Turning Career Lessons Into Ecommerce Wins | Laura Andersen | AlumiTubs

Laura Andersen is the owner and managing director of AlumiTubs. Made to handle it all, AlumiTubs is made to last for generations. Obsessively designed to outperform and outlast, it's the classic cedar hot tub, upgraded for a lifetime of performance.

AlumiTubs is 100% Canadian handcrafted from materials made to stand the test of time. It’s perfect for the backcountry or the backyard, with flex heating for 365 days of use, wherever you find your escape. 

With 1000s in the wild since 2001, AlumiTubs are home to Canada, now available for properties across the globe. Where artistry, craftsmanship, and considered design intersect, the AlumiTubs wood fired, electric and hybrid hot tubs come in 3 sizes with endless heat options, advanced filtration for at-home use, a 50% bigger firebox and 3 layers of insulation for less smoke, less water, and nothing wasted along the way.

It is not an average hot tub, AlumiTubs is guaranteed to get hot and stay hot, no matter how cold it is outside. Bringing people and those they share it with, closer to nature. AlumiTubs was made for more of the good stuff.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:00] Intro
• [00:40] Sponsor: Taboola
• [01:53] Spotting demand beyond your original offer
• [03:14] Balancing careers while building a startup
• [06:04] Bringing an offline product to the internet
• [08:55] Sponsor: Next Insurance
• [10:08] Applying career skills to a new venture
• [13:49] Letting users shape your marketing message
• [15:40] Optimizing basic SEO for discovery
• [17:55] Sponsor: Electric Eye
• [19:03] Balancing capacity with customer trust
• [23:17] Complementing skills to build longevity
• [26:00] Building a business on a great product
• [28:46] Callouts
• [28:56] Hedging bets while testing business ideas
• [31:10] Adding value without reinventing the wheel

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Wood-fired & electric cedar hot tubs alumitubs.com/ 
• Follow Laura Andersen linkedin.com/in/lauraandersendigitalmarketing/  
• Reach your best audience at the lowest cost! discover.taboola.com/honest/
• Easy, affordable coverage that grows with your business nextinsurance.com/honest 
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Transcript

Laura Andersen 

From wearing one hat where you're responsible for doing one thing really deeply in a job to then wearing all these hats and doing everything an inch deep. So I think that was an interesting contrast. It was actually pretty humbling. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I think that is. The founder is definitely a jack of all trades, master of none. But they need to be able to have a conversation about what it is they are eventually going to delegate. And if they don't understand it, they don't know what good looks like later on.

Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow and scale an online business today. 

Have you hit a wall with performance marketing on Facebook and Google? It might be time to think about where your next customers are spending their time online.

That’s where Realize comes in. Realize helps thousands of D2C brands to tap into more ad placements across hundreds of premium websites - reaching audiences you just can’t find on traditional social channels

With intent-based, contextually relevant ad placements, you can drive real conversions, not just impressions, and expand your acquisition strategy with better data, more control, and higher ROI.

Realize helps you build high-performing AI-powered ad experiences, backed by 17 years of data.

And simple to set up, no bloated dashboards or complicated onboarding so you can start scaling fast.

You can also leverage your own first-party data to retarget people already in your funnel.

So if you’re ready to go beyond Facebook and Google and start reaching new audiences, head on over to discover.taboola.com/honest and we can start the new year with a new performance channel.

That's discover.tabula.com/honest D-I-S-C-O-V-E-R-T-A-B-O-O-L-A dot C-O-M slash H-O-N-E-S-T. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show the owner and managing director of AlumiTubs, Laura Andersen. Laura, welcome to the show. 

Laura Andersen

Thank you. Hi, I'm happy to be here. 

Chase Clymer

I am happy too. Awesome. This is going to be a super fun one. Funny enough, I was familiar with your brand before we crossed paths organically.

My business partner actually shared with me your hot tubs because we were talking about hot tubs not too long ago. So it's just serendipitous how the world works out like that. 

Laura Andersen

That's really cool. 

Chase Clymer

Yes, yes. Quickly though, at the top, for those that are unfamiliar with AlumiTubs, what are the products you guys are bringing to market and selling over there? 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. So it started as a wood-fired hot tub exclusively. And then we just had so many customers who were like, “Hey, I want to have this hot tub at my house too, but I'm not allowed to have wood fire,” or "I want to keep it clean year round so I can always just jump in.” So we expanded our product range to include electric hot tubs as well as hybrid two-in-one hot tubs, which is my favorite because it is the best of both worlds. 

So yeah, we are exclusively building fairly unique wood-fired electric cedar hot tubs that have a little bit of a different approach to their design than what you might think of when you hear about a cedar hot tub.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. And they are gorgeous as well. You guys have some amazing content on the website. So they're super interesting. Go check them out if you are just curious to learn more about that. But I guess where does your story start with these beautiful hot tubs? 

Laura Andersen

So our story started actually, when I was helping my husband Josh figure out what he wanted to do next with starting his own business or acquiring a business. And I was still working full time for Shopify. I was leading a performance marketing team there and my career was pretty stacked full. 

I didn't have a whole lot of time, but it was just sort of like helping support him. And we came across these people, Eric and Wendy, who had been building these amazing hot tubs for many years since 2001. And we got to know them and what they were building. They weren't online at all. They were only kind of introducing their tubs to the market through trade shows and kind of like mom and pop handshake type deals like neighbors, friends, that kind of thing. 

And we're like, “Well, this is such a cool design.” Like Josh has a trade background and a business background. So this is a really good fit for him. And then I was actually only about a month away from starting my mat leave, my first mat leave. And I was like, “Okay, I can use my mat leave to help kind of build their online presence and scale this thing and bring it into the 21st century.” 

So that's what I did. He handled everything, building tubs and scaling the team and expanding production and doing things like that. And then I handled all things growth and digital. And that's kind of where we got started with it about six and a half years ago.

That was the beginning of our story. And then there's just been so much since then. It has been just an incredible ride. We had no idea how big this market was when we got started. We just thought we could do it justice. And oh my goodness, it just continues to grow and grow. And it's just such a fulfilling business for us to own. It just keeps getting better. So it's been a journey. 

Absolutely. Now, just for point of clarification, you and your husband ended up purchasing this company from the previous owners? 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. Yeah. was purchased but not really a big enough business to really consider it a traditional business purchase. We took it from their garage to our shop. And they had one employee at the time who was welding and fabricating and doing woodwork and things like that. And then we made it a more robust business from there. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And what year was that? 

Laura Andersen

That was 2019. 

Chase Clymer

Gotcha. And so once you obviously work out the nuances of the acquisition and the unique stuff that went along with that, I'm sure you had ideas on both sides of what you wanted to do. What were the first 3 things that you invested a lot of time, energy and potentially more money into to help recoup any of that investment. Obviously, everyone's goal is to grow these acquisitions. 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. Yeah. The first thing was just getting a handle on the product. Josh had to learn how to build these tubs and he had to learn how to train people to build the tubs and make it a little bit better. Streamline things as you do. Anybody who walks into someone's kitchen, they might do something a little bit differently. So it was that process for him.

And then meanwhile, the second thing for me. The second thing in the business, but the first thing for me was just introducing it to the online world and making it available to the market because it was just something nobody really knew of. It had really just been something that was completely word of mouth and then home and cottage shows and things like that. 

So it was pretty small. And, you know, we were toying with the idea of, “Should we build this? Should we make it bigger?” And the initial response from my husband, Josh, was like, “No, let's just get a handle on it. Let's just do the bare minimum we need to do right now.” 

But I'm a growth marketer. I'm an Ecommerce marketer. I'm a digital marketer. And this is what I do. So actually, I remember we had our baby about a month or two after we bought the business. I have started to develop the website. It was pretty pretty bad to be honest, but it was okay. 

I was doing it while holding my baby and the demand was so incredibly high off the bat that my husband was like, “Turn it off, turn the website off.” I was like, we're not doing that. So we kind of started focusing on building enough staff to actually build these tubs and serve the market. And we started doing, I'd say three or four tubs a week and now we're doing 10. But we could be doing 20 without changing anything. 

Like we always have a six month lead time because they're just super high in demand. So it was definitely those two things like getting a handle on the product, bringing it to market properly. And then the third thing was just sort of expanding our geo. So initially it was just kind of DC and then it was just kind of Canada.

Then we started shipping south of the border to the US and then Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Norway, UK, all over the place. So I'd say that the third thing was just bringing it to a wider market. 

Chase Clymer

Running an Ecommerce business means wearing a lot of hats; founder, marketer, customer service, logistics… and let’s be honest, sometimes even therapists.

But one thing you shouldn’t have to stress about? Business insurance.

That’s where Next Insurance comes in.

Next is built specifically for small businesses, including Ecommerce brands, making it simple to get the right coverage entirely online, in just minutes.

Whether you sell handmade candles, athletic wear, or subscription boxes, Next helps protect you from the unexpected, from product liability to shipping mishaps and everything in between.

And here’s the best part: you can save up to 30% on your business insurance and get peace of mind for as low as $1 per day, knowing Next has your back.

With transparent pricing, flexible plans, and instant certificates of insurance, Next gives you the confidence to focus on what matters most - growing your store.

So if you’re ready to protect your business while scaling your brand, head over to nextinsurance.com/honest to get covered today. That’s nextinsurance.com/honest. N-E-X-T-I-N-S-U-R-A-N-C-E dot C-O-M slash H-O-N-E-S-T

There's a Reddit meme. I don't know if you've ever seen it where it's someone that's drawing an owl and it's like, start with the eye and then you do the other eye. And then it's like, then you draw the whole owl. And it's like, we just did that. There's a lot in there. So let's talk about obviously your expertise, your career, your background. You were a growth marketer at Shopify. 

So there was a lot of innate career knowledge that you brought to the table in bringing this new business that you and your husband are collaborating on to the market and driving in that growth. I guess my first question would be, how much of what you learned out there in the real world in your career was immediately transferable over to helping you grow this business?

Laura Andersen 

Yeah, honestly, a lot of it was like my career was helping entrepreneurs be successful and putting in systems to help them grow and to help make Shopify useful for them. So it was more like a large organization sort of processes and system building. Whereas this was like, almost like a little art project in the sense that I was going back to kind of like creating my poster board, what do I want to put on it? 

And it was cool for me because somebody who was so focused on building Shopify's growth and acquiring new merchants, now was able to actually put myself in those merchant shoes and build my own store on Shopify. To be honest that's not what I was doing at Shopify. I wasn't building stores. I was creating systems for merchants to be able to build stores and discover Shopify and be successful on Shopify.

It was actually pretty interesting. It's kind of like if you managed a restaurant and then you started serving customers. You're going from a very different lens of how you work with those products. But I would say what was really transferable was just learning to put into practice what I was doing in my career, the very foundations of it. 

How do you position a product, how do you help describe what that product is in an impactful way? And what do you want them to do next? And like really taking that user journey. I'd say that probably one of the most applicable things that I took away from my career was just really building systems and funnels and building conversion revenue optimization systems so that people could get from one point to the next. 

And so, putting my UX hat on in building our store and then also leaning into like, not that I was leading social at any of the companies I worked for. But, okay, what were those people on social talking about back then at Lululemon or at Shopify and what can I take from that and put it into practice for my own business here? So things like that. 

I wasn't necessarily directly involved with paid media at Shopify or at any of my other positions. But learning the system of how that works with other channels and what kind of spend and what kind of KPIs make sense. 

So yeah, it was helpful. But you go from wearing one hat where you're responsible for doing one thing really deeply in a job to then wearing all these hats and doing everything an inch deep. So I think that was an interesting contrast. It was actually pretty humbling. I was like, I actually don't know how to do all these little things that I lead, teams of people who do this masterfully. So yeah, it was super humbling. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I think that is like the founder is definitely a jack-of-all-trades master of none. But they need to understand that surface level. They need to be able to have a conversation about what it is they are eventually going to delegate. And if they don't understand it, they don't know what good looks like later on. 

Laura Andersen 

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Having just that perception of what best-in-class marketers in their fields look like and what they bring to the table was certainly a compass for me and certainly an advantage in that sense. But then I had a lot of disadvantages too because I just had never really built something from the ground up like that. 

And AlumiTubs, we were lucky because we acquired this amazing product and this amazing design. But then the job was just, how do you make it better? How do you grow it? How do you bring it to more people? And how do you do it in a way that they can integrate in their life full stop, not just when they're out at the cabin. 

So it was actually my favorite part of business is growing a business, not starting up a business. So I felt like we kind of got to skip over the product prototyping stage, which was really helpful. But yeah, then kind of doing it justice was like my mandate the whole time. And we had all these like amazing customers with amazing stories that kind of paved the way for me. Like I didn't really need to reinvent any marketing talk or copy or imagery. 

The customers told me what the tub was about. They would tell the stories about what they did in the tub with their family. Bringing them to the cabin and they got the grandkids to stay the whole weekend because they had this hot tub they could jump in from at the lake. And so, that was where I started. It was really listening to the customers and what it represented to them. And that was really very useful. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. You mentioned earlier that your husband at one point jokingly said, hey, we need to turn the website off. 

Laura Andersen 

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

What exactly were you doing? Or what did you do before that to help drive that initial demand?

Laura Andersen 

Just having a website with basic SEO, really. People were looking for these tubs and they just weren't able to find them. So really fundamentally, like we were just there when they were looking and uh we were available and we built a really good product that was quite clearly distinguished from other products other alternatives. 

And there were also just not very many people in this space. Like it was more of a product that you would get a local person to build for you kind of thing. It wasn't really something that was a consumer item that you could purchase or procure. It was timing, it was timing of the market. It was also just, you know, building something that they could access. Putting in some frameworks that kind of reduced friction. 

For example, these tubs are like, $1,500, $2,000 to ship. And I just made the pricing appropriate so that we could include pricing or include shipping in our pricing. And that was favorable to people. Nobody wants to feel like they're paying that kind of money for shipping, right? So things like that. And then, just very basic SEO. And we just got such an incredibly high response from that.

Basically, we're meeting the market where they were. They were able to find us, they were able to contact us, they were able to request a tub from there. And, then slowly new entrants in the market came in and we had to be a lot less passive about it. And it was like, “Okay, if we're not focusing on this, we're going to lose our market share.”0

And so what we did is essentially, after my second baby, I didn't go back after my mat leave. So each time I had a baby is when I got to spend the most time on AlumiTubs. Do some big projects online and pricing strategy and product refinement and patent applications and things like that. 

Chase Clymer

“I have been in business for nearly 20 years, and very few companies I have hired in that time have performed as well as Electric Eye. They have knowledgeable staff, and our project was delivered on time and on budget. Electric Eye has exceeded my expectations, and I look forward to working with them again.”

That is a direct quote from one of our clients at Electric Eye. 

Electric Eye is a Shopify Plus partner that has helped over 100 brands migrate, redesign, and optimize their stores since 2016.

If you'd like to increase your conversion rate, average order value, and revenue per session, we are the true Shopify experts you've been looking for. 

Right now, we're offering a free diagnostic to qualified brands that reach out and mention the podcast. Visit electriceye.io today to schedule a call and send us a message. Find out why we have over 50 5-star reviews in the Shopify Partner Directory. Again, that's electriceye.io. E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C-E-Y-E.io

So yeah, after my second, I didn't go back. I focused exclusively on the AlumiTubs. Because it was one of those moments after COVID where we're like, “Okay, we've had that tailwind of where people want hot tubs in their home and they're moving and they're buying vacation properties and all that. So now how do we remain competitive and how do we continue to grow?” And so I leaned in further and expanded what we were doing across all of our channels. 

So we made the website better, made our imagery better, our copy, our design. Actually had other touch points online where people could find us, social blog, better email strategy, better sort of customer interactions, better partnerships. Publications, like pitching to different outlets and things like that. Collaborations and whatnot. And then we just continued to grow. 

Like we kind of thought COVID was our peak and it really wasn't. We still can't meet the demand. So I think our marketing is in a really good spot, but it's something that's always evolving because competitors are always evolving. And they're always leveling up their product and they're always leveling up their market positioning. 

It's something that, even though I think, “Okay, I just did this and it's off my plate.” It's like a month later, it's back on my plate. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now I always have a conversation with clients or potential clients about this. And this actually happens, I think, a lot more when you're talking about growth or paid media agencies. We don't really do that anymore. But it was always like a conversation where it was like, “Hey, if everything works well and your demand doubles next week. Could you service that? And how would that affect the business?” 

And I feel like you guys are experiencing something similar to that. And from my perspective, I always felt like, well, that's a good problem to have. But is it? How does it feel to be dealing with that? 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. As a growth marketer, I suffer with it because I'm like, “Wow, we can do so much more.” I said, like, we're doing 10 tubs a week. That's clockwork. That's every single Thursday, 52 weeks a year, we're shipping 10 tubs. And that's what we have the capacity to do in our shop and with the people we have, and to do it really, really well. And that's a really big piece for us. 

We don't outsource it intentionally, because we believe that that's the way that we continue to earn trust from our customers. And that's the way we get referrals, building something really amazing and being able to put some quality guarantee behind it. People are getting what they're paying for and it's lasting the time that we say it's going to last.

And that's really quite novel now that doesn't really happen. There's a lot of alternatives out there that are imported and we hear stories about them from customers probably twice a week saying how product quality just wasn't there. And so that's so disappointing for somebody and like we're a family and it's important to us to really make sure that we're actually delivering something of value. 

So we intentionally keep it small. But with that said, it hurts my soul a little because we have the demand for 20 a week without scaling any of our marketing at all. And so, you know, as somebody who's ambitious and inspired to do their best in life. It's a little bit hard because I have to kind of curb my enthusiasm because we just don't have the product to meet the demand. 

With that said, we are baby stepping our way towards more output all the time. Like I think I said, we started at three, four or five tubs a week. We've slowly built to 10. Now we're building to 13. So like we're getting there. And I in a way, my husband and I were kind of opposites that way. It's a bit of a tug of war. 

And that works really well. He inspires me to be really thoughtful and intentional about our growth. And then I keep pushing him forward to keep challenging him to do more. So we're kind of a good balance in that sense. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. If I didn't have my business partner, I would have... We would have gone out of business a long time ago because I place so many just absolutely bonkers. Well, if you would let me, I would place a lot of bonkers bets just because that's the way that I am. And he's a lot more reserved, which that balance has allowed us to be around for a decade. 

Laura Andersen

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. No partner is getting 100 % of what they want. But that's what makes the partnership work. 

Chase Clymer

You alluded to it earlier. But also just like I always like to bring up partnerships. And it's also very interesting with husband and wife teams too, because that adds another dynamic to the whole business. But if you were to talk to any young entrepreneur listening to this show, even if it isn't like their husband or their wife or partner like that. What should they be looking for in a business partner? 

Laura Andersen

Yeah, I honestly think they need to find somebody who's good at things they're not good at. I think that having that complementary balance is so important. And then you learn to respect that person, too. But if you're both really good at one thing or a couple things, like if you have a shared sense of skill set, I think that's actually a detriment. 

Because then you're kind of there's friction there. And then there's also a gap, there's a void in what you're able to do. And as you said, like a business is so incredibly multifaceted. There's all the admin and accounting and boring stuff. And then there's all the growth and marketing and really exciting stuff. And somewhere in the middle is all the products. 

The product is so important. And a lot of people in marketing and Ecommerce, they're just trying to source a product. And that product doesn't necessarily have longevity in its fit in the market. So I think that's the piece that Josh really excels at. He understands how to build a really good product and he gets that. So it's helpful. And I think you really need that. 

You can't just focus on the business aspects of a business. You also have to focus on the actual product and what you're actually building for people. And I think it's a recipe for success every single time. Like I haven't heard of an entrepreneur or any successful business who's like, who has tenure in this? Who hasn't focused on the product? 

Like you hear all the time of the guys who do their dropshipping business or whatever it is. But it's fleeting. They have like 25 stores because one thing only works for so long and they didn't focus on the product. They were just trying to focus on the market. So I'd say somebody who focuses really, really well on the product and somebody who focuses really, really well on the marketing is quite a nice combination. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Those dropshipping stores are why this podcast exists because it's not real. It takes hard work and sure, you can have a flash in the pan and have a little bit of success. But you can't build something long lasting. You're not going to build a better life for yourself by not really giving it your all. The absolute number one cheat to building a good business is having a great product. 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

If your product is great and people want your product, everything is going to be easier. Marketing is easier. 

Laura Andersen

So true. 

Chase Clymer

I can't tell you how many websites I looked at. I have learned to not judge a book by its cover. I have seen so many ugly websites and I'm like, these guys are doing $50 million a year. Holy... 

Laura Andersen

Wow. Wow. 

Chase Clymer

It's bonkers out there. And then to what you said earlier, finding the yin to your yang or whatnot. Also, people are different. You and I, we think marketing is exciting. I know people are terrified by it. They do not want to put themselves out there. They just don't understand it. 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

So there are different people who are better at different things. And that is absolutely what you want to find. 

Laura Andersen

For sure. And I think having that connection to the product and the customer. At Lululemon, for example, people at headquarters, people who were running the business, their job once a month, I think it was to go into stores and understand what customers were asking. And understand how they were interacting with the product. And understand the staff in the store, what they were experiencing.

And it was the absolute smartest way. Lots of different companies do this, but it was the smartest way to really understand how to build that business. And I think that's what Josh and I have done a good job of is just learning what the product was based on what the customers say about it. And then learning how to improve the product based on what customers say they want or need. And you always have to continue innovating. 

Like we couldn't get by just continuing to build the exact same tab that worked in 2001. People's needs change and the market changes and what they're able to get instead changes. So having somebody who's focused on product. And who really values the customer. And really wants a customer to have a good experience. Like genuinely wanting that, it does go far. 

But if you have that alone without somebody who can market and communicate that, then you know, it's kind of in vain. Like you can't have an amazing house that you want to sell without being able to put it on the market, right? I just think you have to have both. And without it, you might be successful for a minute, but it's just not going to last. 

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview. 

Is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?

Laura Andersen

Having worked for Shopify, having worked with hundreds of thousands of merchants who are trying to develop a business, most of them give up, it mostly doesn't work. And so you have to hedge your bets. And that's what we did. Like when we bought the business, I continued to work, I continued my career because we didn't know if it was going to work yet. And so you have to burn the midnight oil, you really have to do both at the same time. 

And don't put all your eggs into building a business because most of them aren't the right product market fit. And you have to find that. And once you see that that's working, then you continue to build it. And then when you see that your time is going to be better invested in that business, that's when you give up your job and your other income sources in order to push forward. But you don't do that until you see that that's working and that's needed. 

And that was a huge ingredient to our success is knowing when to lean in and when to just relax and wait. Because if I had given up my work too early, we would have been broke. And if we had leaned into the business too early, generally, the product wouldn't have been ready for that marketing and there wouldn't be product market fit. So finding that I think is really, really important. 

And, you know, I also think people get really excited about their good ideas. That's hard. My approach to business is finding what's working and doing it better. It's not reinventing the wheel. I'm just not that type of business person who wants to start something super exciting from the ground up and tell all my friends and family about how amazing it is and hope it takes off. 

I'm somebody who's like, “Okay, windows, how can I make a window better?” I'm more like that. And so I think that's generally a good way to innovate and to serve the market because it's quite easy now with all these different tools to figure out what are people searching for? What do they want? What do they need? What's there? How could you make it better? 

And I think that's a pretty good recipe for success. If you're making something better and you're able to tell that story, it's a pretty winning strategy. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's funny, twice today, we've had almost a similar conversation. It's like, you do not need to invent some new thing. Right? 

Laura Andersen

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

There are things out there that already exist that you can store in a more novel way. You can differentiate the market to which you're approaching. Heck, there are some products out there that are the exact same products that are just marketed a completely different way to a completely different audience. 

Laura Andersen

Totally. 

Chase Clymer

They're charging more for it for no reason other than marketing. 

Laura Andersen

Yeah, I know. And I do think there are other ways to add value to. Like creating something that's a better experience to ship or to receive or to open or to set up. That was one of the winning ingredients to our recipe was like, how do we make the wood-fired hot tub experience just a little bit easier?

And one of those pieces is like, it doesn't leak. And you can have it next to the ocean. You can fill it with salt water. You can roll it into place. It's all set up for you. That's taking a product that was already in the market, which is a cedar hot tub, and just making it better. And making it exceptionally better through time and through iterations. 

But then it's also like making the experience better. Making sure customers feel supported through that and helping them get it there. Helping them set it up and being there for them whenever they have a question about how to clean it or whatever it is. There's lots of ways to do things better than what's already being done. And that would always be my approach.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And speaking of better and your fantastic products, if I'm listening to this and I want to go check out the amazing hot tubs that you guys are making, where should I go? What should I do?

Laura Andersen

Yeah. You can follow us on Instagram first. It's @alumitubs. And I think that's the millennial way of getting to know something. Our website, AlumiTubs.com. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your story. 

Laura Andersen

Thank you.