high school. Right, And
(33:40):
we want to do that not only here, but we
want to scale that out. So of course we don't
want to you know, be in the southeast area, probably
work our way up East coast and you know, eventually
go out to the West coast.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
That's that's the biggest goal. But the biggest thing I
want to say, soul play Tokyo.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
I've been telling everybody this, Okay, p would be like,
oh you so look, I'm to go in and put
it out there, soul play Tokyo because again, you know,
Tokyo is is is very streetwhear forward. They're very sneaker
for it, and of course gaming and anime is extremely
big out there, and again it just aligns with everything
that we're doing. So the biggest biggest goal on soul
play Tokyo for sure.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Oh man, I love it. Man. Going international for sure,
it got to got to man, I love it. Man.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
We look TJ before we get out of here. Man,
how can folks find out more about soul Play. Support
y'all more poorly, come buy some sneakers, Like.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Yeah, you'all can find us at soul play a t
L s O L E p L A y A
t L on Twitter, same same handle at soul play
a t L.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
And yeah, that's that's the bit. Oh and you can
shout for the address as let me add.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Okay, So our Decatur location is one zero six East
Ponce de Lyon, Decatur, Georgia. And our Lawrenceville location it's
nineteen fifty six the loose Highway squeek b one o
e O see it's it's a big sweet Lawrenceville, Georgia,
three zero zero four three ooh and.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I don't know that doting address. Look, it's only one
soul playing do today. You go right, it's only one
soul playing Dothan my bad Notthing team.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but yeah, pull up
on us, buy some shoes, follow us on social Yeah,
and yeah, just help us with our community impact because
again I always tell people, it's bigger than sneakers and shoes.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
We just used the sneakers and shoes to.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Again generate the revenue to gan to help impact our communities.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Well, that's dope with TJ Man. I appreciate you pulling
up for the pod man.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Thank you. Thanks coming to buttteron nomics and that's the
pod Jawn. We out appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
You've been listening to button Nomics and I'm your host,
Brandon Butler. Comments feedback. Want to be a part of
the show, Send us an email today at hello at
butterdomics dot com. Butter Nomics is produced in Atlanta, Georgia
at iHeartMedia by Ramsey, with marketing and support from Queen
and naked music provided by mister Hanky. If you haven't already,
hit that subscribe button and never missed an episode, and
(35:49):
be sure to follow us on all our social platforms
at butter dot at l. Listen to button Nomics on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Out count count Pump
Everybody thinks you have to be just a legit entrepreneurial, right,
and that's like you just going out starting your own
business and you grow up whatever. But there's also an
entrepreneur route, try to Patrick Bick dave Man. I got
that term from him. It's like you can go into
a smaller business as an employee, grow that business exponentially
and then go back to the owners and say, hey, look,
(00:21):
you know I've grown these visions, I got the relationships,
et cetera, et cetera. You know, I want equity in
the company. Just give me equity in the company, and
if you're doing your job, they'll give it to you.
If not, you know, they'll just throw you to the side.
But typically they do though, you know, and I didn't
have to do that with you know, my partners. It
was you know, they just saw it and gave it
to me. But again, this is a route that some
people can't go into, John to be a business owner.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Everybody, welcome to another episode of button On. I'm your host,
Brandan Butler, and today we got another special guest up
in the studio, my guy, the CEO of soul Play, TJ.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Bennett, j hig doing Man I'm doing pretty good. Man.
How about yourself, I'm good man. It's good to see
you out.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Here, man, to see you, And I'm honest. I'm pretty
sure people say this all the time and get on
the pot, but I'm super honored to be here because
I love which Even before we met, I was watching
from a far of everything that she was doing for Atlanta,
the culture of Atlanta, and I've always admired it. So
thank you for even having me on the podcast. Man,
looking forward to a great conversation.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Oh TJ Man, lookow Man, I appreciate it. First of all.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I appreciate it. You know you're doing the work too, man.
I mean, you know, we've collaborated on a few things.
I've done some stuff at you know, some of your
locations before. Man, how's everything going, Man?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Everything is going good man. You know again, going into
Q four, you know things are you know, things are
catching up, I would say, because Q three was a
little shaky for us.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah, and I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I don't know if it's just the market just in
general and in retail, but it was a little shaky.
But going in the fourth quarter, things are picking up great, man.
So everything is going good for now. So we're just
trying to close out strong.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Now. For those that don't know what is soul play,
Oh okay, so this is what I really do, man.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I always tell people soul Play is the community impact store,
right first and foremost. So what we do is we
leverage our brand influence and our partnerships to you know,
help impact communities that we serve on a daily basis. Right,
he was, okay, well, look how are you impact in
these communities? All right, Well, it's three things that we
typically focus on. We focused on mental health awareness, financial literacy,
(02:18):
stem slash gaming, and these three things. Because again, when
I was growing up, you know, in Phoenix City, Alabama,
shotut of Phoenix City City, we didn't.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Have access to those things. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
We didn't talk about mental health awareness, we didn't talk
about financial literacy. I didn't learn about that stuff until
I was, you know, grown. So I said, okay, look
now we have all these shoes that the coach in
the community rocks with, right, so how can we use
that and leverage that again just to impact the community.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
So that's the ways that we that we typically do it. Man.
We draw them in with the sneakers. We love fashion,
we love sneakers.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
We draw them in with that, and then we give
them the education on the financial literacy, mental health awareness,
stam gaming on the back end.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So so they come in and trying to buy some
some j's, Yeah, and they walk out with all kind
of information everything.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
There you go there, you're going out the cater location.
You have to state of the art gaming facility. So
not only do we talk about it, we actually show
you and again great the access point you know.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
So yeah, man, you've done a lot of stuff. But
I remember the Nike event up there. You know, there's
other activations up there.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
The other location is in Alabama's in Phoenix. Where is
it that It's in Dothan, Alabama? So, like, what's the
difference between the two stores, Like, is that of the
stores it the same thing? Does it have like the
gaming aspect to it too, or is that more than
the one out here?
Speaker 1 (03:26):
No, So the Doting location and the Lawrenceville location they
have actual bar in it, so it's more of a
social social vibe there. You got a bar out there,
man on shot take a shot with us. But but yeah,
so in the Decatur location again has the state of
the art gaming facility, no alcohol and nothing like that.
But it's a dope it's a dope spot. But you
gotta come out to Lawrenceville, man, check it out.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, gotta check it out, man.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
So when people come in and they and they're trying
to get these shoes, like, what are some of the
programs that y'all have in place to like give them
information about financial literacy and some of the other things.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
So the biggest thing we do is say, if we have,
you know, a hot shoe coming out. I don't want
to name a brand, but say we have a hot
shoe coming out, and one of the things to give
you early access to the shoe is say, hey, look,
you have to come to this financial literacy workshop. And
a lot of people might say, okay, well look the
only reason they're coming is to get the shoe.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah, true enough, right.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
But the people that you would know that's like, Okay,
this person just really wanted you. They ain't really interested
in the knowledge and nothing like that. Those would be
the ones that come up to us afterwards and be like, Yo,
look I really appreciate y'all doing this. It was super dope.
When you're gonna have the next ones like just thank you,
thank you, thank you. So it's super effective on how
we do things, even though it might not look like
it from the outside looking in.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
So yeah, okay, I didn't.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Okay, I see I see the model now, Yeah, I
see the model now. Now, like, how did you get
into the shoe game?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Man? How did you get started? Man? That's a long story.
I hope we got time, but no.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So when I was an undergrad man, my undergrad part
of grad school, I worked at a place called Stepping Style.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
This was in Troy, Alabama.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Super small and first of all, Troy is small within itself, right,
but it's a small sneaker store, and it was like
the only sneaker store there. And I worked from the
Bennie business partner now own and then, and he used
to tell me all the time that, hey, look, you know,
whenever you you know, he said, whenever. I in a
few years, I'm going to open a store in Atlanta
called soul Play, and then you're gonna run for me
(05:15):
one day. And again, I'm an undergrad, so I'm like, okay, cool, whatever,
But in my mind I'm thinking, look, I'm gonna go corporate.
I'm gonna go to grad school, I'm finna lead this behind.
I ain't thinking nothing else about it, because people tell
you stuff all the time. Right, Yeah, So I left
went corporate, got fired from my first corporate job at
Coca Cola, went to another company called Snyder's Land, and
that was actually based in Atlanta. So when I got
the job out here, that's when he was building out
(05:38):
soul Play. And this is the one in Lawrenceville. And
I was battling with Snyders because the work life balance
was like super horrible. Coming from Coca Cola, it was cake.
Got to Snyder's Lance. I was driving the truck, selling
in the product merchandise, I was doing everything, and when
the Coca it was all divided. So I said, hey, look,
I said, you building out soul play. You know how
(05:59):
much can you what to pay me to do this
full time? He shot me a decent I mean, it
wasn't great, but I was like, you know what, let
me I'm just going hit and route when let's do it.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
So I did it.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Hated it, right, So I hated it because you know,
corporate will definitely put you on the comfort zone because
you're getting a steady paycheck. You you your four one
K's and all that stuff is taken care of. You
ain't gotta really worry about too much becoming more an
entrepreneur entrepreneur route, it's stuff that you got to just
take care on yourself. And I get I was just
one foot in the corporate world, like do I need
(06:28):
to go back to corporate? Do I need to stay
over here? And I had one foot in soul play?
Do I need to stay soul play? So that's what
really was just had my mind boggle like crazy. So
I was like, look, I just woke up one there.
I said, look, I'm just going to go one hundred
percent in soul play. I'm gonna learn as much as
I possibly hand of my business, the shoe game, market,
in building relationships, et cetera. And I'm just gonna focus
on soul play. So I did that, and man shit,
(06:51):
it it took off. We took off. We went from
one store to now we have three stores. One in
Dowton wanted Decatter, Jordan, of course want Lawrence, but Georgia
and they've seen the growth and aget in mind you,
I'm just a store manager at this point, but they've
seen the amount of energy and effort that I put
into it, and they offered me equality in the business
and I became my owner. Oh man, that's still man,
Yeah yeah, And that's what I tell people, Man, you
(07:13):
don't have to always everybody thinks you have to be
just a legit entrepreneurial, right, and that's like you just
going out starting your own business and you grow it whatever.
But there's also an entrepreneur route. Shout out to Patrick
Bick David Man. I got that term from him. It's
like you can go into a smaller business as an employee,
grow that business exponentially, and then go back to the
(07:34):
owners and say, hey, look, you know I've grown these business,
I got the relationships, et cetera, et cetera. You know,
I want equity in the company. Just give me equity
in the company, and if you're doing your job, they'll
give it to you. If not, you know, they'll just
throw you.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
To the side.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
But the typically they do though. You know, I didn't
have to do that with you know, my partners. It was
you know, they just saw it and gave it to me.
But again, this is a route that some people can't
go into to be a business owner.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
No, man, look that's super familiar. I mean that's how
I got started with you know, like even you know,
a lot of I've told this story before, but you know,
when I started Butter, I was working at a marketing
agency and I came over there as the head of
technology and project management. You know, my background is computer
science and web development and app development all that stuff,
and you know, we had this little side project that
we were kind of working on. We had this idea that,
(08:17):
you know, there should be a media company that's tied
in the culture, but it was still kind of becoming
some things, and it was kind of a little side project,
and through a couple of different things, it started happening.
I ended up kind of taking the project over. And
when I took it over, I remember seeing like the opportunity.
I was like, you know, this could be something big.
But I was always concerned about, you know, putting so
much in my because I knew it was going to
take a lot of my work and my reputation and like,
(08:40):
you know, my credibility to kind of build that thing up.
So I was always kind of hesitant in the beginning
about like putting that much into something I didn't really own.
But you know, it kind of started growing, and I
had those conversations, yeah, you know, with the CEO at
that time of that agency that I was working for,
and you know, eventually I was able to when I
got ready to leave, I was able to basically negotiate,
you know, full ownership of the platform, got all my
(09:00):
IP you know, and it's like a totally different situation now, right,
And so you know, the beautiful part about that was like, yeah,
we were able to build something kind of incubated, and
that was something that I kind of struggled with in
full transparency. When I was getting ready to leave, I
was like, man, I don't want to leave this thing
that I built, because everybody knows that I built it,
and I don't want people thinking that, you know, I
was some kind of puppet or some kind of shill,
(09:21):
because like everything I did I did authentically. But I
just said, you know, if if I leave, I don't
have any control over what this thing becomes, and people
are going to still associate it with me, for sure.
And so I fought really hard. I fought really hard,
you know, to kind of go through that process of
acquiring you know, butter and full so that I can
kind of continue to run it and do the things
it needs to do. And like look at now now
(09:41):
we're on this podcast, not these things are happening right.
So to your point, if you're providing that kind of value,
there are definitely you know, non traditional routes to entrepreneurship,
I think to your point, like everybody really gets caught
up in I got to get it out the mud.
Start from zero shit, Like sometimes it's nice starting air.
It's nice to start with a chair, sit down, especially
if you can like see the opportunity right. So, and
(10:03):
then the other part about that it's interesting is because
you had a chance to do that, you got to
learn more about how the business runs. You know, it's
almost like you kind of got a you know, almost
like an NBA in this specific kind of business by
working behind the scenes and growing into that. Like how
do you think that helped you, you know, continue to
make the store successful and grow.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Man, it helps tremendously because again, you know, and the
thing with me, and I'm just gonna be transparent, I've
never been a big reader until I got into business, right,
And like you said, you know, it's it's like you
get your own NBA and after you read so many
business books from so many different CEOs and whatnot. You know,
you understand that business is pretty much the same. It's
(10:41):
the same formula. It's just the different industries and different
languages pertaining to So the car industry is going to
have a different language, the shoot inustry is gonna have
different linane. But the formula's success, I feel like it's
the exact same. And and again with me being that
that leading the charge with soul play and you know
everything ultimately, you know, I always put it on myself,
even if it's not on me, I always put it
on myself and feel like it's my responsibility to push
(11:02):
the business forward. And again that constant learning about business,
and you know, just for every evolving as a person. Man,
it's critical, it's critical for business success.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Man. What are some of the biggest business lesters You've learned?
Speaker 1 (11:27):
The number one business less I've learned is that you
need a solid team. Yeah, you definitely need a solid
team around you because a lot of people might feel
like they might know everything and have all the answers,
but a lot of times, you know, we don't. You know,
and I understand where my strong points are and I
understand where my weaknesses are. So I make sure wherever
I'm weak I you know, tap in with people. I
work with people that you know, are stronger where I'm
(11:48):
weak at. So that was probably the number one thing
that I've I've realized, you know.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
What, man, let's let's double click it on that.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Okay, talking offline about some of the things you had
to grow, you know, and and you were talking about
how much y'all are benefiting from doing more stuff around
you know, marketing and automation and stuff like that, that
we're gonna started talking about social just like, what's been
your experience as you've started putting money into marketing? Because
I always look at marketing for a business it's almost
like a game, right, It's almost like a jukebox in
(12:14):
a sense, like once you kind of figure out how
it works and you know what you're selling, it's almost
like I know, if I put this much money in,
I'll get this much money out.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
You know.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Has that kind of been your experience that you've been
doing some of these things?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I would say as of late within the past six months,
I would say yes, because we've been more intentional about
our marketing. You know, we typically we used to just okay,
post on social media, to social media, be on Instagram, Twitter,
and just let that be pretty much it. But now
it's okay, look, how do we and I always think
like what if Twitter shuts down, what if Instagram shuts down?
(12:46):
How do we continue to stay in contact and build
a relationship with our community? And that's when we just
lean into you know, SMS marketing, email marketing and things
like that. And now I'm starting to see, okay, this
email might cost me. This is just hypotheticals, right, Yeah,
it's email campaign probably cost me two hundred bucks. And
out of the two hundred boks that it cost to
send it out to our consumers, we brought in four
(13:07):
thousand and five thousand whatever you can. So that that's
when you say, okay, like this really works, you know.
So now with me getting super intention and hyper focus
on that level of marketing, and now, of course you
know we're gonna contain the post on social media, but
just that little SMS and email is like our top
focus right now.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, well, you know, SMS is good, especially nowadays. I
think the stats somewhere around people open like eighty to
ninety percent of like every text message, right so you
think about it was also funny it is too. It's
like with a lot of you know, younger folks, I'm
kind of doing the air quotes right now. You know,
I'm a little bit older than the young folks. But
you know, it's interesting when I talk to people, they'll
stay such like I don't have a computer or I
(13:44):
don't use my email. Like I've noticed that a lot
when I talk to when I say young people, like
people in their twenties, and they're not.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
It was interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I remember I was talking to this one young lady
and she was talking about she had to send a
resume to somebody, and I said, okay, well you know,
you know fill it out whooped, whoop, and then you know,
open up your laptop and email it. She was like, well,
I don't have a laptop. And I was like, I
don't know, you're like twenty seven, Like do you not
have a laptop? And then she responded I'm not in college.
And it made me think for a second, it was
(14:10):
like wow, Like and the way I look at those
kind of things is I'm like, okay, I recognize that
truth that maybe I didn't see from my perspective. So
that means that there's a lot of people that literally
just look at this and they really and truly do
use this cell phone for everything, right, and they don't
think about I need a laptop for certain things. And
this is a couple of years ago, so I can
only imagine what it is now. So you know, my
(14:32):
guests would be you know, on the on the SMS side,
you're probably getting a lot more engagement on that because
even on the email side, the email side is good,
but email typically those like people that a little bit older,
like people that have the check have a reason to
check their email, right, Like if y'all seeing any difference
in those two areas, like email versus text, is one
like that better?
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, you know we we're probably right at a forty
five open rate.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
It's good. It's with email, yeah, and I believe.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
It, like, like you said, sixty to seventy percent, maybe
even eighty with with SMS. But the thing with SMS
is the amount of time it takes to get to
that seventy and eighty percent quicker versus you know, we
shoot emails. It takes a day, day and a half
to get to that forty to fifty percent. Yeah, So
like you to your point like it is, you're absolutely
right because a lot of people don't. People check email,
but it's not as you know, when you got that
(15:19):
phone man, you're on it twenty four to seven. So
your SMS is definitely you know, has been our bread
winning for sure.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Have you ever heard of ab testing before? Av I
have not.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
So what ab testing is is this is something that
you can do in your email, right. What ab testing
is is a lot of times you're sending out one
email to a group of people. So what you're trying
to do, what you're trying to basically appeal one message
to a large amount of folks. One of the hardest
things do in email is actually write the subject line
because that's what gets people to actually open the email up.
So there's lots of different tricks and strategy you can
use and like open up your subject lines, you know
(15:49):
what I mean. I remember I sent one out a
couple of weeks ago for a contest. It was like
do you want free tickets to this concert? And like
that was phone that was all it was. It was like,
well what free tickets to what? And it was like
you click it. It was like okay, well in this contest
for Chase to win. Right, But like that you can
see how that, like you know, drives engagement rate. So
what ab testing allows you to do is it allows
(16:10):
you to basically create multiple headlines or multiple subject lines.
At a minimum. You can also create multiple different emails
if you want to. But like you literally create a
subject line that says, hey, ladies, open this, another one
that says hey, fellas, open this. Another one says hey
at aliens, open this. Because what you'll find is that
the closer you can make the email feel personal to
(16:32):
a person, like, the more you engagement you'll get with it. So,
like one trick you could do on the email marketing
side is to try something like ab testing a little bit.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
There's ways to get crazy with it. I'm not saying
get crazy and I think we've sorry to cut you off. Yeah,
we might be doing that. I just didn't know the terminology.
Don't hold that against me.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
So we'll do like an exclusive drop limited edition because again,
most of the people that would send a message to
are you know, sneakerheads and fashion people, right, yeah, so
always around again, limit edition, early access new Nike Kobe Bryant. Really,
you know what I'm saying things that you know that
again that'll oh, let me go ahead and see what's
going on. We're going and get this shoot so to
(17:11):
a certain extent, Yeah, we're dibbling and dabbling in a
little bit.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
So what a lot of brands will do is they'll
they'll literally say, again, say you got make it up
a thousand people your email marketing database. Right, They'll take
seventy five of those people and they'll email, you know,
twenty five groups one subject line, twenty five the next,
and then twenty five the next, and they'll use that
information to say, Okay, this one performed the best. So
(17:34):
we're gonna now send out email number two to the
entire audience now, because now we have data that says,
out of these three different ones that we came up with, like,
this is the one that got the most engagement open rate.
So now the way that we can increase our open
rate is by then using that one that the tests
at the best to send it out to our whole audience.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Again, I'm just telling you, I love that. No, no, no,
that's great information though.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
That's definitely so if I have, like you said, one
thousand I got email subscribers it'll send out eight hundred
subject line to this, I mean, send the subject line
to this eight hundred in this subject line to this
two hundred, and based off the data, it'll show you
which one is.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
The yeah, which one, which one had the highest like
open engage rate and things like that. Because there's a
couple of things you want to test on emails. One
it's engagement so I'm sorry, it's click through rate. So
the first thing is like open rate or clickbo open rate,
like who even opened the email up right? The next
thing is click rate if again, if I remember correctly,
I think click through rates on average like one to
two percent, you know what I mean. But again, to
(18:33):
have like a you know, forty fifty percent open rate
that shows that people are opening the email, right, so
like you get them to open the email the next party.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
So that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
That's all these things work together, right, you come up
with And that's where I think, like things like chat,
GBT and AI are great for Like now all of
a sudden, you can idy eight fifty different subject lines.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And that's why I was about to ask you, you
do you leverage chat GPT to help with those subject lines?
Speaker 3 (18:54):
And things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
The trick with that stuff though, is that you have
to train it. So I think but a lot of
people don't understand when it comes to AI and tools
like chat gbts. They think that you just type in
give me some subject lines and it just spits the
stuff out. What you actually need to do is you
actually need to train it first. So what you'll actually
do is you'll go in. You can either you know,
you can do anything. You can go Google search and say,
you know, type in Google find me the top one
(19:19):
hundred highest engagement driving subject lines, right, and then you
open up chat GP and you say, look, you give
it a job. So there's a whole framework you can
kind of do with this thing, but you basically tell it.
You be like, okay, in this thread, this is what
you do. So in this thread, you are a email
subject line writer and you write amazing email subject lines
and you're an amazing copywriter, and you know all the
(19:40):
strategies and tricks on how to do it. And what
I'm also going to do is I'm going to feed
you here's one hundred really you know, subject lines that
are tested to already work really well. Okay, so now
you understand chat GBT what you are. You understand in
this thread you're email subject line writer and you're the
best person's ever done it. You also understand here's a
hundred examples of subject lines.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Right now.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Let me tell you about my business. My business soul play,
it does this, it does that. These are the things
we kind of have. This is our value proposition boom.
Then this is what we're selling. You train it, you
give it all that information. Then you say, based off
of that and what I want to accomplish, Now, write
me twenty subject lines that I can use for email.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
You see what I'm saying being very granular with like
just getting down to it, like to the t.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
The best prompt on average is seven hundred and nine
hundred words. I think a lot of people don't realize that,
like the best prompts need to be about seven hundred
and nine hundred words. Now, what's good about this is,
you know on chat GIBT is you can actually talk
to it and they'll transcribe it. So when I say
seven hundred words, I'm not saying you have the types
seven hundred words you can speak.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
You literally open up.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
It's a little microphone icons you get a little microphone
icon and then you just talk and then you just
tell it everything I just told you, and you say,
this is what I want you to do. Here's who
you are, here's the background, here's how you do it.
So you want to just talk to it for a minute,
five minutes, doesn't matter. You give as much background infas
you want to give it. Then you say, now, I'm
going to also give you some more information. Information I'm
going to give you now is information about my brand.
(21:01):
Here's my website, here's my about us page. You know,
here's what we're trying to sell, right like, And then
you say, based off all that stuff, now give me
something tailored to me, because if not, it's just all
all that stuff does it basically just predicts what the
next word is going to be. And so if you
don't give it a lot of good information on the
way in, it's hard to predict what the next word
(21:22):
is going to be randomly because you didn't train it.
But when you look at AI like a trainer or
like an assistant, and you take the time and I
have about it, I'm I have about one hundred different
you know, chechid threads and stuff that I do but
I do it like that. I literally spend the first
half training it and telling it, this is what you're for.
I have one just for my emails, because you know,
after grad school, I hated writing long emails, right, So
(21:45):
what I did was I went and found a bunch
of emails that I've written over the years that I
just liked. I felt like they were very clear, concise,
they had my voice and tone in it. And I said,
you are Brandon's email writer. And so the first thing
I'm going to do, you write all my emails. What
I'm going to do is I'm going to write in
a couple of bullet points or a couple of lines.
I want you to then write an email and my
voice in tone. Let me tell you what my voice
in tone is. Here are ten examples of emails that
(22:08):
I've written over the years, and you can literally just
screenshot it because now it does image text recognitions, so
you ain't got to copy and paste and stuff. You
just screenshot it and just dump it in and just
throw it in. It'll go back and read the emails
and just say, Okay, I now write like Brandon. Then
when I want to send an email, I just write, Hey, Hey, y'all,
this this and this boop and just put it in it.
It's out just like just like a whole paragraph, like
(22:29):
I just wrote it, I go through, I copy edited.
I'm like, wow, Like that's how you use these tools
to scale this stuff up really quickly. So that I
was just saying, like, you know, I think when it
comes to I think it's amazing that y'all doing that
kind of stuff. I'm just I like to talk about
this stuff too, So you know, I'm just throwing out
some free game on you know, how you can one
(22:49):
drive up your engagement rates on emails by you know,
specifically tweaking and testing different subject lines that get people
to open it, and that you can use like AI
to help you do that kind of stuff. The next
part about it is when you get people to open it.
Are you familiar with like funnels and all that kind
of stuff?
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Yeah, I believe, So let me let me let you
dive into it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Well, no, it's the same thing, right, Like think about
a funnel, Like at the top you have a big
kind of opening and you're putting people in it, and
it's people kind of go through the funnel. You just
segment it out, you kind of segment them out or
there they're showing like different levels of interest, right, so
kind of ideas at the top of the funnel, maybe
there's like some kind of high level interest. As they
move through, they get closer and closer to hopefully actually buying.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Right, And then that's one of the things that we
try to do.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Right, It's like, Okay, we have a pool of people
that have purchased, a pool of people that have opened,
and a pool of people, like you said, they just
might be interested in and we try to not even
try we send different level of email to each one.
That's what the people that just open it, Okay, they
don't trust us enough, so like how can we tell
them a little bit more about soul play and build
that trust and convert them into a person that actually buys,
(23:52):
and then the person that buys will send you know,
new exclusive product, different sales, et cetera. So we definitely
try to, you know, communicate differently to each group of
people that we having our email threats.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
You know, that's one side. So that's the email and
the text message and stuff. On the social side, we
were talking about that too, So you're are you all
doing like social art.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
That's not that's where we get we can we can
definitely be a little bit better at and we've been
talking about it internally because again now we've just been
posting pictures just showing everything that we got going on,
any events, new arrivals, et cetera, et cetera. But we're
definitely leaning into Okay, how can we create a stronger
marketing campaign with our social media?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to social
you know, one of the things I've just learned, even
with running Butter, is just one you just want to be,
you know, kind of culturally relevant where it makes sense. So,
I know, I think, what's so amazing about this kind
of stuff, y'all? Do you do stuff with shoes and cold?
Like shoes are you know, everybody's wearing you know, shoes now,
everybody's wearing nice nowadays, Like it's a part of culture.
You see them on TV. You see people, you know,
(25:03):
celebrities doing it, they wearing them with suits and all
that kind of stuff. So there's one way to kind
of showcase it on that side. You know, I think
what you what you want to kind of do on
social is you just want to kind of get that
first position in people's minds, right of Like if I
want to go get some shoes, why do I want
to go pick you all over a you know, a
corporate store or something like that. I can't call it
no corporate stores, but like the corporate store somewhere right.
(25:25):
And I think you all can offer like such a
community feel and some other elements you can like lean
into that part you can showcase.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
The biggest piece of advice that I would give you
about social especially if you which you have what you have,
which is a thing you can show off, is to
document it. I think where a lot of people overthink
social in my opinion as somebody that makes a whole
lot of social content every day for the last couple
of years. If you have a business, just like document
(25:53):
doing business, just like show what happens in there. You
don't have to create something with you know that's like
super edited and has scripts. You can mix that stuff in, yeah,
for sure. But I think what you can get away
with is you can just find ways to be like yo,
like have somebody again, I even look at you stuff
like have somebody just hold up a shoot and just
review it.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, And we do that.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, we we try
to focus when I say we can do better with
social media market it's more like ads and things like that.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
So one of the biggest things that we try to
do is just build community. Right.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
We try to build a and focus on a niche
community because right now, you know, we're big in the
game and this game ecosystem as a whole, so gaming, anime, streaming,
et cetera. So now we's like, okay, look, how can
we lean into this community, tell the stories of this
community in a way that intertwines with our product, right
and hopefully you know, the goal is, Okay, this this
(26:43):
sole play is for me. That's what we want this
community to look at soul play ads and then they
create enough energy and enough emotion behind it, then you know,
we get to this tipping point and then overflood us
out to the masses. So that's been our number one
strategy with you know, again, just growing and building our community,
just being there for these people when list in the
gaming ecosystem and then helping they lift us up, you know,
(27:04):
in their community to create a tipping point to you know,
to bleed out to you know, the masses of the world.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
One of the good things too that I noticed on
Instagram when Instagram ads lately is the added a new
feature where you can promote your content directly to your followers,
people that have engaged with your page, which is interesting.
So that's when I think it's helpful a lot of
times because you'll get people to engage with it. Everybody
follows you for a different reason.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
One of the things that I even did in the
early days of butter is I actually asked people why
they followed us. That's good, you know, Like so I
would even say yeah, so I would even say too.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
That's where you can also use some of that you know,
that email and that text message too, right, is like
put a survey on into some of that stuff and
be like, yo, fill this out for free, find all
a gifertificate or something like that or whatever it is
off you know, because data is I mean, it's always
if not, you're just making stuff up. And I think
that's what the hard part is for me personally, is
like being like, all right, what do I know? Like
what are the facts versus what am I just assuming
(27:54):
about my audience?
Speaker 1 (27:55):
But again, the best thing right again with you is
that you you know, the community that you're serving. Yeah, right,
and that's you know the culture of Atlanta. And that's
that's the point with us. When we first started out again,
you know, it's just been growing and learning, right, we
would just like, okay, look, we're marketing to everybody. We
just want people to come in and buy shoes and
buy clothes. So now it's like, okay, look we got
to tone it down and be again just more intentional
(28:17):
about you know, the things that we communicat and how
we communicate our product and again specifically to which community.
And again that's something we just recently figured out to
do and now we're just again trying to grow it.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm just you know, I'm just
always brainstorming. Man.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
I just I always think, like I think about moments too, right,
Like I think about winter moments that people need shoes.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Who was important? You know, like back to school?
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Like is there but is there like custom specific content
you could do not only to talk to kids, but
to the people that are like the parents, you know.
I think that's like as a parent, you know what
I mean, I don't want my daughter coming to meet
and just be like, Dad, buy me this shoe.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
I mean, she's gonna do it.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
But like, I think it would also be interesting to
be fun if I saw marketing from a you know,
a shoe store or shoe you know, shoe outlet or whatever,
peril brand like kind of marketing and me as a
parent and being like, you know, you know what your
kids look whack?
Speaker 3 (29:05):
They mean? That would actually you know, like that actually
be interesting?
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Man, Like I could you know, I just think about it,
gain like what are moments as of you know, who
are the people that actually have the money and spending it?
You know, and I get there are the collectors and
there's all, but I bet you there's a lot of
parents that are buying their kids shoes too. Of course,
I wonder what kind of you know, marketing and what
kind of information they would want to see from soul Player,
and it'll be more engaged.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
And we get a lot of of course, you know,
especially in our downtown to cater but all of our location,
we get a lot of parents, and so that'll be good,
you know, something to ask like what would you like
to see from a sneakable too that to speak to
you that will excite you enough to Okay, look, when
I'm buying my kids shoes, I'm going to sole play.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
So that's that's all that. Yeah, especially when your kids
feet growing all the day. Time I bought myself some shoes,
he just grew up them things like a month and
a half. Man, I was like, bro, you out here
fronting me out man, this is crazy. Man. So what's
it been like? Man, how's the journey been overall?
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Man? To be honest, I went through and like I
told you before, when I first started, man, I was
you know, depressed, stress, didn't know what I really wanted
to do to you know, trying to find my way
to finding my way and finding my purpose within what
I'm doing. And now it's you know, man, I wake
up happy every day to go to work. It's not
even worked to me, man, I work. I work all
(30:19):
day every day. It's just my life at this point.
And I used to always hear you know, a lot
of you know CEOs entrepreneurs. You know, I always say
there's no work life balance, and I didn't really understand,
you know, what it meant.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
But now I do.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
There is no work life balance. It's just you know,
work is my life and life is work, and of
course I got family. I take time for family and
kids and things like that. I'm not slacking there. But
you know again, it's I wake up every day excited,
motivated to go after it. Man.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
So it's been good. It's been good.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Y'all have done some like dope partnerships of brands like
Teching and some other folks like yeah, what else you
got to get coming up next?
Speaker 1 (30:52):
The biggest thing we got coming up next, and it's
it's actually going to be in twenty twenty five after
we wrap up this fourth quarter. We actually have a
Converse collaboration with Naruto. So the Converse has a Aruto
collaboration with about four or five different styles. So we're
gonna partner with them and do something very similar to
what we did with the Technics, but we're gonna do
that with Naruto. Man, that's gonna be it's gonna be
(31:13):
big because anime, I'm not sure if you're fai with anime,
and but the anime community man, and and and even
from a cultural standpoint, now it's like it's it's it's
super big. It's super dope. And shout out to Trap
Sushi with true.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
You know, they they do. They do a lot of
things to just highlight the culture in anime.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
And I remember when I was growing up, you know,
an anime kid, especially black, you know anime black kids.
You know, we kind of you know, we kind of
picked them day. We're just kind of to theyself, you
know what I mean. I'm very emo. God, none wrong
with that, None wrong with it. But now it's you know,
it's it's definitely like culturally relevant. And I guess you
would say cool to to proudly be an anime fan.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
And I love to see it. And again, I'm just
happy to be a part of that.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
You know, what's what's the something about the sneaker industry
that would surprise people?
Speaker 1 (32:03):
What's something about the sneaker industry that would surprise people
like y'all?
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Y'all really be having three pairs of them shoes and
them drops, don't you? Yah all?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
We do though, and a lot of times we do,
like you know, because we and people think we just
got hundreds and hundreds and units and the start. No,
it's like it's all allocated, it's all strategical place in
different stores, and the amount that you get in each
store might vary, right, So we might get a smaller
quantity and then this store over here might get a
bigger quantity, or vice versa, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (32:31):
So, and I get it. You know, people do get mad,
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
You know y'all just posted this and I got here,
y'all sold out in thirty It'd be like that sometimes.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
So but yeah, it's it's it's all allocations. I want
people to know. It's alligate. Every store doesn't get everything
quantity and style. So so yeah, that stuff. Man, what
do you what do you see the soul Play brand
evolving to in the next couple of years. Oh?
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Man, Again, it's just being super impactful, you know, even
bigg than you know, Atlanta or not bigger than that line,
just growing outside of the line and create more impacts.
So even right now we're in the process of building
out in es sports labs at the MLK Aquatic Center.
But as far as some wreck, you know, and again
on the surface is gaming, right, but with that is
(33:17):
crazy technology and we're also going to be bringing in
with the course partnership, it helps with parts of Wreck,
bringing in certification programs and that might be through Microsoft,
that might be through Google. So you know, kids that
might not want to go to traditional education route by
going to a four year college, you can still go here,
get your certification in Google, Microsoft, and still get you know,
a great paying job out of high school. Right, And
(33:40):
we want to do that not only here, but we
want to scale that out. So of course we don't
want to you know, be in the southeast area, probably
work our way up East coast and you know, eventually
go out to the West coast.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
That's that's the biggest goal. But the biggest thing I
want to say, soul play Tokyo.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
I've been telling everybody this, Okay, p would be like,
oh you so look, I'm to go in and put
it out there, soul play Tokyo because again, you know,
Tokyo is is is very streetwhear forward. They're very sneaker
for it, and of course gaming and anime is extremely
big out there, and again it just aligns with everything
that we're doing. So the biggest biggest goal on soul
play Tokyo for sure.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Oh man, I love it. Man. Going international for sure,
it got to got to man, I love it. Man.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
We look TJ before we get out of here. Man,
how can folks find out more about soul Play. Support
y'all more poorly, come buy some sneakers, Like.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Yeah, you'all can find us at soul play a t
L s O L E p L A y A
t L on Twitter, same same handle at soul play
a t L.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
And yeah, that's that's the bit. Oh and you can
shout for the address as let me add.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Okay, So our Decatur location is one zero six East
Ponce de Lyon, Decatur, Georgia. And our Lawrenceville location it's
nineteen fifty six the loose Highway squeek b one o
e O see it's it's a big sweet Lawrenceville, Georgia,
three zero zero four three ooh and.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I don't know that doting address. Look, it's only one
soul playing do today. You go right, it's only one
soul playing Dothan my bad Notthing team.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but yeah, pull up
on us, buy some shoes, follow us on social Yeah,
and yeah, just help us with our community impact because
again I always tell people, it's bigger than sneakers and shoes.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
We just used the sneakers and shoes to.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Again generate the revenue to gan to help impact our communities.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Well, that's dope with TJ Man. I appreciate you pulling
up for the pod man.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Thank you. Thanks coming to buttteron nomics and that's the
pod Jawn. We out appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
You've been listening to button Nomics and I'm your host,
Brandon Butler. Comments feedback. Want to be a part of
the show, Send us an email today at hello at
butterdomics dot com. Butter Nomics is produced in Atlanta, Georgia
at iHeartMedia by Ramsey, with marketing and support from Queen
and naked music provided by mister Hanky. If you haven't already,
hit that subscribe button and never missed an episode, and
(35:49):
be sure to follow us on all our social platforms
at butter dot at l. Listen to button Nomics on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Out count count Pump
Host
Brandon Butler
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