373: Wall Monkeys: How to Turn Your Dreams into Reality, Beat the Competition, and Pivot with Jason Weisenthal

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, episode 373, wall monkeys. How to turn your dreams into reality. Beat the competition and pivot your online business with Jason weisenthal. Hey, everyone. We're talking right now with Jason weisenthal and his website is wall monkeys.com where he sells these, these decal designs, these stickers. We're gonna hear all about Jason's story, what he's got going on, what led him to creating, what he's created, all these ups and downs. Aha, moments, everything between. So Mr. Jason, glad to be talking to you today.

Jason Weisenthal 0:35 Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Well,

Robert Plank 0:38 I appreciate you, and I so I'm curious about like, kind of who you are, and if what do you have going on right now that kind of makes you stand out these

Jason Weisenthal 0:46 days. So who am I? That's a good question. I'm another guy out there, like everybody else, running an E commerce business, doing my best to give our customers what they want. We print wall decals, like you said. I guess what makes us stand out. We print on demand. Everything's made in the USA. So our our products, we we print and ship within 24 hours, which is pretty tough in the print on demand game. We sell on Amazon, we sell on our website, we sell on walmart.com, and a few other sales channels. So we're pretty, pretty easy to find on the internet.

Robert Plank 1:22 Super cool. And so I'm looking at the the wall monkeys website right now, and so am I right? Did I hear you correctly in that basically, if anyone out there wants to, like, create any kind of sort of stickers or decal sort of similar how, like, there's those websites we can get, like, a t shirt made, or a mug made, or something. That's you, but just if someone wants to make stickers Correct, yeah,

Jason Weisenthal 1:43 well, wall decals, so, you know, big, bigger, better quality stickers. But yeah, so personal business, you can upload any photo, business logo, anything you want to create custom and we also have catalog of millions of images, so you can search for literally anything that you could possibly want, for any kind of business, any type of personal use, college babies rooms, if you can think of it, we have an image for it. Super

Robert Plank 2:12 cool. And so I have to admit, I don't actually know what wall decal is. So he said that wall decals are bigger than stickers. So I mean, how big are we talking like, what's the usual size of one of these things? So

Jason Weisenthal 2:24 when I think of a sticker, I mean, you also think of less expensive or maybe, like, it sticks on your laptop or a bumper sticker. So we sell wall decals anywhere from 12 inches is the smallest, up to we do full wall murals. We'll cover entire walls for businesses or people. You can do a wall mural of a beautiful scene, or, say, a brick wall or something with your business logo integrated into it. Our sweet spot is really like 36 to 48 inches, three or four feet, you know, on the longest side of whatever it is that somebody orders. Okay,

Robert Plank 2:59 cool, yeah. I had no idea this was an actual thing. And so, and I'm kind of looking around, yeah, and I'm seeing, like, think there's like, huge ones, of like the beach or of like unicorns, or things like that. And so, I mean, how did this come about? Like, how did you get the idea in the first place?

Jason Weisenthal 3:16 So I guess the the short version would be fat head. Was, if you're familiar with fat head they sell like the professional athletes for major league baseball, football and things. And I thought it would be really cool to have a picture of my son playing baseball. I don't want to become a grown man. I don't want to put Derek Jeter or someone on my wall. And at that time, this is, you know, this is about eight years ago already. No one was doing it, and I just thought it was such a good idea. I investigated the printers and how to build a website. I didn't have any experience with any of this. I was in a totally different business, and I just put my piece, put the pieces together, and spent the money, got the education, you know, just hired someone to show me how to use the printer, hired a graphic designer helped me build the website, and it just all, it all just came about and then evolved over time. Super

Robert Plank 4:07 cool. And I think I've heard of fat head, but it's one of those things where I probably just kind of like, saw and moved on and so, and I'm looking at sort of fat head by comparison, and am I right in that they do like, they do all kinds of stuff, right? They they do all kinds of, like, you know, baseball cards and stand up posters. They're kind of like, they do all kinds of different things, and you're just focused on just sort of one thing, right? Mainly

Jason Weisenthal 4:30 the decals, yeah, and they'll have the professional athletes and more of, like, licensed products like that. And our images come from, like, National Geographic and Corbis and other like Adobe, so really big stock photo companies, but not we don't have say Disney, but we have millions of images for all types of needs,

Robert Plank 4:53 okay? And that's super cool. I always love stories like that, where it seems like there's some, you know, huge, established company, and it seems. Like, they're unbeatable. But then if we, as some of us, smaller guys, if we just focus on, like, you know, one little thing, or focus on, you know, what, one way that we can be different, then we can kind of win in our own way, and so and so, super great and so, so you figured out all this, like, you know, printing stuff and all these different kind of terms and stuff. And, I mean, did you have any difficulties with this, like getting caught on or with getting people to start to use the service, oh

Jason Weisenthal 5:24 yeah. So the first three years probably where lots of pain, lots of learning, the the digital cameras weren't, weren't good enough quality on the phone or even on their camera, and parents didn't know how to upload the pictures properly, so the custom was really hard. So we had to, we moved into the content. That's why we have all the images on our website. And, you know, there was tons of of bumps along the way, like selling through our website and then learning how to sell on Amazon and learning how to sell in other places, you know. But like you said, actually, when you a company like fat head, you know, I actually don't look at them as a competitor. I think they create awareness for the space. A lot of people don't know exactly what a wall decal is, kind of like how we started our conversation, but a lot of people might know fat head, and they say, oh, like fat head. And I'm like, yeah, like, fat head. It answers a lot of the questions. And because we have such different products, you know, they actually, I feel that they they compliment my business. They create awareness and an understanding of our brand that actually helps us

Robert Plank 6:25 Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. So in a way, they've, they've kind of blazed the trail for you. And it's sort of like, if, you know, if smartphones didn't exist and you were their first smartphone, you had to explain that to someone like, well, it's this phone you carry around in your pocket, but if it was already established, it's like, oh, it's like this, but sort of different. So that makes a lot of sense, how, how, like, what, what almost looks like a bad thing is a good thing, because they kind of, like you said, they create awareness for this, for the sort of thing. And so as this kind of wall monkeys thing caught on, and you had these difficulties, and you had to figure out how to put it on Amazon and things like that. I mean, are there any interest? There any kind of interesting, like, just real tough kind of, like, growing pains, or any, like, really important lessons that you wish you knew back then?

Jason Weisenthal 7:11 So most of the lessons were good. I mean, the lessons would be to to pivot quickly, and I don't like the word pivot, but I tried lots of different things, marketing to different, you know, different organizations or different business niches and and quickly if something failed, you know, try to make small investments or do small tests and be, be be quick if needed to change. It's better to lose a little bit of money. It's better to lose no money. To shoot down an idea before you invest in it. But as you have these ideas, if you can test them quickly and for as little money as possible, until you, you know, prove that it's that it's a good idea, you just have to keep finding the right angle. You know, I thought we were going to sell every mom in America was going to order a picture of their kid playing sports, but ended up that until we added content that, you know, that's really where the business came about. But it took, it took about three years before we really started to add content and put those pieces together and learn how to sell.

Robert Plank 8:13 Okay, super cool and and so. So, speaking of that, do you happen to know or do you happen to be okay with sharing like, Is there, like, what's, what's your best seller is like, the are the biggest thing that sell the most? Like, those custom pictures people upload, or are they your biggest sellers, those images you already have in the library? Or, like, what's kind of caught on for you? Best

Jason Weisenthal 8:34 Sellers are generally like items for little kids, like, little cute cartoon images of you know, like animals, Cartoon Animals, also real animals. People love people love their dogs. People love their cats. People love their kids. So on the custom side, it's pictures of people and animals, you know, especially little kids. And we saw lots of images of pretty places, you know, people want to put a picture on the wall of a beautiful beach or a beautiful mountain or sunset, or maybe a bridge from, you know, the Golden Gate Bridge, or something like that. So, you know, the focus really little kids stuff like nursery type graphics, and then panoramic images of of beautiful places.

Robert Plank 9:18 Okay, cool, and I'm getting what you're saying, how sort of one thing led the next. Like, when you started, you said, Well, here's sort of what, what I think is going to happen, I think that it's going to be used for this purpose. But then, as you kind of used it, as you, you know, tried out these small tests, as you said, you tried out these different ideas. It was like, it was like, You were kind of led to what the actual use for it for like, what the use for it was and so, so a lot of people, like, like, you said like, they'll post other upload, like, their their pets or their kids or things like that. And I imagine that some people have actually used your service for an actual like business as a way to, you know, get, like, hundreds or 1000s of these things printed. Is that? Right?

Jason Weisenthal 9:59 Yeah. Yeah, so we're, we don't print so many in the hundreds and 1000s, but tons of businesses. It's great for business logos in your office or trade if you're going to attend a trade show, or if, if you're a retail store and you want to do retail signage, you know, we, our prices are very reasonable and our turnaround is so fast that, if you're a small business and you want, you know it's great branding for your for your logos, or for your events, lots and lots of business uses.

Robert Plank 10:29 And so if, if someone's looking to to get some of these, these wall decals created, I mean, what are, what are the steps involved in doing this?

Jason Weisenthal 10:38 So you can just go to our on it, right on our website, there's a custom button, and just go to wallmonkeys.com click on the Custom Button, and there's a bunch of sizes that you can choose from to upload your logo to. You can upload your file straight through the site. Or a lot of our businesses, they go right through us. So you could just email like cs@wallmonkeys.com which stands for customer service. And you tell us what you need, and we work with you to make it perfect,

Robert Plank 11:07 awesome. And so, so, so, yeah, this looks super cool. And you mentioned that there's also some way to to hook into Amazon and walmart.com and things like that.

Jason Weisenthal 11:19 Well, our products from our galleries, we have a lot of images available on Amazon and on Walmart. So if you were on any of those places shopping for wall decals, you'd probably come across us anyway. But if you went to Amazon and typed in wall monkeys decals, you would see 1000s of decals available in all kinds of sizes.

Robert Plank 11:42 Okay, so, so what you're saying is that that you wall monkeys also have a storefront on Amazon and also on Walmart as well.

Jason Weisenthal 11:50 Yeah, we're on a we're on a variety of sales channels. We don't just sell through our website, and, you know, it's pretty important as an E commerce retailer to, you know, be be spread out and be available in a variety of places,

Robert Plank 12:04 right? And that's a really good lesson, right, right in there, because, like, you know, I've talked to a lot of E commerce people, and they'll just be on the one platform. And I sometimes I wonder, like, oh, it's, it's weird that they're only, they only have a Shopify store, or they only have an FBA storefront. And it's like, if you're allowed to be on these other platforms, you know, why not go for it and so, oh, yeah, did you have something I

Jason Weisenthal 12:25 would say, I mean, it takes it takes work. But, I mean, you know any for anything, you should never have all your eggs in any one basket, right? I mean, disaster. Who knows what can happen with any one thing. Your site could go down. You could get suspended or kicked off of Amazon. You could get something could happen on your Walmart store. You know, you should really be in multiple places. So if one thing goes wrong, you're not, you know, potentially out of business, or have a major problem on your hands, right?

Robert Plank 12:50 You're not just screwed over because Amazon wanted to get rid of your inventory, or your listing got shut down, or you had some competitor, you know, drive your price down, or, like, any of those number of sort of scary things and so and so, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And so. So people, you who, people who are getting these wall decals, you said that, like, you know, individuals and families who want to have, you know, these huge pictures of of, you know, them and their family and their kids and stuff like that on the wall. Sometimes businesses will want to get, like, you know, the logo made, and all the that, you know, all that apparel stuff sort of made, all those, those things for, like, decorating the office. But do you have any interesting stories of, like, people who kind of used this wall monkey service in kind of a different, unexpected way,

Jason Weisenthal 13:37 um, you know, so we on the custom side. I mean, we've we've had on the dirtier side, or the funner side, more fun side. We've had quite a few guys order pictures of their girlfriends. I don't know how appropriate that is. We've printed Barack Obama. We've printed Sarah Palin. They've been used to with messages and stuck all over subway stations and things like that. I don't know about how crazy sometimes I get surprised by or pleasantly surprised by the big orders that come in. A company that sells popcorn ordered 1000s of dollars worth of images of popcorn from our library and made me feel good that not too many wall decal companies probably had hundreds of images of popcorn to choose from. So when, when people buy those niche fringe items from us, that type of thing makes me really happy.

Robert Plank 14:30 Yeah, I imagine it. And having used in all kinds of different ways and so. So along those lines of that kind of, that stock photo library that you've built like, it sounds like, like, I mean, if you have hundreds and hundreds of images of popcorn, it sounds like, it's maybe like, a larger size of an image library than some of these other sort of websites. Is that? Right? Yeah,

Jason Weisenthal 14:53 we, we have access to millions of images. So, you know, if you use the. Search feature, and whatever your niche is, you know, it's not just say, pictures of a dog. You know, you can get a specific breed of a dog, or even a specific breed in a certain color at a certain age. You know, you can drill down as far as you want to find exactly what you want. So it's not even 1000s. We have millions of images, and we've built out our collection to cover pretty much every single need that I could think of for for pretty much any business, any school, parent, anything. And

Robert Plank 15:30 is there a reason why you have more stuff than these other guys? Is it just that you you invested more money than them into buying up the rights to these pictures?

Jason Weisenthal 15:40 Um, you know, I think it's, we've, we're in a niche, and, you know, we're really only selling wall decals, and we, you know, we've, my angle is not angle, but our business, we were made in the USA. We turn things around quickly. You know, I'm focused exclusively on this, and part of what I felt would create value and provide a service was to have a larger collection than other people. So I think it's really where I chose to invest my time and my energy, and that's where we ended up,

Robert Plank 16:07 super awesome. And so as you're moving forward this Do you have any kind of interesting new features or any kind of exciting things happening with your company coming up

Jason Weisenthal 16:17 soon? So one of the things, the thing that I'm most excited about is, because we have so many images we've got, we've gotten really good at creating our listings for Amazon and other sales channels, not just our own, and we're starting to help other companies that want to create 1000s of listings, especially for Amazon. So we sell wall decals, but with the knowledge we have now, we're helping companies that sell coffee mugs or Canvas wall art or other print on demand items, and we're helping them create, build out their larger collection of listings on these other sales channels. So it's, it's fun to, you know, use my skills to help other people and then watch them make money. That's probably what I'm most excited about helping other businesses.

Robert Plank 17:03 And that's super cool. And that's another thing kind of along the lines there of the these skills that you picked up that you didn't even realize you were gonna pick up. But just that, you know, since you had put 1000s of listings of this print on demand stuff onto Amazon, in these marketplaces, like you never would have thought that, oh yeah. Like, there was, I'm sure, I imagine, there's all kinds of sort of hiccups and things to figure out, and different, like, kinds of software to figure out and figuring out the process. And once you kind of have that, it's like, whoa. Now, now you solve this problem that it's kind of a specific problem. But there were a lot of companies out there who, in all these different niches, uh, kind of, you know, have the same issue that that you guys had maybe a couple of years ago, and now you've, you've figured it out. So that's super interesting that you kind of came across this, the solution of this problem that you yourself had. And it kind of reminds me of, kind of like, how Amazon has, you know, they sell, like, Amazon s3 for, like, to store a bunch of stuff, and they, you can, like, you know, basically rent out a whole server farm. And it seems to me like all these things that Amazon provides, as far as, like, you know, the storage and the server stuff, it's like they were things that Amazon themselves needed to run all of their warehousing, and something they just said, Well, now that we figured out the technology, why not open it up and make some extra money, since we already did the hard work. So that's super interesting, that you know that you guys solved your own problem, and now let's solve a problem that can be solved for others. So, super cool.

Jason Weisenthal 18:25 Yeah, that's, that's really true and accurate. It's nice. You wake up one day and you realize that you do have a, you know, this, this knowledge set that other people don't have. And also, you know, we did make, you know, many, many mistakes along the way and you know, it's we can help other businesses avoid those mistakes and save a lot of time. Now, you're right. It does create a valuable service. And it just, you know, it's a good feeling.

Robert Plank 18:50 Super awesome. And so would it be okay if some, if one of these sort of print on demand companies who's looking to scale, if they're, if they're just kind of listening to this show today and they want to reach out at that email address you gave before. Is it okay if they reach out and kind of see what, what you and your company can can do for them? Yeah,

Jason Weisenthal 19:07 I would love that we're actually looking for people in some other product niches to to help them, you know, to find the right partners that can, you know, print and ship quickly to help them sell a lot more stuff. So yeah, I'd love to hear from companies at jason@wallmonkeys.com,

Robert Plank 19:25 awesome. So, so yeah, I mean, it sounds like a situation where, like, the rising tide lifts all boats, kind of stuff. And I'm really glad that you were able to take the time to talk to us today. And it's really awesome that you've mentioned a few times that it's really easy for people to just email you and your company, at cs@wallmonkeys.com, to kind of ask some of these presale questions. And even as I'm looking at some of this, this custom stuff on your website, I'm seeing that if someone uploads an image for a wall decal, I'm seeing something that says, if there's a background in the in the image you got. Lights will even remove the background. Is that? Right?

Jason Weisenthal 20:01 Yeah. So, you know, if your kid is, say, your son is, you know, hitting a baseball, and you just want the player. You don't want the background, the dirt and the grass. We do that all the time. So you can just print the whole image as a rectangle. Or we, you know, lots of our images come cut out where you just peel off the person, and there's no charge for that. We we do all the graphic design and set up free of charge.

Robert Plank 20:26 That is super awesome. That's a super great way of going the extra mile, because I know that for sure. Like some of these, some of the other like the huge print on demand companies, like, there's not even a person to talk to, and you'd have to go and figure out how to do that yourself, or hire out a graphics designer so super cool that you guys, you guys just have all these, these, these little, small touches just to make things a lot easier for people. So Jason at Wall monkeys calm, if you want to email Mr. Jason and wall monkeys calm is the place to check out all of those wall decals to see if you want to make them for yourself, if you want to buy them to decorate, or for any other reason. And is there, like, anything specific on this site you want people to check out? Or any other website besides wall monkeys.com today,

Jason Weisenthal 21:11 you know, if somebody's looking for, you know, I'm not sure how big your audience is, and it probably is a lot of business owners or people that want to be entrepreneurs, or are entrepreneurs. You know, I love talking to people. If you wanted to ask a question, or if you wanted to, you know, inquire about a custom order, I'd be happy to make that be the first point of contact, and you can just email me directly.

Robert Plank 21:32 All right, super cool. So jason@wallmonkeys.com if you want to email directly, if you have something in mind, or if you just want to run something by Jason, and wallmonkeys.com is the website that's W, A, L, L, M, o, n, k, e, y, s. So lots of interesting things today, and I always like hearing about just kind of the thought process and how things kind of got from point A to point B. So lots of just interesting lessons and reminders in there and a great story. And I hope your business continues to do really, really well. So thanks for stopping by and sharing some of this knowledge with us. Mr. Jason,

Jason Weisenthal 22:05 Robert, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure attention.

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