This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:00:00]:

To build a thriving, sustainable, long term business, it absolutely requires a certain level of consideration and patience. The sweet spot is making sure you can line that up with the corporate ambitions. And so you’re delivering on your targets, but in a healthy way.

 

Kyler Mason [00:00:15]:

Whether you’re going to market through dealers, distributors or some other partner channel, the mediated sale is complex. We call it B2BX.

 

John Gough [00:00:24]:

But the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I’m John Goff.

 

Kyler Mason [00:00:29]:

And I’m Kyler Mason. And this is why you win. Presented by element three.

 

John Gough [00:00:34]:

Our guest today is Vanda Razvodovska, the VP of sales at Dect. DECT makes incredible truck storage accessories that they sell direct to consumers on their website and in retail environments, as well as to commercial upfitters and to fleets. We got a chance to look at the DECKED product at the NTEA show this year and we’re incredibly impressed. It’s a very, very cool product. You should definitely go check it out. Vanda comes to DECKED after several years at Nike and in other direct to consumer retail environments, and she has just a wealth of experience. Our conversation with her was really interesting and we’re excited to share it with you today. Bunda, welcome to the show.

 

John Gough [00:01:13]:

We’re so excited to have you today and really grateful for you for coming on. Bunda is the vp of partners sales at DECT, which produces some really incredible materials for trucks and truck beds and some commercial spaces, as well as direct to consumer. And so your background is really interesting to us because you’ve worked across retail and you’ve worked direct to consumer and now you’ve also got this distributed model that is really relevant to the people listening to this podcast. And so we’re hoping to explore all of that with you today. But before we go all the way there, I just wanted to get you to kind of give yourself an introduction and tell us where you been, where you from?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:01:53]:

Happy to be here. I’ve been an admirer of element three for a while, so thanks for the invite. I’ve been at DECt for the last nine months. You did a brilliant intro there. Maybe I’ll focus more on what led me to Dect and where my career was. Prior to that. I spent twelve years at Nike, mostly at the world headquarters on the commercial side of the business, merchandising for most of my career, as well as some time in sales and strategy as well. A big part of my career at Nike was on the specialty side of the business, which is pointed to sport categories like skateboarding, golf, tennis, soccer.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:02:30]:

That has a very important cohort of partners that we would call independents, you know, mom and pop shops that, you know, would sell Nike through their channels. But equally, there was a business through big box like Dick Sporting goods Shields Academy. So much of my career at Nike was really managing portfolios at the end of the day with my peer group. Ultimately that led me to DECKED, like you said, as a distributor model, Big B, two b partners that we manage through my team, but equally an important DTC business through dec.com. it was an excellent opportunity to take my experience to a new industry. It’s been a big learning curve, but I did it for two reasons. One, the product market fit that DECKED has is quite significant as you think about who we can serve. And then equally the team, a bunch of ambitious but kind human beings and I’ve considered a privilege to work with them.

 

Kyler Mason [00:03:23]:

I bet we’ll jump all over the place from Nike back to DECKED and connecting experiences. But tell us a little bit about your team at DECT just to kind of give shape to what your world looks like.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:03:34]:

Yeah, love talking about my team. It’s an incredible bunch. Really proud to support them. I lead the wholesale side of the business, so I have a peer tailor who leads the DECKED.com business. Just to give you an idea of the landscape within my team were crafted in really three main groups as a territory sales group led by the number two sales hire ever at DECT. He leads a team of six regional sales managers, each with a specific group of states that they serve, and they partner with SEMA retailers. So we have a network of about 3000 SEMA retailers that help get us DECKED product in front of consumers. They equally call on wholesale distributor partners, both national and regional.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:04:23]:

And the third panel they call on is commercial outfitter partners that are pointed more squarely at commercial fleet business. That’s our territory. Sales team. We equally have what I call an emerging channel partner team. The last two years, the DECT sales team has spent time selling to small and medium. Besides fleets, DECKED is only ten years old and the last two years is really the first two years where the team would say they’ve intentionally sold to the fleet. So they targeted small and medium sized fleets to learn the dynamics of the industry, what it means to co sell with our partners like SEMA retail and commercial upfitters. And through that effort, at the tail end of 2023, the team won some really incredible, interesting deals with larger fleets, enterprise fleets, which gave us some great proof points that we can probably better position our team and find the right skill set to serve enterprise fleets.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:05:25]:

It has slightly different selling motions, different service levels, different level of expectations. That’s why I call it emerging. So the second team is channel partners. We have a strategic partner manager there, Rachel, who’s been with the company for eight years. So since Dect was two years old, she’s got incredible institutional and industry knowledge, and she’s been partnering with our account executives on refining those selling motions on the enterprise fleet side of the business. And we’ll grow that team accordingly as we hit business business. KPI’s to sell to enterprise fleets through.

 

Kyler Mason [00:05:59]:

Our commercial partners is the you’re describing as sales inside of the structure. So an integrated sales and marketing and channel approach, or are those separate teams and you’re just talking about the way you’re working together?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:06:13]:

My team is 100% sales focused. We partner with our peers over on the marketing side of the business accordingly. So territory sales team, then a channel partner team, and an equally emerging team dedicated to the specialty side of the business. For the first time ever, DeCT has small format product for the last ten years. To be a customer of dect, you really needed to own a truck bed. And we have three core product that fit in those truck bed. Truck beds is our drawer system, the DECKED cargo glide, and the DEC to toolbox, all large format product. In 2024, we launched Deco Cases, which is the first small format product, which enables us to distribute through different channels in the very early stages of launching a specialty, a specialty strategy with some key partners on the specialty side of the business.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:07:09]:

And what do we mean by specialty? Through the independence across several verticals, hook and bullet. So fish or hunt retailers hardware think like the do it yourself consumer or trades person, what we could call prosumer sport and outdoor farm and ranch. We have a leader there that’s building that strategy and just in the early days of starting to scale out that business.

 

Kyler Mason [00:07:37]:

What does independent mean in your world when you say that?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:07:41]:

Good question. You know, not a publicly held company, typically a one door retailer, sometimes three or as big as ten doors. You know, it’s not like a shield or an academy that has many doors across the region or across the country. So they serve a very small trade zone of consistent return customers that calls on them. And those customers typically look at those independent specialty retailers as a point of expertise, really trusted advisor on what’s the best brands, what’s the best product. The sales associates are usually really well versed on the brands and can do a great job of storytelling, the brand features and benefits. And again, they’re trusted advisors because often the community’s coming back and back for repeat purchases.

 

John Gough [00:08:33]:

I’m getting the feeling that that’s got to be a very high touch, what kind of long term investment to get those channels really activated because of the high level of trust that the sales point has to have in your brand and in your product before they’re willing to make those recommendations to friends and people who are really trusting in them.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:08:56]:

Absolutely. Yeah. Some of these shops, they would say they consider themselves editors or curators for their, they’re a customer base, so they’re very careful about who they do or don’t carry. I think it depends on the product category as well. Some product categories are just commodities and very transactional. DEC doesn’t want to be bucketed in that space. Our marketing team has spent a lot of effort the last ten years building a very specific, unique brand. We want to make sure that that brand is story told in retail as well.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:09:27]:

So we’re being very intentional about who we partner with in that space on the specialty side of the business as well as how we show up in retail. We won’t partner with shops who won’t commit to retail footprint with us. The onus is on us to build the displays and the skin kits and the brand copy and content of how we want to show up in those stores. But that’s certainly like a foundational ask with those partners that they will partner with us to provide an appropriate retail footprint four by four space. So what’s that 16 sqft. So it’s not an insignificant ask considering how crowded some of those spaces can be and where new brand doesn’t have proof and sell through yet because we haven’t been selling any of our prior large format products to them. So they are certainly called it taking a bet on introducing us to their customer base. But we do have proof point in the business that the team’s been driving over the last ten years to give them the confidence that is the right bet and that we have consumer overlap.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:10:25]:

The customers that Dec is serving in other channels today where we want to serve through their channels is there. We have a really interesting data point through dec.com that 68% of DECKED.com customers fish camp or hunt yet we’re not in their shopping paths today because we have as a brand been squarely focused on the automotive side of the business through B2B, which was the right thing to do for the first ten years as they look to establish the brand and become a leader in the automotive space. But we have consumers who use our product for recreational purposes as well. Yet we’re forcing them to go out of their typical shopping path to find DECKED and we want to reduce that friction, streamline their, their shopping paths and be where they are when they go and buy their fish hunt or camp gear.

 

Kyler Mason [00:11:21]:

So you’ve got salespeople assigned to territories for the independents. What do you think would accelerate the rate of, I don’t know, adoption or even the pull through having these store owners, these independents reaching out to DECKED to say how do I get my hands on this? What do you think would help you accelerate that?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:11:39]:

We purposely want to slow our roll and make sure we have the right blueprint with the right partners out of the gate, make sure our sell through tactics are working. So we’re setting our customers, our retailers up for success and messaging the brand and the product correctly. So while we’re an ambitious bunch here at duckd absolutely. And we have strong growth targets as we’re entering a new channel we want to be intentional and considerate about how we do it. So if you ask me 18 months from now how we accelerate I’ll probably have a strong plan and a desire to accelerate it. Let’s say between now and then you know, the next twelve to 18 months it’s more about getting the blueprint right with the right partners out of the gate. And so yes, we may say no to customers, retailers who want to sell DECKED simply because they don’t fit the profile or the criteria of our first twelve months in this space. And it’s no dog on, on that retailer that we may potentially say no to.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:12:40]:

We just have a prioritized consumer profile that we’re going after first. And certainly Dec products are quite universal. Right. The use cases is massive with all of our product, the back of the truck bed accessories as well as the small, small format boxes. But how we introduce it to these new consumers, new markets we have a quite considered thought process and we’ll look to be disciplined about how we do that for the first twelve to 18 months and next chapter will be disciplined as well, but perhaps with a more inclusive wider aperture.

 

Kyler Mason [00:13:14]:

This is calculated and talk me through how that decision was made to really be deliberate about how you’re going to really roll out the product and open up distribution and test and things like that. And is there experience you have from Nike that’s helped inform the approach here?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:13:30]:

Yeah, actually I’m glad you nudged me on the Nike example because there is a super relevant business case there is. Think about Nike skateboarding. The independent are skate shops. They’re often one door community hubs that sell the most curated, edited assortment ever. They want the hottest product that they can get their hands on and not a lot of noise. So a lot of these skate shops will be very clean looking. They’ll have like a t shirt on a hanger and then like five inches until the next t shirt. So it’s very curated.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:14:02]:

The footwear wall would be beautiful by brand. And with just the iconic, you know, Nike, Adidas fans and some of the, some of the more endemic skate brands as well. What they do and who brands they introduce has a halo effect on the rest of the market. So if you can get it right with those, let’s call it tastemaker, cohort of retailers out of the gates, then you can benefit from the halo to the broader market. It’s important that phasing versus going for the big gross mass market revenue out of the gates, that’s potentially not the long term sustainable approach versus getting really targeted on what retail partners will help us introduce the Dec brand to this new consumer base.

 

John Gough [00:14:48]:

You are familiar with these stores in a very intimate kind of way. As a sales leader at Nike, I think a general manager. How much time do you spend in the retailer environment or in the purchase environment?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:15:02]:

Yeah, I mean, it’s the most important place to be. At the end of the day, all the answers sit there often, and I’ve been guilty of it as well. We sit behind our desks or in our corporate offices and just talk to ourselves on what’s the best approach. And at the end of the day, when you’re in market in front of retailers and in front of consumers, even if it’s just observing shopping habits or what are they wearing when they’re doing the activity that your product can enable, all the answers are there. But at the same time, we’re all business leaders and have corporate goals and ambitions. And so I think the magic lies in marrying the two. But when one of them gets too skewed, even if you’re following corporate goals too much, you often do it at expense of doing what’s right for the consumer. If you follow the consumer too much, you know, you’re potentially not on brand.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:15:51]:

So there’s on either side of that, you know, that imbalance is detrimental. So it’s finding that sweet spot between listening to the consumer and then understanding how that aligns to business objectives and getting after it from there.

 

John Gough [00:16:03]:

Yeah. Looking back, are there any moments that stand out to you? Of times when it’s gone really right or you’d think, oh man, I really regret the other direction.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:16:14]:

Yes, gosh, I could spend like 5 hours talking to you about failures and equally successes, but gosh, I think growth is a really dangerous word. I like to talk about like healthy, sustainable growth versus growth at all costs. And anytime leaders or a company are required to hit certain growth targets and at the same time not being enabled to do it in the right way with the right pace, and it gets.

 

Kyler Mason [00:16:42]:

Dangerous to what you just said. How did you suss that out with Dect before jumping on? Was that a big part of your criteria? And what are the goals? What’s the leadership style? Tell us about a thing that seems to be a very core business value of yours. Tell us about how you vetted that.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:17:02]:

Yeah, dectism is one of the most ambitious groups I’ve ever worked with. But it comes with a healthy dose of understanding what DECT is good at and equally where DECT needs to evolve and committing to either the resources or the energy to get better. If it’s a space that endgame is going to help us reach our, reach our goals, sometimes that’s upskilling our team, which I prefer. If we’re talking about team and talent, sometimes it’s upskilling the team to align the skillset to new ambitions. DECT has a goal that 50% of our leadership team is in house, promoted in house, which I love. I’m a huge fan of that. But sometimes we don’t have time to get on that learning and development path to upskill our teammates. And that’s a moment where we may just need to hire expertise from outside the company to enable our goals.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:17:59]:

So DEct has a healthy dose of what we’re good at and where we need some help. DECKED equally has the advantage of a product that has massive product market fit. So you asked me what helped me get to yes to join Dect is that product market fit. And what that enables is building a great portfolio which then enables you to do the right thing based on whatever channel of business needs. So dect is a growth company. Maybe today that means every single channel of business has to grow double digits or more. But future state, as we get more mature, we’re going to have three or four to five thriving channels of business. So that pie has like healthy slices.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:18:43]:

And then based on the dynamics of the industry, we can play the portfolio and find growth. More growth out of one channel, less growth out of another channel. If that’s like the right thing to do. Industry is always changing. Consumer preferences are always changing. Our product portfolio is always changing. Right. Sometimes we’re going to have product that hits and is hot.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:19:05]:

Other times we might be purposely sunsetting a product. And so that means strategically divesting from it in market. Ideally you have the next best product lined up, but it doesn’t always work out that way. So future state, I mean, Dex goal is to have three, four, five channels of business that is thriving and we can manage that portfolio accordingly to do the right thing for our partners in the business.

 

John Gough [00:19:28]:

Just as I’m synthesizing and listening, I feel like you’ve got a really keenly honed sense of timing. Is one of the things that you maybe keep referring to is, is the product market fit right? Are we in the right channels at the right time with the right people? Are we listening in the right, in the right ways? And are we being patient in the right places and impatient in the right places? And sort of we’re reflecting back to you. I think one of the reasons that you’re winning, that you’re winning you personally, but also the reason dect is winning right now is just being willing to be really observant about the right time for the right thing. Does that resonate? Does that feel close to home to you?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:20:09]:

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve all probably been part of business where we’ve like forced something. You can do that with a great product, with great sales teammates who have great relationships, and you can pull favors. You need some strings, but that’s always temporary. To build a thriving, sustainable, long term business, it absolutely requires a certain level of consideration and patience. The sweet spot is making sure you can line that up with the corporate ambitions. And so you’re delivering on your targets, but in a healthy way.

 

John Gough [00:20:38]:

I’d love to hear a moment when that went really well or that again, just like totally botched it.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:20:47]:

Yeah, look, this one is like all over media, publications, so I feel comfortable sharing it. But late 2010s, Nike skateboarding was in its 20th year or so. So really no skateboarder kid at the time, you know, the 15 year old skateboarder, our core consumer, had ever lived without Nike as a skateboarding brand, which is important, you know, because as Nike was entering skateboarding in the early two thousands, led by Sandy Bodecker, you know, where he took a Nike basketball shoe in the dunk. Actually, he didn’t take the shoe. He noticed that skateboarders were really appropriating it and started skateboarding in Nike dunks and had an incredible idea to create an SB version, a skateboard version, and sell it to skate shops. Only the skateboard business cycles are, I wouldn’t say they’re predictable, but they’re very consistent in like, these six year cycles where skateboarding spikes become super popular and then drops for a bit. Kids are obviously still skateboarding. You’re always going to have core kids out there skateboarding.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:21:52]:

It’s a lifestyle for many of these kids, and then the business cycle will pick back up again. And in late 2010s, skateboarding was really on a valley of those cycles, and Nike was contributing to it in the sense that Nike was a growth company and required every sport category to drive growth versus the portfolio approach. We’ve talked about prior Nike dunks, this iconic shoe. You know, you could walk into any skate shop that had access to Nike dunks, and you’d have to go to the very back of the skate shop and you’d see this big pile of green, mint green SB boxes of dunks on 50% off sale. And we realized that we had overstocked, oversold an iconic shoe. That’s really at the center of the success of the Nike SB brand. So as category leaders, I was on the merchandising side of the business. There.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:22:45]:

We all came together, sales leaders, merchandising leaders, and product creation leaders, to revisit our strategy and what growth meant. And maybe it meant degrowth for a while, to kind of pull back almost that example of a bow where you pull the arrow back to enable it to fly forward. So that was certainly a moment where we had to revisit our strategies, revisit how many units we were putting in the market. And, you know, at a brand like Nike, you can’t just degrowth without finding growth elsewhere. So in that moment, no other sports drove growth to offset what we strategically had to do at SB. But then, equally within the skateboarding business, we looked at other avenues of growth that would help tide us through doing the right thing for the core skate shops. And ultimately it took two years. But we did rebuild trust back with the skate shops.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:23:32]:

We got more targeted about how many units we put out in the market. So it went back to the scarcity model for those iconic models. It took two years, really, to make that comeback. So it does take time. So probably better to be considered upfront and do the right thing and take that level of patience upfront versus having to really fix issues future state. But it wasn’t because Nike didn’t have great leaders in the category at that time. It’s just often lots of different corporate pressures. Often it’s not just one decision that creates an issue, but it’s like papercuts.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:24:05]:

It’s a whole bunch of different decisions that aren’t necessarily on brand or on strategy as you think about doing the right thing for the core consumer and the core customer and ultimately the brand.

 

John Gough [00:24:16]:

I love the way that you’re describing their relationship with the skate shops and that story and building trust with them instead of taking an approach where they are beholden to you. You’re the behemoth. You have the control and a lot of power in that relationship, naturally. And it would be very easy to say to them, I imagine, why aren’t you moving these units, put all the blame and pressure on them. Instead you’re taking a real partnership approach and saying, we’re not merchandising this appropriately in your environment and we need to scale this back so that you can trust us and that we can be a good partner to you long term and that we’re going to grow together.

 

Kyler Mason [00:24:52]:

Just nerd out for a second like you’ve been building this d two c muscle and killing it with DECKED. And it’s going to be interesting to see with, I’m assuming, the tech stack that you guys have, what sort of shopping journey plays out where you are starting to like retail a little bit more often and have product and independence. Like what sort of referencing are they doing online when they actually maybe end up purchasing in store. Do you guys have any hypotheses on how that’s going to play out?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:25:22]:

Absolutely, yes. And today Dec has no owned retail where you can go to a DECKED space and touch feel the product. That’s a critical role that our B2B partners play for us. And we take that seriously as we think about building displays that display our drawer system, our cargo glide and our toolbox to enable them to play that role for us. We have 2000 SEMA retailers with displays today. If you were to go on the DECKED.com dealer Locator, which we take a ton of pride in, in the traffic, we can drive to our retailers through the dealer locator. To give you an example, my peer on the ecom side of the business, she has, her and her team have an OKR, an organizational key result metric, which is how much traffic they can drive to the dealer locator. So they’re actively thinking of digital strategies to help drive our B2B business.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:26:19]:

Yet they still have their own revenue target. So I think that’s an interesting tactical example of how Dec thinks about overall demand in the marketplace. Our job is to try and understand what is appropriate demand. Let’s say as we’re thinking about a year in our annual planning process, what’s the overall demand out there we should be capturing? And then we need a perspective on, okay, what percentage should we be capturing through our channel, our channels of business, whether it’s dec.com, our SEMA retailers, our wholesale distributors, or our commercial upfitters. And that’s like next level math to try and understand rev targets by channel. But it’s our job. But at the end of the day, if you click really, really high up to our goal, it’s simply to capture demand. And we don’t really care what channel it gets captured through.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:27:14]:

We just want to enable great shopping experiences. Whether that’s to your question. Kyler on Deck.com, that information consumption, they may have their favorite SEMA retailer down the street from where they live, that they’ve gotten all their truck parts from, and they love the team there and they trust the install process. We want to enable that. And if that means having great product information on our e comm site so they know exactly what they’re getting and what SKU they need for their specific make model trucks, we still consider that a win, that we’ve enabled that shopping journey and that the dollars flow through the SEMA retailer if they choose to purchase through dec.com because they just want to install it themselves and they’re familiar with our product and don’t need the expertise of an installer, and we want to enable that as well. So at the end of the day, it’s like Tippy top goals capture demand and create great shopping experiences however they choose to make their purchase. DECT is only ten years old, so its origin story and its growth came in this period where omnichannel is just a consumer expectation. I almost feel funny using that term, omnichannel, because if you put yourself in the shoes as a shopper, rarely are we like, okay, now I’m on DECKED.com and now I’m going to transition to the offline experience and assume the retailer to touch and feel the display.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:28:33]:

Right? But that’s how we talk about it, you know, internally as business leaders, is crafting those experiences accordingly, all the brand touch points, I think just trying to come back to the consumer experience as much as we can of how do we enable a seamless, frictionless online to offline and maybe back online and probably the back and forth during a shopping experience if you were to map it out from the moment of first awareness of the brand to. We think it’s twelve to 18 months for a DECKED consumer to purchase $1,600 average price point. So it’s not the most expensive out there on the market as you think about truck accessories, but it’s certainly not a small price point like impulse buy. Pretty considered buy. So over that twelve to 18 months time period, the different brand touch points they will have is vast. We as business leaders, whether we’re my marketing peer, my ecom peer, or me and my team on the sales time, we simply want to create incredible brand touch points. Wherever it may be. The timing of the brand starting only ten years ago, and the consumer expectations that have lined during that decade related to online offline shopping.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:29:43]:

We’re not a 50 year old brand like many of our competition is where it was squarely started with B2B. Only then they had these legacy brands built 90% of their businesses. B2B 10%, if they’re lucky, is running through Ecom. I mean, if they’re lucky in the sense of, as you think about building a diverse portfolio, so they’re potentially flip flop to DECKED where we were just founded in a moment, in a time period where B2B and e column was equally important. And that’s reflected in our mix of business and how we go to market.

 

Kyler Mason [00:30:21]:

You should feel lucky. We have a lot of experience where even the idea of going direct to consumer would ruffle so many feathers with the type of experience we have in the B2B2C, B2B2B environment. With your distribution partners, like your dealers, do you ever experience any tension or conversations around like, I wish you guys would push more to us versus direct to consumer, does that ever come up? Or is it just this is just DECKED in the way you go to market and they’ve accepted it?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:30:51]:

Absolutely it does. You know, I think where anytime there’s anything unknown, it’s human nature. We all start to play videos in our head. There’s certainly stories out there that we may not be investing appropriately in certain channels. That’s definitely not our intent. And we always come back to, this is really repetitive. I understand that. But we always come back to the consumer enabling shopping journeys.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:31:12]:

But I will say, as you think about the end consumer, if it’s the recreationalist fish hunt camp, that’s highly relevant in terms of enabling the shopping experience they want. As you go over to the commercial fleet side of the business, there’s nothing we do in terms of selling that isn’t arms locked with our B2B partners on the commercial outfitter side. So certainly there’s a big difference in terms of end consumer and how we sell to them. It’s much more like mixed channel on the consumer side as their shopping journey floats back and forth between B2B and e.com. but on the commercial fleet side, that’s 100% focused with our commercial upfitter and SEMA retail partners.

 

Kyler Mason [00:31:55]:

So you wouldn’t sell direct to a commercial fleet?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:31:58]:

No. If a fleet has an established upfitter partner, the first thing we do is immediately reach out to the commercial upfitter and ask them how we partner with them to serve this fleet. There’s different points in that selling journey where the commercial upfitters leaning in more, other points where me and my team would lean in more. So as you think about product expertise, we should have the product expertise versus our commercial outfitter partners. We certainly do everything we can, and they’re great partners in terms of understanding DECKED products and catalogs. But at the end of the day, nobody can speak to our product better than us. So we find those moments where we can show up and support their selling process by getting in front of the fleet partners and giving product demos.

 

John Gough [00:32:41]:

One of the things that you’re describing is this relationship that you have with your fleet customer and your upfitter partners that exist in those environments. And you mentioned earlier that you’ve had your fleet sales team had some really big wins, I think, at the end of the last year. And as you’re moving in kind of upstream into these large enterprise fleets, I guess the question is, what’s new and different in that environment that you’re seeing from a sales perspective that is changing the game for you there.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:33:17]:

I love that you called out some team wins, and we’ve been serving small and medium sized fleets for the last few years with some big wins back end of 2023. We were really proud partners at NTEA Tradeshow this march to have a partner build on our pad, and that was an at and t build the biggest telecom fleet on the planet. So incredibly proud partners to be working with them to help solve some of their biggest problems as they think about the productivity of their infield techs. What that signaled to us is fleet directors out there are seeing the connection for what DECKED product can do for their fleets, and we’re not even intentionally marketing to them. Right. As you think about what would they look to a DECKED product for safety. They’re rolling their gear to where they’re standing. They’re not jumping into the truck bed anymore.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:34:13]:

We all have desk jobs. If our boss has told us we had to jump onto our desk 50 times a day, we’d, like, laugh, right? Like, what the hell are you. What? No, we’re not doing that. But that’s what these guys and gals do out in the field. And DECKED product basically splashes that, right? Because now they’re rolling their gear out to them, and they can grab their gear without ever having to get in the back of the truck bed. So productivity gains, safety gains, highly ergonomic, and we don’t talk to that overtly in our marketing messaging. So today, those fleet directors are connecting the dots themselves. They see our marketing messages, which today are more consumer facing.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:34:55]:

Decom DECKED, Instagram, declinked in, has starting to evolve more to speak to fleet directors. So right now, they’re connecting the dots from their, let’s call it, like, personal life, perhaps, or where they shop and where they consume media on their personal life. And they’re connecting dots back to their roles of sleep directors and saying, well, wait a second, this product can help our fleet. I think it points to a massive opportunity for Dect as we think about our future and how we speak directly to those fleet directors through our marketing and sales tactics today. It’s really what I call over the table tools, where we work with our commercial outfitter partners to get in front of fleets and then use these over the table sales tools to speak to some of those pain points they’re trying to solve for, like, safety and productivity and sustainability. I mean, DECKED is lightweight, right? It’s high density polymer versus some of the competition. And legacy product is steel, metal, aluminum, heavier. So as these fleets transition to EV’s, every hundred pounds you remove from the build saves 1% in range.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:36:05]:

So the reduction in range anxiety is very real. With DEC production, we’re at a pivot point where I don’t want to undermine efforts of the sales and marketing team to date in the sense that they’re out there hustling, selling to fleet, small, medium, and now enterprise, but without the tools, where we’ve intentionally been speaking to the needs of enterprise fleets, and they’re still winning deals. So I envision a future where we can line up our go to market tactics across production, sales, and marketing to serve them better and better every year. And the opportunity just continues to grow.

 

John Gough [00:36:42]:

Have you seen an environment where you feel like the B2B and the B2C coexist in a really healthy way? Is it easy for you to see that vision, or is there tension in that for you?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:36:56]:

There’s certainly tension. I would say it’s healthy tension because it means you’re being considerate. Ask yourselves what brands out there are doing it. Well across B2B and B2C, we really struggle to point to one. So if anyone out there knows, please send it my way. Fundamenc.com dot we look close to home at the oems, right? Like Ford and Ford fro, and they have really considered strategies on how they show up. One watt channels. If you go on ford.com versus fordpro.com comma, different copy, different imagery relevant to the consumer.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:37:27]:

Ford Pro doesn’t have an Instagram handle, Ford does. There’s certainly strategies that at the end of the day, if you work through the end consumer, you’re trying to connect with those strategies come to life. But for a team like Dex, for ten years focused on DECKED.com and our b, two b partners, small and then small and medium sized fleets, it’s certainly a transition to think about. Okay, now what and what does that mean in terms of what media channels we show up on, what content and copy we want to use? And Dect is leading me. We’re a small team. At the end of the day, we certainly like, I think we have outsized revenue to the size of the team and it certainly speaks to the talent and the energy and passion that sits within the team. So it’ll be an interesting next one to two, three years because our product fit is massive and it becomes a prioritization exercise of where do we have current wins, where do we want to grow market penetration further before we enter new channels, new opportunities.

 

John Gough [00:38:29]:

I sometimes feel like we treat brands and businesses as if they need to be fully different things in these different environments. And it’s sort of like the buyer themselves. The buyer is a person who may be covered in tattoos and doing their own thing, and when they put on a suit, they’re still the same person still covered in tattoos. They just happen to be wearing a suitable and they don’t have to be a new human to exist in a new environment. And I think the same thing is true sometimes for brands. Like, we think that, oh, if we’re going to go to these large enterprises, we have to show up like IBM and we have to be, you know, everybody, g man kind of thing everywhere we go. I just don’t think that that’s true anymore, if it ever was. And brands can be who they are and still have the same DNA and show up in a way that messages to the buyers pain points in their different environments.

 

John Gough [00:39:22]:

But the ones who recognize that DECKED is arable and it is easy to use and it’s healthy for them to get, not have to get in and out of their truck. Those same guys don’t want to be jumping in and out of their truck to get their guns and their fishing poles as little as they want to get any of the rest of their tools for their job.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:39:40]:

Yes, well said. I mean, that’s a great analogy. I may steal it. I think my marketing leader would love me showing up in a room and expressing it that way because I actually agree with you. You know, I don’t, I don’t think it needs to be completely disparate strategies and wouldn’t feel right either, you know, to have a mode of aspirational, fun marketing and then go to kind of boring white truck marketing on the fleet side, not on brand. So, you know, it’s potentially about finding that sweet spot.

 

Kyler Mason [00:40:09]:

I think that the example you used is a good one. And Ford Pro does a great job of leveraging the tenets of the brand. And what they’re acknowledging is they have a buyer with specific needs. It’s not like a different brand. You know, who you’re working with. The messaging is just very specific and acknowledges the buying that’s happening with the commercial buyer.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:40:30]:

Yes. I mean you’re describing an and proposition, right? Both can be true and therein lies the exciting business challenge is figuring out how to make it happen.

 

John Gough [00:40:39]:

One of the things that we sometimes see in these manufacturing environments is a gap between sales and marketing in terms of responsibilities and planning and expectations. You mentioned that the marketing team has done a great job over the last ten years of defining a really kind of iconic brand and really interesting position in the marketplace. Can you talk about how you all as a team collaborate across planning times and these execution times to deliver those experiences in the right way?

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:41:12]:

Yeah. If I were to envision like a waterfall, at the very top of that waterfall would be our target consumers. And then the channels kind of cascade from that consumer on where they shop. And then piercing across that waterfall is your cross functional tactics to serve that consumer channel. It’s almost like a matrix of where the consumer and customer meets with the cross functional tactics on how we can best serve them. There’s a critical mass of us at the Sun Valley office here. Cross functionally, we meet for different reasons almost daily, both from annual planning process to with our monthly, quarterly, even weekly tactics. We have demand gen meetings every Monday morning where the full marketing e.com and sales team meets to talk about the weak priorities.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:42:10]:

We have the benefit of all three of those teams laddering up to one leader, Delamani’s SVP of revenue. I think that’s a bit of an unlock too, when you have one leader that can wrap their arms around sales, marketing and, and e.com. kind of like the ultimate tiebreaker, right? As you think about what are the most important tactics and strategies across those three functions to serve our consumers. And then product launch is a big moment. So as we build product launch strategies, we’re always evolving the product, the product portfolio, the product team quarterbacks go to market meetings and those are heavy, cross functional envision like two ramps, one ramping down, one ramping up with at the front end of that first ramp, the product team over indexes on owning it. I used to think about new product, new markets, actually creating the product, creating prototypes, putting it through the different design iterations and production phases. And then they start to ramp down, but they still act as the quarterback the entire time. And then what ramps up is sales and marketing and the Ecom team starts to take over to build the sales, marketing and ecom tactics.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:43:30]:

We’re all involved from end to end just at like varying degrees. Let’s say each of the leaders are like empowering the leader to focus where they need to most focus and then willing to take the baton when it’s our functional space to lean in more. But we’re all there at the table, some of us over indexing, just depending on the time on that end to end calendar.

 

John Gough [00:43:54]:

Yeah. Product launch is the moment for all manufacturing organizations. I’m sure you’ve seen dozens, hundreds of products launched over your career. Any moment or experience stand out to you as something again, that was like, this was the absolute right way to do it, or I will never do this again ever in my life.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:44:14]:

I mean, the right way to do is when everything goes right, which never happened.

 

John Gough [00:44:18]:

Yeah, that’s nice. When that happens, never.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:44:21]:

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my career, it’s mitigation strategies, what ifs, scenario planning. You know, it’s one three one. Like, what’s the problem? What are the three options? What’s your recommendation? We lean into that a lot. But, you know, at the end of the day, as you get closer to the end of that product launch calendar, those what ifs become very real. Maybe you don’t, you’re not able to produce as much as you’d like to, serve full demand across all channels. Maybe you’re not hitting the price points that were targeted and you have margin implications. You have to figure out what’s the best price point. Maybe it’s a late no go on a product launch because it’s not ticking the boxes.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:45:02]:

That’s where the magic happens. And it’s huge. Cross functional partnership at DECT we have a very open team. I think everyone’s comfortable and uncomfortable in having those conversations. And on the sales side, I benefit from partners who are enterprise thinkers. So certainly they’re advocating for their businesses, whether it’s marketing, EcoM, or as I need to do for the sales side and our B. Two B partners. But at the end of the day, I think we all remember when we ladder up to what are those.org goals.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:45:32]:

Agnostic to our rules and we can do what’s right for and consumer. Not easy certainly. And I’d say we’re not perfect, we’re all humans and not flawless, but we certainly ambition to that end.

 

Kyler Mason [00:45:45]:

So we’ve covered a lot of ground. But is there anything that you’re working on at Dect or you have on like your three year plan when you were brought on nine months ago that you could share with us that you’re working on? That’s just a big priority that we haven’t gone through.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:45:58]:

We have incredible partners in geographies. We have a distribution model through EMEA, Europe, Middle east and Africa, as well as partners in Australia and New Zealand with the team based here. And the market opportunity we have domestically, we rely on those partners heavily to extend Dex brand awareness into those geographies. Today we haven’t been able to really elevate how we work with them because of our focus here domestically. As we think about the next three to five years, more midterm becomes really interesting as we further solidify our market penetration in the US and Canada and then create scope to think more about those international markets. And certainly not like straightforward one for one, like sales marketing tactics. You know, the van market is much more relevant in Europe. Think it’s ten vans for every truck.

 

Wanda Rozwadowska [00:46:56]:

So flip flopped to here and then the Australia New Zealand market equally has some uniqueness. You know, think about the ute’s that are relevant down there. I always picture a Subaru with a truck bed attached to it. So it certainly requires consideration on how DEC would evolve product portfolio sales tactics and equally marketing that’s relevant to the geographies languages metric system. Yeah, so no small feat, but certainly an area that we’d look to grow into longer term.

 

John Gough [00:47:27]:

Why you win is presented by Element three, a marketing firm focused on modernizing go to market strategies for manufacturers that sell through complex distribution channels. We help leaders solve problems across demand generation, sales channel support, and brand development.

 

Kyler Mason [00:47:44]:

If you’d like more from myself or John, connect with us on LinkedIn. And for more from Element Three, visit Element Three. That’s elementthre.com.