Speaker 1: Ryan Grepper was sure he knew how to beat the
Speaker 1: heat with an innovative approach to the old beach standby
Speaker 1: the drinks cooler. He added some bells and whistles, updating
Speaker 1: the frosty concept with some picky bonus features. To get
Speaker 1: things moving, he launched a crowdfunding campaign that was incredibly
Speaker 1: successful and earned a lot of ice, but soon found
Speaker 1: out that manufacturing a new product isn't easy and the
Speaker 1: whole process ended up leaving a lot of early supporters
Speaker 1: out in the cold. This is the coolest cooler on
Speaker 1: the brink. Hey guys, I'm Jonathan Crickland and I'm Ariel Casting,
Speaker 1: and thank you Bill Jeffers for giving us this awesome suggestion. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a one that I have covered on my
Speaker 1: show Text Stuff a little bit. I did an episode
Speaker 1: about some of crowdfunding's biggest successes and failures, and spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: coolest cooler falls into the latter a category. Yeah, sadly.
Speaker 1: Sadly because I think the concept is really cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be saying cool a lot and not meaning
Speaker 1: it in a punny way. But if you want to
Speaker 1: interpret it as a pun, feel free. Yes, but no
Speaker 1: I if I were not so thrifty, I was about
Speaker 1: to say cheap, but I'm going to say thrifty. I
Speaker 1: would have wanted to back this. A lot of people did.
Speaker 1: Lots of people backed this product so much so that,
Speaker 1: not to skip ahead too much, but it would become
Speaker 1: one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history. We'll
Speaker 1: get to that. But as it turns out, as as
Speaker 1: we alluded to in the introduction, things did not go smoothly,
Speaker 1: and it was largely a thing due to innocent naivete.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of of of underestimating exactly how
Speaker 1: hard it is to mass produce a brand new product.
Speaker 1: I'd have to agree with you, Jonathan. So let's get
Speaker 1: into a little bit of how this product came about.
Speaker 1: This Coolest cooler. It was launched in two thousand thirteen
Speaker 1: by Ryan Grepper from Portland, Oregon. He used to be
Speaker 1: a medical sales rep uh and he was a self
Speaker 1: described inventor since two thousand and six, which is I
Speaker 1: believe around the time that this product started taking form.
Speaker 1: He's also um He's still listed as a member of
Speaker 1: the CNBC Tech Crowd Council, which is made up of
Speaker 1: people who have done a successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yes, his
Speaker 1: campaign was successful for the crowd funding part. I was
Speaker 1: kind of surprised to see him still on there. But
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, guys, coolest cooler is still around. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: Ryan Grepper's reputation has taken an enormous beating in the process.
Speaker 1: So so his idea initially started off as a pair
Speaker 1: of ideas before it merged into transformer like what the
Speaker 1: coolest cooler would be? Right? Yeah, he tried to make
Speaker 1: a portable blender from a weed whacker, and then he
Speaker 1: made a cooler with the car stereo in it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then after he made these these initial prototypes, he
Speaker 1: was like, well, I need to make them smaller so
Speaker 1: I can bring them places. And he got the inspiration
Speaker 1: that if he made it smaller, he could sell it.
Speaker 1: And his idea was for the cooler to be a
Speaker 1: place where people gather, to have all the things that
Speaker 1: make a space somewhere you'd want to hang out. And
Speaker 1: according to CNBC, his early experiments to compile all these
Speaker 1: things together didn't work. So well, yeah, I just have
Speaker 1: this in my imagination. Now. I know this isn't what
Speaker 1: it actually looked like, but in my imagination you have
Speaker 1: like an iglue uh style cooler with a car stereo
Speaker 1: duct taped onto it. Like, that's how I imagine these
Speaker 1: early versions being That's how I'd do it, just just saying.
Speaker 1: But the whole idea was, you know, you've been to
Speaker 1: plenty of parties, you've hosted parties. You note as well
Speaker 1: as I do, that often a central gathering point for
Speaker 1: a party ends up being the kitchen. It's it's kind
Speaker 1: of it's where the food is, the is where the
Speaker 1: drinks are. People tend to hover there and then sooner
Speaker 1: or later a party kind of just it's centered there.
Speaker 1: It might spin off in other places. So this was
Speaker 1: kind of the same concept, was that if you have
Speaker 1: all of these elements in a cooler and your outdoors,
Speaker 1: the cooler becomes kind of the central focal point for
Speaker 1: the party. Yeah, and he had an initial setup for
Speaker 1: the cooler, but by the end of his Kickstarter campaigns
Speaker 1: plural his cooler. His coolest cooler would include a USB
Speaker 1: charging station, a blender for crushing ice, a waterproof bluetooth speaker, watch,
Speaker 1: a proof bluetooth speaker, and LED light for the lid,
Speaker 1: dinner wear and storage for it. A cutting board of
Speaker 1: bottle opener and all terrain wheels like a bungee cord
Speaker 1: thingy and a little hidi spot for your keys and phone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also it was cooler. Yeah, it would be kind of
Speaker 1: ridiculous if he made this cooler with all these bells
Speaker 1: and whistles that didn't actually keep your beverages. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of the trend It was before even smart watches,
Speaker 1: but the trend where watches were including more and more features,
Speaker 1: and the standard joke was what's the time? And then
Speaker 1: the person exactly that was that was that was That's
Speaker 1: a longstanding joke in technology. You've seen it in like,
Speaker 1: you know, comic strips and things like that, same sort
Speaker 1: of thing, Like if you had ended up with the
Speaker 1: coolest cooler that couldn't actually keep food cold, that would
Speaker 1: be ridiculous. So he initially launched a crowdfunding campaign in
Speaker 1: November two thousand thirteen, and he was targeting a specific
Speaker 1: kind of of market. He was thinking about people who
Speaker 1: liked tailgating, and he was timing it to go along
Speaker 1: with the holiday Christmas shopping, uh season. I mean you
Speaker 1: think that would be a smart move, right, Yeah, But
Speaker 1: it turns out it didn't. It didn't quite pan out.
Speaker 1: He did not make his goal on that. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was seeking a hundred twenty five thousand dollars and he
Speaker 1: ultimately raised Uh. Well, the campaign met a hundred two
Speaker 1: thousand from two backers. But the way kickstarter works is
Speaker 1: it's an all or nothing proposal. Do you either make
Speaker 1: your goal or you get and you get whatever you
Speaker 1: make plus over, or you make nothing at all. So
Speaker 1: if you have a goal of fifty thou dollars and
Speaker 1: you only hit twenty thousand dollars, nobody gets charged, no
Speaker 1: money changes hand ends, and your campaign fails. If you
Speaker 1: make fifty thou, then everyone gets charged however much they pledged.
Speaker 1: You get your fifty dollars minus kickstarters cut, which I
Speaker 1: think is five percent of the actual money earned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if it makes more than fifty thou dollars, then
Speaker 1: you get more than what you had set as your goal.
Speaker 1: Kickstarter obviously has a strong incentive to promote the the
Speaker 1: campaigns that are doing well. Like if there's a lot
Speaker 1: of buzz, it makes a lot of sense for a
Speaker 1: kick started to kind of let those closer to the
Speaker 1: front thing that's comsion. They get exactly. Yeah, so if
Speaker 1: it's a really successful one, then kicks Started gets a
Speaker 1: bigger cut, because I mean it's still five percent, but
Speaker 1: it's five percent of a much larger number. And so
Speaker 1: that first one didn't work out so well. But the
Speaker 1: second Kickstarter campaign was a different story. Yeah. His second
Speaker 1: campaign launched on July eighth, two fourteen. He set a
Speaker 1: smaller goal, the thousand dollars, which just from the get
Speaker 1: go that seems problematic to me. If you need two
Speaker 1: d and fifty dollars to create your coolers, don't set
Speaker 1: a lower goal so you meet your goal unless you're
Speaker 1: specifically thinking I'm gonna start with a very small shipment,
Speaker 1: like if you if you still kept the price point
Speaker 1: or your cooler at the same level, but you thought
Speaker 1: i'll make a smaller batch, then that might work out.
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, that's not what happened. No, no,
Speaker 1: So first I want to say it shows you how
Speaker 1: small Ryan was thinking, because at his cheapest donation amount
Speaker 1: five dollars, you gotta thanks in the promise of having
Speaker 1: your name written on Ryan's personal cooler. Court cooler can
Speaker 1: only hold so many names unless you're like one of
Speaker 1: those grain of rice writers and even then um and
Speaker 1: then the highest level if you donated two thousand dollars
Speaker 1: or more, Ryan would come be your personal bartender for
Speaker 1: an event in your hometown and give you one of
Speaker 1: the first coolers and he would sign that one. And
Speaker 1: he didn't have any of space. Yeah, and so you
Speaker 1: look at this and you go obviously he was thinking
Speaker 1: he'd get a moderate amount of backers two hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty or so like his first campaign, maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit more because he can't travel to that many people's hometowns.
Speaker 1: And and he he had earned more than a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars had the campaign succeeded in the previous example.
Speaker 1: So even if he got twice as many, you know,
Speaker 1: you're still thinking, all right, a hundred thousand, maybe two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars, that's more or less on what he
Speaker 1: on par with what he was looking at for the
Speaker 1: first time. So he was he was thinking, let's try this,
Speaker 1: and he he decided to launch it at a different
Speaker 1: time of year, Yeah, because he was looking at the summer.
Speaker 1: He was launching it right around you know, just after
Speaker 1: the fourth of July weekend. You're talking about Prime Beach
Speaker 1: going outdoor grilling kind of of time frame here. It's
Speaker 1: when people are going outside and doing these activities where
Speaker 1: they need to have a big cooler or wanting a
Speaker 1: cooler they can crawl into and hide from the hot
Speaker 1: Georgia summer. Yeah. Especially Yeah, once you get into the
Speaker 1: heat and humidity here, you're looking for any relief available. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He estimated that the final retail cost of the Coolest Cooler.
Speaker 1: This is from the Kickstarter page, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: is still it's still something you can visit. You can
Speaker 1: go and check out the Kickstarter page for this, uh
Speaker 1: this particular campaign. Kickstar keeps them all. It's no longer active.
Speaker 1: Certain parts of the page you cannot access unless you
Speaker 1: have donated. Yes, there there are messages that go out
Speaker 1: just to backers, so if you are a backer you
Speaker 1: have access to those, but the public facing page is
Speaker 1: still available. So he estimated that the final retail cost
Speaker 1: for the Coolest Cooler was going to be two uh So,
Speaker 1: three hundred dollars for a cooler seems like a hefty
Speaker 1: price tag, but as it turns out, it was also
Speaker 1: an underestimation of how much he would need to charge
Speaker 1: for that particular invention. I do want to say. I
Speaker 1: went online and I did a little bit of research.
Speaker 1: Some super high end, super large coolers do cost hundreds
Speaker 1: of dollars. So it's not a completely unreasonable price. It's
Speaker 1: more than I probably would want to pay for a cooler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, so there are products that cater to
Speaker 1: people who have way more money than you and I
Speaker 1: do and not very much idea of what to spend
Speaker 1: it on. I'll put it that way. That's not it's
Speaker 1: not to say that those those products are no good
Speaker 1: or that they're only marginally better than say, a decent
Speaker 1: cooler would run you. I don't know. There are some
Speaker 1: of them may be truly incredible and be much more
Speaker 1: efficient and managing you know, heat and all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. I don't know. But uh. He also on
Speaker 1: that campaign had an offer where if you were one
Speaker 1: of the first fifty people to pledge, you could pledge
Speaker 1: a hundred sixty five dollars and get a reserved coolest
Speaker 1: cooler of your own. Uh. Those fifty slots disappeared almost immediately, surprise. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we cooler is a lot more palatable. Yeah. So then
Speaker 1: because they went so fast, and because the West coast
Speaker 1: had not even had an opportunity to look at it,
Speaker 1: because the campaign went live before most people on the
Speaker 1: West coast of the United States had even woken up.
Speaker 1: He decided to release another group, this time just twenty
Speaker 1: slots for more early bird coolers, and those went super
Speaker 1: fast to the next amount you could pledge. Let's say
Speaker 1: you missed out on those seventy, which wouldn't be a
Speaker 1: big surprise. I mean, they did go super fast. Your
Speaker 1: next option would be to pledge at a level of
Speaker 1: a hundred eighty five dollars or more, and that would
Speaker 1: put you on the reservation list for your own coolest cooler.
Speaker 1: So again you're you're still looking at a hundred fifteen
Speaker 1: dollars off the projected retail. Yeah, you would then also
Speaker 1: have to kick in fifteen dollars for shipping, which would
Speaker 1: you could argue push the the price tag for the
Speaker 1: coolest cooler to two hundred dollars. And that's how most
Speaker 1: websites refer to it. It was a cooler yeah, still
Speaker 1: not still not horrible, Still a pretty big discount. Um.
Speaker 1: I think it was so popular because he took lessons
Speaker 1: that he learned from his first Kickstarter and and really
Speaker 1: marketed the second one, well, he reached out to previous
Speaker 1: backers and enthusiasts through email, he hit up social media,
Speaker 1: and he did live events all prior to actually launching
Speaker 1: this campaign, So anybody who was already excited about it
Speaker 1: would then be excited at their friends about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They would tell people, oh, you know, I tried to
Speaker 1: back this last time. It didn't work out. You guys
Speaker 1: should get done on this, because think how incredible this
Speaker 1: is going to be. And then it worked because some
Speaker 1: news outlets, mostly local ones, were starting to pick it up,
Speaker 1: and this would increase as the campaign would launch, and
Speaker 1: in fact, it would turn into a frenzy when the
Speaker 1: campaign was starting to get truly successful. So it became
Speaker 1: a a self perpetuating cycle, right because the campaign started
Speaker 1: picking up steam, it was getting a lot of backers
Speaker 1: that in turn was notable enough to get the attention
Speaker 1: of the media that hadn't already covered this, which brought
Speaker 1: even more people to back it. So it started to
Speaker 1: kind of become a spinning boulder down the hill situation. Well,
Speaker 1: and it became a spinning baller quickly. It beat its
Speaker 1: school in four days. Within four days that had made
Speaker 1: three point two million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot more
Speaker 1: than a whole lot. And by the end of the
Speaker 1: two month campaign, it had raised thirteen million, two hundred
Speaker 1: five th two hundred and twenty six dollars from over
Speaker 1: sixty thousand backers, and once it beat out Pebbles Watch
Speaker 1: as the most successful kickstarter of all time at that time,
Speaker 1: it got a ton more press coverage. Time magazine even
Speaker 1: named it one of the best inventions of two tho. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they did this in two thousand four. Um. Yeah is
Speaker 1: before before this had really even had a chance to
Speaker 1: prove itself. And so then they began to work on
Speaker 1: finalizing the actual design of the products. And now they
Speaker 1: got the money to go into the process of making
Speaker 1: the thing. Yeah, And they worked with a studio, Fathom
Speaker 1: to get their prototype out, which had fifty parts in it. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is so that Time magazine could photograph it
Speaker 1: for the article. Yeah. It's hard to take pictures of
Speaker 1: a thing that's largely theoretical. Yeah, I mean they had
Speaker 1: pictures of the original design of the cooler, but this
Speaker 1: was redesigned so um and and through all this so
Speaker 1: he has this successful campaign. Ryan thought he had planned
Speaker 1: appropriately for supply and logistics ahead of time. He thought
Speaker 1: he had sourcing partners in place based on the money
Speaker 1: that he made, and he was so optimistic that he figured,
Speaker 1: unlike of crowdfunny campaigns that face delays, he would be
Speaker 1: able to avoid them. Yeah he was wrong, and yeah
Speaker 1: he was wrong. He had planned on starting to deliver
Speaker 1: coolers by February two. But if you know anything about
Speaker 1: this story, you know that was are too optimistic. And
Speaker 1: if you don't know anything about this story, we'll tell
Speaker 1: you about it. First. We're going to take a quick break,
Speaker 1: al right. So Grebber has this crowdfunding campaign. It is
Speaker 1: monumentally successful, as an enormous following, lots of enthusiastic backers
Speaker 1: who just can't wait to get their hands on this
Speaker 1: cooler that can do everything, uh that you can imagine
Speaker 1: and be prepared to live their best beach clad lives.
Speaker 1: The cooler cannot do everything you could imagine. I don't
Speaker 1: think it could walk a puppy for you, nor could
Speaker 1: it actually transport you to the beach, but just about
Speaker 1: everything else that ever. Yeah, So what happened, Well, he
Speaker 1: immediately started to encounter issues in manufacture ring and this
Speaker 1: is a good time to remember that manufacturing has got
Speaker 1: a lot of moving pieces. Right, You've got your whole
Speaker 1: supply chain. Now, it's one thing if you're making a
Speaker 1: relatively simple product, where the supply chain is is pretty linear,
Speaker 1: where you know you've you've got you get the raw
Speaker 1: materials from one place, it goes into a manufacturing facility,
Speaker 1: It then goes into the shipping department of that facility,
Speaker 1: and then it goes out to customers. That's really simple.
Speaker 1: But the coolest cooler had a lot of different parts
Speaker 1: to it. It had these speakers, it had the USB
Speaker 1: charging UH outlets, it had a motor for the blender. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's got all these different parts and they were coming
Speaker 1: from different places, which means if there's a delay and
Speaker 1: any part of that supply chain, it delays the overall product.
Speaker 1: And there was so the manufacturing facility in China that
Speaker 1: made the blender motor, which there was one place that
Speaker 1: he sourced for this one place. Only he had no
Speaker 1: backups because his specifications for this blender motor were so
Speaker 1: high he wanted to be really good auction Um they
Speaker 1: went on strike and so it stopped his entire his
Speaker 1: entire line of assembly, which also took a really long
Speaker 1: time because they had fifty parts, a lot of which
Speaker 1: had to be hand assembled. Now, if you've ever looked
Speaker 1: at the Coolest cooler online, like you've gone to Amazon,
Speaker 1: where you can still see coolest coolers listed, although if
Speaker 1: you want one of the classic ones, typically you're looking
Speaker 1: at buying it from a reseller. But if you look
Speaker 1: at it, you'll see that there are a couple of
Speaker 1: different configurations. There's one version of the Coolest Cooler that
Speaker 1: has a regular top, doesn't have the blender part, and
Speaker 1: it's significantly cheaper than the one that comes with the blender. Well,
Speaker 1: the one that was on the Kickstarter page. One of
Speaker 1: the backers backed specifically mentioned that the blender was part
Speaker 1: of it. So that was a big issue with the
Speaker 1: the supply chain for the blender motor all all uh
Speaker 1: screwed up. It really put him behind. But even still
Speaker 1: he was estimating that by September. By September he could
Speaker 1: get everybody there coolers and that did not happen, No,
Speaker 1: not at all. Um everything was a lot more expensive
Speaker 1: then he anticipated. Yeah, so that final retail price turned
Speaker 1: out to be too low. That and in fact, he
Speaker 1: said this over and over again, So one of the
Speaker 1: biggest problems he had was that he had underestimated how
Speaker 1: expensive it would be to produce these coolers, and that
Speaker 1: it was an issue where if you did the math,
Speaker 1: there was no way around it. You were going to
Speaker 1: lose money on those Kickstarter orders like there was. This
Speaker 1: was beyond selling things at cost where you're just covering
Speaker 1: the expense of the materials and labor to put the
Speaker 1: product together. Now you're actually taking a bath on those sales.
Speaker 1: And I mean, it does not take a business major
Speaker 1: to tell you that you can't stay in business that way.
Speaker 1: You you're bleeding money being in business. You cannot. You
Speaker 1: can't make it up in volume. That's just gonna bleed
Speaker 1: you out faster. So this is where he had to
Speaker 1: start figuring out what do I do about this? Well,
Speaker 1: he had another idea that again kind of makes sense
Speaker 1: but also made a lot of people angry. He decided
Speaker 1: to sell his cooler on Amazon because that way he
Speaker 1: could sell it at a higher price than what he
Speaker 1: listed on Kickstarter and make up some profit on the
Speaker 1: coolers and then use that money on making and shipping
Speaker 1: these individual coolers to people. To get all of the
Speaker 1: coolers for all the Kickstarter people to them. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: he didn't have the money to do it. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: essentially this was the reason this caused such as a fuss,
Speaker 1: is that the people who were backing it on Kickstarter.
Speaker 1: I can't speak for everybody, but I notice in general
Speaker 1: that a lot of people act like Kickstarter is an
Speaker 1: early access store. That's not what starters. You're an investor
Speaker 1: in an idea, Yeah, and you sometimes investments don't pay off.
Speaker 1: I mean, We've done plenty of episodes of the Brink
Speaker 1: where that has turned out to be true. You've backed
Speaker 1: some some campaigns that didn't. Let's not go into my
Speaker 1: personal history and how many watches I have backed that
Speaker 1: never came out. But the campaigns are successful, Yes they were.
Speaker 1: I I think there are three different watch campaigns I
Speaker 1: backed that did not ever ship. I think that just
Speaker 1: makes you an expert on the topic. But again, I
Speaker 1: didn't knowing that there was the possibility that somewhere down
Speaker 1: the line something like this could happen where I'm giving
Speaker 1: I'm pledging money to a business that I hope succeeds.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of factors out there that
Speaker 1: don't have anything to do with the sincerity of the
Speaker 1: business owner that can sink a business, right. You also
Speaker 1: have people out there who are disingenuous, who are snake
Speaker 1: oil salesman, who they're selling an idea but they don't
Speaker 1: have any any intention of seeing it through. I never
Speaker 1: got the feeling that Grebber was one of those people. No,
Speaker 1: I really think he just lacked the business knowledge to
Speaker 1: set this up to be successful or as successful as
Speaker 1: it was. Maybe if he had the low numbers that
Speaker 1: he expected and the money that he he was originally
Speaker 1: estimating for, he would have done fine. Yeah, maybe he
Speaker 1: could have ramped up slowly and grown more organically. But
Speaker 1: the crazy success and the amazing amount of attention that
Speaker 1: was directed towards his campaign really was an albatross around
Speaker 1: his neck. And so the whole goal of any business
Speaker 1: oriented kickstarted campaign is to have usually at least to
Speaker 1: have a sustainable business on the other side of it, right,
Speaker 1: So the whole goal of Coolest Cooler that campaign wasn't
Speaker 1: just to ship out coolers to backers. It was to
Speaker 1: create a viable business where he be selling these coolers
Speaker 1: to other retailers and that the people who backed it
Speaker 1: their reward for backing it would be getting a cooler
Speaker 1: at a discounted price. The problem was that unless he
Speaker 1: was selling them at this higher mark up at these retailers,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have the money to cover sending out those
Speaker 1: those Backer coolers to the backers. So the backers are
Speaker 1: upset because the thing that they've been waiting for is
Speaker 1: not coming to their to their house when they expected it.
Speaker 1: And somebody else who didn't back the campaign could, in
Speaker 1: theory go out and order one and get one ahead
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah, in two weeks or or a couple
Speaker 1: of days. You have a note here, And I think
Speaker 1: it's true that a big part of the issue was communication.
Speaker 1: There are their notes and their comments about we haven't
Speaker 1: heard anything. And so they did do a live stream
Speaker 1: to say, look, you guys, we need fifteen million more
Speaker 1: dollars than we expect it. We're trying to get it
Speaker 1: through selling coolers so that we can get you your rewards.
Speaker 1: They and they did, they send out some rewards early on,
Speaker 1: and it just it got too big for them. Well,
Speaker 1: and and that also ended up being an issue, like
Speaker 1: there was no good way for Creeper to get out
Speaker 1: of this because he owed something like sixty thousand people
Speaker 1: these coolers, and he could only do them in batches,
Speaker 1: and so what would happen is you would send out
Speaker 1: you would have this company sending out coolers to backers
Speaker 1: in these smaller batches. But the media focus was on
Speaker 1: how many people were still waiting for a cooler. It
Speaker 1: wasn't saying, coolest cooler has made good on you know,
Speaker 1: ten thousand of the pledges and is working hard to
Speaker 1: get the other fifty thousand. It was instead it was
Speaker 1: fifty thousand people are still waiting for their coolers, which
Speaker 1: wasn't doing him or his company any favors. So again, like, yes,
Speaker 1: the mistake was his. We're not gonna lift all responsibility
Speaker 1: off of him and say like he was a victim
Speaker 1: in all of this. But at the same time, I
Speaker 1: think the way it unfolded, it was pretty much a
Speaker 1: worst case scenario for him to have to deal with
Speaker 1: on top of all just the production headaches he had. Well,
Speaker 1: he does, he does. I don't know if it's victim
Speaker 1: blaming or a little bit of shaming, but he he
Speaker 1: has been noted to say that he thinks part of
Speaker 1: what has delayed him so long is that when he
Speaker 1: put the coolers on Amazon, all of these backers went
Speaker 1: on and made these horrible reviews because they said they
Speaker 1: didn't have their coolers, and he's like, guys, you're shooting
Speaker 1: yourself in the foot here. Yeah, it's it's just delaying
Speaker 1: when I can get enough money to make good on
Speaker 1: the promise I've made you. But then again, if I
Speaker 1: were said, hey, if you pay nine dollars, will get
Speaker 1: you your cooler quicker than you're paying the quote unquote
Speaker 1: retail price for the cooler at which point, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that was something else that came up with that. He said.
Speaker 1: One solution to the problem they had was that if
Speaker 1: you were a backer and you wanted your cooler faster,
Speaker 1: you could get it by giving an extra nineties seven
Speaker 1: dollars to the company. That would make up enough of
Speaker 1: the difference for him to be able to put those
Speaker 1: people on a priority list and they would get their
Speaker 1: coolers faster. But you didn't have to do that. Again,
Speaker 1: the way a lot of news outlets reported this, it
Speaker 1: sounded like if you don't cough up the nineties dollars,
Speaker 1: you're never going to get your cooler. That wasn't the case.
Speaker 1: It was if you want your cooler now, you have
Speaker 1: to pay almost an extra hundred dollars. If you are patient,
Speaker 1: you can wait and it may take a while, but
Speaker 1: at least in theory, you will eventually get it. I
Speaker 1: wonder if some of those news outlets reporting it, where
Speaker 1: the reporters maybe had backed it and we're feeling a
Speaker 1: little sore, I mean, probably not. It was, it was.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to get the the idea that the
Speaker 1: company was bleeding backers dry. But again, the more I
Speaker 1: look into it, the less I feel like that's the case,
Speaker 1: and the more I feel like there was no good
Speaker 1: pathway out of this this whole Okay, So after all this,
Speaker 1: they started shipping in July of two more coolers. They
Speaker 1: had enough money to restart shipping, and they hoped they'd
Speaker 1: be done by October of two thousand fifteen. Uh, how
Speaker 1: did that turn out? It didn't. Yeah, there's so, I mean,
Speaker 1: there are still lots of people waiting for their coolers.
Speaker 1: I'll give a kind of figure in a second. But
Speaker 1: they began to sell the model of the cooler that
Speaker 1: was covered by the kick starting campaign for four d
Speaker 1: eight five dollars on their site, which if you look
Speaker 1: at the if you look at the initial projected retail
Speaker 1: price of to I'm pretty sure fo is more than that.
Speaker 1: I'm an English major. But that's a lot for a cooler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just shy a five hundred bucks. But it also shows
Speaker 1: that at this cooler and all the parts that were
Speaker 1: necessary in order to put it together and to have
Speaker 1: it do all the things that was supposed to do,
Speaker 1: that it was way more expensive to produce than what
Speaker 1: he had anticipated. And it's about again we'll get into
Speaker 1: lessons at the end of the episode, but one thing
Speaker 1: this immediately tells you is that whenever you are thinking
Speaker 1: about really any business endeavor, but particularly if you're making
Speaker 1: something physical, you should grossly overestimate how much it's going
Speaker 1: to cost you to make it, because it will prepare
Speaker 1: you better to when you encounter those problems to manage
Speaker 1: them well. And then if you do have if you
Speaker 1: do have a surplus at the end of it, if
Speaker 1: everything goes as you expected and not as you planned for,
Speaker 1: and then you can either give it back to your
Speaker 1: supporters or you can invest it in your company to
Speaker 1: be more successful. Um, make sure you talk to other
Speaker 1: people who know what they're doing instead of just like
Speaker 1: your own. Research is good, but also talk to industry experts.
Speaker 1: But you know, i'd have imagine that there were there
Speaker 1: was fallout beyond just angry consumers from all of this
Speaker 1: failure to deliver product. Oh yeah, you had You even
Speaker 1: had people who were ordering it and uh and you
Speaker 1: know they're actually purchasing it online and getting it ahead
Speaker 1: of time, who were reviewing it and saying the cooler
Speaker 1: is fine, like it's there's nothing wrong with it, but
Speaker 1: it might not be cool enough to justify the cost.
Speaker 1: So again that ends up hurting sales, which makes it
Speaker 1: even take even longer to to make good on these
Speaker 1: these kickstarter backers. So it's a domino effect, right, or
Speaker 1: a ripple effect if you prefer. It's a ripple effect.
Speaker 1: If something goes wrong at ripples out and it effects
Speaker 1: and ultimately the people that it is affecting the most,
Speaker 1: at least in the eyes of the backers, are the backers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which led to some legal troubles, but we're going to
Speaker 1: tell you about that right after this break. Okay, So
Speaker 1: when we started talking about Grepper and his ideas, we
Speaker 1: mentioned that he is from Portland, Oregon. That's where he
Speaker 1: was operating out of, and Oregon has been the home,
Speaker 1: not just of Grepper, but of some of Grepper's biggest woes. Yes,
Speaker 1: he got a whole bunch of consumer complaints to the
Speaker 1: Oregon Department of Justice. Three hundred fifteen incidents of complaints
Speaker 1: were filed with that d o J in Oregon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you've got an issue with a company, you've
Speaker 1: got to file it where that company is. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: from people outside of Oregon complaining to Oregon. Uh, And
Speaker 1: the complaints stated that the Coolest Cooler was being negligent
Speaker 1: in delivering their product. So that was enough to to
Speaker 1: inspire the d o J and Oregon to launch an
Speaker 1: investigation in two So Kickstar, by the way, their policy
Speaker 1: the states that any successful campaign is supposed to either
Speaker 1: deliver the awards to backers that were promised or offer
Speaker 1: refunds to backers. And so part of the problem here
Speaker 1: was that Coolest Cooler, at least according to these complaints,
Speaker 1: was refusing to refund money to backers who were discontented.
Speaker 1: I mean they didn't have it. Yeah. But the problem
Speaker 1: that is kickstarters own policy is that if you successfully
Speaker 1: fund your project, you either have to make good on
Speaker 1: these rewards or offer up the refund to your backers.
Speaker 1: So it's what gave a foothold for the d o
Speaker 1: J to really kind of look into what was going on. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: in two thousand six, Um Coolest Cooler did try to
Speaker 1: a piece people again. They added a tracking tool to
Speaker 1: their website for backers to track where the progress of
Speaker 1: their delivery was, like it hasn't even been made yet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could see your place in line basically. But then
Speaker 1: they also weren't going in chronological order of who backed
Speaker 1: and shipping these things. They were going by address, which
Speaker 1: makes sense from a bulk shipping standpoint. Yeah, but not
Speaker 1: great if you happen to be like if you had
Speaker 1: prided yourself on being one of the first, like let's
Speaker 1: say that you were one of those first seventy, like
Speaker 1: you were an early bird backer, but because of your address,
Speaker 1: you were not at the top of that list. You
Speaker 1: might think, what the heck, I'm the reason. I'm part
Speaker 1: of the reason why this campaign was so successful. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: They also tried to put on that tool on their
Speaker 1: website where all of the money raised had gone, to
Speaker 1: give some transparency to people. I'm guessing that didn't really
Speaker 1: help much because they're employees of coolest cooler that we're
Speaker 1: getting docs and Ryan's family even got some threats from
Speaker 1: some angry consumers. Yeah. Yeah, people, man, when they don't
Speaker 1: get what they expect, they can turn real ugly, real fast.
Speaker 1: And I mean I get the frustration, trust me, I
Speaker 1: could the frustration of backing a campaign and not getting
Speaker 1: what you were promised when the campaign funds. I also
Speaker 1: and at least one of those instances, did not get
Speaker 1: a refund, nor did I get my reward. Uh. The
Speaker 1: I cannot have any recourse for that because the company
Speaker 1: that was supposed to make the thing I backed no
Speaker 1: longer exists, so there's no one for me to get
Speaker 1: money from at this point. It's just it's the risk
Speaker 1: of investment. Yeah, you got to know going in that's
Speaker 1: again you have to remember it's not a store, right.
Speaker 1: So but there are people who they have that expectation
Speaker 1: and they're like, well, I bought this product and you
Speaker 1: won't give it to me, So therefore I it's fair game.
Speaker 1: I'm allowed to do whatever I want to strike out
Speaker 1: at you because you have taken my money, which you know,
Speaker 1: so these people who filed with the organ Department of
Speaker 1: Justice took a much Yeah, I'm more responsible and less
Speaker 1: like psycho U unsympathetic approach. Yeah. Yeah, so how did
Speaker 1: that turn out? Um, well, you know, at least turned
Speaker 1: out well for some of the backers. The Oregon Department
Speaker 1: of Justice did find that Coolest Cooler was or at
Speaker 1: least was approaching the point of saying that the Coolest
Speaker 1: Cooler was negligent, but Grepper was able to settle the case.
Speaker 1: But the settlement, of course, came with some pretty strong
Speaker 1: agreements that he had to abide by. One of those
Speaker 1: was that, uh, he was going to have to ship
Speaker 1: Coolest coolers to Oregonians who had backed the campaign that
Speaker 1: included eight hundred seventy three backers in the state of Oregon.
Speaker 1: He also agreed that if backers in general did not
Speaker 1: receive their coolers by the middle of twenty so we
Speaker 1: still have some time to go. Yeah, Like, while we're
Speaker 1: researching this episode, there are people actively posting on the
Speaker 1: cool Cooler Kickstarter page, I haven't gotten my cooler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well there's thousands of them, but that anyway, if he
Speaker 1: does not get the coolers to the backers by mid
Speaker 1: twenty for every backer who has not received his or
Speaker 1: her cooler, they will receive twenty dollars from Grebber and
Speaker 1: no matter if the company goes into bankruptcy or if
Speaker 1: it's still solvent, he will owe that money. If the
Speaker 1: company goes into bankruptcy, it will not protect him from
Speaker 1: that that uh obligation. He will still have to pay
Speaker 1: the twenty bucks per person. Well, and I know people
Speaker 1: were not happy about this. I mean, obviously they hope
Speaker 1: to get their cool Some of them don't even anymore,
Speaker 1: like I don't care about this cooler anymore, and is
Speaker 1: a small amount of their investment back, but it's something Well,
Speaker 1: and you know, the idea would be that assuming the
Speaker 1: company was still solvent, that even with the twenty dollars
Speaker 1: being sent, it would still the cooler would still be
Speaker 1: on its way at some point. Yeah, so it's not
Speaker 1: like here's twenty dollars now you don't get your cooler. Yeah,
Speaker 1: assuming that the company is still around. Of course, if
Speaker 1: it were bankrupt, then it's just coming out of Grabber's
Speaker 1: personal funds. I assume. After this settlement, Grabber actually wrote
Speaker 1: a letter to people and he put it on the
Speaker 1: Kickstarter as an update to all the backers, and he
Speaker 1: explained their plan and he explained there strategies for going
Speaker 1: forward to get this done, things like going international and
Speaker 1: things like that, more investors and stuff, but he was
Speaker 1: really salty about it. He's like, I feel vindicated that
Speaker 1: this is how the Oregan Department of Justice ruled that
Speaker 1: we aren't shysters. We generally want to get you your product. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we just we can't, and you're hurting our progress, right right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like like the you know, we're trying to do
Speaker 1: good on the agreement we had, but the more you
Speaker 1: guys put up a fuss, the harder it is for
Speaker 1: us to do that. Yeah. It's kind of like, uh,
Speaker 1: like you've promised a toddler that you're gonna go to
Speaker 1: the water park in the afternoon, but it's still in
Speaker 1: the morning and you need to do some errands, and
Speaker 1: the toddler starts having a melt down. You're like, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to go to the water parks. Says yes,
Speaker 1: we're going to the water park, but first we have
Speaker 1: to run errands. But I want to go to the
Speaker 1: water park. I mean, mind you if I had been
Speaker 1: promised to go to the water park in two thousand
Speaker 1: fourteen and I hit two thousand sixteen, it's a very
Speaker 1: long afternoon. Areal very long afternoon when you're a toddler,
Speaker 1: time stretches before you like an infinity. Yeah, that's true. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: in two thousand seventeen, there was actually a petition filed
Speaker 1: on change dot org to get them to stop selling
Speaker 1: their coolers until the backers got their's again, which makes
Speaker 1: no sense. It's it's hurting the process to get you
Speaker 1: your cooler. Yeah, that is kind of crazy, like the
Speaker 1: idea that hey, stop stop doing this thing you're doing
Speaker 1: that is helping fund actually getting coolers to backers and
Speaker 1: get coolers to backers without any funds. That's not the
Speaker 1: way the world works. No, no, but Grebber, you know
Speaker 1: obvious Lee didn't listen to that. The petition didn't It
Speaker 1: didn't change well, I mean, it's a petition. It's a petition,
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't have any holding value over anything other than
Speaker 1: letting you know. There's a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: ticked off enough to fill out a form. So, in
Speaker 1: addition to trying to boost international sales, get more investors,
Speaker 1: reduced production costs, all of which are great ideas, although
Speaker 1: hard to get investors when you've got a bad reputation
Speaker 1: um Greber started innovating more to try to get more money,
Speaker 1: so he made peripherals like batteries and solar panels and
Speaker 1: charging chords for the coolers. He made a soft sided cooler,
Speaker 1: which is expensive for a soft stadic cooler, but apparently
Speaker 1: is like super magnetic. It's also less expensive than the
Speaker 1: full coolest coolers. Yes, and it has like a universal
Speaker 1: attachment thing you said, you can put on your bike
Speaker 1: or your backpacker. But the whole idea was that he
Speaker 1: could use profits from that or revenue from the sales
Speaker 1: of those products to help again make good on these backers.
Speaker 1: That I have a feeling that that should the day
Speaker 1: come when Greber is able to send off that final
Speaker 1: backer cooler, it will be an enormous weight off his shoulders. So, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: how many people would you suppose don't have their coolers yet? Well,
Speaker 1: it's tough to say because there's not really an ongoing
Speaker 1: tally that I could find anywhere. But in ten lateen
Speaker 1: there was an article that stated as many as twenty
Speaker 1: thousand people were still waiting for their cooler. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of people. So it's about a third of
Speaker 1: the backers who who pledged at a level that was
Speaker 1: enough to get a cooler in the first place. So
Speaker 1: two thirds got their coolers, a third are still waiting. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's tough. And there was an article and so
Speaker 1: the Oregonian was the newspaper that published the report that
Speaker 1: said twenty thousand people were still waiting. A few months later,
Speaker 1: they published a second article that stated that during the
Speaker 1: most recent quarter, according to a statement from Coolest Cooler,
Speaker 1: the company had shipped precisely zero coolers tobackers in that
Speaker 1: most recent quarter, meaning that they weren't able to do
Speaker 1: any in that three month period. So obviously every month
Speaker 1: that goes by is bringing them closer to that mid
Speaker 1: twenty twenty deadline that they need to make. And um,
Speaker 1: there have been a lot of other things that have
Speaker 1: happened over the last couple of years that have added complications.
Speaker 1: For example, you probably are familiar that there have been
Speaker 1: some issues about tariffs and China, as as the United
Speaker 1: States of America has enacted certain policies that have instituted
Speaker 1: these tariffs that in turn ends up impacting the supply
Speaker 1: chain and manufacturing plan for the Coolest Coolers, so which
Speaker 1: that is not now there's nothing he can do about
Speaker 1: it other than like he trying desperately to find a
Speaker 1: way to still stay within budget and be able to
Speaker 1: continue production. It's not like it halts production, but it
Speaker 1: makes production more expensive. And since that was the problem
Speaker 1: in the first place, in addition to the timing issues
Speaker 1: with things like the strike, uh, that does not make
Speaker 1: his life any easier. Yeah. Again, I really think the
Speaker 1: lesson here is give yourself buffer, give yourself a leg up. Yeah, overestimate,
Speaker 1: like you said, how much it's gonna call you talk
Speaker 1: to people. Give yourself a longer deadline too. You know,
Speaker 1: if backers know that going in, they might be okay
Speaker 1: with that. Yeah. It's it's when you start changing things
Speaker 1: and people had. It's when you set certain expectations and
Speaker 1: then you have to change those expectations. That's always a problem,
Speaker 1: and I've seen it on multiple Kickstarter campaigns, and it
Speaker 1: almost always happens with stuff that's related to producing something physical.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't have to be complicated either. I've backed
Speaker 1: Kickstarter campaigns that were producing things like a deck of cards,
Speaker 1: but then there are printer issues, their quality control issues,
Speaker 1: and these things slow everything down and they increase the
Speaker 1: costs because you have to pay for another production run
Speaker 1: because if it's not going to meet the expectations of
Speaker 1: your backers, then you're going to have problems that like you,
Speaker 1: you either ship nothing and you tell your backers were sorry,
Speaker 1: but the quality was not up to our standards, so
Speaker 1: we're going to go back and try it again, or
Speaker 1: you end up shipping something that is of substandard quality
Speaker 1: and your backers get upset anyway because they're like, backed this,
Speaker 1: that was a waste of money and a really long wait.
Speaker 1: And also you know the lesson for you, uh you
Speaker 1: know you've listened to this episodes so you know, but
Speaker 1: realize that you're making an investment. It's almost like loaning
Speaker 1: money to your family or friends where you shouldn't. You're
Speaker 1: hoping to get something back, but you may not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you need to You need to ask yourself, like, can
Speaker 1: I make this pledge if this campaign is successful? Is
Speaker 1: it okay if this money never comes back to me? Like?
Speaker 1: If I if I make this pledge, and what for
Speaker 1: whatever reason the act will endeavor fails despite the campaign
Speaker 1: being successful, Am I okay with taking a loss of this?
Speaker 1: If I'm not, then maybe I should just wait until
Speaker 1: it's for public consumers. Yeah, exactly so in this case
Speaker 1: with coolest cooler, if you saw it and you thought, wow,
Speaker 1: that sounds really awesome and I would love to have
Speaker 1: one of these, and it would be nice to get
Speaker 1: it for a discounted price, but I'm also aware of
Speaker 1: the potential pitfalls that can be in the way of production.
Speaker 1: Then you might think, well, is it is it worth
Speaker 1: potentially saving a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected retail
Speaker 1: price or is it better for me to wait, because
Speaker 1: it could be that instead of saving a d fifteen
Speaker 1: dollars and throwing away a Yeah, policies are great, but
Speaker 1: the truth of the matter is, no matter how well
Speaker 1: intentioned the inventor or the founder of the kicks starter,
Speaker 1: if they end up going bankrupt due to misfortune, not
Speaker 1: even poor planning, but just misfortune and end up living
Speaker 1: under a bridge, you they can't refund you. It's it's
Speaker 1: just the way it is. Um It's It's also interesting
Speaker 1: to point out that crowdfunding has largely changed over the
Speaker 1: last couple of years, where we're seeing more and more
Speaker 1: established companies using crowdfunding, and they're not using it to
Speaker 1: raise the money needed to make whatever the thing is.
Speaker 1: Often the thing has already made. They're using it to
Speaker 1: kind of judge the reception of whatever that thing is
Speaker 1: so that they know how much of it to make
Speaker 1: or whether or not it's going to be a successful product.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's changing where it was kind of
Speaker 1: aimed at the individual creator originally, like this was an idea,
Speaker 1: Like you have an idea for something, you launched this
Speaker 1: crowdfunding campaign to get the money you need to actually
Speaker 1: bring that something into reality, and then you ship off
Speaker 1: or you start selling or whatever. Now it's companies are
Speaker 1: using it almost as a marketing tool, and so it's
Speaker 1: it's dramatically changed how crowdfunding is working in the like
Speaker 1: I said, in the last couple of years. But we
Speaker 1: still have these issues and uh. And there are no
Speaker 1: shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that do come across as kind
Speaker 1: of scammy, so that's also good. Although to be fair,
Speaker 1: both Kickstarter and indiego go and others have gotten a
Speaker 1: lot better at weeding those out. Although indigo go you
Speaker 1: can get your funding amount even if you don't magic Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you don't. If you said you can, you can
Speaker 1: choose if you set Let's say you set a ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollar goal but you only raise five thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and it's on indiegog. You can choose to accept any
Speaker 1: amount raised even if you haven't met your goal, but
Speaker 1: it's with a heftier fee taken out. For indie go go,
Speaker 1: they take a much larger percentage of the money, so
Speaker 1: you get you get even less. So if you ask
Speaker 1: for ten thousand dollars and you end up getting five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, you might only end up with four thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: So it's it's one of those things that it's kind
Speaker 1: of a slippery slope issue. Um, we have a couple
Speaker 1: of fun facts and I just read them and now
Speaker 1: I'm angry. I'm sorry, Jonathan. The first is Ryan Grabber
Speaker 1: has backed his own kickstarters. Uh, he backed the potato
Speaker 1: salad kickstarter. That's the one that gets me mad. It
Speaker 1: is because Jonathan had a kickstarter around the same time
Speaker 1: and his didn't get funded. But this darn potatoes salad
Speaker 1: kickstar was a choke. The potato salad was a choke,
Speaker 1: and then it got it got ridiculous. Not just backing
Speaker 1: it was again like a crazy viral success for a
Speaker 1: joke potato salad. I mean, the guy did take all
Speaker 1: the funds and make a major party out of it.
Speaker 1: All props, all props to that guy and and his
Speaker 1: joke and the fact that it brought joy to people.
Speaker 1: But I am I am unapologetically envious because I had
Speaker 1: a project. It was near and dear to both of
Speaker 1: our hearts. It was that I was really hoping I
Speaker 1: could get funded, and it uh. It also managed to
Speaker 1: buck another trend. It funded about halfway to where it
Speaker 1: needed to be. But it was on Kickstarter. It was
Speaker 1: make or break. And the reason why I say it
Speaker 1: broke some trends is that, generally speaking, on Kickstarter, if
Speaker 1: you reach a certain level, a certain percentage of funding,
Speaker 1: and I want to say it's somewhere around that, of
Speaker 1: campaigns that hit their gold during the campaign, we'll we'll
Speaker 1: get all the way to funding by the end. Mine
Speaker 1: was not one of those. I'm really sad about that too.
Speaker 1: So we'll move on to our last fact and then
Speaker 1: we'll wrap things up. The original version of the Coolest
Speaker 1: Cooler had an attached to grill yeah, which turns out
Speaker 1: probably not the best idea for a product that's mostly
Speaker 1: made out of blast it was nixed for. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't imagine a grill working too well. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can maybe have like a stand alone little stand and
Speaker 1: grill that you could put over a fire pit or something,
Speaker 1: but even then you'd have to have it cool down
Speaker 1: enough to be able to put it against a plastic cooler. Um.
Speaker 1: So that wraps up our discussion about the coolest cooler.
Speaker 1: But before we go and wrap everything up for the episode,
Speaker 1: we also wanted to give an update about a previous
Speaker 1: topic that we've covered. We did an episode about Toys
Speaker 1: r Us and we talked about how at the end
Speaker 1: of that episode, we talked about how UH there was
Speaker 1: an effort to kind of bring these sort of pop
Speaker 1: up stores to life, targets and things like that, and
Speaker 1: the Toys r Us name might not be totally gone.
Speaker 1: And now we've gotten word for the heads up as
Speaker 1: of the recording of this podcast, which is on June one,
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, that there is a a sincere effort
Speaker 1: to bring back uh a larger version of Toys r Us,
Speaker 1: although not at the full size of the older toy stores. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there will be about the third of the size of
Speaker 1: the old toy stores with more experience points, play areas
Speaker 1: and things like that. And also they're looking at bringing
Speaker 1: back their e commerce site. They're hoping to be back
Speaker 1: by the holiday season of two thousand nineteen. So we'll
Speaker 1: have to see if that happens. Yeah, and if it does,
Speaker 1: we'll do another update where we'll talk about maybe we'll
Speaker 1: have to do an episode at some point where it's
Speaker 1: it's all follow ups on brand. I was thinking the
Speaker 1: same thing. Clearly Canadian would be another one. Thanks for
Speaker 1: the shout out, clearly, we greatly appreciate it. Awesome. I
Speaker 1: still haven't received any crates of drinks or anything. You
Speaker 1: don't listen to him. I totally gave him a BlackBerry,
Speaker 1: clearly Canadian. That's not a crate. That was one drink
Speaker 1: and it was from you, not from clearly. Not that
Speaker 1: we do this to get stuck from companies. We're just joking.
Speaker 1: We don't expect nor do we deserve anything from anybody.
Speaker 1: But let's say that you wanted out there. You and
Speaker 1: listener Land wanted to give us a suggestion for something
Speaker 1: we should cover in a future episode of The Brink.
Speaker 1: How would they reach out to us, Well, they could
Speaker 1: email us at feedback at the Brink Podcast Dot show yep,
Speaker 1: and you can go to our website that's the Brink
Speaker 1: Podcast dot Show. It has an archive of all of
Speaker 1: our previously published episodes. Got information about your beloved hosts
Speaker 1: and other interesting things you can check out. And that
Speaker 1: wraps this up until next time. I have been Jonathan
Speaker 1: Strict and I've been aerial casting