July 1, 2026 – Pull Marketing Rob Synder, True Crime Author & Podhost Daphne Woolsoncroft and Off-price Apparel Kenchen Bharwani

Jim Beach 0:04
We don’t have time for the introduction today. Three great guests. First up, Rob Schneider is going to teach us about pull B2B marketing. It’s a really fascinating conversation. Then we’re going to speak with Daphne Wollstonecraft about writing a summer thriller, and then we have Ken Chen Paris Arwani with us, talking about off-market retail. We get started right now. Very excited to introduce my first guest. Amazing, impressive career. Graduated from Harvard Business School and became a consultant with McKinsey and Company, and then went on a string of startups, did a whole lot of interesting things. If you looked at his section, or the what is it called, the activity, no, the experience sections. Gosh, that was stupid to me. He has just all sorts of interesting things that he has done, different startups and things. Today, though, he is focusing on VC efforts. He is the operating partner of Grix G R I X V C. They help B startups take off. He is also the author of a new book called The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand to Build a Successful Startup, and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong. Raw Book. welcome to the show. How you doing?

Rob Synder 1:24
I’m doing great, Jim. Thanks so much for having me. It

Jim Beach 1:27
is my pleasure. Very impressive career. Where do you live in New Hampshire? Are you just over the border, so you can get the cheaper taxes?

Rob Synder 1:35
I actually say I am right where the taxes stop. So, you have nailed

Jim Beach 1:40
it. I had a lot of friends that grew up in that area and spent a lot of time there during college, so I know the area pretty, pretty well. Are you a big skier?

Rob Synder 1:53
My, my wife is a much better skier than I am, so she’s a big fan. I’m from the South originally, so I didn’t, I didn’t see snow until you know I was like 15 years old, but I am, I am decent enough to bomb down a hill, not good enough to stop very well at the bottom. The

Jim Beach 2:13
Grix website looks like you’re a skier, it’s just a beautiful mountain scene, just looks like you love the mountains.

Rob Synder 2:21
Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s the the other partners at the at the firm are based in Salt Lake City, and so they have really good skiing there.

Jim Beach 2:30
Yes. Tell us about the book. The focus is on pull, so let’s go ahead and just find pole. Then tell me about the book.

Rob Synder 2:38
Yeah, so pull is this thing that we are all looking for as founders? It’s basically when customers rip the product out of your hands. We see this from all the startups that take off. People, people buy almost despite whatever the startup does. You know, there’s that old story of Twitter, what Mark Zuckerberg – Mark Zuckerberg called the clown car that fell into a gold mine, where they couldn’t not succeed, despite basically doing everything. So that’s what pulled feels like. Customers rip the product out of your hands, your startup is taking off. I had this in my own startup, where I have people call me and say, basically verbatim, I need to sign up, I need to pay. How do I do that? And also, what do you do in that order, which is just a very strange experience, and so I didn’t understand it when it happened. I didn’t understand it when it didn’t happen, when I, when I thought it would, and it didn’t. And so this book was basically my goal to try to figure out why do customers rip a product out of your hand.

Jim Beach 3:38
All right, absolutely fascinating. I love that idea, and that premise. I have had that situation myself, where a product sells itself if marketed correctly. I can’t wait to find out more about it. What is that secret sauce? Is it scarcity or is it pure marketing and trickery? What’s at the core of that?

Rob Synder 4:00
Such a good question. It turns out that it is about what’s going on in the customer’s world before you show up, and kind of independent of you. I always thought it was, you know, if you build the best product, if you build a better product, you show up, they’ll rip the product out of your hands. Well, turns out I did that. They definitely did not. There’s a lot of products that offer a lot of value that they’re just not prioritizing right now, and so they won’t buy it, and so they’ll be kind of indifferent. So, no, it has to be they are stuck in some sort of a situation where they’re trying to do something, but they can’t do it with the tools that are available to them if they’re in that situation, and you show up, the product doesn’t even have to be good. In my case, I just offered a spreadsheet, basically. It was me and a spreadsheet, it wasn’t even a software product, and they ripped it out of my hands, despite that. Okay,

Jim Beach 4:56
what about physical products like the. Beanie babies, or some of these other crazy boy things that go insane at Christmas. What is the motivation behind that?

Rob Synder 5:10
That’s a good one. What I’ll say is, I am mostly focused on B2B products. I’ve done some consumer stuff, so I can tell you about kind of some of the physical products that I have seen. There’s this one product that I know of where it’s a, it’s this new kind of headset for communication that has very, very, very good noise canceling, and so the question is, okay, like that’s a cool technology, but is there any pull for that? It turns out you and I probably don’t like our noise canceling, is kind of good enough. Well, they found that at really intense manufacturing sites, these people have two layers of hearing protection, and they can’t communicate with each other, and it causes all sorts of downstream things. And so they show up into that environment, and those customers rip it out of their hands, they put it on, they take a look at a prototype, even before the thing is ready, and say, I need this yesterday. How do we get early access to it? And so it is all about finding the person who is stuck before you, they’re trying to do something, but blocked from being able to do that specific thing before you show up, and then right, that’s your center of your bullseye, those are the people who rip it out of your hands, and maybe they will talk about it, they’ll shout about it, and and that could be how the those innovations diffuse across the rest of the the economy, but it has to start in the zero to one stage with that person who is going to rip it out of your hands,

Jim Beach 6:40
okay, and you would think that in the B to B world, people would be more polite than that, you know, they’d be more mature. What do you mean, more, more mature? Tell me, tell me more. You’re the idea that they’re ripping a spreadsheet out of your hands, you know. You would think that they would be a little bit more mature than that, and know that there’s an infinite amount of spreadsheets you can hit copy as many times as you want to with a spreadsheet.

Rob Synder 7:09
Yeah, I totally agree. You would think so. What I’ve found, and I’m curious, what you experienced when you had had people pull products out of your hands. What I found is that they are, they’re usually so stuck and so kind of frustrated in that situation that that it’s you know they just behave in a way that is shocking to you, it’s often shocking to them too. There’s, you know, they’ll say, you know what, I never respond to people who, who cold email me, but I saw your message, and I had to take this conversation. How do you help, and how actually does it work? And they will, because they’ve been stuck for so long.

Jim Beach 7:52
Sure, you know, I imagine you know these neuropathy pain commercials that you see with a picture of people’s feet. I’ve had neuropathy for 20 years, and I look at every single one of those ads because I have that pain, but I now know that all of those are mostly they’re just fake, they’re all elegant ads with nothing behind them, so

Rob Synder 8:17
yeah, yeah, and like the another example in that kind of direction is again Ozempic, right, where forever there had been people who were trying to find easier ways to, like, lose weight, as an example, and all of the commercials for everything, for every kind of weight loss program, the miracle drug was always there, and people would buy it because they were, they were stuck, and they were trying, then finally the a solution that actually fits kind of comes around and actually does deliver on it. And okay, now we’ve seen, we’ve seen how fast that’s grown.

Jim Beach 8:53
Yeah, it’s taken over the world, still so fat as a country. Well, we’ll see. We will see. I think that we have a long way to go on that. I’m afraid, you know. So, do is there any part of the marketing that we can do to create this kind of crazy demand? Is there psychological tricks that are used in this, you know, I’m thinking more about consumer products, I guess, in my mind having celebrities endorse it or any of these other things. What about in the B2B space? There’s there tricks that you use there, totally. So, what I typically, yeah,

Rob Synder 9:43
totally, totally, so what I have seen is that most startups are really, really stuck in the early days, where it’s hard to get anybody to buy your product, right? You might get some revenue, but it’s, it’s not growing. Very fast, and it’s definitely not doing the hockey stick growth, so the first unlock is just to find the people who will rip it out of your hands, kind of despite your marketing, despite the way you talk on a sales call, despite what the product actually is. In my case, the spreadsheet, then once that starts working, once you find that kind of person and they start ripping the product out of your hands, then you can, then, then you can raise money, for example, and hire really effective marketers, really effective product people, and you can make everything much better, and, and, yeah, there are tactics like FOMO, is a really great tactic that a friend of mine actually came up with it’s a tactic that you can employ to get people who are kind of on the fence to say, oh, you know what, why not, and you can, you can publish a bunch of case studies, and you can, you can do a bunch of creative marketing exercises, or attention gathering exercises, it just has to be built some traction, some attention, but we’ve seen all of those Silicon Valley companies that do that, and, and you know, they might take off for three weeks because they’re the main character on the internet for a little while, but they disappear just as quickly as they appear because there’s nothing underneath it,

Jim Beach 11:22
that is so very true, so very true. And then you see the things like the EFTs, you know, can that be seen in a new light through this idea? Could you explain what an EFT is? Sorry, the token things the electronic tokens? Oh, using the wrong term, isn’t it? EFT,

Rob Synder 11:46
I think maybe an NFT,

Jim Beach 11:48
NFT. Okay, I’m sorry. Yes,

Rob Synder 11:52
no worries, no worries. I was like, I think EFT is a very real thing, and I don’t know what it is. So, yeah, NFTs and crypto, generally, the challenge with crypto was that it was a fascinating new technology. It’s really an interesting new technology, but just because something is a new technology that is even better than existing technology in a lot of different ways doesn’t mean it’s going to find a customer who is stuck and pulls it out of your hands, and so you can have my work with MIT and Harvard on all their kind of like academic entrepreneurs and and professors who are trying to commercialize amazing new technology, all of these have that same problem, where it is a fascinating, objectively valuable technology in a lot of different ways, but if it’s not finding a person who is trying to do something in stock who will rip it out of your hands, then it’s just going to sound cool, and yeah, you can make it be a flash in the pan, but it’s not going to take off.

Jim Beach 13:07
Can you have one super influential person in the software space put up a post on Reddit or somewhere, one of the tech boards saying, “Hey, I discovered this spreadsheet, you should rip it out of the guy’s hands. Is that how critical is to the ultimate viral success? Is something like that.

Rob Synder 13:28
Oh, that is a amazing way to make something go viral, 100% right. If I could somehow get Andre Carpathy, or if I could get Marc Andreessen, or whoever it is, to say this book right here, this that you just wrote, is the greatest book ever. Right? I have no doubt that my book sales would go straight to the to the moon, and any same thing for any kind of technology or any kind of product or service. The question is just, does it have staying power, because that can get you attention, but you know, and people will even buy it, but will they stick around and keep using it? That’s a, that’s the underlying question here. And businesses are built based on that, they stick around and keep using it, the thing that’s underneath, and so, yeah, you can get, generate flash in the pans in a bunch of different ways it, and that is often necessary, but it is not enough.

Jim Beach 14:27
You mentioned things sticking around and having staying power. How many apps on your phone do you never use? Oh my gosh, I’d say the majority of them. Yeah, I don’t even use all the apps on my first screen, much less the second screen, or the third, or the fourth, or the 10th. How do I build that into apps, or how do I make it, you know, so that I might go back to

Rob Synder 14:55
it? Really good question, I would say, and one of the core. Things that I found doing this research is the reason someone’s going to come back to your app exists not in your app, it exists in their world. They are trying to do something, but they, in their life, they have some project on their to-do list, they have something they’re doing in their day that causes them to enter back into your app, so for me an example is Uber or Lyft, or any of these. I don’t use them every day because I have my own car, but there’s a situation that I’m in when I’m not at home or I’m traveling or whatever, when I will go back in and open the app. So the mistake that a lot of founders make, and I’ve made this myself, is that I think, oh, maybe if I just add some push notification, or maybe if I just add some feature, they will come back into my application, and the answer is just not found in my app. The answer is by going and watching them throughout their day and saying, when you know, what are situations where they’re kind of stuck, where I can inject something there, maybe it’s when I’m traveling, maybe it’s, you know, in the morning, maybe, you know, it’s just finding the person who is already a power user, or could be a power user, and seeing what they’re trying to do, where my app could fit in, and then figuring out what the feature is to build,

Jim Beach 16:20
yes, and then getting them to update, so that they bring in the new feature,

Rob Synder 16:25
exactly, exactly.

Jim Beach 16:31
And then, is there any sort of counter oppositional force, like a push that we would ever encounter, or be able to use? Is there any antithesis of this that we should talk about or think about? Oh, by the.. oh, yes.. uh, ETF is exchange traded fund, and it’s a particular package sold by JP Morgan. What are their financial products? So

Rob Synder 16:58
that’s.. that’s what I thought it was. Okay, it. yeah, I was like, wow, that’s a very thoughtful question about something that I have no knowledge about

Jim Beach 17:08
everything,

Rob Synder 17:09
that’s what I thought until I went into building my own startup and got punched in the face for a couple years when nobody wanted it, so now I know I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know very much at all, but but remind me of your question that you asked just before that.

Jim Beach 17:27
Push, is there anything in push position to this?

Rob Synder 17:30
Yes. So, push, you can think of as convincing somebody to buy, persuading, right, which is something like, for example, if we’re on a sales call and you’re not convinced, I can try to persuade you to buy. I can try to persuade you. I can say, well, you know what? If I dropped the price 100 bucks, or what if I dropped the price 1000 bucks? Or what if you know, and you’re just trying to find some way to convince them? Or maybe I’ve seen this in a lot of cases for early stage founders, as you say, you know, I can tell you’re not convinced. Can I fly out to your office tomorrow and try to convince you that you should buy this? Because I really think you should. That’s pushing, that is convincing, and that is totally reasonable to do early on when you’re just trying to get early customers, so you can figure out who will actually pull it out of your hands, and you’re not quite sure how to do that, or what to do. You just don’t have enough information yet. Totally fine to push over time, though. Your goal is to figure out who doesn’t need that. How do we build something that doesn’t require that, and you don’t want to build your business just on you having to go and personally convince every single person to buy.

Jim Beach 18:49
No, that doesn’t make sense in my world, the consumer world, especially back in the business. I ran it in the my 20s, I could get your credit card number in seven minutes if you’re a mom, seven minutes is all it took, and it was all because of exclusivity, but mostly because I am exactly your child, and I know your child is upset that I was that child. It was just the sales pitch was so perfect, because we knew the customer so, so very, very well, but yeah, we could convince them in seven nine minutes that you better buy now, because we’re selling out fast. So,

Rob Synder 19:29
yeah, and you can see, though, what you, what you just described there, that’s a really interesting case. What you described was there was elements of pull and elements of push, where the pull was quite clear, right. You knew their situation, or what they were trying to do, and what they weren’t able to do, but they were desperately trying to do, and so in that situation, if that hadn’t been present, you probably wouldn’t – those push tactics probably wouldn’t have worked, but when you layer on the kind of push tactics around scarcity. Urgency, they work really, really well when there’s the pull on the core pole underneath.

Jim Beach 20:07
You have kids yet, Rob?

Rob Synder 20:09
I do. I have a, a 15 month old daughter.

Jim Beach 20:13
Oh, congratulations, that sounds

Rob Synder 20:15
thank you.

Jim Beach 20:16
What would you pay for her to have the last Coca Cola or the last copy of ET or something, you know, parents will pay anything to make their kids happy. Yeah, it’s the scarcity does work in that case. Rob, how do we find out more? Get in touch, follow online, get a copy of the book.

Rob Synder 20:38
The book is called The Power of Pull, and it is for sale anywhere that you can find a book, Amazon Barnes and Noble. You can find me at my website, Rob snyder.org and I’m also on LinkedIn.

Jim Beach 20:51
Fantastic, Rob. Thank you so very much, and we’d love to have you back. Congratulations, thanks so much. I’m sure it’ll sell well for you.

Rob Synder 20:59
Well, thank you so much,

Jim Beach 21:01
and we’ll be right back. Very excited to introduce our next guest. Please welcome Daphne Wolfsoncroft, to the show. She is a thriller, author, and a true crime podcaster. She has a show of her very own that is called Where I Lost It: Going West, where her husband talks about all great true crime that was acquired by a network of shows, which is an unusual step. I think it shows how prestigious and successful the show has been. She has just published her second book here in the last day or so. It is called The Season of Sinking. Is that a follow-up to Night Watcher, Daphne, or is it totally separate?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 22:04
Hey, Jim. Thank you for having me. It is a totally separate book, all my thrillers. I don’t plan to do any series, so this is a very different book from my first Night Watcher.

Jim Beach 22:14
Why? Why aren’t you going to do any series?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 22:18
I don’t know. I think I just have so many ideas. I used to want to be a filmmaker growing up, and ingesting so many stories, like true stories, every week with my true crime podcast going west. I think I just.. I have my first 15 books planned, so I think I have so many ideas. If somebody wanted me to do a series or continue a book that I wrote, and people wanted that. I would probably consider it, but I think I’m just going to stick with one-offs for now.

Jim Beach 22:46
Okay, but that makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people will kind of push back on this term you just said. You have so many ideas. I have published five books, and I’m writing three or four right now, and I have amazing suicide list of things I want to do, and I think that’s going to piss people off too, because they’re trying to get one idea right. I know they can’t be like us, truly about the success of having one idea, and there’s how that opens up so many possibilities.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 23:25
I think that with my first book, Night Watcher, I think that was such a great place for me to start, and, like, you’re saying, with having so many different ideas, it’s weirdly hard to replicate things, I think, and my first book is very specific, I think it connects very well to, again, my true crime podcast, Going West. It’s about a serial killer, a mask serial killer. I love horror movies. I always wanted to make horror movies, like I said, I wanted to be a filmmaker in my earlier years, and so I think that idea of my first book is really fun, it’s there’s a lot of murders in it, and it focuses on a young radio show host, so I think you could relate to her as well, and but when I was thinking of ideas after that book came out, and where to kind of go from there, you know, so many people have said that my second book is so different from my first, because my first book is very horror-based. It’s again, there’s many murders that take place across it, and my second book is more of a slow burn thriller that takes place on the lake, and there’s a lot more mystery to it. I think we’re all so multifaceted, and we have so many different things to show that we should just kind of embrace that.

Jim Beach 24:42
What is your writing process? How do you actually make it happen?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 24:47
So, I, it’s actually very difficult, because I have so many ideas. It’s really hard for me to land on one and go forward with it. I have.. there’s so many months of weighing the idea. Is in my list that I love the most, and determining which one feels like the most, most natural step, because we’re always changing as well in the process, as you know, between writing a book and coming out with it is at least a couple years, depending on how long it takes you to write the book, from when I finished writing my first book, and when it came out, it was two years later, so you know you want to write something that sticks with you, and so I spend many months just figuring out what that next idea is, and then I fully believe in outlining. One of my best friends says you’re either an architect or a gardener, and I am certainly an architect. I think, especially with mysteries and thrillers, being able to plot out everything properly and drop your bread crumbs where they need to go is really important, so I love outlining, and I usually.. it depends. Sometimes I know exactly what I’m doing, and I can write an outline in four days. And for my second book, it took me a little bit longer, because it was a bit more complicated of a plot. So, and then I just write my.. my second book took me eight months to write. My first one took me five, and my third book, which is coming out next year, only took me two months, so you know it just depends how much is really coming to me. But I have a beautiful office here in Los Angeles, and I just write away as fast as I can.

Jim Beach 26:16
All right, music, no music, people walking around, totally locked in silence.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 26:23
What was that?

Jim Beach 26:24
I don’t know. I was just describing circumstance. Do you have music on? Do people walk around? Are you in,

Speaker 2 26:29
oh,

Jim Beach 26:30
with a ball?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 26:32
Oh, yes. Oh, locked room. I always lock up my office door because I’m always scared my husband is gonna, because I wear headphones, and I, I listen to, like, rain sound effects or a really quiet moody playlist, and I’m always afraid he’s gonna come up behind me and scare me, because I really write very terrifying, real things. So I like being by myself in my solitude and locking away, especially because when you’re writing a book, you’re building this world, and you want to be in that world, and it’s really hard to pop in and out of, because you need to be in it and trying to determine what people would say in these situations, and what they would do, and how it would play out. So, you really want to close yourself away. So, I definitely do that. Like, I’m not a coffee shop writer, that’s for sure.

Jim Beach 27:18
What about getting Hachette as your publisher, very impressive. How do you pronounce that name? And how’d you get them?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 27:26
You got it right. It’s a shit. Yeah, I think just from being a true crime podcaster and having an agent, it was really lovely that I was able to connect to my literary agent, who is with UTA, and he has been so lovely. His name is Dan, and he was able to get me out in front of all the big publishers, and so my first book, Night Watcher, actually went into auction because multiple publishers wanted it, and it was a really, really exciting process that happened the day after my wedding, and it was really cool to be able to kind of decide what was going to be the best fit for my next two books, because they, they did a two book deal, so I got to do be with Hachette for my first two books, and hopefully we’ll continue that for my books to come, but yeah, it was, it was very exciting, because when you’re writing a book, you don’t know what’s going to happen to it, or if anybody’s going to care about it, or where it’s going to go, so the fact that multiple people wanted it was so exciting, and then landing at Hachette was a beautiful experience. I have a great team over there, so that’s been really, really exciting.

Jim Beach 28:30
But on the other hand, you have to wait two years. Yes, my first book was published by McGraw Hill, and that was a train wreck, and

Daphne Woolsoncroft 28:40
I don’t know,

Jim Beach 28:41
then we’ll see. Second book was since my third book, I’ve decided just to self-publish and created publishing name brand of stuff, and I just can’t wait two years, you know?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 28:57
I completely get you, I totally feel

Jim Beach 28:59
that more money per copy, and they don’t do that much, you know. I have they done that much to justify helping you?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 29:09
Yes, I totally. I totally get what you’re saying. It’s a very frustrating process to wait, especially when you’re so excited about something, and you just want it to be in the world, and it’s ready, and then you have to wait. I totally get it. Self publishing is such a great route as well.

Jim Beach 29:24
Okay, but you don’t think you’ll cross over into the darkness.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 29:28
I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to my agent. I, I do love my team, and I have such a great editor who I really value her. I value her opinion and her notes, and, and I love their, their art team, they made these beautiful covers for me, and they got me to you, so I think that I think that there is a lot of value in that, but I don’t know, I, you know, I actually came out with a kind of crime noir thriller when I was, I think I was 19 when I came out with that, and. Self-published it, and I think I just had so much going on, because you’re, you’re, you’re pushing the book yourself, of course. So, I think I didn’t have the hot spot to make it happen back in the day, maybe in the future.

Jim Beach 30:18
Podcasts, I love listening to those on a long trip. What crimes are you talking about? How do you find your crimes? Just give us a lowdown on the show.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 30:27
Yes, so my husband and I started this podcast going west seven and a half years ago. We did it not even a year into dating, I think it was 10 months into dating. We started this podcast together, and we do two episodes a week now, every Tuesday and Friday. We cover different solved and unsolved disappearances and murder cases, and we do everything. We really prefer to focus on lesser-known stories, because we like helping get stories that need attention out there. But there’s also a lot of cases that are breaking in the news all the time that really intrigue us, like the Celeste Rivas Hernandez and David Case, that music artist, and she was found in his Tesla last year, that really hooked us. That happened in Los Angeles, and so there’s a lot of really wild stories, actually, right around the time this episode is about to come out of us talking right now. We’re covering this crazy story of this woman named Lynette Hooker. She recently, in April, was on a dinghy with her husband in the Bahamas, and he says she went overboard, and we, and nobody else, really believes him. You’ve seen that. Yes. So, we, yeah, so there’s a lot of stories like that that really capture us, and I don’t think that this man is telling the truth. Her husband, I think he did something to her, and so we cover that entire story in depth on Going West this coming week. So we really like to push stories like that further out into the media and get them on people’s radar and just try to help help with exposure for stories.

Jim Beach 31:57
Have you heard the theory about the Pacific Northwest, and the question, or the first line of this story was, there are a lot of serial killers that came out Pacific Northwest in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and it might have had something to do with the lead manufacturing there.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 32:18
Yes, I have heard that, yes, I’ve heard that it’s wild, you know. I think, in general, the Pacific Northwest is such a.. this is where all my books take place. My first book took place in Oregon, and my second in Washington. And I think the Pacific Northwest is such.. that would happen there, you know. So, we cover a lot of stories that come out of the Pacific Northwest, which is where my husband is from. So, we’ve. we’ve talked in depth about, about this theory, for sure.

Jim Beach 32:44
Okay, I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t crazy. No, no, no. This is,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 32:50
this is a thing. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of serial killers from the Pacific Northwest. It’s hard, though, because there’s also a lot of unidentified serial killers across the US, so sometimes you don’t even know where they’re from, but there have been many that have been uncovered and named in the Pacific Northwest, for sure. I would say, particularly in the 70s and 80s, that was such a time for serial killers, you know.

Jim Beach 33:14
Yes, I think so. It has to have something to do with the environment that just makes so much sense.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 33:20
Yeah, I agree.

Jim Beach 33:21
All right. Tell us the plot behind Season of Sinking, whatever you want us to know to get us excited about the book. Yes.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 33:33
Thank you, Jim. It is a lakeside thriller. I love a lakeside thriller in a movie, and so I always wanted to write a lakeside thriller. I just love that setting so much, especially, of course, again in the Pacific Northwest, because it’s so beautiful and I think under explored for thrillers, in my opinion. But it is about a young woman named Imogen Bly. She lives in Seattle, her twin sister lives in Seattle, and they get this call that their mother suddenly passed away in a freak drowning accident on the lake where they grew up, and so they have to go back and do all the things, you know, they, they have to pack up the house and settle her estate, and while Imogen, in particular, is looking, you know, she’s she’s packing up boxes and she’s looking through files, and she finds this file from about 20 years earlier, from when she was a kid, that she doesn’t remember, it is an incident involving her as a child, and so then she starts to wonder, what is my, what was my mother hiding from me, what did she not tell me, and then she starts to believe that her mother’s death wasn’t really an accident, that she was potentially murdered, and somebody on the lake did it, and there’s a local missing woman, and there’s a little romantic subplot with her neighbor, so there’s a lot going on in it. That’s what I said earlier. It was very tough to kind of map it out, because it’s such a complex storyline, but it deals with obsession and sisterhood and grief, and it’s perfect for anybody’s next spoon. P. Summer read

Jim Beach 35:01
sounds great. Sounds like a lot of fun. Do you think genres are you going to do a police thriller? Or

Daphne Woolsoncroft 35:10
my first book kind of touched on that, because we had a POV from a detective, and so we were very much involved, more so in the investigation with that book? I don’t. I probably will do that again, because I think just with my true crime background, I know so much about true crime investigations, and it already bleeds so much into my work. I think I would do something like that again. But, for example, my third book that I just finished writing a few months ago, that one is a little bit more of a romantic suspense, so I’m trying to not change it up too much, you know, Jim, because you want to keep your readers happy and, and keep, keep things somewhat in the realm of their interest as well. So try not to change up too much, but I do, I do love the detective angle, that’s for sure.

Jim Beach 35:54
I just finished a crime thriller that I’m very excited about, and I want to tell you one of the things I did, and get your thoughts on this morality of what I did, just everything. So I wrote the entire book, and then put the entire book into Chat GPT, and 8.2 I asked for a score, and it gave me 1.2 and I said, well, why? That gave me all of its reasons, and I eventually ended up going chapter by chapter and putting each chapter in the into the system, and we would work on each chapter, and I went until the entire book got a 9.5 out of Chat GPT, and it was an infinite editor, you know, you were talking about you had a great editor. What happens if we just kill Wendy? You know, have an hour-long discussion who with someone who’s read every thriller book has ever written, having right about whether you should kill off Wendy or not, or right, had enough deaths in the book, are they spaced right? You know,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 37:03
right,

Jim Beach 37:04
deep, deep questions like that, that are hard to answer, you know. It’s rare that an editor is going to spend as much time as you on it, and know the book as well as you.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 37:13
Totally,

Jim Beach 37:14
DPT knew or knows the book as well as I do, and quoted stuff back to me. What do you think process and the morality of that, and just Chat GPT in general,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 37:26
you know. I don’t know that much about Chappy Chat GPT, so it’s hard for me to say. I think AI in arts is very tough, especially if you’re using it to create the art that I’m not interested in. I think, and the level that you’re talking about, of kind of using it, maybe more so as like a chat, like a reader buddy. It sounds like maybe you’re almost using us, or like a part partial editor. I know some people do that, but I don’t know. I don’t know that much about AI. I know a lot of people have issues because of water and using resources and all that kind of stuff, which I’m not invested in. It’s

Jim Beach 38:00
horrible for the environment. Yes,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 38:02
yeah, horrible for the environment. So, I, I’m not into that, definitely, but I don’t, I don’t use Chat GPT, so, but I know a lot of other people do, but I totally know what you’re saying. How, how interesting it is that they can kind of delve further into certain topics and kind of help you chat through things, which I think is really, it’s interesting that we have reached this, this level in life, for sure. It’s very, very strange.

Jim Beach 38:27
If you were to go today and go just to the main prompt, and there’s a little plus button, click that and upload both books, and ask for school, give it a grade, ask for a grade. Ask, are you getting better? Is one better than you would be, so you’d spend hours there, I think. Daphne, because it would be, you know, let me tell more about you. Tell me more about you, you know? Or it’s just, I don’t know. I just got sucked in for hours, I can’t imagine, right?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 39:03
What book did you do with

Jim Beach 39:06
my, my crime thriller that I just finished?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 39:10
Oh, you did it with your book that you wrote.

Jim Beach 39:12
Yes, yes.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 39:13
Oh, I thought you did with somebody else’s book, and you were like, ‘Hey, what do you think of this? Okay, you were saying, ‘I thought that makes more sense. Okay, so you were going through with chat and kind of using chat more so as like an editor.

Jim Beach 39:27
Yes, right.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 39:28
Oh, got you. Got you. Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of people doing that. I think, especially when people are going more the self-published route and they don’t have an editor, and they’re using kind of the tools that they have, like Chat GPT, but yeah, I don’t know, I haven’t used it, so I don’t know. Do

Jim Beach 39:48
it today, I don’t know, be enthralled by what it teaches you about yourself. Wow, books, it’ll blow you away, I promise.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 39:58
Well, I love that you. A crime thriller that’s so cool. I can’t wait to read it.

Jim Beach 40:03
Tell you the first,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 40:05
please. Yes,

Jim Beach 40:07
so girl, 16 year old, comes out of the mall carrying probably about $10,000 of daddy’s money from all of the big brands, Vendy and stuff, and opens her Mercedes trunk and puts everything in the back and closes the trunk, and a white panel van pulls up, grabs her, and drives away. About two minutes later, not even that long, a Mercedes pulls up in front of a huge mansion in Beverly Hills and says, “You know, mr. Jones, we just kidnapped your daughter. Daddy, Daddy, they’re gonna kill me, sir. You got a Picasso painting for your 50th birthday two years ago. It’s in the living room on the left. You have 60 seconds to give it to me, or we will kill your daughter, 59

Daphne Woolsoncroft 40:53
Wow,

Jim Beach 40:54
the guy realizes it’s true and goes against the painting and gives it to the Mercedes guy, and the Mercedes guy drives off, and they let the panel, the girl off in the parking lot. They haven’t even left the parking lot yet. The entire crime takes 101 seconds, which is the name of the book. And, oh, wow, it’s a super organized crime organization that’s feeling and wow,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 41:23
Jim, when did it come out? I, you’re in charge of that, aren’t you?

Jim Beach 41:28
Yeah, you know, it’s number two in the list right now. I have a non-fiction that I need to finish. The

Daphne Woolsoncroft 41:34
cool leading

Jim Beach 41:35
force to do the audio book, I’ll send it to you. I’d love for you to look at it and see if you can give me any advice on it, or

Daphne Woolsoncroft 41:43
yeah, I’d love to. It sounds right up my alley.

Jim Beach 41:46
I think you would enjoy it. So

Daphne Woolsoncroft 41:50
it’s very cool. That’s very, very exciting. Good for you.

Jim Beach 41:54
And then my next one is going to be a.. it’s called The Custodians: The Unofficial History of the unofficial government behind the UFOs, and all that kind of..

Daphne Woolsoncroft 42:06
oh, wow. Okay, I need to read that

Jim Beach 42:08
one. That’s designed to get me on Joe Rogan. I’m gonna.. the whole goal is just to get on Joe Rogan,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 42:14
right? Of course, that would be an interesting conversation.

Jim Beach 42:17
Yes, Daphne, we are out of time chatting with you, and I love these, your genre, and I will, I think I’ll read the first one first.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 42:27
Thank you, Jim. I think that’s a good place to start. I think you would, I think the first one is a little bit more up your alley, because we have a male POV in that one as well, that’s the detective Jack De Lacy. So it’s that’s a really fun one. I love that book so much. Hopefully it’s going to be made into a movie. They’re in the works right now.

Jim Beach 42:44
That’d be cool.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 42:46
Yeah,

Jim Beach 42:47
movie again.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 42:48
Oh yeah, you can play the detective.

Jim Beach 42:51
Is that the main character or just like a character?

Daphne Woolsoncroft 42:53
Oh no, he’s main. He’s big time. Okay, okay, we got to work on this then.

Jim Beach 43:00
What’s the website,

Daphne Woolsoncroft 43:02
Daphne books.com

Jim Beach 43:07
Excellent, we would love to have you back with the next book. Then I hope you have a fantastic summer. Thanks for being with us.

Daphne Woolsoncroft 43:13
You too. Thanks for having me, Jim. Take care,

Jim Beach 43:15
and we’ll be right back. Bye. I’m excited to introduce another great guest to the show, for an industry I know absolutely nothing about. Please welcome Ken Chin Barwani to the show. She is a fashion consultant in the off-price fashion sector and has had a very successful career there. She is currently working at a company, Carmen Industries

Kenchen Bharwani 43:50
Empire Apparel,

Jim Beach 43:52
Empire Apparel. I’m on the wrong page. Sorry. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Kenchen Bharwani 43:58
I’m doing good, thank you. How are you? Thank you for having me. I’m

Jim Beach 44:01
great. What is the off price fashion sector? What does that even mean?

Kenchen Bharwani 44:07
Okay, so off price, off price fashion is the stuff that you see in TJ Maxx, Burlington, you know how you get branded stuff for less.

Jim Beach 44:15
Yep,

Kenchen Bharwani 44:16
over there. Yes, so that’s essentially what off price is. So my work explores, I mean, we, we, we get merchandise internationally from all over the world, and we bring it into United States, and we resell it back to Burlington and TJ Maxx, and so on, and these merchandise are basically they are stuff which are canceled by the brands due to delayed delivery, so they’re great condition. That’s why you get them for really good deals. It’s just they’re not in their original stores because they were delayed to get here on time for the brand itself, so it is passed on to us in order for it not to be dead inventory in the factory. It’s

Jim Beach 45:01
okay. Does that happen to all brands, even like the fancy upscale luxury brands as well?

Kenchen Bharwani 45:09
You know what, I don’t deal with the fancy luxury brands, I deal with the day-to-day brands, the household names that you can think about. Yes, that’s the brands we deal with. But if I were to say, does this happen to luxury brands. It probably does, but in a very small quantities, not massive excess amounts of quantities, the way it happens for off price, off price retailers like the one in Finland shift.

Jim Beach 45:32
Okay, and what kind of discount do they do? They sell at after you’re done with them, when your wholesale price, I guess.

Kenchen Bharwani 45:42
Yeah, so for instance, like if you see something in store for, say, you see a coat for, say, $100 in the original brand store, right? For us, we have to buy it so much lesser and resell it for so much lesser, so that in when you go to TJ Maxx or to Burlington, you’ll get them for $50 so you can imagine how much we buy that. Like, it has to be a lot lesser for us to buy it in order to be able to resell it and make some margins, but yet allow consumers access to affordable fashion in that sense.

Jim Beach 46:15
Well, not only do you have to do all those things, you have to move it around too. Don’t you? Don’t have to buy places, send it to somewhere else, and then send it to

Kenchen Bharwani 46:23
yes. So we import, right? We purchase it from all over the globe, like I said. We sometimes do it domestically,

Jim Beach 46:30
okay,

Kenchen Bharwani 46:31
domestically. So we, it’s workable for us if we think that this is our customers are going to like this, and this, our customers, in essence, are the stores that we sell to. If we feel that they’re gonna like this. This is something they like to buy. We will bring it in, and we will resell it to them. And yes, you’re right, we will have to help them deliver it to all their distros, and they don’t only have one store, they have 1000s of them,

Jim Beach 46:54
right? So, how does that work?

Kenchen Bharwani 46:57
So that process works. They assign us when they purchase normally in their purchase orders, they assign to us, they call it, they group it by distros, that’s what they call it. So they have their distribution centers, we are asked to send to, for example, eight distribution centers. From there they will arrange it by themselves to each individual stores. So we are assigned to the mean distribution centers.

Jim Beach 47:22
Okay, very interesting. And do you buy some things and reject other things? Like, I like, yes, I do pieces out of the line, but I don’t want that stuff.

Kenchen Bharwani 47:32
Yes. Um, what we, what we generally buy is, of course, it’s based on my learning curve, as well as, obviously, learning what the customer likes, what they don’t like, obviously, that is one of it. And second thing is also based on season, and we do not buy things which are bad quality. Keep in mind that the merchandise that I’m referring to, the brands cancel on them due to the most minor things that does not affect anyone’s wearability. It is only canceled because they’re going to be late and not make it to the stores in time, or the hang tags, you know, the price tickets that you see hanging on garments, for instance, if the brand says you must put it on the right under an underarm, like the joint over there, you must hang it, you must put place the tags over there, by mistake, sometimes they would place the tags on the other side, if you must do it on the right, they did it on the left, but just because of that, they cancel the whole deal, they cancel their own orders, right? So these things happen a lot, or for some reason, like for instance, if they say, “I want black, I mean, like, they want to manufacture black color coat in a certain Pantone, for example, Pantone number one, but then the factory did it in Pantone number two, so us customers, black is just black, we don’t really care which pendant is, but they do, so if there’s mistakes like that, they can solve, but for us that’s like it’s, it’s wearable, like this doesn’t affect the quality, it looks brand new, we would never know if I don’t tell you, that’s the essence of it,

Jim Beach 48:59
right, that is funny. Particular companies that you get more rejects from than others,

Kenchen Bharwani 49:07
we rejects in the sense like I have quality issues, and what we buy from them, they

Jim Beach 49:12
just put them into your system, they say we’re not going to sell

Kenchen Bharwani 49:16
it. What, what happens is normally what we buy are stuff that they over produce or they cancel. I told you due to delayed deliveries, that’s what happens. So we don’t really buy rejects, per se, like rejects in my language, rejects is you have quality problems, like if you have stains or holes, or those are like bad rejects, like obviously we do not buy those because we only buy stuff which are canceled due to actual reasons, which does not affect the wearability, and the garments are still in good pristine condition.

Jim Beach 49:48
Okay, well, we call that category then

Kenchen Bharwani 49:50
of price. There you go. Yes, close out of price. Those are those terms are used interchangeably,

Jim Beach 49:59
and how. What’s how big is that sector, that industry?

Kenchen Bharwani 50:03
Oh my god, it’s a very, very big, like it’s very big, like DJs and Burlington, they just reported their earnings, like if you read it online, it’s huge, and plus also like the fashion industry in general, like what we do essentially is a major practice of sustainability, as well, because if we do not buy it from the manufacturers, if people like us don’t buy it, it will go to the lenses, you know what I’m saying. So this is a

Kenchen Bharwani 50:31
practice of,

Kenchen Bharwani 50:33
yes, so we essentially kind of the whole process of redistributing it and reselling it to stores, it gives those garments a second life, as opposed to it’s just sitting, deteriorating. It starts to smell, and then nobody would want it anymore. Then what happens? Bozo landfills, that’s it. And which we’re trying to avoid, because that’s a problem that is already like very much highlighted here, especially in United States. And there are reports about the mounting amounts, like, you know, about 92 million tons of, like, textiles are like, it goes to waste annually, that on its own

Jim Beach 51:10
tons.

Kenchen Bharwani 51:12
Yes, yes, that’s that information is online, you can always have a look at it. So, yeah,

Jim Beach 51:19
so how big is Empire Apparel itself? Your home company, is it a billion dollar a year company or 500 million? No,

Kenchen Bharwani 51:27
it’s actually not a billion dollar company, it’s a million dollar company, it’s not a billion dollar company. But we’ve been very blessed to be able to deal with the giants, you know, that operates off price, like I said, like, to deal with TJs, to deal with Burlington. It’s not easy to get access to them, and, but we’ve been very blessed that we do have access with them, and we have access with them in all divisions, like even with Frost, with the Macy’s backstage. So, we do deal, I mean, we have the good, like, the solid clients that we deal with, and we’re very happy with it, and we’ve also started to open channels of supply to same retailers like this, but overseas, like in Mexico, you know, in Panama, we started to do that as well.

Jim Beach 52:10
Okay.

Kenchen Bharwani 52:11
Yes.

Jim Beach 52:12
What country do you get the most from? China.

Kenchen Bharwani 52:17
Vietnam. Vietnam. Yes, of course. Indonesia, right now, not as much. Pakistan is big for me. Ethiopia is big for me, and we also do China, of course, 100% And yeah, I mean, so many, like around 12 countries that we buy from. Jordan is big for us as well, and Jordan produces really beautiful active, the ones that I mean, especially for many, like the Under Armours, are over there, the real trees, the all the good, good, you know, good quality sporting wear, like a lot of it, you will see made in Jordan, because they, they’re just very well known for their polyester spandex, you know.

Jim Beach 52:55
Okay, I didn’t know that.

Kenchen Bharwani 52:57
Yeah,

Jim Beach 52:57
never heard.

Kenchen Bharwani 52:57
Yeah, try observe your care labels when you go to the stores you’ll see a lot of Jordan there.

Jim Beach 53:05
This is absolutely fascinating. I appreciate you educating us about this industry. How do we find out more? Follow you online.

Kenchen Bharwani 53:12
Oh, you can always check out my website. My website is basically my name, Anchan Marwani, except it is K E N C H E N, so that’s my first name, and my surname is B H A R W A N I. You can find me online, you can find me on my website. It lists like the couple of the press features I’ve been in, the podcasts have been in, and more about me, basically over there, more about what I do, and you’ll get to get you have a feel of what’s going on in the off price oil from there.

Jim Beach 53:41
Fantastic. Thank you so much for being with us, and I hope you continue to have great success. Thanks a lot.

Kenchen Bharwani 53:47
Thank you so much. Bye.

Jim Beach 53:54
Right, we come back to our Be Safe By Now,