On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Kyle Hency. Kyle is the Co-founder & former CEO of Chubbies, Co-founder at Loop Returns & now Co-founder & CEO of GoodDay Software, where he’s redefining ERPs for modern Shopify brands. With years of experience building DTC brands and scaling SaaS solutions, Kyle brings a wealth of knowledge on brand growth, team leadership, and operational optimization. We talk about simplifying operations with modern ERPs, lessons learned from scaling, empowering businesses to boost resilience and so much more!
Kyle Hency brings years of entrepreneurial expertise to the world of ecommerce and operational efficiency. He is the Co-Founder and former CEO of Chubbies, Co-Founder at Loop Returns, and now Co-Founder & CEO of GoodDay Software, where he’s redefining ERPs for modern Shopify brands.
Kyle’s experience spans building beloved DTC brands to scaling SaaS solutions. His time at Chubbies and Loop Returns has equipped him with unparalleled insights into brand growth, team leadership, and operational optimization.
With a passion for empowering businesses, Kyle specializes in creating tools that streamline processes, boost resilience, and help brands thrive in today’s competitive landscape. His journey reflects a commitment to innovation, entrepreneurship, and delivering impactful solutions that drive success.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
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Kyle Hency
I think people focus so much on the new that they forget to make sure they're reinventing the thing that they're best at.
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. Today, I'm welcoming the show, the co-founder and former CEO of Chubbies, the co-founder at Loop Returns, and now co-founder and CEO of Good Day Software, Kyle Hency.
Kyle Hency
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Chase. Glad to be here.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to chat. I've talked to a few of your co-workers, is the way I'll say, in the past. I've had quite a few ex-Chubbies and ex-Loop people. Shout out to Columbus, Ohio, Loops headquarters. But let's just dive in real quick. Where did you start your career in eCommerce? How did you get started down this path?
Kyle Hency
I think obviously, starting Chubbies was really the start of my entrepreneurial career. But quite a ways, probably five years even prior to that, I was really fortunate as a young analyst in investment banking to work on the Amazon and Zappos deal. As a young 22 year old, I had a front row seat to a lot of hard work that was done to make that deal happen, but also just saw what was happening at Zappos. It was just such a special business.
You could see the future of how people are gonna be shopping on the internet. For me personally, I was completely hooked at that moment. Then everything after that, I was really focused on internet and e-commerce, whether it was investing in the software tools in the ecosystem or talking to and researching all of these e-commerce companies that were growing up on the early internet of the time. This is five years before there was even an advertising platform on Facebook. It was just a different generation of an Ecommerce company. But then I operationally spent my early years as an entrepreneur at Chubbies growing up and learning a lot.
Chase Clymer
Alright. Well, give me the elevator pitch of your career at Chubbies.
Kyle Hency
While we love Chubbies, we've told the story before.
Chase Clymer
I do want to talk about what you're up to now. And we've got a few pieces to get through.
Kyle Hency
Of course. At Chubbies, I started it along with three of my best friends, some of the most talented people I've ever met. When you're a young startup and you're in your mid-20s, it's really exciting to start something like that with other talented, hard-charging folks. And I think it was like such a huge pickup for us as a startup e-commerce business to have four of us running around being pretty wild. Figuring out the edges of what we could make happen with the brand.
I would just say that that process was so rewarding and so fun. It's almost like hard to imagine bottling that back up again because it was just such a moment for me. But in terms of things we learned over time and things I reflect on that are important, I think over time we learned to be really methodical with our team and treat our internal team at Chubbies with a lot of care and thoughtfulness.
Call it seven to eight years into the business and look back, we had a huge audience of people who had spent over five years at the business. Even when I left, in 2021, there were still a lot of the early folks in the brand. As I reflect, that's probably the thing I'm most proud of, that we built something that was special enough that a huge audience of our employees committed their careers, a decade of their careers, to making it happen. That's the thing I look back on and reflect most positively about.
Chase Clymer
I think that's what the folks refer to as building a great company culture.
Kyle Hency
Totally. We were notably bad at that at the beginning. It was completely non-existent in the early days. I think in most good company cultures, ours was very authentic when we decided to put our minds to putting it down to paper. We ran a big process with all of our employees and we were able to build a document that we actually lived for the next five years. It was very powerful for us.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Is there any other kind of learnings or maybe even mistakes that you learned from, from your time at Chubby's that you still look back on or you think that might resonate with our audience?
Kyle Hency
Some of these things are so simple, but just not forgetting why customers are there to engage with you and your brand. It's so easy to be building these things and be like, You know what? We're not doing this. We're not doing that. Let's go do all these new things.
The simple thing we learned over time was that if you just got really great at the thing that people were already coming to you for, it was one of the most high leverage things you could be doing. For us, we were making men's shorts. We were banging a lot of pots and pans about a brand that was evolving, a radical shorts brand that was growing up on the internet. That stuff still holds true today. The percentage of the total that is men's bottoms of Chubbies today is wild to me.
Not at all how I thought it would come together, but the underpinning of why there is just, that's what we're best at. That's where we spend all of our time and energy. I think the team that's still building Chubbies today is doing a great job of expanding into things that we never would have dreamed of. But the core nucleus of the business is still kind of centered in the thing that we started in. People focus so much on the new that they forget to make sure they're reinventing the thing that they're best at.
Chase Clymer
Entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes and wherever they are in their journey, they all think part of being an entrepreneur is having that terrible shiny object syndrome and always wanting to try new things or try it again a different way. As I mature as an entrepreneur and as a consultant in this industry, I find myself giving similar advice all the time, which is you haven't even maxed out this channel or this angle or this campaign. You don't need to spread yourself thin trying every different marketing channel or adding every different marketplace when you still haven't just maximize your ROI in this one area where you're already performing.
Kyle Hency
I completely agree. The other thread that I pull on from this is one of Bezos's things, which is to focus on the things that are not going to change over time and figure out how your, what you're doing is going to benefit from them. One of those areas, as I reflect, that's kind of funny is, when we got into building this brand, like 80 or 90% of all retail was transacting offline.
We were very excited about innovating and being disruptive in an e-commerce environment that was being created. But here we are over a decade later and still 80% of retail happens in a physical store format and lo and behold, a huge piece of Chubbies’ business is offline through wholesale partners who are amazing all over the country. That's how human beings like to buy things. I just think it's really interesting as I reflect back around a young entrepreneur being like, how are we so different from everything around us? But then you get to 10, 15, 20 years and ultimately you have to be great at all of these things.
Chase Clymer
I think another thing about how people buy, especially apparel, is they need to make sure it fits and enter Loop Returns.
Kyle Hency
Totally.
Chase Clymer
I know the story like the back of my hand because I know some of your co-founders personally. How did that happen? Explain to the audience.
Kyle Hency
The original kernel for Loop was very much an operational problem that Chavis was actually experiencing. And so we were working with our developer partners at the time at Rocket Code who are based in Columbus, John Poma and team.
Our customer service representatives are just responding to the same email. I want to refund that one in exchange. They're responding the same thing over and over again. The simple solution at the time was a project with Rocket Code to say, hey, what if we just make this experience something where they can put their order number and their email in? We just say, cool, let's do an exchange and let's pop them right back on our site and have them select what they're doing.
We can just get rid of this whole back and forth email interaction and we can just let them go shopping. That was the simple insight in the early days. We put this in place and we were like, holy cow, we can just take our three customer experience reps who we love and we can get them working on other operational things that are way harder in the business. Once we had that experience, we had two thoughts, well, one, other brands are going to want this. Two, if other brands do want this, I think this is like its own company. And that was a real moment.
And as I think about my own life as an entrepreneur, taking that back to our board at Chubbies, is like, what are you talking about? You have a really successful brand that's doing well. Why are we wasting a minute of our time around this? And the entire management team, myself included, had a lot of conviction around what Loop has become. And we actually pushed back.
In the 10 years of managing our board, it was actually the only time we really had a, we're not that interested in this, but okay moment. Thankfully, we continued to build Loop. We put an operating team in place. A lot of folks worked really hard to make Loop what it is today and now look, it's the market leader in its space. You know, they have upwards of 5,000 Shopify brands on Loop and it's one of the real innovators in the Shopify ecosystem.
For me, I'm super proud about what we've built there. I've unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know how to think about it, never been operational over there. Just benefiting from all the hard work of the team over at Loop. Of course, we're trying to introduce new customers from time to time. That makes sense.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think that's like the entrepreneurial dream of selling your sawdust. You build something to solve your problem and then realize there's a whole other business here. How long into that process did that idea start to catch?
Kyle Hency
Yeah. It was pretty wild. So we introduced this. We were fortunate enough that some early brands, Allbirds and Cotopaxi, who were brand friends of ours at the time, both agreed to get in there as design partners with us at Chubbies to help make Loop real.
But the first couple years, we were showing brands and consumers that this self-service interaction was superior. Like anything that's good, there's a little bit of friction when you're teaching consumers to behave in any way. So it did take a couple years to get it right and make it feel good.
But then you fast forwarded another, probably three or four years into the journey and there were a lot of people building a lot of different interfaces. For this self-service returns experience and it was pretty powerful. There's a lot of momentum in the business. I think back to those times and what was really cool is that this entire market kind of was created out of nothing, but Loop kind of stayed on the forefront of it the whole time. Then if you rewind a year from now, the market actually consolidated in some unique ways. Loop ended up buying returnly, big competitor of ours in the early days. Just like a full circle moment for the team over there.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now let's pivot to what you're up to these days. Obviously, we have spoken of your accolades. You know what you're talking about here. And let's get into ERPs. First and foremost, I would say half our audience doesn't know what they are. So in layman's terms, what is an ERP and why doesn't Shopify do it for me?
Kyle Hency
All right. We're starting at ground zero. One, I will say the acronym ERP means nothing to nobody. So I'm not even gonna try to explain that. What we're building is an alternative to ERPs and completely rethinking the entire exercise of investing in an ERP like what we did back in our day at Chubbies. If you wanna just talk through the surface areas of what an ERP is, this is something that helps manage your inventory and your orders as they flow through your system.
Push them down into your fulfillment and logistics operations, and then ultimately through to your financials. Taking all of those exercises out of spreadsheets, typically sitting in a set of disparate systems and or spreadsheets and putting it into one unified system is what people think of as investing in an ERP.
When you're actually building the brand, the way it feels is you're kind of updating all of these things everywhere, you're pulling down CSV imports from here and there and there, you're mashing them into like monster Excel spreadsheets, running a bunch of e-lookups to answer a bunch of complex questions.
In general, that feels very reactive when you're in the moment and you're trying to make all of these decisions, sort of shooting from the hip, but sort of informed by this monster Excel spreadsheet you've created. to move all of this into one system. You only do the data entry one time versus in all these systems. All the systems will talk to one another.
Bonus points in the case of GoodDay, we're gonna start to be contextually aware and actually say, if this is true over in this part of your business, and this is true in this part of your business, here's this useful information for you. I really do think of it as this kind of centralizing experience that really becomes the backbone of your operational business. Then as it relates to Shopify, right? We're both building as closely as we can to Shopify, but also studying the edge of Shopify. It's one of the most powerful platforms for commerce out there, super innovative, but they also like to draw their line on where they're gonna stop building.
Chase Clymer
I remember hearing it the other day. They wanna do most things for most merchants. That is a very specific term. Everything else is living up to the partner ecosystem.
Kyle Hency
And I would say where they stop is where we start. And look, I think they've been incredible partners to us in that when they're working with a merchant, and it's clear that the merchant has needs that are beyond the most of the most, right? They're introducing them to us. It's an amazing relationship.
Building our entire business on top of their platform as a result. Really powerful space to be focused on. Some really specific ones, building out B2B and wholesale flows at an earlier age in the brands are things that we do today out of the box. We make that really simple for brands.
That's either doing just-in-time B2B business or pre-booking in advance. We focus a lot of our attention on connecting inventory flows to accurate FIFO level cogs. So under the hood of all of the complex operational stuff we do is a bunch of accounting, the really exciting stuff that Goodday is doing.
That's just not stuff that Shopify wants to spend a lot of time on, right? That's probably one of the most interesting ways that we're complimentary and just building in a different direction and can kind of extend what they're doing.
Just for the mental model for folks at Chubbies, we had Shopify in place and then we would send half of our team over into another system called NetSuite. Those two combined were like our core infrastructure. What we're doing is just saying take the power of a lot of those tools from NetSuite, make them really simple and move them closer to Shopify where the operators are already operating.
Chase Clymer
Can you talk to me about any historical experience you have integrating NetSuite? What does it look like from a time commitment, a budget commitment, a resource commitment to implement NetSuite on a modern direct-to-consumer brand?
Kyle Hency
My perspective is a bit dated. I will acknowledge that. Talking to the Chubbies experience, this was 5 years ago, 6 years ago, when we were doing a lot of our work. We spent 12 to 18 months initially building custom scripting to handle all the complex inventory management requirements for Chubbies at the time.
We had a really like 12 to 18 month period before we got any value from that system. Over the life of all the building we did on NetSuite, we spent about a million dollars. You're talking about a system that took a million dollars before it started giving a lot back.
We also benefited from the other side of that. We built out a really successful implementation ultimately, and we felt the power of it, particularly during COVID where the supply chain just required a lot of fast action and a lot of fast decisions. We were really strong in that sort of moment of uncertainty.
The vision for a GoodDay is like, take these like hard parts of, of traditional ERPs and make them real simple. Our systems we can put in place in four weeks. Our systems don't come with huge upfront implementation fees or big groups of outsourced developers you need to put them in place. We just hop in there with you and put your data in the system and configure the system for you.
Your time to value in our system is both completely dislocated from an overall cost perspective, but also really tight. From the moment you start working to implement good data, the time you get value is typically four to eight weeks. It's just like a completely different experience around this set of tools. That is the disruption we're trying to bring with the day.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I asked that pointed question for a reason. I just want to point out on our end, we've been in this space since 2016. As a specific decision of service offerings that we wanted to handle over at our agency, ERP sucked to integrate. We just say no anytime NetSuite comes up, right? Because it's a different monster. It's like Salesforce has its own ecosystem.
NetSuite has its own ecosystem. Shopify has its own ecosystem. It's just a whole different thing. Sometimes you just have to understand your limitations as a consultant. You're honestly speaking a different language and you need to go find someone that understands that language. That's just the amount of lift that's required to implement something like that.
Kyle Hency
Yeah, absolutely. I do think a part of the impetus for why now is the state of building brands in Shopify. It has become harder, right? Like we're in a completely different interest rate environment. The consumers are behaving completely differently. We need technology partners that are working with the brands that are really helping them create successful, resilient brands step one and then figure out the economics as you're building.
But we really do think there's an opportunity to just make these tools a lot more simple, maintain the power of these inventory in order management tools, but just really drastically simplify them. We're not for everybody as a result. We can't customize to no end or we just become net speed. And so I do think structurally if you're like, how is it different? I mean, we're really opinionated around retail.
We're operators and we're gonna set your team down some flows that are tried and true flows that make a lot of sense to us, but maybe they wouldn't work for your business for some reason. Maybe you do need a fully custom head to toe build out on NetSuite. But our belief here, at least in the Shopify ecosystem, is that the vast majority of these brands will make a lot of sense for.
Chase Clymer
Making some of those decisions for brands. I think that's one of the most powerful things about Shopify is that you're using this checkout for the longest time. They wouldn't let you noodle where you didn't need to noodle. Focus on the things that make you money. I think that when you're looking at a blank page, and you don't know where to start, that is terrifying, especially when you're talking about custom software and powerful software like NetSuite. So I think helping people make some of those choices at the beginning. Getting the ball rolling going from 0 to 1 is insanely valuable.
Kyle Hency
I think it's worth sharing that it’s easy to take a lot of what we're talking about and say, these guys must be going right at NetSuite and taking their customers. Wrong.
Chase Clymer
We keep saying that. No, they're different customers.
Kyle Hency
Actually, wrong. They're completely different customers. We're actually working with young brands that are mostly in Shopify and spreadsheets and saying, let's get some of this data into a centralized tool so the rest of your team can see it.
People throughout your organization can self-serve. Where did we learn that? That is pulled directly from Loop. Let all of your employees inside the business have access to your operating data and let them self-serve. That's real leverage inside of your company, especially when you're five or 10 employees.
Traditional ERPs, they literally require more full-time employees to manage them and keep them alive. Our systems do the opposite. As you scale, you're gonna not require as many new employees. That's the way that we intend to just actually foundationally build more resilient brands with our partners.
There's a big part of what we're doing, which is like, you kind of have to adopt the GoodDay method of operating, which is a bit more lean, more centralized systems. Helping people wherever you can, self-service. These are not necessarily how everybody wants to operate. There is a bit of change management as you go through this transformation.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. You alluded to a few moments ago, helping younger brands. The term doesn't mean much out of context. Let's use size as far as sales per year. When does it make sense for a brand to start exploring a solution such as GoodDay versus a solution that might be a little more custom?
Kyle Hency
Well, I would say in the case of GoodDay, we typically are talking to brands anywhere from 1 to several hundred million on Shopify. That's a wide range. But it's wide because revenue levels don't really communicate operating complexity. Any brands that have multiple pools of physical inventory that they're shipping from.
Think of that as multiple distribution centers or a bunch of retail stores. Or brands who have a need for virtual inventory segmentation. Managing a pool of inventory that's e-commerce, a pool of inventory that's retail stores, and a pool of inventory that's wholesale and B2B. You might be a 1 million revenue brand and have all of those needs.
You're gonna make a lot of sense and good day is gonna look amazing to you. I do think a big part of the mission here is to democratize these tools, make them easier to put in place, make them more cost effective. But really the goal with what we're doing is, get in there with these brands early as they're growing, where we can be really impactful, help them learn this way of working through the system, so that in two, three, four, five, 10 years, they don't need to graduate to some larger, more custom ERP. They should be able to get 90% plus of the way there in our own systems.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, we've talked quite a bit about ERPs. If someone was thinking about a traditional ERP that GoodDay maybe doesn't do?
Kyle Hency
In general, we have decided like Shopify to partner in the areas where we think there are really great innovations happening. outside of our sphere of influence. What we're really great at is making a lot of complex operations for brands simple, right? I'll talk specifically about the WMS landscape. In the WMS landscape, you have real innovators. You have Shapiro over there. You have a bunch of other WMS innovators, and we partner with most of them. For the brand, what that means is they can work with the 3PL and the WMS that they want to. They have a bit of freedom in who they want to work with there.
Some ERPs actually build that entire WMS system out. To me, in the Shopify ecosystem, that makes no sense. The other area is EDI. So EDI is its own beast, almost as complex as ERP itself. You know, in the EDI landscape, you have SPS commerce, which is just like NetSuite, a total bruiser, but also the market leader. And we're partnered really closely with a disruptor over there called Crystal.
EDI. They're the no code, just built in the last 3 or 4 years, version of EDI. It's a far more simple, higher touch and service. It's all the things we're hoping to be ourselves in ERP. I do think there's a new generation of operating software that's coming through right now that's going to be very competitive and built very closely to Shopify.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing, Kyle. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Kyle Hency
This is more on the brand side. I think growth is easy to be the mantra. And one of the most rewarding things we ever did in the Chubbies’ experience was we started to focus on resilience as a prerogative. That allowed us to focus on healthy growth. That allowed us to focus on incremental profit generation.
I think there's this idea that that's somehow not as compelling in the day to day. That is just completely contrary to our experience with Chubbies is when we started to get into this resilience oriented mindset, it actually opened up our creativity. When you're in a revenue growth at all cost mindset, EU is really, really limiting operationally.
One of the things that we did is just focused the business back in 2016, 2017 on being far, far more resilient. When we went through hard times in 2020, we were kind of ready. We were ready to step up, and create a lot of separation from our peers. I just always try to help entrepreneurs be thinking about those long-term big things that they're focused on.
I say that knowing that absolutely, there are moments in time where revenue growth and market shares, all that matters. We might be entering the next phase of that. To me, I kind of feel like we've hit the bottom or base of where we're gonna be. I see the next thing around the corner as much more growth oriented for a lot of these brands. I hope we don't lose track of how important it has been to build some resilience.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. When you say resilience, I hear being profitable and monitoring your costs and being very insightful about your decisions to spend.
Kyle Hency
Yeah. And long term minded. There's a lot of things you might want to do in the short term that would hurt you in the long term. I just really urge folks to be thinking about the long term price.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now, if I'm listening to this, and I have been thinking about ERPs as a long term thing that I want to do, how do I get a hold of you? What should I do?
Kyle Hency
Go to GoodDaySoftware.com, sign up for a product demo. I'll hop in. It'll be me showing you around the product. We're a lean team over here, almost all engineers. And we're building a lot of product. So if I gave you a product demo today and I gave you another one in 90 days, you'd see a completely different product. So I would just urge anybody who's interested in looking at these sort of tools to hop on and sign up and we'll be excited to meet you.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Kyle, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Kyle Hency
Alright. Thanks, guys.
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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