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How A Travel Brand Survived the Pandemic | Brendan Kennedy | NxTSTOP
Episode 179

How A Travel Brand Survived the Pandemic | Brendan Kennedy | NxTSTOP

On this podcast, we talk about how NxTSTOP pivoted to face masks as a gamble, how they moved forward from having audiences from masks to selling their main products, the pros and cons of Amazon, and so much more!

Honest Ecommerce · Chase Clymer with Brendan Kennedy

June 27, 202239m 24s

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Show Notes

Prior to the NxTSTOP Brendan spent his career working in enterprise technology with Accenture and then VMware. 

In 2015 he founded his first startup Fathomd to bring interactive business games into MBA coursework. 

In 2020 Brendan launched NxTSTOP to outfit world explorers with functional sustainable travel apparel and scaled it to a multimillion dollar business in just one year. 

He is a graduate of Stanford and received his MBA from MIT Sloan.

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

  • [00:00] Intro
  • [01:17] Travleisure® and the IPs of NxTSTOP
  • [01:45] What is NxTSTOP
  • [02:07] Coming up with the idea of NxTSTOP
  • [03:26] What made NxTSTOP explode
  • [05:20] Pivoting to face masks saved the business
  • [06:57] Dealing with non ideal customers
  • [08:52] Acquiring “new” customers
  • [11:52] Customer feedback is valuable
  • [13:36] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io
  • [13:56] Sponsor: Mesa apps.shopify.com/mesa
  • [14:39] Sponsor: Gorgias gorgias.grsm.io/honest
  • [16:06] Sponsor: BeProfit beprofit.co
  • [17:37] Sponsor: Klaviyo klaviyo.com/honest
  • [18:24] Being on Shopify vs being on Amazon
  • [22:04] Did Amazon produce economies of scale?
  • [23:15] Other channels that NxTSTOP uses
  • [24:38] The importance of domain authority
  • [25:38] NxTSTOP’s SEO play
  • [26:40] SEO for D2C Brands
  • [27:46] SEO has great ROI
  • [28:06] Brendan warns against agencies
  • [29:48] Chase’s perspective on Brendan’s statement
  • [30:09] Brendan clarifies to be careful of big agencies
  • [30:57] Chase’s restaurant analogy
  • [31:12] Build a “dream team”
  • [32:44] Dealing with the iOS 14 update
  • [35:22] How Chase analyzes brands for Electric Eye
  • [36:25] Brendan tries out Chase’s technique
  • [37:00] Triple Whale and other first party pixels
  • [38:33] Where to find NxTSTOP

Resources:

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