Jeff Alexander is a fourth-generation member ofAlexander Manufacturing, a company that transformed from contract manufacturing into a multi-million dollar business by developing proprietary products. The company started in 1927 and successfully transitioned from custom metalworking to creating branded firewood storage solutions under the Woodhaven name.

Nate Wheeler is the host of the popular Manufacturing Insiders podcast. He also owns weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.

In this episode of Manufacturing Insiders, Jeff Alexander shares how contract manufacturers can develop their own products and build lasting market position against global competition. He explains the practical steps his family business took to move away from dependency on contract work when clients began outsourcing to cheaper overseas alternatives. Alexander reveals how they identified market opportunities and built brand recognition that now drives customer loyalty.

Jeff provides actionable insights on product development strategies that work for manufacturers with existing capabilities. He discusses how to evaluate market gaps, build quality differentiation, and create effective marketing approaches that reach customers directly. Learn how his company maintains competitive advantages through American-made quality while competing against lower-priced imports on major e-commerce platforms.

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Nate (00:01.68): Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. I have Jeff Alexander with me today. He is a third generation manufacturer. They started out originally as a contract manufacturer and this is something I like to talk about a lot.

How contract manufacturers can develop their own product, bring it to market and really see huge success and growth from that strategy. Alexander Manufacturing has done a great job with this. They created a multi-million dollar business by just coming up with an idea and running with it. Jeff, thanks for joining today. How’d this whole thing get started?

Jeff (00:40.856): You want to go back to the very beginning? So the company started in 1927 by my great grandfather, Melvin Alexander. He was a woodworker. He created a lot of products for the government as well.

He had a few contracts with the Pentagon to create a top-secret bullet that gained velocity once it left the barrel. I always joked that we could have been the next Lockheed Martin if we would have stuck with it, but he just enjoyed his hobbies. I think he wasn’t necessarily focused on running a serious business at the time. So my grandfather Dale took it over at that time.

Nate (00:44.742): Sure, give me the history.

Jeff (01:35.634): He’s the one who transitioned it more into metalworking, building custom machinery for companies. One of our major revenue streams back in the day was we made machines that would drill wood for Warner Ladder Company. That’s where we made a decent amount of our money back then.

Then for some reason, in the mid-90s, that dried up and they went to more plastic base ladders. Fiberglass, that’s it. So we were shutting the doors for a while and that’s when my dad had a friend who gave us an idea for a firewood rack. The friend ended up not wanting to put in the $10,000 or whatever to get it going.

Jeff (02:33.55): And we made a few modifications to call it our own, improving upon the design structurally. During the dot com boom, we bought firewoodracks.com and we’ve been selling them online ever since underneath the Woodhaven name since probably like 98, 99, I want to say.

Nate (02:50.396): How long would you say it took to transition from the contract sort of work to completely being focused in the firewood racks?

Jeff (03:06.286): So for a long time, I want to say probably about 10, 12-ish years, we were doing some contract manufacturing, powder coating for other companies in the area, coinciding with our firewood rack business at the same time. I want to say probably about 2007, 2008, somewhere in there, we knew that the firewood racks would be our best opportunity to keep growing and put our eggs in that basket.

As companies were starting to outsource a lot of powder coating, a lot of assembly work we did for companies like Coleman, Rheem Air Conditioning. We did a lot of contract work, not just manufacturing, but just painting and packaging for them. When that stuff started going, I think they shipped a lot of that powder coating packaging system to Mexico.

That’s when we thought, you know, we’ve got a better opportunity with the firewood racks and we’re not going to chase down people who are willing to leave at any given moment.

Nate (04:16.986): That makes sense. And that’s really why I encourage that concept with the manufacturers I work with. I think there’s still plenty of contract work out there. And honestly, with the tariffs and the changes that are coming, I think that there’s going to be more and more opportunities for our manufacturers.

But I think it’s always a great diversification strategy to develop your own product. I think the thing people struggle with the most is how do you decide if something’s a good idea or not? How do you assess the market need for what your idea is and then take that next step to actually develop the product? I think that’s a big challenge. What are your thoughts on that?

Jeff (04:58.818): For sure, that’s a huge challenge. Even when we’re developing complementary products to our firewood racks, it’s hard to determine what’s going to be a good idea or not a good idea and what’s worth chasing and not chasing. It just comes down to, there’s no guarantees. There’ve been two or three inventions that I’ve had that were like, oh my gosh, we’re going to sell these to the point we’re all in mansions.

And it seems like it just doesn’t. Some of them don’t go over very well, but the thing that helps me develop new products and we’ve got a few in the works right now is just listening to what people say. You’ve got a customer base that’s bought products from us in the past and they’re like, we could really use this widget. Or if you just sold fire starters, that’d be great if you had some fire starters for sale. Now we sell fire starters.

Another thing you look for too is are there entry points in the marketplace? You just get on Amazon and shop around and see what’s available. Like if you want to make a fireplace poker set, just search it out and see. Order one or two and are they crappy?

Can you make them better? Can you make them here in the States? Can you do something more unique with the concept of a fireplace toolkit, there’s something value added that hasn’t been considered before. You just ask yourself a lot of questions.

Do a fair amount of research to see if there’s something that’s being made poorly already out there, or maybe the idea you have doesn’t even exist yet. Those are just some of the things that I run through my head when I’m thinking about new stuff.

Nate (06:54.362): I agree. I think you really need to, I think a lot of people, when they come up with an idea, they’re really quick to say, well, we’re going to do it better than other people, or we can make it cheaper than other people. They rationalize why this product is going to work. But I think you have to be really honest about it when you look at the marketplace.

If there are 10 companies out there that have a lot of market share that are doing the exact same thing as you want to do, maybe think of a different idea because that’s going to be an uphill battle the whole way. So I think you have to really be able to analyze the gap between what’s on the market and what you are trying to bring to the market and make sure that gap is big enough that there’s space to fill there. So with a product like a firewood rack, obviously, I don’t 100% understand your manufacturing process and what’s different about it from other products on the market.

In my mind, it’s probably somewhat easy to reverse engineer what you guys have done in China and make something cheaper. So how do you stay competitive against a global market with your product? What’s your strategy?

Jeff (08:20.438): That’s really tough because back in the day, we didn’t have very much competition. Now, you get on Amazon and just look up an eight foot firewood rack and there’s a billion of them out there. Something we do to differentiate, the manufacturing process, we’ve done it for so long that we can do it in our sleep. We don’t cut corners with our products.

We use thicker steel, use a rectangular tube instead of a circular tube, which is a little more expensive. We’ve also found out that using a rectangular tube makes firewood stacking for the firewood guys out there in the field a lot easier. They always pull me aside and they’re like, oh my gosh, we love your racks. They’re so much easier to stack on than the circular tube racks.

Nate (09:13.4): It makes sense too. More surface area touching the wood.

Jeff (09:16.46) Yeah, then that’s something that we didn’t even factor in when we were building it. But we have solid welded sections. So if you were to take a look at a picture of one of our racks, the upright that goes up and down is solid welded. And a lot of the competition out there just bolts together.

So, well, I mean, when they’re coming from China, you know, they’re wanting to put like 90 SKUs on a pallet. We can put about 30 on a pallet. So our product is more ready to be assembled when it comes out of the box, but it’s a little more expensive in that you’re getting what you paid for. You’re getting a solid powder coat on there. You’re getting precision drilled holes that we step back into our machine building ways and we build our own equipment to kind of drill the holes and everything.

And so, I mean, we put a lot of thought and effort into the products we sell. So that coupled with the name brand, it helps us stay relevant because people can remember the Woodhaven if they see it. And a lot of our competition on Amazon is like, I don’t know, they come up with these weird names like Vivo Home Firewood Rack or Artie Bear.

Nate (10:41.676) I see Vivo. I bought… What did I buy from Vivo? I think I bought something like… I know what it was. I bought a turbo fan. I used to have a fire… So I burn a lot of wood. I used to have a fireplace that had a heat-o-lator. And I didn’t feel like it blew enough air, so I bought Vivo Sun. I’m assuming that’s the same type of brand. But I bought a really strong fan and installed it in there. It actually worked pretty good, but in the meantime I ended up buying a wood burning insert, so that works much, much better.

Jeff (11:18.798) Yeah. So you got companies like Vivo or Sunny Days, Firewood Rack. I mean, our name branded the Woodhaven is quite literally a wood haven. It holds wood like a wood house. Yeah. I mean, you know, that’s both quality and brand recognition. We’re able to stay relevant. If you, I mean, anyone can go and look at the Amazon reviews. I go on the competitor sites and they’re like, I would never buy this. I wish I would have got the Woodhaven. It’s a couple bucks more, but it’ll last a little bit longer. Things like that.

Nate (11:56.314): Obviously, if you’re burning firewood, I think a lot of people’s motivation for doing that is saving on energy costs. At least that’s maybe mine. So you would definitely want to know that your wood rack is going to last. You have to be able to make that investment make sense. I think the American made quality aspect of it certainly would give you a competitive advantage.

Nate (12:26.684): So going back to the contract manufacturing side of things, are you still looking at that as a potential opportunity moving forward? Do you feel like there’s a lot more growth opportunity in the firewood rack space and perhaps the new inventions that you’re coming up with? Or are you looking at that as another method of scale?

Jeff (12:57.176): Right now we’ve got, since we do all of our manufacturing in house, or at least on the firewood racks, there’s a few things that we source locally from other places. But we’ve got welding equipment, we’ve got torches, we’ve got a machine shop at our old facility that we grew out of. If the right opportunity comes along, we’re not going to turn down something nice if someone comes up to us and they’re like, we need you to give us a quote on making X amount of widgets.

We could easily provide some quotes and work. We would look into it, especially like you said earlier, the tariff stuff playing a role in things and making it expensive to import things from China and Mexico. For sure we could turn that switch back on pretty quickly if the right opportunity came around.

Nate (13:49.39): I think the only thing you probably have to do is break out another website focused on that side of things. But it sounds like you have a great diverse number of skill sets. I always like when a machine shop, for example, has the ability to do some fabrication and welding and things like that. I think anything you can do to have a broader offering is going to get you in front of more customers.

Tell me about the marketing strategy. How are you getting this product in front of your customers? And maybe what ideas do you have to expand that?

Jeff (14:30.414): Well, primarily right now, we’re in a period of transitioning from back in the 2000s, television advertising and things like that was super expensive and pay-per-click stuff on Google was a lot cheaper. And now it’s flopped. I’m not saying we’re necessarily going into television or anything, but we’re looking into where the bulk of our shoppers are spending their time?

Obviously, social media has been very large for the last 10, 12 years. We’re talking to a few companies right now about getting our family story out, getting the good news about the quality and the product out. I think just bang for your buck, you can reach a lot more people that way through Instagram and YouTube.

Those are the platforms that we’re looking to, those are the platforms we’ve worked hard growing into the last couple of years. And those are the ones we’re going to continue to pursue just because of the volume of people there. The cost per impression is so much lower.

I run the pay-per-click ads on our Amazon and they’re just, it’s getting to where you can spend whatever you want on Amazon ads in a month. You can spend $85,000 if you want and they’re happy to take it and get your product. The Amazon ads do work. They just happen to be probably the most expensive ones we have to run.

Nate (16:14.966): The return on investment is definitely questionable a lot of times with PPC. I noticed you guys are doing Google Ads too, right? Are you running that as well?

Jeff (16:25.77): We have someone, we have a company that we’re working with to outsource some of that. I’ve managed to learn how to do Amazon’s pay-per-click and it’s an animal of its own and I’m like, I don’t know if I want to touch another one of these things.

Nate (16:44.794): Actually I just googled that and if you don’t mind, I want to do something a little bit unusual because we did chat a little bit about this. I wanted to show you a couple thoughts that I had, take them or leave them, but just some thoughts that might help. So you can say yes or no if you don’t want it.

Nate (17:10.332): And by the way, I always like to take just a second to say, our mission with manufacturing insiders is to really just share peer-to-peer knowledge between manufacturing leaders, what strategies are working, what strategies aren’t working, give you some tips that can help out. So if you learned something from the video today and enjoy the conversation, please hit a like on that YouTube video, subscribe to the channel, and we’re going to be sharing a lot more stuff like this.

But anyway, back to the PPC. This is something I preach all the time. Especially if you have brand recognition and you have pretty good ranking, which you do across the board for terms like firewood racks. You guys are ranking organically very well for that. You have no problem ranking for somebody searching for a Woodhaven firewood rack.

Nate (18:07.682): If we take a quick peek at your, all I did was Google Woodhaven firewood racks. And right at the top here, we have a sponsored post. So this is somebody that already knows that they’re looking for a Woodhaven firewood rack. Why do I want to pay for that click?

Jeff (18:28.62): A lot of our web traffic that we do get in, I look at the reports, a lot of it’s organic.

Nate (18:33.914): So, obviously I want to pay for the keyword set, firewood rack, sure, right? But my company name, if somebody’s already looking for my company name, they’re going to find me. Even if there’s an ad, they’re going to click on firewood haven right here. So a lot of times you’ll see companies running, and I’m not saying this is intentional, but I see a lot of people do this.

I see a lot of companies that run PPC. They’re like, look at all the conversions you got from our PPC campaign. Well, 90% of them came from our brand search. It’s always the money. So just a thought.

Jeff (19:06.813): No, that makes sense. And it’s funny because I was doing some work with Amazon. Amazon gave me a client engagement rep or something and they were always like, you’ve got to do brand defense and Woodhaven firewood racks on Amazon is a valuable search term there. So it’s like, sometimes you’re paying $8, $9 a click and it’s like, well, do you play the brand defense or do you just let them go ahead and find your rack?

I mean, I definitely see it both ways. And I wonder if you scroll down, I wonder if it has to do with Woodland Direct. They’re a company that we sell a lot through. That’s sponsored as well.

Nate (19:55.994): That’s fine for them because they want to sell your racks. Obviously, that’s taking it away from you, you’re going to have to give them percentages of the sale or however that works. But that’s their prerogative if they’re selling your product. But for you, if they’re looking for Woodhaven, they’re going to find you.

And we’ve actually done these tests before where I had a customer that was running pay-per-click and they were going after their own brand searches and I said well if my theory is correct here we should see the organic clicks so when we go to Google search console we should see the organic clicks for your brand searches go up when we shut off the Google Ads for that keyword and it did it was a direct correlation. That’s one thing that I always preach is like why waste money on why give money to Google when you don’t need to.

Jeff (20:53.452): Makes perfect sense.

Nate (20:55.792): The other thing I was going to show you too, because we chatted about digging into the customer experience and are they looking for things on your website that aren’t there? How are they interacting with it? So I just want to show you this other tool that I use. Pretty cool. It’s called Crazy Egg. And I’m going to show you a snapshot from my website. It was a landing page we just developed for a Google Ads campaign.

Nate (21:25.306): This tool is super cool because it gives you a bunch of different ways to look at the people that are visiting your site. So I’m just going to look at this ads page on my desktop. And it gives me a heat map that’ll show you where people are clicking and how they’re interacting with it. You can actually watch recordings of sessions as well.

So it’s loading here. So this snapshot has 284 visits. So what I could see here, when I looked at this, I was like, all right, I noticed that very few people are clicking on my Book Alive demo, but most people are clicking on the See the Results here.

So the first thing I tried was to get rid of the See the Results. Well, that still didn’t influence how many people were clicking this. So then what I did was I, instead of having this scrolled down the page to a place where I have some results, I had it open a video of me just giving a nice personal intro to WeCreate and why we do what we do.

And right off the bat, we started seeing more conversions from this campaign. So it’s pretty cool that you can see exactly how people are interacting with it. You can actually see also how far people are scrolling down the page.

So this is giving you a heat map. You can see what part of the page 100% of people are seeing. What part of the page only 25% of the people are seeing. So you can see that the views are really highly concentrated in this area.

That tells me I really need to make sure I’m putting what I need them to see here. And obviously, the further you go down the page, you’re getting less and less and less. So just a cool tool. I thought you might be interested in that and might want to try it out.

Jeff (23:18.124): That’s very interesting. I’ll make note of that crazy egg.

Nate (23:24.028): It’s pretty neat. That was just my little marketing insert there.

Jeff (23:30.368): Is that a subscription based service or is it?

Nate (23:33.756): It’s pretty reasonable. I can’t remember what exactly we pay for it, it’s probably a hundred, a hundred and fifty bucks a month or so.

Nate (23:43.74): But worthwhile, and it’s something you can honestly, if you’re testing out a new campaign, you build a new landing page, you don’t have to pay for it indefinitely, but at least get your page where it needs to be.

Jeff (23:55.712): And so that’s just you can track basically our homepage, just where people are clicking and not clicking.

Nate (24:04.548): You can put in any page on the website that you want to track. So I’ve specified that one. I’ve specified a couple of the blog articles that we get a lot of traffic on because I want to figure out how I can monetize the blog article a little bit better.

Nate (24:20.764): I did have one more tip for you if you’re interested. And this comes from me being a guy that burns firewood. I have never, firewood stacking is a challenge. Keeping the firewood dry is a challenge.

Putting tarps over it that blow off in the winter time and then snow piles up on it and you have to try to dig the snow off before you pull the tarp off. It’s all a pain in the butt, but I’ve never once thought to myself I should go look for a firewood rack.

I thought a really good strategy that I would do for you guys if I was in charge of the marketing is going after more of the longtail stuff. So what I mean by that is somebody like me might look up like what’s the best way to keep firewood dry and off the ground in the wintertime. Or are there tarp tie downs for firewood?

Just things like that that somebody like me would look for before I would ever go shop for a firewood rack. And I think that would really open up your market beyond those people that already know that they’re looking for a firewood rack.

Jeff (25:37.144): Kind of like addressing a problem people might not be aware of having basically.

Nate (25:42.362): Right. And another thing I was thinking too is if I was shopping for a firewood rack, my thoughts are how much wood, how much time does the wood I can stack in an eight foot firewood rack last me? You know what I’m saying? So some way to help people calculate usage and like what sort of rack they would need. You might have that on your website.

Jeff (26:09.514): No, we have people calling us that all the time. And it just comes down to the individual. I’d tell them like an eight foot firewood rack should last quite a bit for just the person who’s, if you’re a casual wood burner and you’d have one fire like every four or five days, that eight foot rack’s probably going to last you full of wood quite a long time. But if you’re someone that the firewood is the primary heat source, you’re going to chew through that pretty quick.

And we’ve had people in like West Virginia, one lady called me and she goes, yeah, this is my sixth 16 foot firewood rack. And I’m like, holy cow, what are you doing building a wall? And they said, they just primarily heat. The people that do firewood down to a science are pretty smart folks.

Like they know that dried firewood burns a lot better than freshly cut firewood. That person who’s got six of our 16 foot racks probably has two or three racks full of freshly cut wood. They probably got three or four that have been drying out for over a year sitting in the sun.

You want your firewood to have like a little hollow ring to it whenever you hit it or tap it. That’s a good way of telling it’s dry. So the people that burn firewood seriously have got it down to quite literally a science.

Nate (27:39.484): I’m still learning because this is really my first full year with a wood burning insert. So I don’t use quite as much wood as I did with the previous, but I still go through a lot of wood. I just had a giant pile of it that I chopped up over the summer last year and just kind of pull from it. It’s under tarps, which, like I said, is a huge pain in the butt, especially when you get like four feet of snow like we have several times this year.

Nate (28:10.074): But super cool product. So give me a piece of advice that you would give to someone that is considering developing their own product. Maybe they have an idea, maybe they don’t. What would you tell them?

Jeff (28:28.27): A rule of thumb that we use around here is if you’re gonna create a new product, especially something that’s not really even on the market, find a way to make it for yourself. If it’s something that, I’m trying to think of an example here that I could use.

Like going back to the first cars like Henry Ford, something that was not around ever. Or even the Harley-Davidson motorcycle guys, they built those for themselves for fun and improved on their own designs and eventually found that there’s people that were like, hey, we’ve never seen this two-wheeled motorized bike before, but where do I get one?

Jeff (29:26.398): The best thing you can do is find a way to manufacture something you see in your house that you might need. Because if you need it, there’s probably a chance other people need it as well. And if you can take some time, I would say number one, don’t rush anything. Don’t feel like you’ve got to get it to market tomorrow or the opportunity is gone.

Take your time seeing what needs you have and addressing your own needs with your own invention. Always keep perfecting it. Maybe you’re like, man, if this was circular shape versus square, it’d be so much easier to use. Then boom, all of a sudden you’ve got more of a complete product to take to market that way.

I would say that and just listen to what the people around you are saying. Just when you’re out to dinner with your friends, they’re like, man, I could really use a towel rack next to my pool, but I hate the plastic ones. And it’s like a metal towel rack next to the pool. There’s little nuggets of information always out there. You just gotta keep an ear open and be willing to experiment on your own.

Nate (30:42.458): I think that’s all great advice. Everything that you just said right there is sort of a repetitive theme that I’ve heard from everybody that’s in a similar situation as you. One of the big things that jumped out that you said was the continuous improvement of the product. Because across the board, the people that are successful with these products are always coming up with new ways to make the product better, to give it more applications. So I think that’s excellent.

What about one of them, so having an idea, being able to manufacture the product? The first part of the challenge, the second part of the challenge is how the heck are you gonna sell it? How are you gonna get in front of people? What are your general thoughts? I know you guys are using some Amazon, you’re using some SEO pay-per-click, what do you say to somebody who has a consumer focused product.

What would be your recommendation to help them get it to market?

Jeff (31:47.566): That’s a really good question because it changes all the time. So when we first came out with these firewood racks, the internet was starting to not become a joke at the time. The way to get our products in front of people was to physically go to trade shows. And my dad, Don, signed up for a show called the HPBA show. It’s the Home Patio Hearth Association, something like that.

Jeff (32:17.354): And he had, we had not really taken this product to market yet. So he was looking to see if there were any wholesale opportunities out there, get some feedback from them to see if this was worth a shot or not. And so that way of doing things is probably extinct now, but that’s a tough question because that is hard for someone.

I’m trying to put myself in someone’s shoes who just invented something. I’ve got this great product, what do I do now? Amazon’s a really easy way to, I mean, not easy. There’s a lot of science behind it.

But for someone who’s not gotten their product out yet, you can list a product on there fairly easily. There’s a lot of avenues like, we sell on Wayfair as well. I don’t think the risk involved of putting a product on some of those networks is super hard. I’d say you have to have some kind of an LLC or business certificate of formal letters of incorporation. So I guess that’s where I would start getting through that paperwork, that red tape.

Nate (33:32.828): And you have to, I think you have to have a product UPC too, right?

Jeff (33:36.716): So for someone starting out, I would probably try to do things as low cost as possible. So try and register a business, go through that paperwork, that red tape. And then there’s websites like GS1 we use to create UPCs, things like that. So that’d be step one and step two.

And then after that, it opens some doors for some low risk, mediumish, lowish reward. But once you get a product out there and you can see it, it takes time. So that’s another thing I would say is I wouldn’t give up too quickly because we come up with new products and we put them on Amazon and our website and all of our wholesalers on the internet.

And sometimes it can take a while for that concept to really grow. Our carts are one of the best, in my opinion, one of the best products that we make because they’re solid welded. There’s only one axle that goes in there and a cotter pin and you’re ready to roll.

That took four or five, six years for people to really start enjoying it. And now we sell like five or six a week, which for us is great for the accessory side of things. You just can’t give up too quickly. But I would say starting with some kind of articles of incorporation and getting like a GS1 or a UPC, which is basically a social security number for your product. And it also protects your product too.

Try to come up with some intelligent brand name for your product. And I would say the thing that I would do too is find whatever your product is and make your brand name part or make the actual name of the product part of the brand name. That makes everything searchable so much easier.

Nate (35:42.97): That’s a good point. I mean, I think that’s all really good advice. The only thing I would add to it is, I’m a web guy, website, SEO, I think are really important. And that’s like you said, a long game, you don’t just start a new website and rank for what you made overnight, but a lot of times you can find keywords that are around.

Like you might not rank tomorrow for a firewood rack, but you might be able to rank for solid steel USA made firewood rack. That’s a long tail keyword. So you can go after lower competition keyword sets with a brand new website and potentially rank for some of that stuff. That’s another low cost way to get into a marketplace and just see what people are looking for.

Jeff (36:38.03): I would say I should have said that I just assume it’s like second knowledge to me, but I would recommend as you’re doing those things through Amazon and Wayfair definitely have your own storefront, your own retail storefront for sure.

Nate (36:56.432): Right. Because there’s people like me that’ll go, I’m very much against giving money to some of these corporations. So what I’ll do is I’ll go to Amazon, I’ll find a product I like, and then I’ll try to find that company’s website and see if they sell it directly through their website. Because I know I’m doing them a favor too, because you’re not giving that money to Amazon.

Jeff (37:18.19): We get a lot of that where sometimes my dad or someone’s like, where are we spending all this money on Amazon ads and stuff? I’m like, well, we had two people call in the last month and said, yeah, we saw your ads on Amazon and we wanted to give you a call and see if you’re the manufacturer. And we just thought we’d buy from you. Sometimes our Amazon ads don’t, they hurt our conversion rate, or not our conversion rate, our average cost of goods sold on the Amazon side, but they help out on the retail side from our own storefront.

Nate (37:53.892): I honestly wish more people would do that. I don’t think a lot of people think about it, but I think it’d be good for U.S. small business if people would just take that little extra minute to just find the manufacturer and buy from them directly.

Nate (38:19.1): Well, I mean, you guys have built a great company. I really like your story, kind of that generational, really quality focused, focused on employee quality of life as well. And it’s great to see.

Nate (40:45.744): Yep. Awesome. Well, hey, great advice, Jeff. I really appreciate you coming on today. I think that anybody who’s in the process of coming up with their own product is really going to benefit from the things that you had to say today. And like I said before, if you enjoyed the video, please like, subscribe to the channel. And thanks for coming on, Jeff. Awesome. All right. We’ll see you.