I desperately want to read Bert Bassett's book.
Alas, he hasn't published one (yet?) so I downloaded as much information from his brain as was possible in this 30-minute episode.
While working at eBay, Bert built a successful side hustle selling cat toys online. 15 years later, that gig is still earning him a handsome profit. All it takes is an hour per day.
A few highlights from our conversation:
Bert's website: cat-mat.store/
I desperately want to read Bert Bassett's book.
Alas, he hasn't published one (yet?) so I downloaded as much information from his brain as was possible in this 30-minute episode.
While working at eBay, Bert built a successful side hustle selling cat toys online. 15 years later, that gig is still earning him a handsome profit. All it takes is an hour per day.
A few highlights from our conversation:
Bert's website: cat-mat.store/
And I classified my customers as, obviously, there's a group of people who haven't bought off you yet and could be. Then the second group was people who had bought off me once. Then the third group was people who'd bought off me more than once. And the fourth group was, and this is the absolute critical one, your best customers are the ones whose cat's name you know. On the face of it, he sells cat toys online. After today's show, you might not think of cat toys in the same way ever again. It's a fascinating conversation with Bert Bassett, ex-eBay. He sees it as selling joy to a cat, selling an experience to the cat owner, getting to watch their cat having fun, getting to feel good as a cat owner and projecting that out to the world. It's such a refreshing, sensible way of thinking about selling online that a lot of us can learn from. Bert, welcome. Before we talk about eBay and marketplaces and e-commerce and stepping into that vault of knowledge inside your brain, selling cat toys online, I suspect there might be a story. It's a story about my own cat. One late night I was watching YouTube videos and I saw a video of a couple of cats playing with a simple paper toy. I had some wine, so I ordered it in the middle of the night. And about two weeks later, a mysterious parcel turned up from America. I had to go back and look at my internet history and found that I paid something like £30 to get a small parcel over with the import duties and the postage. It was a tissue cat toy and it mimics grass. And cats just love them. They jump up and down on them, they crinkle them, they rip apart, they hunt toys and stuff like that. It just started as a hobby business. I was literally buying boxes of cat toys from America and putting them on eBay. I was working for eBay at the time. It was just to finance my own cat's habit. You're not supposed to get high on your own stash, but my cat was getting high on my own stash of cat toys. Yes, so it was a side hustle. And let's talk about that for a moment, because there may be people listening to this who have full-time jobs, who want to let their entrepreneurial spirit jump out. How do you make space for something like this, where you're a real grown-up with real grown-up responsibilities? Traditionally, there's been quite a macho view of what capitalism is. Success in capitalism is defined as, I have hired 100 people and now I have a million pounds. But when you work at eBay, you see that there's loads of people who have a definition of success in capitalism as chaining it to their goals. So there's loads of people who fit commerce around their life on eBay. It's been a very big site for people who've been excluded from traditional careers in business because of, say, disability or family commitments or lack of investment or something. So eBay is a real window that, rather than be chained to the beast of capitalism, you can chain it and make it what you want. So when I designed my business, I was fully aware of, and I'd seen many people do this, I was saying that the primary thing is, absolutely, this has to fit around my life. And what I have to do is maximize how much I can get out of what I'm prepared to do. So I define my boundaries. And my boundaries really at the moment, except very occasionally, I don't really ever want to be working more than an hour a day on the e-commerce business. So I want to design an e-commerce business that can work that way. And so I work full time, but usually there's about an hour of the day when I still do a little bit of picking and packing at home, but mostly it's kind of admin. And sometimes I'll sit down at the weekends and do a little bit. When it was a hobby business and I was working for eBay, my locker at work was stored up with what I would imagine would be the day's required stock. And I would pick and pack at lunchtime and send it out. So it's always just fit around my life. I mean, that's many people's dream. You've got a full time job with a stability and everything that comes with that. And at the same time, you've got a side hustle, something that you can call your own. It sounds like it doesn't eat up too much of your time. Give us a sense of the upside from that hour or so a day that you're putting into it. Yeah, at the moment, it's a side hustle. I mean, be relatively honest, it made profit 20 something. Well, it didn't make 20,000 something profit because I paid myself from the company as well. But in terms of how much cash it put in my pocket, it was 20 something thousand pounds last year for doing five or six hours a week, which is better than a paper round. So that's all good. It's also kind of set up so that I can flex and make it a bit bigger. And also, I'm trying to make the business bigger just by expanding it territorially rather than expanding it in any other way, which is one of the best ways of expanding without increasing your workload. The big plan for me is that I'm 50 this year, I'm going to sell my house in London, I'm going to move up to Birmingham, and I want to work a ton less. And so the cat toys business will have to start producing a little bit more money to allow me to spend half of my days watching television and wondering about then the other half working. I don't want to be working full time, really, for very much longer. Okay, so someone's listening to this going, man, that's the life. I want to do what Bert did. I want to be Bert. What do you tell them? The really strong advice I have for anyone who's trying to do this is to spend a lot of time thinking before you start doing and be really aware of this. And I know e-commerce really well from the inside. And I know service companies that provide services for e-commerce really well. But I also know other, because I'm an early internet person, I know the people from the Facebooks, the Twitches, the YouTubes, the TikToks, and so on. And what you've got to remember is that within e-commerce, these companies are designed to effectively, they're almost like a conversion engine for people's enthusiasm, capital, and labor. They convert that into money for them. Of the 100,000 people that decide to set up a business on eBay every year, and 100,000 businesses or so are kind of set up, I mean, some of them may just be a dream and someone just registers as a placeholder. There's generally only about a quarter of those are left after the first year. And what tends to happen is people start with a burst of enthusiasm and they work very hard and they put some money into it and they sell for a while. But then they realize because they haven't structured themselves properly or they haven't really thought about profit loss, they haven't thought about the implications. All they've really done is transferred that enthusiasm into the bank accounts of the service providers they have. Because those service providers, they're like fruit machines. They don't operate on profitability. They operate on turnover. Every time you do something, they're taking money away. And so there's a relentless shrinkage that happens. So you have to plan really hard and think very much about, I'm doing this now. If I'm doing this as a loss leader now, what is my route to profitability? Do I value my labor? And that's the really important thing. You've got to calculate how much you value your time and accurately monitor how much time you're spending on things. And what you'll then find is that the time you spend doing things is probably the most accurate guide to your profitability. And again, I say, go and get yourself a paper round or work in a pub because sometimes you'll find you could work eight hours a week and earn more money doing that than actually doing e-commerce as a side hustle. And the same is true for things like Twitch streamers and YouTubers and TikTokers and things like that. Sometimes you find that there's just an enormous amount of work in it. When you work out the wages you're paying yourself, it's tiny. So be very, very, very conscious of your time, I think, is the thing. And be very conscious of the fact that the industry is set to profit from kind of unpaid labor and optimistic investment. That's no longer just an eBay store. You're on Amazon. You've got your own website. I imagine the same is true for acquisition channels. It would have been Facebook back then. It may be TikTok now. But the market keeps on shifting. Demand starts drying up in one area and then popping up in a different area. And you've got to adjust your strategies along with that. How has that changed and where do you see it moving to next? Yeah, at the moment, eBay shrunk to about 10 percent. Well, not shrunk to about 10 percent of the business. Other parts of it have grown. So eBay's small, but Amazon is a powerhouse. Amazon is more than half of my business now. I have my own website on Shopify. I'm on Facebook. I'm on TikTok. I'm on Pinterest. I've just applied to be on B&Q Marketplace, powered by Miracle, because they've opened up pet supplies, primarily UK. But I'm just opening up Europe. I've got French and German VAT numbers, and I'm going to experiment with Europe, primarily using Amazon FBA, just because it's a more practical way to enter the European market. So I'm kind of all over the place. I'm channel neutral. I don't care where my sales come from. And I'm always interested in looking into adding demand, because you tend to find that you get quite a lot of value when a company is relatively new. So for instance, TikTok at the moment is doing a pretty good job for me in terms of driving traffic to my website. I don't have the necessary energy to do the transaction on TikTok so much myself, because it's very labor intensive being successful on TikTok Shop. But certainly in terms of driving demand for my products and stuff, it's pretty good value. And Pinterest is a bit forgotten as well as a really good source of demand. And I think Pinterest is going to be moving way more into the commerce space, because they've just done a partnership with Amazon anyway. What's been your experience with TikTok? Do you have an iPhone wielding Gen Z helping you with it, or how have you approached it? Possibly one of the driest business books ever, but the one that I like the best called the Experience Economy. And the premise being that if you buy a handful of coffee beans in Peru, it costs a penny, but the same handful of coffee beans served to you in a slightly different way. The gavroche is 15 quid. And it's all about how you're actually selling experiences and not products. And so I don't like to think I'm selling cat toys. I'm selling joy to cat owners and happiness to cats. And every part of my e-commerce experience, I'm thinking, how do I increase the experience? And so a big part of that is making the cat owners feel heard and making them really feel as though we as a business care about what cat owners care about and stuff. So I chat to my customers all the time, and I aggressively solicit contact. I have quite a number of customers who are now friends, I would suggest. Maybe not. We don't go out dancing. But the big thing is, is I have tons of content. I get dozens of cat photos every day and videos all the time. So I have on my computer, I have this vast reservoir of content. The internet is largely about cat videos, and I have lots of them, which is very much in my favor. So I drip feed those on. That's my organic content. I buy advertising there, and I have my website all properly tagged up so I can track the effectiveness. But also, TikTok have a really good affiliate program. So what you do is you can put your product up there on offer, and influencers can come and say, I will promote your product for a cut. It's all automatic. Or indeed, you can go and search through the index of influencers that they have, and you can say, well, I want this lady in Scotland who has a cat. Are you interested in being my partner? Sporadically, I do that to get the content. But it's a part of the mix. For me, Facebook has traditionally been the most effective of my social media, because I think, as I said, cat videos are a bit Facebook old school. And my audience of purchases tends to be, I don't want to make stereotypes about crazy cat ladies, but I do tilt towards women over the age of 30 as customers. And Facebook is probably a little bit stronger. But TikTok's coming up. They're my next generation. So I use those two. And Pinterest is very much on my demographic. But creatively, there's not a huge amount of animal pet content. Twitter's OK. Instagram, I'm working hard on, because my imagery is very good. But for some reason, I find it harder to crack Instagram. But with all of these, again, the issue is, to my earlier point of being squeezed, and this relentless pressure, is with all of the social medias, what tends to happen is, as time goes on, so organic use of social media fades as a proper channel, and you have to start paying for it. When Facebook was first going, you can have a community of people. And when you posted something, they would all see what you posted. And you would be widely circulated. Whereas now, you're pretty much suppressed unless you're paying for it. A few weeks ago, we had Chad Price on the show. Chad is founder of Kettlebell Kings. Like you, he spoke of communities and the importance of getting content from customers. And I said to him, you know, Kettlebell, we're talking about a lump of metal with a handle attached to it. How much is there to say about that? And he said, it's a never-ending stream of content coming from our customers that resonate with future customers. And it sounds to me like you have a similar experience. I categorize my customers, someone who's bought off me once. Obviously, there's a group of people who haven't bought off you yet and could be. Then the second group was people who had bought off me once. Then the third group was people who bought off me more than once. And the fourth group was, and this is the absolute critical one, your best customers are the ones whose cat's name you know. So as soon as I know I'm selling to Tiddles, I'm golden. Like they are going to be my super customers. And the great thing is, is it sounds kind of cynical when you say it that way, but I really love it. You know, there are some cats out there that I have a great deal of affection for because I am a cat person. And so what I did is I developed a communication strategy, which was to escalate to the point where I could get their cat's name. Because then you're in the territory of being able to find out stuff like when the cat's birthday is. You can address the parcels to the cat rather than their owner, which is again, all part of this experience about how the journey of your customer goes. And that builds in your loyalty. It makes it much harder for people to compete with you. And it makes people want to buy from you rather than someone else. And I think that really helped me in terms of what I do. So I built a kind of script where I would shamelessly use my own cats in communication with cat owners. And I think this probably works in other industries. Maybe if you talk to the kettlebell guy, there's a little bit of when I buy something for my hobby or enthusiasm or my passion. I am nervous that I am purchasing from a cold and heartless corporation or someone who doesn't know about it. So I could be buying my kettlebell from someone who just makes kettlebells because they forge metal or something. It's a byproduct of what they do. My dream is I'm buying it off a gym bro. And I can talk to him about muscles and stuff like that without any shame, because I'm not going to get over enthusiastic and embarrass myself. So what I found within the cat industry rather than kettlebells, which as you have just demonstrated, I know nothing, is I wanted to give them permission to reveal themselves as crazy cat person by demonstrating I was quite happy being a crazy cat person myself. So I started using things like catisfied customers. Whenever I sent out a message saying that I dispatched on eBay, and back in the day on eBay, you used to be able to have a personalized dispatch message, which you now can't. I would say, your parcel has been sent. Royal Mail have it now. It started with me saying, fingers crossed, it should arrive tomorrow. And then I just changed that to paws crossed. And there was a step change. The moment I revealed myself to be an idiot for cats to do something like that, suddenly I started getting responses back. And then whenever someone talked about their cat, I would ask what the cat's name was. And I kind of had a script that I ran through as I escalated them from like group one to group four. And you'd hit to chat with them. And you realize when someone's buying a cat toy, you think about the psychology of what they want. And I wanted them to be reasonably high excitement throughout the entire process and was constantly tweaking the process. So theoretically now, your first contact with my business will be you are scrolling through your social media or a friend of yours has just bought one of my toys. And as a result, some content is shared with you. And that content is of a cat having, I don't know, if we can't swear on the podcast, I won't swear, having a good time with one of these toys. There's loads of videos of kittens rolling around with toys, cats just having a whale of a time. And you sit there and you think, I could be watching this with my cat. My cat could be having this kind of fun. Find out what the product is and you click. If you do a Google search, there's a half a page of content, most of which is still content still cats playing and everything. If you go to the shop, the shop is just full of cat-isfied customers. So you just genuinely seeing tons of cats having fun with this and you're imagining the whole thing. When you order the product, all the communications around it are all about how your cat's going to have fun, tell us about it, you're part of the community and everything. Then the product arrives and then you're encouraged to activate it properly. You know, you've got the proper instructions for it. You can go and look at how it works properly because it does involve a little bit of picking apart. And then what we want you to do is to tell everybody else to like, we want, we encourage people to use these toys on social and everything like that. And to say to other people, look how much fun my cat is having, look how much fun I had them. And the nature of the toy is it's flimsy. So in some cases, the cats just absolutely go mental and shred the whole things in seconds. But we kind of encourage that and say, look, actually, all right, that's cost you probably£2.50 to watch your cat go absolutely loopy for one minute and create carnage. But look how much fun everybody had. And actually, yeah, you could have spent £2.50 on a catnip mouse, which is now going to sit in the corner of your living room for the next two years. I love the way you talk about and think about the customer experience, the entire user journey. And it resonates deeply because, well, I operate in the world of CRO and a lot of CRO out there is really just moving stuff around the page to see what sticks. And the way we approach CRO in our agency is optimising the sales conversation, you know, the stuff that you're talking about. I mean, do you do you think of it in those terms? Do you do you analyse your site and identify areas where the user journey or the customer experience has broken down? The one downturn in the customer experience we had was because the thing is made out of tissue paper and it's all collapsed and compressed. When it arrives, you've got this really high excitement about what you're going to receive and you receive this really anonymous looking piece of compressed paper. And there's a massive experiential drop when the, you know, like when you buy a model that's fitted together, when the box turns up, it's just a load of plastic pieces. It's not the fighter jet or the robot or something like that. And so what we've done is we massively invested in like the packaging, which is full of activation instructions, all the messaging around it so that whilst there's always going to be a drop because the product looks a bit underwhelming when it turns up, that we do as much as we can to kind of mitigate that. And it goes to that whole point is we're not really selling cat toys. We're selling joy, which is a very overblown way of thinking about things for a small cat toys business. But it's part of my philosophy that what you want to be is a big, small business. That's the way to survive. All these huge corporations are designed to take your money and your sweat and tears. The only way you can do that is like a cat, you know, puff your tail up and be big and behave like Coca-Cola would do. Like think strategically like they would do. Do your logistics like they would do. So I have, you know, my product range is three products, but those three products, I order them in lots of $10,000. I manufacture them themselves. I treat them all like enormous products. Whereas if I started selling 200 cat toys, I would be a small, small business. By focusing on a small quantity of products and really, really being big with those products, it means that I protect my margin. Now here's a scene that might be familiar to you. People sitting in a boardroom kicking around the word customer centricity. And actually it's meaningless. It's lip service. They have no idea how to bring that to life. You've clearly done that. What practical advice do you have for us? I mean, are they tools or frameworks that you can apply? How do you give real meaning to something like customer centricity? What I would say is that, and again, this is the advice to the small person. E-commerce, similar advice to the writing a novel or a screenplay is, you know, write what you know that you want. And I would guess that when you're talking to people on your podcast, you know, the kettlebell guy, I bet the fellow had muscles. I bet he'd been lifting a few weights. And so that makes it easier because you're kind of halfway there and it helps. But ultimately what you do is you take a step back and you keep asking questions until you can't ask any more questions. So you look at the product and you look at your customer and you say, what need does my product fulfill within this customer? And you keep asking that question. They have a cat, so the cat needs entertaining. Why does the cat need entertaining? You work through it, you see the cat's kind of amused themselves. You know, if you keep asking questions, you realize that it's not really about the cat, it's about the owner of the cat. And then you say, well, why does the owner of the cat feel that way? And you keep asking those questions. And ultimately, you know, there's a certain desired outcome that the cat owner wants is that they want to not just be a good cat owner, but kind of demonstrably a good cat owner and to be able to broadcast to the world that they're a great cat owner. And even if they don't broadcast, you want to give them the feeling that they could. And that comes from just asking questions. And there is a management theory called the five whys. If you ask five questions on the same topic, by the time you get to the fifth, you've usually got to the core reason why something is happening. And then what you've got to do is be very cynical and think, how many points of contact do I then have with that customer? How realistic is it? I've sat in meetings where people have been talking about the relationship that the customer has with their toothpaste and stuff. And you're thinking, this is not the real world. Think about when you're actually in contact and then think, what's the role of that particular contact? Keep asking questions about what people actually want. And if you ask those five whys, then you kind of get to the heart of what you're doing. But certainly at the heart of it is, what need does my good fulfill? And what does my customer want? If you keep asking those questions, then it's going to naturally provide a route to how you go about doing things. So you can use this kind of thinking and theory on any product, no matter how theoretically dry it is. Because the one thing I did find with talking to thousands of people is, no matter how dull a subject you may think it is, there are hundreds of people who find it incredibly, incredibly exciting. I suppose that's the point to make, is that never imagine that nobody cares about what you're selling and it's humdrum. I've always found that everybody can be interesting when you start talking to them about what they actually care about. And with your customers, often that will be the case. You could be selling them a clothesline, but you never know when there might not be a clothesline nutter. At which point, if you think about why they might be, you're more likely to be able to sell. And obviously, the really big thing is, if you get those people who really care about the subject matter, they're going to be more powerful in terms of advertising and promoting your products forever. I mean, my breakthrough was I sold some cat toys to the Rutland Cats Protection, the woman who run it. And she loved the toys so much. She said, can I have a couple more for the shelter? I said, well, if it's for a shelter, you can have a box. And I sent her 20. She then told all of Lincolnshire about the whole thing. And I got a ton of orders just in a really tight period of time. And if you know anything about marketplaces, if suddenly you sell like 100 items in a day on something like Amazon or eBay, you just shoot up. And I suddenly became, I literally, that weekend, I became a top five cat toy on eBay. You want to seek out those customers, because actually, a very tiny percentage of people are going to become advocates for your business. So hitting those mavens, those influencers and connectors, is going to be really important. And if you take that kind of obsessive user experience view, then you're going to appeal to those kind of people. I have one final question about marketplaces, how to succeed at Amazon, FBA and eBay, because not only is that your background, but you still knee deep in that. You work for an agency that does marketplace optimization. Before I get to that final question, then quickly tell us about Optimizon. I mean, Optimizon takes businesses that either don't have the expertise or the capacity. In some cases, they're fairly expert, but they just don't have time because they're very busy. And they help them expand and grow on marketplaces. What we know is these platforms are self-service. And so you can get 70% of the way to where you want to go just by doing things yourself. But to get to 100% on those marketplaces is an enterprise. It takes a lot of expertise. So we have the great benefit. There's almost 50 of us, and we have specialists in every area from SEO and paid ads, creative, logistics, everything. And what you can do is you can focus on what you're really good at. Everything you do outside of your expertise layer is you doing something inefficiently and wasting time that could be spent doing other things. So the really classic example for me is logistics was actually starting to take up 90% of my time running my business. FBA was probably a little bit more expensive than me doing it myself. But then I realized I would rather spend my hours doing the things where I really added value to the business. Also there's just constant innovation. Within the platforms, things are changing all the time. Amazon are currently rolling out a raft of products that will allow you to sell internationally, but also their new marketplaces. So there's a company called Miracle, and they power Debenhams, Boots, Superdrug, B&Q, and they're a real big coming force. And they're relatively new, and people are unfamiliar with them. TikTok shop is big. It looks as though Pinterest is going to get into commerce. Meta is getting bigger. If you are a small business, how much time do you really want to dedicate to chasing stuff? And actually what you can do is expand by using an agency like Optimizon. Right. Your final top tip about winning on marketplaces. I mean, what's the secret that only insiders like yourself know? How do you make a success of Amazon FBA and eBay? So for Amazon FBA, my top tip would be securing your search position and getting sales going is really unbalanced with early profitability. So if I'm launching a product on Amazon, I will say to myself, I'm not going to make money on this product. I may even lose money. There's going to be a pretty protracted period of time when all of the money that would have gone into profit is going to be invested somehow in improving my organic search position and building up my reviews. The longer you spend within that investment period, the longer that you can hold off on trying to take the profit, then the higher you install yourself because you can kind of buy yourself the way to the top. But what you should always know is underlying, there are quality scores underlying even the paid products that you have on Amazon. And so therefore you're better off advertising a good product that's established and has a history and is high in search anyway than attempting to kind of put lipstick on a pig. So hold your nerve, keep investing in making your product powerful. Reviews are important. Transactional volume is important and conversion levels are important. So if you have to go a longer period selling your product for cheaper than you would imagine or spending a little bit more on promotional stuff, then do so. Because the longer you hold out and the more that you kind of establish yourself in the higher reaches of search, the more that you establish a customer base that can recommend you, then when you relax, you can start taking the profit. There's loads of other advice about structuring your listings and making sure you're doing your SEO properly, but there are hundreds of articles all about that. On eBay, I mean, honestly, these days on eBay, my advice is try and get your efforts into reducing the amount of workload that eBay takes you. So if you're going to launch an eBay, what I would do is I would take my Shopify main website and I would put a plug into the Shopify and run eBay from Shopify rather than having it as a kind of discrete standalone channel. And the reason for that is for brand new products, eBay is not as powerful relative to the other marketplaces as it was. It's still a really good viable channel and it's excellent for your SEO. You should be on as many platforms as possible because it just means your product is just all over the place. It's like the equivalent of being in every window on the high street. It builds up your ubiquity on the internet. So definitely be on those marketplaces, but recognize that eBay is not perhaps the mainstay that it was 10, 15 years ago. The one exception to that is that eBay is exceptional at the moment as a kind of an official secondary channel. So brands that use it for kind of overstock purposes, for season plus one, for refurb, having a whale of a time, they're bucking the trend and they're growing mightily on eBay. And you'll have seen the pre-loved stuff and everything like that. So for instance, I've kind of flexed a little bit in that what I view eBay as is it helps me with manufacturing flexibility. So in order to make enough profit on my stuff, I have to order it in quite large quantities. So theoretically it's risky. If I buy 10,000 pounds worth of one SKU in one go and it doesn't work out, then that's material to my company's success. However, if you know you've got eBay there as a backup and you're prepared to say, well, that product, it didn't do what I expected to do in the full market. What I'm going to do is dispose on eBay. So I manufactured some toys made out of plastic for cats. They were really popular, but slowly loads of other people got in and they were easy to copy. And it wasn't really about my brand as well, because my brand is a little bit more about sustainability and also about not buying your cat loads of plastic tap and filling your house with stuff that makes it look as though you have a hyperactive toddler. Things that actually go with your house and don't look insane. I had probably about four cubic meters of these plastic toys and they're small as well. I just got rid of them on eBay and it just solved the problem for me immediately because I was able to discount them without messing around with discounting on any of my other channels and just get rid of the stock, free up that storage space, get more stuff in, free up some capital to buy different toys and better ones. So with eBay, twofold is think of it as a way. It's a really good tool for allowing you to do other things with your stock management and with your ability to take a risk because you're going to always sell discounted stuff on eBay. It's still a really good channel for that. But otherwise what I'd say is be really efficient with the way that you use eBay. Don't spend too much time on it because it's not going to produce the same volume as return as it did 10 years ago. Now Bert, of course, there are people right now listening to this who can't think of anything other than their cat having fun and the enormous joy that it brings to them as a cat owner. So where do they go? They go to cat-mat.store or they just search for cat mat. I'm quite good on Google now. And obviously the big thing that I'm trying to push now and the psychology I'm working on is people who know someone who's mad about cats and don't know what to buy them for Christmas. So even if you don't have a cat yourself, I bet you know a crazy cat lady. Bert Bassett, it's been great talking to you. Thanks. Thanks for having me.