Will Green: Director of Sales & Marketing with Paleo Ridge

^{Joe Fox (00:02.47)}
Hey everyone, Joe Fox here for another episode of Retain Grow Thrive. Today I'm joined by the head of marketing and head of sales at Paleo Ridge, a customer of Growave, Will Green. Will, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on.

_{Will Green (00:16.398)}
Cool, thanks for having me, Joe. Yeah, excited to be here.

^{Joe Fox (00:19.48)}
Absolutely, mate. And I'm excited because I feel like you have a very, strong marketing background. I know you have your own podcast, which we'll dive into as well. But I think what I'd love to do just to kind of set the tone and kind of bring everyone up to speed about how you got to where you're at with Paleo Ridge. Do you want to give a little bit about your background, mate?

_{Will Green (00:39.542)}
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I, I was originally in the music industry and I got into marketing while I was a, I was a tour manager. So I used to be a tour manager for the ministry of sound. 20 years ago. Yeah, it was a, it was great, a great lifestyle. And obviously in my early twenties, it was a pretty, yeah, pretty cool. But, I started to get into marketing. So was really interested in why.

^{Joe Fox (00:47.908)}
wow.

wow. Nice. I'm a big fan. That's awesome.

_{Will Green (01:05.678)}
you know, when we were touring, everyone was all the artists and DJs were spending so much time on their marketing side. You know, they were kind of constantly doing social media. It was in kind of early form then, but making sure that, you know, posters were being done for and promotions for events. And you spend a lot of time with artists when, know, in that situation. And I just wanted to be able to help. So I started doing my own research and ended up.

^{Joe Fox (01:18.767)}
Yep.

_{Will Green (01:33.824)}
studying a masters in marketing, which then I decided to take a step out of the music industry and have a career in marketing. So I went through, you know, lots of different industries, including charities I worked for, the paper industry, you know, very, very high end retail, a lot of different areas and ended up in dog food, which is where I am now. So I've worked for Paleo Ridge for six years.

I started in digital marketing, so that's kind of my background is digital. And I'm now the director of sales and marketing. yeah.

^{Joe Fox (02:08.879)}
I love that. That's really cool journey. I know you're despite the accent, I know that you're also an Aussie originally. So that's that's kind of cool as well.

_{Will Green (02:19.47)}
I am, yeah, I'm West Coast, so I was born in Perth.

^{Joe Fox (02:22.406)}
Perth? Yeah, fantastic. Beautiful part of the world. It's funny because every time I talk to people about Australia, you know, they all know the East Coast, they all know Brisbane, which is where I'm from, and certainly know Sydney. But I'm like, you got to check out Perth. It's beautiful, beautiful part of the world. And I can imagine that would have been a really cool time, you know, as you said, your, you know, early 20s and in your 20s, you know, touring with these incredible artists and

_{Will Green (02:26.477)}
Love it.

^{Joe Fox (02:51.532)}
and being in that space and you know, to your point, I think that's really cool. You mentioned early days of social media and those sort of things and how that's translated across to digital now. there core kind of principles that you feel that you've learned by, I would assume that would have been a very like kind of growth hacking role. Like you just go and go and go experiment and figure it out. Are a lot of those principles things that you still utilize today?

_{Will Green (03:20.022)}
Yeah, and I think like it's part of its mindset. you know, touring with artists, you know, touring with the most famous artists, they don't stop, you know, every single... I remember touring with Danny Rampling, who's a big house DJ. he, you know, we were on the plane, he was just focused the whole time, working, working. He had, you know, his other businesses and so he's working on all of that. And it just helped him to be able to bounce ideas off somebody and...

you learn a lot like kind of being a sounding board for these kind of things. And, you know, when people are just working for an hour on one photo, just in Photoshop, you know, on a plane as well, you just kind of you see that attention to detail. And that for me made me realize what sets aside like the very, very top top, you know, artist from the not so top ones. And I took that on board and wanted, you know, wanted that myself as well. You know, what did that

to take that on. But there's also, you know, like with the early days of social media, it's that connecting with the audience. So it's, you know, creating conversation, online presence. And, you know, this is the these are the days before Instagram and, you know, and obviously TikTok. So it was very early days where everyone was photoshopping all of their their photos before they put them up on

^{Joe Fox (04:26.655)}
Yes. Yes.

_{Will Green (04:48.014)}
think it was mainly like Facebook and MySpace even.

^{Joe Fox (04:50.547)}
MySpace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to say MySpace was the, was a really cool one back then. you, you know, you had your top five favorite artists and all of that sort of thing. So that's, that's really cool. Really cool. Show my age here as well. I love that. Well, and you know, tell me a little bit, you know, cause I know about the success that paleo ridges had. I think it's fantastic.

_{Will Green (05:00.397)}
Yeah.

^{Will Green (05:04.19)}
one too, yeah.

_{Joe Fox (05:15.882)}
My question is, one of my dogs is in here at the moment. I have two cattle dogs and I really hope you guys expand to the US because I think it's such a cool brand and I love what you guys are doing. But tell me a little bit about, I know Grow Wave has had some part of involvement in that, but I'd love to understand what's the growth journey looked like since you came on board at Paleo Ridge?

^{Will Green (05:43.958)}
Yeah, yeah. So I joined in early 2020, which was obviously just before the, you know, the COVID kind of couple of years. And, and what I kind of came into was, was an amazing product, like no doubt, just the one of the best products that you could get in the UK. in terms of like the ethical sourcing, environmental, the quality, but it didn't actually look like it, you know, when you looked at the website, the website looked

budget and didn't look, you know, it didn't really scream premium to me. The packaging was very, very basic. It was black and white, you know, and, and so it was relying on people to have done their research to know that how good the product was. So the steps we took were, were to, you know, completely revamp the website, which we, you know, we completely taught, you know, started again. We did that on a platform called craft commerce.

_{Joe Fox (06:18.205)}
Yes.

^{Will Green (06:41.074)}
we moved from Magento, to craft commerce at that stage. And then, we, you know, redesigned the packaging and introduced like really decent branding, with clear brand positioning and, adding foiling to the packaging, all those kinds of things that gave people, the, best idea that it was a premium product. And that coupled with COVID coupled with

because obviously then everyone, the increase in ordering online happens over COVID. Plus, you know, there was this overall movement and I think in Australia, we're quite aware of it. And it's coming into other areas, which is the kind of real food movement, moving away from ultra processed foods to, you know, food that you could describe, as the way I like to put it, but

_{Joe Fox (07:14.982)}
Yes. Yes.

_{Joe Fox (07:30.246)}
Yes.

^{Will Green (07:38.816)}
You know food that has very clear organic ingredients. No synthetics and Minimal processing so the products frozen and and the demand just shot up and up because people got Puppies in lockdown and they want they're spending more time with their dogs. They can actually see the effect that the food has on their dogs Which is where customers, you know a lot of customers came to us because they wanted to feed their dog the best they could feed them

_{Joe Fox (07:59.366)}
Yes.

_{Joe Fox (08:06.779)}
Yes, yeah, I love that. And I think, you know, to that point, it's like, for someone such as yourself, who's a master at marketing, being able to come into something where there's a really good product already in place, and then just figure out how to translate that better to, you know, the audience and those sorts of things is really, really powerful. And, you know, I think to your point, the the real food movement is real. mean, I'm an Australian who moved to the US.

And I very much struggle a lot with the ingredients that are written on half of the things that I try not to eat. But yeah, it's a very interesting space. to that point, think, you know, even the US, I think we're seeing a bit of a kind of movement towards that very much human wise, but starting to see a bit of that, you know, kind of pick up with,

the pet food space and I, you know, like I said, I really hope you guys expand here and you know, focus on this market because you'll have a very loyal customer in my in myself. But to that point, you know, I'd love to understand because I think what you guys have done with grow wave is really cool and really powerful. And I don't want to turn this into you know, a podcast that's just testimonials. But I'd love to just kind of understand from your perspective.

how Growave helped with the growth journey of Paleo Ridge and from your perspective as a marketer, how easy it was to utilize GrowWave to action what you wanted.

_{Will Green (09:41.856)}
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I was talking just then about when we made the move to craft commerce and we were on craft commerce for a number of years until last year. just over about four and half years, we were on craft commerce and we saw a huge amount of growth in that time. But the platform and the kind of tech stack didn't really keep up with what our needs at the time. So we identified the need to move platform and that

^{Joe Fox (10:06.913)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (10:10.882)}
the, we identified Shopify as the platform to go to. We, we needed that internal flexibility and everything. So once we made that decision, it was then about, you know, well, what are going to do with the key areas that we have? And one of the clear key areas that we have is, was a really strong loyalty program that we had, but it was bespoke on graph comma. So we wanted to move that into something that would work really well on Shopify and

^{Joe Fox (10:34.583)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (10:41.026)}
So we really did a lot of research on what platform we would use. We looked at what our loyalty program looks like, which is a bit sometimes different to other people's and how we were going to put that in place. And there was some very key things that we didn't have on the old platform, like the loyalty points totals weren't feeding through properly.

to the CRM, so we had to do manual updates whenever we wanted to send loyalty points email. And the lack of automation was kind of crazy when you look back now. So we looked at all these things that we wanted to do and GrowWave just came out on top as like a clear leader. And the flexibility that the platform has, you can turn various elements off and on. And we don't...

you say, we don't have tears or anything like that. We just, the main thing for us is to reward the customers for every order in some way and give them something really valuable that they can use. But there's other areas that we do that we do. We have a eco-friendly ball call solution. It's like an insulator because it's a frozen product and we want to reward

^{Joe Fox (11:42.367)}
Yep. Yep.

_{Joe Fox (12:03.062)}
Yep.

_{Will Green (12:07.928)}
customers for returning it so that we can reuse it. So that some of those complications, a lot of the other platforms couldn't cope with, but GrowWave could. So that's why we chose platform. But what I would say is when we were looking at Shopify, GrowWave and how we were going to move forwards, there were opportunities with GrowWave that we hadn't even considered. So I know if you're trying to do this from scratch, an integration where

If people follow you on social media or something like that to to give a look, you know, a set loyalty points for that is quite difficult. It's built in with GrowWave. So that was just like, OK, tick. We've got another another area we can add. And as we went on, loyalty points didn't expire on the old website. And and so that obviously means you carry.

^{Joe Fox (12:46.313)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (13:02.412)}
a huge amount of potential loyalty points that could be used at any point, is, which financially can be a big risk. that, you know, changing that was great for us as a company because easier to manage. So there are a number of areas that that grow have offered. So it was, it was, was brilliant. And in launching it, it was just, we kind of, you always think, okay, it's not meant to be complex, but I'm sure it will be complex at some stage, but

^{Joe Fox (13:09.651)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (13:31.502)}
It wasn't. So that was amazing for us.

^{Joe Fox (13:35.375)}
I love to hear that well. And I really, I'm really glad you touched on the, the expiring of the points because I haven't had a guest bring that up. But I personally think that's so important because you can imagine it's almost like you're accumulating all of this debt in a way, isn't it? Like you're, you're accumulating this debt in product that eventually you're going to have to

give out. So I really like that you address that because I think that's really important. And the other thing that I that I love to hear well is, you know, not all marketers fully harness the power of Growave. And I really like the fact that you guys, you know, are rewarding customers for doing the right thing with the eco packaging, because the eco packaging is a big part of your selling point. It's a big part of the brand. It's a big part of the brand.

kind of identity and being able to reward customers for honoring that ties them so much more in from a loyal customer perspective. So I love to hear that well. And, and what I'd love to also touch on, at the moment, there's a lot of like things going on in the world. We've got, you know, AI, we've got, you know, crazy things happening in the Middle East, unfortunately, and

You know, I know that tariffs are still kind of like a thing for some businesses, but all in all, there's a lot of, you know, kind of different things going on in the market, a lot of change. And sometimes that means a lot of uncertainty. And sometimes people are, you know, not spending as much as they, you know, potentially would. I'd love to dive in because I know that subscription is quite a large part of your business. So I'd love to kind of dive in.

around some of the for the audience that are listening that might be thinking of doing subscription or they already have subscription but it's not performing as they like it to. Is there a couple of quick pointers or light bulb moments you had with subscriptions that really made a difference?

_{Will Green (15:40.906)}
Yeah. mean, subscriptions, if you look at our journey of subscriptions over, we launched three years ago or just over three years ago, our subscription, offering and that, that was on craft commerce. And it was a struggle to be honest, because, just the, the, what a craft commerce is like a platform that you have to do a lot of bespoke development with, whereas, the antithesis of a platform like Shopify.

^{Joe Fox (16:04.207)}
Yes. Yeah.

_{Will Green (16:10.614)}
where you actually have, you you have that everything at your fingertips, really. When we were looking at again, and and I guess to be completely transparent, tech tech stack was a new term for me a year and a half ago, you know, because it we everything was on one platform. So when we were looking at the tech stack for Shopify, we were then having to look at, which

^{Joe Fox (16:14.905)}
Yes, yeah.

_{Joe Fox (16:28.367)}
Yep. Yep.

^{Will Green (16:39.518)}
area of which app is going to integrate with another one. So we started to look at how the ecosystem would look, what would integrate with what. And that's one of the reasons why with GrowWave we use App Store subscriptions. So was really important that they worked together and that they both worked with Klaviyo as well, the email, to make sure that everything fed into each other.

_{Joe Fox (16:45.241)}
Yes.

_{Joe Fox (16:56.694)}
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep.

_{Joe Fox (17:03.342)}
Yes. Yep.

^{Will Green (17:08.118)}
which is what we've got and then obviously you can kind of connect them all and things just work, which is, you know, I think not to be taken for granted, I think. That's the first thing. Yeah.

_{Joe Fox (17:19.748)}
Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, it's kind of refreshing. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like, you know, I used to have an agency in Australia and we built a lot of sites on WooCommerce and, you know, we did some Adobe stuff and some Agento and, you know, we've even done some Salesforce stuff and we did a bit of everything and, you know, I always thank myself for making the move.

into the Shopify ecosystem because I think for one, it's such a really cool supportive community. So not just for, you know, not just for merchants, but also for all of us on the tech stack side. We really all like to work together to make the best product and to help the most customers. So like you touched on the Klaviyo side of things. It's really cool for you to know we've got some even deeper integrations coming with Klaviyo.

that will actually like make your life easier and make things better for you as well. So I think that's one really cool thing that not everyone may know about the Shopify ecosystem is like, yes, we're all working to make the tech stack as good as possible from a Shopify perspective. But then we're also all kind of working behind the scenes together to integrate our products better for the merchants or our customers.

It's really cool. And in turn, it creates a much better experience, you know, not just for such as yourself, merchants managing that side of things, but also the end customer gets a smoother flow of, of a shopping experience. So I really love that. And it's nice to hear that from you too, because I'm well aware of craft, craft commerce and aware of a couple of the other platforms as well. So that's cool. And so, well, I think I'd love to also

_{Will Green (18:58.168)}
Yeah.

_{Will Green (19:07.832)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (19:12.939)}
you know, kind of we're talking about some of the things that are happening, you know, in the market and all of those sorts of things. What are your core focuses at the moment for Paleo Ridge?

_{Will Green (19:24.526)}
Yeah, well, subscription is definitely one of them because I think one of the things that, know, a couple of years ago, I studied an MBA and I did a lot of research into consumer behavior and really the way, you know, that consumers like to buy products, especially dog food. And a lot of that was on the influences and stuff of why people buy certain foods. the most useful thing was about how people actually like to buy.

^{Joe Fox (19:44.277)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (19:54.58)}
raw dog food tends to, you know, a lot of people will go to raw dog food because they have an issue with ultra processed food. Their dogs not, not very well as I'm well or whatever. And that stops that kind of buying, habit that they have before. And when it stops that habit, they then look for a new brand, a new top product or whatever it may be. And often that's how they come to raw dog food because they do their research about what, what is going to be actually a

^{Joe Fox (20:02.793)}
Yep.

_{Will Green (20:24.462)}
appropriate to feed to the dog, then they come to us and there's usually a period where they're kind of testing out if the product works, does what they think it's going to do. So they don't necessarily want to subscribe at that point. But then after trialing the product and seeing the benefits with their dog, that's where we see a subscription happen. So what we have to be aware of, we can't just force subscriptions down people's necks and people do.

^{Joe Fox (20:38.261)}
Hmm.

^{Joe Fox (20:52.381)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (20:53.518)}
And we made a mistake, I think, on our previous website of having the kind of subscription where you only kind of can access it one way, very late, you know, very much like we're leading you in through the process, which is all good, but people need flexibility. And so when it came to Shopify, we have totally simplified it. You can buy as a one-off, you can subscribe easily. It's up to you. It's really, there are benefits to subscribing, but

^{Joe Fox (21:04.116)}
Hmm.

_{Will Green (21:22.414)}
It's totally up to the user and the journey is planned with complete flexibility, which might be a lot of work on our side, but it makes the customer journey way easier. So that kind of came from that research, you know, from about how consumers actually like to buy a dog food product. There are lots of different things that you mentioned about, you know, the environment we're in at the moment.

And that the biggest effect that that can have is price volatility. especially when it comes to, you know, the fuel charges, that, that are out and about, we, we make a frozen product. have to keep our products frozen, frozen here. We have to keep them frozen in transit. And there's a cost to that. there's a cost to the ingredients that we source, and that there can be volatility there. But what we're really looking to do is.

^{Joe Fox (22:11.644)}
Yes.

_{Will Green (22:20.216)}
to give people reassurance that when they subscribe, got the, you know, they also lock the price in. So there's a lot of, yeah.

^{Joe Fox (22:25.681)}
Yes. Yeah. I love that. So sorry to interrupt there, Will. So you're locking in. So if someone subscribes, they're locked into that sort of pricing for the amount of time they subscribe for, despite your internal cogs being affected by external kind of, external problems. Yeah. Yeah.

_{Will Green (22:46.24)}
Yeah, that's basically what we're working towards at the moment because it's easy to come up with a concept, it's then making it work is another thing. But what we're working on now because we know how important that is.

^{Joe Fox (22:59.098)}
Yeah. Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (23:04.602)}
I think that's really generous of you. I think that's really, really cool. And I think that buys a lot of customer loyalty. think, you know, outside of the technology, you showing that level of care and stuff. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I love that. And one last thing, because I, could talk forever and I really enjoyed this conversation. It's been fantastic. But we try and keep these under 30 minutes, but, well, I know you have your own podcast.

Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the podcast? I love when I have other, you know, guests on that have podcasts as well. I really like to kind of shout those out. So would you be able to talk us through, you know, the elevator pitch of the podcast? And I'll also make sure that the link is in the show notes for the audience to go check it out.

_{Will Green (23:54.486)}
Yeah, definitely. So the podcast is part of like a wider platform called Marketing Made Clear. what that how that came about is I studied their MBA, I had all this research and I wanted to publish it. But you can go down the typical publisher route, but I really wanted to have my own place to publish it. So I started marketing made clear then, which is basically like the website has loads and loads of marketing articles, like nearly 600.

^{Joe Fox (23:57.105)}
Ahem.

^{Joe Fox (24:01.328)}
Yup.

_{Will Green (24:23.702)}
marketing articles on all different sorts of things. So there's more academics stuff. There's more kind of general interests. Like some of the best performing content is me looking at how Coca-Cola and Pepsi have performed over the years and with the rivalry, the history of it. But then there's other areas which are a bit more, you know, they try and take an academic concept and make it a little bit easier to understand.

^{Joe Fox (24:24.45)}
wow. Wow.

_{Will Green (24:51.852)}
Thus the name marketing make clear. and on the, podcasts, we go into deep dives of certain areas. did one up about, the dogs as an extension of ourselves. It's basically. Psychological concept of us buying for our dogs and how we take our own views and kind of project them onto, onto dogs when we're actually purchasing for them, which I think is an area that I've been fascinated by. but it draws back to earlier things like

^{Joe Fox (25:03.221)}
on us.

_{Will Green (25:21.71)}
how we've always said, know, dogs are their owners or owners of their dogs, whichever way around you want to put it. But yeah, it draws on a few different concepts. I do a bit, you know, try and make it a little bit fun because some of the topics can be a lot to get your head around. So, yeah.

^{Joe Fox (25:26.414)}
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

^{Joe Fox (25:41.174)}
I love that. And I think that's so cool to be able to make that, you know, accessible and easy to understand. And I love the name as well as a fellow marketer. That's awesome. And to touch on that point, just as a funny side note is the, you were saying about projecting onto your dogs as owners. So my dog that's in here now, or I've got two, but they're both cattle dogs. This one's a red cattle dog. I brought him over from Australia with me.

And I did feed him a majority raw diet. He has about a 50-50 diet now. And I used to eat a lot of kangaroo in Australia because it's really high protein, it's free range, it's organic. But then also, so did he, because it's free range, because it's organic and it's high in protein. So I guess I fit the mold on that article perfectly.

_{Will Green (26:32.974)}
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the other thing is, I, way before, you know, even when I was before I in the music industry, I spent a couple of years out in the back end, in Australia with my family and I did a few months up in a cattle ranch in the Ghibli, in the Kimberley. Yeah. So that was my first time I ever saw raw feeding because, we were in a very, I mean, not, not every listener wouldn't necessarily know what, what the

^{Joe Fox (26:50.042)}
wow.

_{Will Green (27:02.914)}
what it's like out there, but you know, there's nobody for miles. There's no shops for miles. And so the dogs are all fed, are all diet based on the meat that comes from the cow station that you're on. So there are lots you've ever seen.

^{Joe Fox (27:14.261)}
Yep, yep, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're all buff, look like they've been in the gym. But yeah, no, that's awesome. And I mean, I haven't been up to the Kimberley, but yeah, it's just, I've heard amazing things, like apparently the stars and everything like that out there are just second to none. But the closest I've done something to like that in the Outback is Longreach in far North Queensland. And that's very out there as well. But I don't think quite as remote as the Kimberleys, but yeah.

Yeah, good part of the world to Australia, that's for sure.

_{Will Green (27:51.128)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (27:52.751)}
Excellent. Well, well, look, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really, really, really enjoyed having you on. I know the audience would have got a ton of value here. I think there's some incredible, you know, points that merchants themselves can pick up, but also fellow marketers from agencies and those sorts of things as well. And so, you know, if you're in the UK, please make sure you go check out Paleo Ridge, I'll make sure the website links in the show notes beautiful website.

If you've got a dog and you care about them, you should definitely be feeding them raw. So please check that out. If you're a marketer and you're looking to break down some of the complex things around marketing and a lot of these academia posts and those sorts of things, also make sure you check out Will's podcast and platform, Marketing Made Easy. Well.

Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Appreciate the kind words about Growave and look forward to keeping in touch and thank you for your time.

_{Will Green (28:53.656)}
Thank you, Jay. No, it's my pleasure.

^{Joe Fox (28:55.729)}
much appreciated. Thank you so much, Will. Cheers. Audience, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of retain grow thrive. All of the show notes and links we mentioned are with sorry, all of the links we mentioned are in the show notes below. Really, really, really good insightful episode there with well, it was really nice to hear him talk about grow wave and how it's been able to help paleo ridge grow. But also there was a ton of really fascinating insights there. So please make sure that you check out Will's content as well.

_{Will Green (28:57.944)}
Cheers.

^{Joe Fox (29:25.554)}
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Retain Grow Thrive.