How Material Retail CEO Elliot Djmal grew Material Retail to $9.9M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

shop teaks was launched back in way back in 2010 they helped merchandise or sell online one of those merchandisers was Elliot's company called dorlador nyc.com uh they that company does five to ten million top-line Revenue but eventually he said you know I like the software and I like shop teaks more let me start Consulting over there before you know it he's now running it as co-ceo of the platform they make money in three ways they'd have a take rate on Revenue that goes through shop teak they sell software we call material retail that folks pay 125 bucks for again these these brand boutiques use it to grow their business and lastly they actually ship POS systems and they actually take a smaller percent uh flowing through those systems 72 million in gmv through those systems last year hoping to grow their revenue their total revenue not not like some big GMB number but their actual Revenue to about 1.5 million this year with a small efficient team which we love with four full-timers hey folks my guest today is Elliot digimel he's an experienced entrepreneur successfully LED an independent retail business with eight locations for eight years he's now the co-ceo of a dynamic startup called materialretail.com they build software services for independent retailers Elliot you ready to take us to the top definitely definitely all right so what were you using material retail when you were running those eight retail locations like as a customer yeah definitely so material retail has a lot of uh parts to it the main one which uh most people know is called shopgeeks.com it's a Marketplace for independent retailers and stop what shoptiks.com t-e-e-k-s like uh t-i-q-u-e-s like Boutique shopping so uh we as independent retail we were putting our products on that Marketplace and it was super successful um we kind of went two routes for e-commerce one we launched our own website um and the other one we started selling on shop peaks in the marketplace and we had much more success on the marketplace we'd have to worry about the you know the tech the logistics the marketing and we just kind of posted the good product and got orders and fulfilled so it worked really well what year did you launch those independent locations so we launched uh door the door is the name of the retail company in 2010 2010 sorry door to door.com door La door so the website's door Ladora nyc.com so door La door no d-o-r-l-t-o-r-n-y-c.com to our door La door okay nyc.com okay interesting and what was your main product what were you selling so it's like Fast fashion for a uh 25 to 35 year old girl um definitely like going out clothing and things you'd wear to a club called disposable fashion like a step up from forever 21. okay well I know obvious question people are going to look at you here and thinking why the hell is this guy selling clothes to like you know you know teenage girls well so uh you know it's in my blood to be honest um my grandfather was in Fashion retail my dad was a Fashion retail and we all just kept doing it um and yeah my dad worked my grandpa I worked for my dad and uh yeah so so we learned and we look at you know there's definitely a lot of ways to look at Fashion retail so if it's by like what's fashionable the others looking at numbers and see what's selling and the end of the day of style is just a number and a spreadsheet and see what's selling and you go after that good vendors good things like that that's wild okay so you you get door-to-door going door ladore nyc.com in 2010. uh is that so is it still operating to age you sell it or what yeah no it's still operating there's uh eight locations my family still runs it um and yeah interesting so okay so there are eight locations so do you rely more on Virtual Marketplace Revenue through shop teaks or actually physical people walking in your eight locations definitely the eight locations are the majority of the revenue but um we were able to use the a locations and leverage you know all the inventory and all the stuff we have there to have a profitable e-commerce we don't have to add really any expense um or any inventory any overhead light any overhead and just you know have incremental sales interesting so how many how many like unique people bought at least one thing from door La door last year um in store I'd say in the five tens of thousands uh online in the you know one to five thousand people oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview interesting and can you give us a sense of Revenue size are we talking like one to five million five to ten where were you guys generally yeah it's like five to ten five to ten wow okay so I guess why leave that and go deep into door oh sorry I can go deep into material retail so it was uh it was just called a slow transition so I was uh very involved in shop teaks material retail as a customer really kind of spearheaded that in Doral door um so made a lot of friends at the company um and you know over time slowly got involved started Consulting there two days a week in 2018 actually so did that for two years two years I was there two days a week and really kind of fell in love um with just helping if they pay you for that are you just doing it because you it helped door the door grow yeah no they paid us for that paid me for that I definitely uh I wish I could work for free we can't do it uh one day um and uh yeah so it was like a slow transition it made it really easy because I knew what I was getting into you know after two years maybe two days a week I really knew the business I knew what I can add to their business um and then also what I could bring to the boutiques to help the boutiques be more successful using their products um and what year was that so the Consulting started what year 2018 2018. okay then so so I guess fast forward when did you realize oh maybe the founders want to leave or they're getting forced out and you're going to jump in as co-ceo so it was like 2020 early 2020 right when covert was happening kind of happened really really quickly me and uh my co-ceo Mark um were kind of put in place by the Oto and founder and the board and uh we hit the ground running kobit was a very busy time where definitely e-commerce focused business um yeah interesting so you mentioned board had they raised a bunch of money yeah so shopping story history it's uh launched in uh 2012 wait sorry just to be clear are we talking about shop teaks or material retail so shop teaks uh we rebranded material retail in 2022. oh same company so yeah shop Peaks is uh the marketplace that material retail owns um shoptix.com was the only business that we had for about eight nine years and then we launched a software suite which is material retail in 2019 and uh slowly over time a lot of the focus um moved towards the software suite as opposed to the marketplace so now shopgeeks.com which is the marketplace is a subsidiary of material...