On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Ryan Johnson. Ryan is the President of NewRuleFX. We talk about building a business from childhood passion, attracting customers through engagement, scaling the business quickly using Shopify, and so much more!
Ryan C. Johnson is the mastermind behind NewRuleFX. He stands out as a seasoned videographer, filmmaker, and entrepreneur with over three decades of esteemed experience in the media realm.
His career is adorned with 18 industry accolades, recognizing his outstanding contributions to TV programs, video productions, commercials, and indie features. Since founding his company in 1991, Ryan has been a dedicated artist, shaping the landscape of TV and video production, showcasing his expertise on national television, in captivating commercials, documentaries, and through corporate and home entertainment ventures.
Notably, his creative vision came to life as the Creator, Executive Producer, and Director of the American Dragster TV series on ESPN. NewRuleFX, home to the innovative SMASHProps line of breakaway props, encapsulates Ryan's passion for craftsmanship and innovation.
His journey in the TV and film Special Effects industry has seen him construct a plethora of effects and props for many productions. Ryan's workshop is a hub of creativity, where he experiments alongside his team, with an array of materials and techniques to devise the next groundbreaking prop or effect.
This commitment to excellence and innovation is reflected in NewRuleFX's dedication to providing high-quality, specialized props that push the boundaries of what's possible in the realm of special effects with an effort towards actor safety.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Ryan Johnson
Daily grind and there's really no other way to look at it. I come in and I work every day and we put out proposals for projects and it's just the little tiny bites of the apple every single day.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today I’m welcoming to the show Ryan Johnson. Ryan is the president of NewRuleFX and I'm so excited to chat with him today.
We've got such a unique niche business here to walk through. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Johnson
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Chase Clymer
Alright.
So for those that are not familiar with NewRuleFX, what are the types of products you guys are selling online?
Ryan Johnson
NewRuleFX is a special effects prop company. What that means is, we're not going to be the props that you would just go rent as things that are going to sit in the background like small hand tools or something like that that you would augment a costume with.
Our props are going to be more specialty built so that they perform in some way. So for those of you who can see us in the behind me, you can see a range of our breakaway bottles. That's probably the product line that we're most known for. And these are props that are made to break easily and safely, whether it's a fight scene for an actor or something like that.
Or our foam props, which are usually foam, rubber versions of their real-life counterparts. And those can be used in stunts and things like that.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And as a nerd and I love cinema, I definitely understand what these props are used for and the various features that they'd be in.
Where did the idea for this business come from? Take me back in time.
Ryan Johnson
Out of high school, I started a video production company and I was really lucky to be very involved in video production and filmmaking at a very young age. My father bought one of the very first video cameras that you could buy as a consumer on the market.
And, you know, when I was 10, 11 years old, I was dragging that thing all over the neighborhood and making movies and music videos and blowing stuff up and doing all kinds of fun things.
And I always enjoyed the hands-on part of filmmaking, the technical process, both figuring out what to do with the camera and how to shoot things.
But I also love taking my Star Wars models out and doing those animations and a lot of physical activity. Learned how to build props and do some moderate special effects and things like that. So I always had that kind of passion in this industry.
As I started my video production company, I did the typical video production route where you do TV commercials, industrial videos. And then we got bigger and bigger and started a studio and kind of grew and grew.
And then I started doing television. We're most known for a television show called American Dragster that I created a number of years ago that was on ESPN. So it kind of went through that whole cycle of starting small and growing into like a big video production company.
Then right around 2009, 2010, the economy was kind of slowing down, we weren't doing it as many TV commercials and things like that. So kind of that tinkering side of me, uh, continued to keep busy.
I started playing with the idea of making a breakaway bottle because whenever I wanted one for my productions, I just couldn't believe how much they cost. And so I thought, I really set about trying to figure out a way to bring the cost of those down or just make them for myself.
First of all, because they were such a cool prop, you know, just these bottles that look like glass and just exploded, but we're safe.
And so I kind of learned how to do molding and casting. I learned about plastics and all these different resins and spent a couple of years, just mad scientist style, in the garage of my house like cooking up all these different plastics and molds and doing all these things until I had a small, you know, small little product line.
And so I launched my first Ecommerce business called Smash Props. And I just had like a few beer bottles and like a foam hammer and a frying pan, a few little things like that.
And that business kind of slowly grew alongside my video production business. In 2012, I moved from the Central Coast where I had lived previously down to Los Angeles and said, “I got to put a little more effort into the special effects side.”
So we moved down here and started the company and haven't looked back. It's just grown.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, with the launch of Smash Props, how were you getting customers in growing that business? Was it all organic, word of mouth?
Ryan Johnson
It really was in those early days, it was very much like people were finding us on search engines. I wasn't even really doing any major advertising to speak of. We went to USITT, which was a technical theater industry organization, and went to some trade shows there and showed off our things.
But really, once people kind of got the word that a company was making these breakaway props and there was a little competition in the industry, the organic traffic started to really come in.
And so every time the phone rang, they say, “Hey, can you also do this?” My answer was always, “Yeah. Let me reduce the initial cost to build the mold and do all that. But then we'll keep the mold and then that'll add to our product line.”
So every time we did a custom one-off prop, we would basically keep the mold and then be able to offer that as another product. So that product range just kept continuing to grow and grow and grow.
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's an amazing growth hack for the product side of the business.
Not only are you saving on the manufacturing cost by pre-selling it and then keeping the mold, but your customers are telling you exactly what they want.
Ryan Johnson
Yeah, exactly. And that's been a real key part of NewRuleFX, which is really trying to listen and see, what is being used out there? What are the problems?
I go to the movies almost once a week. I'm always watching them from the standpoint of what they are using? What's the cool new thing that people are using in their movies? What are they not using that I see that could be used? Just try to always give them more options.
Chase Clymer
So you guys moved from central California to LA and you're going to take NewRuleFX seriously. It's no longer just a Smash Props line–it's actually a full-fledged business.
In your words, you said you're going to start taking this seriously. What does that mean? What are the boxes that you needed to check?
Ryan Johnson
When I transitioned my Smash Props website and decided, “You know what, we can do more than just breakaway props. We can do these phone props and things like that,” I made the transition on the web from Smash Props to NewRuleFX so that it could encompass more things.
At that same time, we made that transition from the Central Coast to Los Angeles. So we kind of did a few starter steps. Before I moved, we took about a year and had a smaller physical space in Santa Maria where I lived. And I kind of use that as my test bed to build the manufacturing site up mostly to see how many square feet do I need because I know it's going to be a lot more expensive down in LA for a space.
I rented a space near where I had previously had my soundstage and everything so the people knew me, it was easy to get in there. So I set up a temporary manufacturing thing.
And I kind of shut down my video production side. I was still doing projects but I wasn't really going after them. At this point, my mind was focused on, “Okay, let's develop this new set of products, this new business.”
And so that's when it kind of shifted in my brain from NewRuleFX being my primary business, or, excuse me, NewRule Productions being my primary business to new rule effects now starting to kind of take over.
So when I made the move to LA, it was kind of like get the same size space, it was actually a little bigger, luckily, and then just move things over and put them up in the exact same way in LA so that way I could hit the ground running because, to be honest, I thought when I get to LA, it's going to be like ramen for a year.
Like, I'm going to be doing everything I can to just struggle to catch up and make the rent because the rent was a huge amount of money for me back then. Making that leap was kind of scary but you know, my girlfriend, soon to be fiance at the time, was so supportive and she was super helpful and just saying, “Yeah, you just let's do this.” We built it up and it was almost successful overnight.
People, once we were down here, a lot of the clients that knew me knew that I was really serious because we're in LA.
It's the unfortunate truth. If you're going to be a professional production organization, dealing with the entertainment industry, you have to be near one of these production centers like LA, Atlanta, New York, wherever.
So once people could come in the door here and see what we were about and I could sit down and have the conversations. And people understood that I came from a background of production and directing and cinematography. And they knew that I understood the unique demands that these types of products would require on a production.
Chase Clymer
No, that's amazing. And I love it when I have a question in my head and a guest just answers it without me asking it, which was, does the location matter in building such a nice business, which you obviously answered.
I do want to ask though, this is now, though, not just based on your location. You are selling these things online. So how did that transition happen?
Ryan Johnson
I mean, the whole time, the business was probably web first. And I just kept iterating the website, redoing it and redoing it. I don't remember the date exactly.
But when we made the transition from a website that had these like Ecommerce buttons that would just send people to a cart to Shopify was when I realized that I could scale the business much faster because of that platform.
I was able to really add products quickly. Once we got through the painful step of taking a website that was hand coded, essentially, and moving it over into this Ecommerce Shopify platform, then it became like, “Okay, I can scale this quickly,” and then that's when it really started taking off.
Because now, I had more fun just going, “Alright, what's the next prop I'm going to build?” And then I could dive headfirst into the development of new props, bringing on more staff, training them on how to do things, and then having the conversations with the various filmmakers.
Chase Clymer
Oh, I have to ask a follow-up question. So I'm obviously a Shopify fanboy. I own stock. Basically, my whole career is based on building Shopify websites.
But I'm not going to try to let that taint this question.
Would you ever recommend building a custom site to an Ecommerce entrepreneur ever? Now?
Ryan Johnson
No. I don't even... I wouldn't even know how to start. The coding has gotten so complicated. I was typing literal HTML back in the day, writing underlines and all. Yeah. Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. I wouldn't even think.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
So how much easier was it to use a platform that was basically tailor-made to sell stuff online?
Ryan Johnson
Oh man, it's so much easier because I think the hardest part is picking your template and then trying to get it squared away so that it works for you. Like, you look at these templates and you basically have to just kind of fill in the blanks and put your information in there.
You know, I wish there were six of me because one of them would love to be just playing in a website world all the time and developing and making the best website that I can.
As it is, I'm still doing most of that background work. Like right now I'm working on another Shopify template that I'm hoping to push live for the next month or two. But I can kind of just be working on it in the background and it's like its own whole thing until I make it go live. And that's really nice to be able to do that. And was not as easy to do, you know, the manual way, if you will.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
So talk to me about when you get over to Shopify, you realize that it is the truth. It makes your life so much easier.
But what about, say, marketing and advertising? How were you finding customers that weren't necessarily in LA or hearing from you from word of mouth?
Ryan Johnson
Yeah. So I started dabbling with Google Ads and they were a lot easier back in 2012, 2015 there. You just kind of gave it a little sentence.And if it was approved, it would be an ad. And so it was very, very basic.
And so that worked and we always stayed pretty close to the top on the search engine, if not the top, because I worked really hard to understand what people were looking for and trying to work my ads that way.
I have since brought on agencies that are helping me. I've worked with a lot of people that are very talented and they kind of look to understand what our business is doing and then help us generate Facebook ads and Google ads.
But it's really, for me, it's always been having the conversations with the people when they answer the phone. When they call our phone, answer it and really have those conversations with the customers.
People don't really know the right question to ask, especially when they need to do prop and stuff like that and converting a customer by having a conversation with them is basically a big part of the business.
We're not a huge, huge volume company. We do a lot of custom work. So in addition to the things that are on the site, a lot of our work are the one-offs that we'll do for movies and TV shows and theater. And so those conversations have to very quickly inform the customer that we know what we're doing, we understand their perspective from a production standpoint, and we can execute it in a way that's going to be safe for their actors.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, I've asked you a ton of questions today and you shared so much. But is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Ryan Johnson
I've never had a big win. I listen to your podcast and I hear how these people have these great experiences where a video will just go viral and all of a sudden it's like the orders are just pouring in. For us, it is a daily grind and there's really no other way to look at it. Like I come in and I work every day and we put out proposals for projects and it's just kind of the little tiny bites at the apple every single day.
It's only with the benefit of perspective looking back and going, wow, this started in my garage and now I'm in my third building and we've been doing this over 11, 12 years now, whatever it is.
And it's just like, yeah, it's really crazy to see the growth. But it's kind of hard to see the forest through the trees sometimes. But you gotta just keep after it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And not every business will have that crazy moment of growth. You built something that is sustainable. It's paying for your life, the life of your family, all through just showing up every day, doing the work and selling the product.
Ryan Johnson
Yeah, and our focus is really about keeping actors and filmmakers safe in the production of them telling their stories. So I really try to look at the things that we're doing as what are the tools that we can provide them so that they can get back to what they're doing best, which is telling stories, you know what I mean?
We wanna make sure that our props, if they're breakaway props, they need to work perfectly, they need to look good, they need to be affordable. That's a really key thing with us as well. And then, they need to be safe so that people can do what they do best and not worry about getting hurt on the set or injuring somebody like one of the crew or breaking equipment or whatever. These things happen. Films can be very dynamic environments.
It's really just... I love the process of building things and then seeing how people use them. It's always different from what I imagined when I'm building a prop. We hand it over to production and then 6 months to a year later, I'm in the theater going, “Oh, that's what they did with that. Okay. Interesting.”
Chase Clymer
Do you have a master list of all the productions that have featured one of your products? We...
Ryan Johnson
I tried to keep up. It's gotten to the point where I can't really keep up with all the productions that we've done. But you've heard of a lot of them. We've done stuff for Walking Dead, 9-1-1, like all those police crime procedural drama shows. We do a lot of props for that.
Of course, you've got your Marvel shows, all the Netflix shows, things like that. Yeah.
Even the Tonight Shows, late night shows, love to use our props when they have some crazy skits going on.
It’s really cool because the very first time a studio truck pulled up to my warehouse in LA and it said Paramount Television on the side, I was like, all right, this is going. This is really cool. I'm in the business.
And it's cool now because when I tell people we're in the industry, like my company, and tell them the name, they're like, “Oh yeah, I love what you guys do”, and it's like, “Really? You have heard of us?” And I have to get used to the fact that we're kind of part of the industry now and a lot of people use us. And I don't even know all the shows that our stuff is in now, which is kind of fun.
Chase Clymer
That's absolutely cool. So just quickly for the audience again.
Obviously, the breakaway stuff is super fun. What are some of the other props that you're pretty proud of? Or maybe some custom things that you put out there that always come to mind?
Ryan Johnson
Sure. Yeah. So besides the breakaways, one of the things we do a lot is like rubber props. For example, I'm holding a black knife. This is actually a plastic knife. So it's a safe blade so that if somebody's doing an action scene or they're jumping around, they're not going to get actually cut.
And that all just starts from a rubber mold or real thing. And we make a mold of it, make those out of plastic. We do a lot of foam props and stuff like that. Heck, we even have body parts in the background there. You can see a severed arm just hanging off the end of the shelf. Swords, knives, axes. We have a ton of different types of axes. A lot of foam things. Anything that's gonna be used in like kinetic action and stunt scenes.
We also have super good stage blood. It's actually a washout formula. So you can douse yourself in blood and then it just washes clean so it's not going to stain. And we're known for that as well.
Chase Clymer
That's awesome.
Now, I don't know how many aspiring filmmakers I have in my audience. But if this is interesting to me, and I want to check out the products, where should I go?
Ryan Johnson
Real simple. newrulefx.com/. N-E-W-R-U-L-E, the letter F, the letter X dot com.
And you don't have to be a filmmaker to order from us. We get orders from people that just maybe they just want to break a bottle and do a prank for a birthday party or something or a YouTuber or anything like that. So yeah, we sell to everybody.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Ryan Johnson
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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