“We Had 5 Years of Inventory…and It Almost Killed Us” With Brandi Dugal

Brandi Dugal is the Founder and CEO of The Fidget Game, a company that creates curriculum-aligned learning games to make reading and literacy practice effective and fun. The company’s resources are used in more than 50,000 schools. A former teacher with classroom experience in multiple countries, Brandi developed The Fidget Game after working with students who were struggling to read. Through the Fidget Forward program, she makes educational tools more accessible to classrooms and families in need.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:06] Brandi Dugal describes the inventory forecasting mistake that left The Fidget Game with years of stock
[6:13] How creative testing, new hooks, and studying other brands’ ads allowed The Fidget Game to scale
[7:31] Why Brandi shifted from judging performance by ROAS to using marketing efficiency ratios (MER)
[10:46] The danger of optimizing for too high of a ROAS
[13:16] How Brandi structures Meta campaigns by product and tests various ad formats, angles, and hooks for each game
[19:37] Why copy and storytelling are the primary levers in Meta ads
[25:50] How showing up authentically as a founder allowed Brandi to create winning ad campaigns
[30:13] Brandi’s skepticism of UGC and the value of authentic affiliates
[41:01] The advice from Melissa of Melissa & Doug that shaped Brandi’s approach to hiring and rapid product creation
[52:50] How Brandi’s global teaching experience shaped The Fidget Game’s mission
[1:03:21] Brandi’s 20-year vision for The Fidget Game, including broader gamification in classrooms and body safety education
[1:07:23] Advice for founders: trust yourself, meditate, and filter outside advice through your own intuition

In this episode…

Scaling an e-commerce brand often requires a counterintuitive move: letting go of the metrics you once used to measure growth. Yet when growth stalls, how do you know whether to pull back or push harder?

Brandi Dugal’s answer is to zoom out, measure the whole business, and keep testing until the system reveals what works. As an educator-turned-e-commerce founder, she recommends looking beyond platform-level ROAS and using marketing efficiency ratios (MERs) to assess overall marketing efficiency. Brandi also suggests separating campaigns by product, tagging ad angles carefully, testing high volumes of creative, and staying close to customers through real conversations, feedback loops, and founder-led storytelling. Sustainable growth comes from pairing disciplined measurement with authentic, customer-informed creative.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Brandi Dugal, Founder and CEO of The Fidget Game, about scaling through creative testing and whole-business measurement. Brandi shares how MER changed her Meta strategy, why authentic founder-led ads outperform polished UGC, and how gamified classroom insights shaped her product development.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“The more we go into the pain and the trauma and the things that are so uncomfortable, the more free we become.”
“Creatives are a huge unlock for you to scale if you just keep testing and iterating.”
“Storytelling is what engages humans; it's what people need to understand a story.”
“I want people who believe in us and who are excited.”
“Just trust yourself. Build out time to meditate and connect with yourself.”

Action Steps

Evaluate performance across the whole business: Looking only at platform-level ROAS can hide what is happening across Amazon, Shopify, and other channels. Use MER to understand whether your marketing is driving healthy total revenue, even when one channel appears less efficient.
Test creative angles consistently: Scaling requires more than increasing spend; it requires a steady pipeline of hooks, formats, and messages. By testing many variations, brands can identify winning concepts before creative fatigue slows growth.
Track ad performance with detailed naming systems: Tagging ads by product, angle, format, and audience makes it easier to spot repeatable patterns. This helps teams double down on what works instead of guessing which creative elements are driving results.
Stay close to your customers: Authentic conversations, feedback, and customer questions reveal the problems your audience actually cares about. Use those insights to shape products, ads, and messaging that feel more authentic and useful.
Trust your intuition while filtering outside advice: Founders receive constant input from mentors, peers, and experts, but not every recommendation fits their business. Taking time to reflect helps you separate fear from instinct and make decisions aligned with your company’s direction.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 00:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 00:15

Hey everyone, I'm William Harris, I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you grow your business and your personal life. Here's something that sounds completely backwards. One of the biggest growth unlocks for The Fidget Game was accepting lower ROAS, not higher. Lower. Today's guest, Brandi Dugal, built a multimillion-dollar e-commerce company, but almost lost when an employee ordered five years of inventory by mistake.

Most people would panic. She did, too, but that pressure forced her to rethink how she approached meta, how she thought about creative, and how she measured success. And what she discovered is something I think a lot of DTC brands still get wrong. Brandi, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Brandi Dugal 01:01

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

William Harris 01:04

I'm excited to chat with you. I always like to get a shout out to the people who put wonderful people in touch. And so this one goes out to the inimitable Sarah Carusona, DDC growth consultant extraordinaire. Thank you, Sarah, for putting us in touch.

Brandi Dugal 01:16

Awesome. Sarah's a badass. She is a badass. She has a she has a big part of a lot of my success with the brand as well, because she has helped. Yeah.

William Harris 01:26

Oh, that's so good.

Brandi Dugal 01:27

Yeah, yeah.

William Harris 01:29

I mean, that's actually the name of her company right now, right? Isn't it BA or whatever. So yes.

Brandi Dugal 01:34

Yes yes that's right.

William Harris 01:36

Yes. Last interruption. Then we'll dig right into the good stuff because I got a lot that I want to talk to you about. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit.

In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that Ipoed. You can learn more on our website at Elumynt.com, which is spelled nt.com. Okay. Your ops person built a forecast that basically said, congrats, you've got five years of inventory. What's going on in your mind at that time?

Brandi Dugal 02:06

Oh my gosh. Well, I honestly, I think for like three months straight, I literally would go in the shower at the end of the day and I would just lay on the floor and cry on the shower. Like, I just didn't know what to do with myself. It was you were. I was just in such a hard place.

So what happened is we aired on Shark Tank. We did over a million in a day on Shark Tank when we aired. And then the next year, she forecasted the same amount for products that, you know, our hero products are constantly shifting based on what's working with meta. And, and then she forecasted not only that amount, but like that we were going to ten X or something. I don't know what was going through her head.

I, I don't, I don't understand, but anyways, I was so intensely busy because we were growing 100% year over year. We really were. And I just kind of let it go. It was the first time in the business I was like, okay, I can let something go off my plate. The first time.

What a lesson. And, you know, trying to delegate and build trust and let go of things. And then, yeah, I think there was a moment where I was like, how much stock do we have? And it was 3 to 5 years for 20 products. Wow.

And so I just, I just cried, but then I was like, this is do or die. Like, because our, our storage fees were so insanely high on Amazon and they were so insanely high. Actually, we were just all with Amazon at the time. So you can imagine Amazon has crazy storage fees and, and yeah, and then someone told me a really important thing where they were like, this is all psychological. People are spending 100 grand a day on meta and they're making it work.

Like your your ad account looks amazing. Your Roas is stunning. You. You can scale. And the problem is, is you have to find the right people on meta that can scale, right?

I think there's good media buyers for like 1 to 5 million. And if you want to go past that, I think you need a new media buyer that can really take you to the next level. So yeah.

William Harris 04:15

That is some very good advice from a very good friend. I have to laugh. I've got a I've got three daughters, 16, 13 and ten. And we were playing a game the other day, like just getting to know you kind of stuff, you know, talking as a family. And one of the questions was, who gives you the best advice in your life?

And the oldest one thought for goes a little bit. She goes probably myself. And I was like, that's the most teenage thing you could possibly have said at this moment. But you didn't give yourself this advice. Who gave you this advice?

Like, where did this come from?

Brandi Dugal 04:44

Okay, you're gonna you're gonna think this is hilarious because this is such a this is such a moment. So I had to let go of that, that person that made the mistake. But then but this is this is like a full circle moment. Then someone contacted me, a founder, to hire her as a reference, and he is the one that gave me the advice because I talked to him and he was doing an insane amount a year in revenue. And he was like, you know, I'm looking to hire her.

And I was like, absolutely not. Do not. There's, there's, there was just a lack of detail. And I think in anything in operations, you need someone who is super detail oriented. And he was like asking more questions about the business.

And then he was like, listen, it's all psychological. Whether you spend 1000, 5000, 10,000, 100,000 a day on meta, it's all psychological. And, and then that's where I was like, f it. Like I'm just gonna go full force. And we did.

And it worked.

William Harris 05:49

But like, easier said than done because A lot of people are like, yeah, I'd love to go from, you know, a thousand a day to $10,000 a day on meta. And, and maybe they'll scale from 1000 a day to 1500 a day or to 2000 a day. And then the Roas starts tanking and they go, no, no, no, no, no, we got to pull back. And it's like, they'll do it for a day or two. And then they're like, okay.

And they get cold feet and they pull back. Like, what changed in your mind to allow you to go from those numbers to those numbers?

Brandi Dugal 06:13

Well, let me be super clear. This was six months of hell trying to scale. So it was six months of really. I went through four agencies in a span of six months. It was really, really, really difficult.

But for the unlock for us was creative. We started testing just an insane amount of different creatives and hooks. That's what really allowed us to scale, I would say. But in my mind, I was like, I will bend reality right now because I'm in survival. So I was doing everything I possibly could, but I would say creatives are a huge unlock for you to scale if you just keep testing and iterating and use meta ads library and look through brands and what they're doing, even if it's not relevant to your brand, there's, there's something you can learn from every brand that's, that's doing well in e-com.

William Harris 07:05

Yeah. There's so much there, right? I do, I do want to get into the, the creative. There's a lot that I want to get into because you're doing some interesting stuff there. But you also had to measure things differently.

Like this is one of the things like, I think you told me that you had to accept a lower Roas. Yes. And a lot of people don't like that idea. They're like, no, I want a higher Roas. Like, how did you switch that thinking and how did that actually benefit the business?

Like what changed there?

Brandi Dugal 07:31

Okay. So it was really interesting because I had to, I decided to look at everything through MER right? Marketing efficiency ratio. So the overall Roas of the business basically. And before I was really just like keeping Amazon in a separate little bucket.

And I was keeping Shopify in a separate bucket, and I wasn't really thinking about MER. And then once we did start thinking of that, it was a massive unlock because our Roas on Amazon was so doing so, so well, like it was so high. We actually started pulling spend from Amazon and we realized there was so much overflow from meta, like the halo effect from meta to Amazon. And so we just started pouring more money into meta and lowering Amazon. And we became so much more efficient as well.

So there was a lot of a lot of thinking of it like that. So yeah, our Roas is so significantly lower on meta now. I would have, you know, two years ago, I would have been like, oh my gosh, we're gonna die. This company, if I saw my numbers today, but the MER is healthy and that's all that really matters now for us.

William Harris 08:38

Yeah, it’s A systems thinking. There's a lot of silos that get built in. It's one of the biggest things we talk about on here often Inventory. Not talking to marketing. Finance.

Not talking to marketing. All these things. Just not being in the same boat. But even like you said, like DTC and Amazon and retail and wholesale, like all of these also talking together. It reminds me of there will be like drug studies or something.

They'll say something like, you know, people who took this medication had 50% less heart attacks. And it's like, well, that sounds really good for a moment, right? Like in this silo. But then you're like, but they had like 300 times more, just all cause mortality. And you're like, okay, well, this is not good.

Then like, if my goal is to not die, then I still shouldn't take this, right? Like it's good if I don't want to die of a heart attack, but it's bad if I want to die prematurely, right?

Brandi Dugal 09:22

That's a perfect analogy. That's perfect.

William Harris 09:25

And we see this. And so it's like when you look at this, you're like, great. You're like within the platform, high Roas sounds really good. But if you're looking at like the whole system and you're saying, but how is this impacting Amazon? How is Amazon impacting this?

How is inventory impacting this? What's finance doing with this? And when you start to look at these things, you start to see how they all fit together. And it allows you to potentially look at a lower row as as being a better thing. MER being a really, really, really good metric.

Now I'm going to ask you, I'm gonna put you on the spot. We didn't talk about this either. Is there when you're looking at MER right now, do you like to look at it as we sometimes use the number of like MTB months to break even of zero, where it's like you need to break even on first purchase? Or are you saying I'm willing to lose money on first purchase in order to be profitable on purchase? Two.

Three four.

Brandi Dugal 10:10

No, we have to be profitable on first purchase. Yeah. Yeah. Some brands, I mean, we're not a subscription. We're not a subscription brand.

And we, our AOV is really high because a lot of people order bundles. So it's different. Like our, our retention numbers are different and our returning customer numbers usually will come back like a year later. They're not coming back more, you know, more often. So yeah, for us, we have to be profitable on first purchase.

William Harris 10:39

In your mind. What is the danger of optimizing for Roas like? Too high of a Roas.

Brandi Dugal 10:46

For too high of a Roas? What's the danger if you're optimizing for too high, is that I think you're going to get really stuck in scaling. I think that's what's like, you're not, you're really going to, you're really going to stop yourself from scaling to the next level up. Because I get it, I get it. It's very nerve wracking.

When you first start a company, every dollar you put out, you're like, I need to make this back to survive and to like build the next product or to, to hire that next employee. But yeah, you kind of have to, I wouldn't, to be honest, I don't know if I would, I would be at the level I'm at right now if it wasn't for that mistake, because I just, I was in do or die. I had to push it. But I'm grateful for it now. And I see the opportunity of scaling further and further and how that how that, you know, but I would say from going from 5 million a year to 10 million a year was like.

that was a really hard jump and a really hard thing to do.

William Harris 11:45

Almost every episode, there's some kind of a thing that people say. They're like, I'm not sure if we were going to survive this thing. And it was horrible and nerve wracking, and I'm on the floor crying in the shower. And then but like, that's the catalyst that they look back and they say, I'm so thankful for that moment. Because without that moment, I wouldn't be where I am today.

And I love looking at life that way, to realize that these moments that were the most afraid of are usually the moments that unlock the thing that we wanted as well.

Brandi Dugal 12:11

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think that is that goes to absolutely everything in life it's facing, you know, I'm, I'm a really, I'm really big into therapy. And I think our personal development is really closely tied to just the growth of the company as well. It's like little unlocks that I make in my personality. I see, you know, the business unlocks in some ways. And I think the more we like go into the pain and the trauma and the things that were that are so uncomfortable, the more the more free we become.

And I think that's very that's that that goes into all areas of life.

William Harris 12:48

I completely agree. Yeah. I want to talk about the creative then, because that's one of the things that you said, like, that's like the biggest unlock for you. So step one, you have to be willing to look at meta a little bit differently in how you're interpreting the numbers. Step two though, even if you look at it, but you don't have the creative that you need to be able to spend at that level, that's not good.

So like within the creative, what specifically did you start doing to make sure that you had the right creative to be able to spend at the level you wanted to spend?

Brandi Dugal 13:16

So what we did is, well, it's a little unique for us because we have many hero products and I'm, there's a lot of controversy, a lot of people like being like, just focus on two hero products over and scale your whole brand by, by those two products. My thing is, I would love to have ten hero products. You know, it adds more complexity to the business. But, you know, let's keep going. Like, let's keep finding more hero products.

So what we do in our, in our meta ads, like on the back end is each product is in its own campaign. And we're just like constantly throwing many different angles and hooks and. Like, you know, we do our podcast ads, we have our UGC ads, we have founder ads, we have yapper ads and me just talking, you know, we have all different types of things and we throw it for that product and we see what works. So we're just doing many different variations. Eventually, after a while, we know that this one angle works really, really well.

And we just keep doing that angle in different formats. So, you know, there's different the angle format, you know, I know all the nuances between that. I still get confused with it all. It's like endless with the creative flywheel talking about these little things. But honestly, if I'm being like super honest.

We just threw stuff at the wall to see what would stick. It wasn't. It wasn't anything like super sophisticated.

William Harris 14:40

But like, you're telling me that it's not super sophisticated, but like the approach you're taking is still very sophisticated. I like the idea of like the multiple products and the different, like each product in its own category or its own campaign. Are these products. Is there a significant difference in their price point or margin?

Brandi Dugal 14:58

No.

William Harris 14:59

No.

Brandi Dugal 15:00

So it's all it's all it's all of our games are mostly 29.99. So yeah, they're all around the same price point, which is interesting except for one game that's $10 more. But you know, they're they all perform kind of around the same. We don't really see a difference between the two price points.

William Harris 15:16

I like that you segmented them out even though there's not like a difference in the goal. So I will say that we segment a lot of campaigns out. If there's a difference between price points or margin or something like that, you could have two products that are $100, but maybe the margin on one is 50 and the margin on the other is 25. And so I have a very different goal for what I want to acquire those on. Right.

Or you've got an $800 product, you've got a $20 product. Very different goals. I haven't done that for ones that are the same price, same margin. I think that's interesting. I'd like to try that out sometime.

But I like that approach because it allows you to, like you said, scale that particular thing and just continue to see what's working for that.

Brandi Dugal 15:47

And then when it starts to die, like the creative fatigue starts to die for that product. We know, like, you know, the creative team is immediately informed, like we need to test more creative for this, right? Because I have so many hero products and I want so many hero products, we have to kind of keep those going, right? And the fatigue will happen. So it kind.

William Harris 16:07

Of.

Brandi Dugal 16:08

Inevitable. Yeah. Yeah.

William Harris 16:09

And so like you said, you've got like these different angles. You're going through some that are UGC, some that are podcasts, some of the ads, which I appreciate that. Yeah. We were talking earlier that you and I are verbal processors. And so yes, I like the idea of ads.

Brandi Dugal 16:23

Yeah.

William Harris 16:24

When you're trying to figure out the right angle for getting this. Is there somebody, whether it's you or somebody on your team that's trying to think through, let's just say like behavioral science tactics and you're getting into it and you're like, let's use the zeigarnik effect and see how that happens to you impact things or.

Brandi Dugal 16:42

Yeah. And actually, we have a really now we're more sophisticated because I have such a wonderful team behind this, but now we have a tagging system. So actually like our, our name of our meta add, like I don't like it is like crazy long and we have like the angle in there. So it's really easy every month to see our creatives and be like, okay, this angle consistently works because it's been tagged and we're tracking like what our top five performers are. And we top five perform performer ads and also top five new ads we always look at as well, because that's really helpful for us to be like, oh, this new thing we tested is actually starting to work.

So I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, like we're, we're, we're, we're tracking the angles really closely. And then we like we know, for example, I'm trying to think it's it's like product aware is a really important thing in our ads is, is making customers product aware of what we're talking about. And then solution aware is, I think like our second. So we're going, yeah, we're, we're going through always being product aware, if that makes sense.

William Harris 17:52

It does. Well, and I, I appreciate that idea of like really long names for ads. We actually do the same thing as well. And it's like this really, really, really long name and it gives you the ability to kind of it does, but it gives you the ability. Now when, you know, we bring everything into power BI, which is how we evaluate things, but it gives you the ability to segment across campaigns, across different products, even how does this work just in general for our audience or this audience or whatever?

Yeah, we use there's a lot of behavioral science tactics that we're using that we're looking at things. There are, like you said, the different customer personas, and it's like how you're looking at the different things there. There's, you know, the, the style of the format, like you said, whether you're talking, if it's UGC or you're talking about if there's a podcast or yepper. Yeah. But then we're even getting into like some interesting things where it's like, you know, this one uses industry jargon and the other one doesn't, right?

Or it's like this.

Brandi Dugal 18:42

Yes, yes.

William Harris 18:42

Little, little nuanced things.

Brandi Dugal 18:44

Like, yeah.

William Harris 18:45

Yeah.

Brandi Dugal 18:46

Yeah. No, no, it makes it makes sense. And for us, we can get super educational, right? We can be like, this teaches phonemic awareness and phonological. Like we can keep going on about that.

And then, you know, but then we're really aiming at teachers, but we're the experts because my team is full of teachers and the teachers also do the ads for us. But then, but then if we just make it really basic for a parent to understand, right, that that's different. And, and we have to keep going back and forth actually with it, because sometimes it works when we're using all the teacher jargon, and sometimes it doesn't because it just goes way over people's head. It's, it's interesting.

William Harris 19:25

But that's a lot of content.

Brandi Dugal 19:27

I think copy is the biggest lever by.

William Harris 19:29

Far really, because a lot of people don't say that. And I actually so I agree with you for a lot of this, but I want to hear why you think copy is such a big lever.

Brandi Dugal 19:37

Well, first of all, I just left a mastermind and I've always thought copy is the biggest lever. But he literally started his presentation. He's like doing incredible, this guy. And he was like, copy is your number one lever for meta ads. And he is doing like just AI voiceovers basically with B-roll, and he's doing 5 to 8 minute ads.

That's what's performing the best long form.

William Harris 20:00

Wow.

Brandi Dugal 20:01

And, and, you know, it was really interesting. He was like, I hire full time copywriters. Like, it's like, Claude can get you 80% there, but it's not going to get you all the way there. And I believe that I really do. I think copy is super important. In Storytelling because it's storytelling. Storytelling is what engages humans. It's what people need to understand a story to be able to understand what they are purchasing or what is going on in your video.

William Harris 20:32

So I really appreciate good copy. I think that good copy also allows you to test a lot of different things to see, like concepts, ideas, and hooks. Preston Rutherford was on the podcast. If you know Chubbies, if you remember the shorts.

Brandi Dugal 20:45

Yes, yes, yes.

William Harris 20:46

Yes I do. And he and he talked about hiring. I think, if I remember correctly, hiring comedians off of Reddit or, or something like that or Upwork or somewhere, or is it like comedians who are like, I need or it's like next door, I don't remember if it's like, just like just comedians because they're funny. And it's like that ability to tap into like humor. It's like you could come up with something.

I'm sure you've done it with AI. It's like you asked, you ask AI to come up with a joke and you realize just how far AI is from being that intelligent, right? It's just not funny.

Brandi Dugal 21:13

Exactly. Yes, we still need our human touch, I really do. I think we still we still have to add that human touch in and, and yeah, I think it's important. I think storytelling is just, it's, it's important for all of us.

William Harris 21:25

So you're making a lot of ads. Like how many ads roughly per week are you trying to launch?

Brandi Dugal 21:31

So we're doing 100. Okay. So we're doing let me just get this right. We're doing 30 unique ad concepts. Is it 30 unique ad concepts?

No. 40 unique ad concepts a month right now. And then like three three, you know, variations per. Yeah. So that would be yeah, like 120 a month.

William Harris 21:52

That's a lot to come up with. How are you structuring the ability to come up with that many new things? Because eventually it's, you know, sometimes people are just like, man, I've got, I've got ten really great things. And then after that, I run out of ideas. How.

Brandi Dugal 22:06

Well, it's I wish we could do more. I think we could do more. It's because I have so many different products, right? I have my math products that teach financial literacy. I have my math product to teach multiplication and division.

I have my literacy games that teach comprehension or sight words, whatever. So for us, it feels endless. Like I it does. So that's where we don't really struggle with that. And then we can take, for example, supermarket squishy spree teaching financial literacy.

We can do it. A yapper ad founder ad yapper. We can do a podcast ad on it. Like there's so many, there's so many things. UGC we can do just for that one game.

William Harris 22:46

So yeah, there's a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that I really like. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or had a chance.

Brandi Dugal 22:52

No.

William Harris 22:53

But he talks about like all the things that make people statistical outliers. And one of them talks about this idea of doing pottery in there were two groups and like the one group, they were like, okay, 30 days you're going to spend working on like this perfect vase. And the other group, they're like, we want you to make as many vases as you possibly can over the next 30 days. And the group that did that ended up with a significantly better vase at the end of the 30 days versus the masterpiece. And I've heard musicians talk about that as well, that they're like, what's interesting is you think that maybe you have like this, you know, magnum opus that you're going to write and you're like, this is going to be like my best piece ever.

But the reality is you actually get better at writing even better stuff by writing more and more and more. And it's like, I think they publish like 1% of the songs that they actually write half the time. And I think creative is the same way where people are worried that like, I can't create enough. The reality is when you get into the habit of being creative, you get even more creative and more inspired, and you just can't produce all of the stuff that you actually have rattling around in your brain.

Brandi Dugal 23:51

Yeah, that's, that is once again, another good analogy. I would say that out of the 100 ads that we test, maybe only nine work. You know, so it's kind of that, but but I agree with that. The more I'm a big believer, I mean, I have tons of games and I'm continuing to do product dev. I don't get stuck on one particular game. I'm like, let's keep building more and more and more games. So I'm a big believer in that, that theory, I like that.

William Harris 24:21

So only 9 or 10 work are you is the goal to find the winner or to build a portfolio of like a portfolio of really good ads that are now diverse and creative? So you're keeping a lot of them live.

Brandi Dugal 24:37

Like to be honest, the goal is to find the winner. Yeah. That's like, that's the biggest goal is to find the winner and then that's it and scale it from there. Because, because, because for us, because it's byproduct, right? We want to make sure that we keep those products continuously going and going and going and moving inventory, because I don't want to be stuck with overstock again.

Right? And if we're selling 20,000 of something a month and all of a sudden those ads die, right? We need to keep finding winners to keep that going.

William Harris 25:11

Are you looking at things that are early indicators of success. Are you pretty much just looking at whether or not they're driving purchases? Like, do you look at thumb stop rate or things like that to say like, hey, this is likely going to work, keep scaling it and let's give it a little bit of time.

Brandi Dugal 25:23

Yes, I think that's what I can't say for sure. I have a phenomenal media buyer, but I'm pretty sure that's like he gets the indication and that's why he scales. Yeah.

William Harris 25:35

Have you found that there are patterns that seem to work across all of your products that you're like, okay, you're testing all these other ideas, but you're like, these are a couple of patterns that just seem to consistently work no matter what product we're trying to test out.

Brandi Dugal 25:50

I would say, well, I can tell you the common denominator and it's me. It's me really. Every single I'm in every single ad right now that is winning. Why really? I know it's it's well, I don't know.

I don't know if it's because I've become the face of the brand. And people find there's recognition in that. We have tried so hard to get me out of that, but it seems that yeah, just me talking honestly, really naturally and really authentically about the games. And I'm super passionate about every single thing we're doing. I really feel like people feel that like it really it something, something and energetically can be relayed, I think to people when you're, when you're passionate about your products.

So it's kind of crazy.

William Harris 26:38

But yeah, so, so I've, I've thought about this before because it's not that every founder is more dynamic. It's not that they're better in front of the cameras, things like that. Right. But there just seems to be something about it where a lot of founders, even if they are, even if they're dull, seem to just their content works really well. And I think that there is something about the energy that you mentioned.

I'm not calling you dull, by the way. Like I'm saying, some are. Let's clarify that. But but I think that there's something energetically, like you said, I really like science and we're really discovering a lot of like quantum entanglement of atoms and stuff like that. There's there's some like, like you said, some subtle nuance about that.

It's like just that slight uptick in the voice or something that it's like, this is a genuine passion. This is not an influencer saying something. This is, this is a founder who is like, I fully believe in this thing. And like, we can just, we're attuned to subtly pick that up somehow.

Brandi Dugal 27:31

Yeah. And I, I like, I, I meditate a lot before I even do ads. Like, I like, I breathe and I'm just like everything that comes out of my mouth, I want genuinely to help other humans wherever they need to. So there's a lot of like, there's a lot of thought before I even do it. There's intention there of I'm not just trying to sell my product to make money.

Like I really want this to find the right person with the child who is really struggling and make sure that I somehow energetically can meet the people that I need to meet. So then I can continue to, to continue to spread goodness with what we're creating like that. So there's a lot of intention behind it. You could call it woo woo, but it's.

William Harris 28:12

No.

Brandi Dugal 28:13

No, it's what I do.

William Harris 28:14

I'm so I'm with you on it. I think that the stuff that we used to call woo woo, we're starting to see more and more that there's a lot of science behind it. There's a really good book, actually. I got it right here. Switch On Your Brain by Doctor Caroline Leaf.

Ooh, there's some very oh, it's so good. There's some very interesting things in there. It's one of my favorite books now, but there's some studies that are done at Harvard where I think, you know, this is very tangential, but I think you'll talk about like when we think negative thoughts, our actual DNA shrivels up. And when we think positive thoughts, our DNA loosens up. And they showed something like a 400 times better immune response against HIV, like in like this particular, you know, study that they did like massive difference just from positive thinking.

And so I do think that there's, there's a lot more that we're just starting to crack the surface on, on understanding like positive intent and how that impacts ourselves. Like every strand of DNA as well as people outside of us.

Brandi Dugal 29:14

Yes, I completely agree. When I first started The Fidget Game, I would just I would lay in my bed and imagine every child that popped a bubble that I would give them like a bunch of this good energy of like knowing how loved and intelligent they are. And I used to do that. I did that, and then I would go through my first customer orders and I would do like prayers. I know this is crazy on Shopify over all of the customers to like, thank them and just think like hoping that this helps them.

But I think there's something like that's such good intention for every single person that has come into contact. And by the way, they gave me their money, you know, they gave me their money and purchased something from me. And that's, that's an exchange like, you know, and I want to give back the best I can. So yeah.

William Harris 30:00

Beautifully worded. Let's go to. You see, because you have a interestingly contrarian point of view on this. You don't believe in paying for UGC.

Brandi Dugal 30:11

I don't.

William Harris 30:12

Why not?

Brandi Dugal 30:13

I'm like super anti UGC. Honestly, it goes back to like the authenticity part of it. Like I really think we have great products. I think there's a great exchange with someone who is like, I love your product. I want to be an affiliate.

I want to, I want to talk about your products. It works with my kids or it works with my students. And then I find like page. UGC they're just not in it. They don't even know what what we're doing or what our mission is.

And I find it to be really transactional and like in a cold way. And I feel like it's really ridiculous when they give you these crazy high numbers and we've done it before, and then we don't get a return on it. And I'm just like, I, I can't do this. I want people who believe in us and who are excited and maybe they don't have the best lighting and maybe they're not as put together, but I think people could feel that they're still excited about something. I'd rather someone just post on a Facebook group and say, this company is great, then pay $5,000 for a 32nd UGC clip for sure.

William Harris 31:19

That said, Justin Bieber, Justin Bieber, e-commerce extraordinaire here set in records what, $15 million in a single day or whatever it was that he just did?

Brandi Dugal 31:28

Wow. I didn't know that.

William Harris 31:29

That's crazy. Yeah. At what was it, his Coachella or whatever, like set the record, right? If he all of a sudden was like, I want to produce some UGC for you, right? Like, like he's not going to have the intent behind it.

It's probably going to be successful. Would you accept successful? UGC? Would you pay for successful UGC if it if it actually performed, even if it wasn't as intent driven?

Brandi Dugal 31:55

Like like if they could guarantee me a number.

William Harris 32:00

Yes, sure.

Brandi Dugal 32:01

Sure. Yes. Like, of course I would. If someone's like, hey, if you give me 50,000, I'll give you a four x return on that. I'd be like, of course I'm going to do it.

I just don't, I just don't know. I just would be skeptical. Sure. But I would do it if I was going to get, you know, a great return on something. And I had to pay a lot of money for it.

I would, I, I just am finding and talking to other people in the ecom. They're like, we're not getting, you know, the, the, the people who have a million, 2 million followers and ask these crazy amounts and I don't blame them. Like they've, they've worked hard to build their following. I get it. I don't think as many people are even open to listening to them to purchase things.

They're just like, this is just another brand. They were given 5000 or 10,000 or, you know, however much to, to advertise for them. So it's just not genuine. And if Justin Bieber started promoting my product, it's like I would want him to care about what he's promoting.

William Harris 32:54

You know? Well, in fairness, it doesn't fit his brand. But Justin, if you're listening. Justin. Brandi.

Brandi will work with you, if you were wondering. She is considering.

Brandi Dugal 33:03

Education and kids. Yeah.

William Harris 33:05

Yeah, she's considering it.

Brandi Dugal 33:06

I'm considering it, yes.

William Harris 33:09

You do some other really outside the box creative that I really liked. You talked about recording real conversations and then turning those into ads. What's an example?

Brandi Dugal 33:18

Oh yeah. So I actually just recently do like reading rescue calls. There was like, I get, oh my gosh, it's so crazy. I get every week, probably hundreds of DMs from because we whitelist the ads to my profile on Instagram, so on Facebook and Instagram, I get tons of parents that are like, help me. I get parents, give me their kids report cards to look through to be like, what?

People get desperate, you know, like it's really hard when you're watching your child struggle and trying to figure out how to, to, to make things work for them. So I decided like, I'm going to do, I can't respond to all of these every day. It's too much. So I created this reading rescue call where parents can book it in with me. They get ten minutes with me, and I kind of figure out where they're at and what game would be the best for them.

So I offer a free game in exchange for recording it. So I record it and use it as an ad also. So if they agree and they'll get a free game in exchange, I'll record it as an ad. They'll talk through all the issues they're having and then I'll talk through the game. So it's a unique mechanism problem.

And then I'm giving a unique mechanism solution, which is really important in ads. But it's perfect because it's a win win for everyone.

William Harris 34:35

And it's very authentic. This is like a real conversation that's taking place.

Brandi Dugal 34:38

Yeah, you can't make that up. And that's like, and then it gives us the best ideas. Like I have the team go through that and go, okay, we will make ads based on these customer problems because these are real problems. You know, you brands start to get really far from their customer. You know, that was always my fear.

I was a teacher. And then it's like, you know, even my chief of product was a teacher. And she's like, we have to keep going into schools and talking to teachers. We need to talk to our customers. And you never want to lose sight of that because you lose sight of, of your your audience.

William Harris 35:10

I want to come back to that one. I want to stick on this for one second because like, is there an example of an ad, whether it was this one or a yap or ad or anything that you're like, this was maybe the weirdest concept we've come up with that worked like that's good.

Brandi Dugal 35:27

I would say the weirdest concept. That's a good question. Well, I would say it was talking to a parent randomly and this like scaled, this was like our top performing ad forever also so strange you get so you're like, why did that work? Why did that one work sometimes? And it was just a parent asking me, like, my child's in pre-K.

What can I do to prepare them? So it was a readiness ad and I just like started telling her like, these are the skills you need to know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that is what scaled that became like our top performer for like 4 or 5 months, I would say. So yeah, like it's kind of random stuff like that.

William Harris 36:12

It is random. So I'm, you just brought back a memory of mine that I hadn't thought about in a long time. You used to run ads for a company called Cellebrite. They were acquired by GoDaddy and for, I want to say like 4 or 5 years, the best performing ad was one that Mike Eugenio made. It was like he was like our CMO at the time.

And he's like, just made like this. I don't even remember like, like really, really bad looking ad that was like almost like an Excel spreadsheet or something. It was like it was the dumbest ad and nothing we did could ever beat this ad. It was like, why? Why is this one?

It's like every week he's like, can we please turn this, that off? I was like, I'm not turning it off. This is the best performing ad in the entire account?

Brandi Dugal 36:53

Yes. And I have to say, that's so funny. We had a tech sales letter ad and that performed like that was one of our best performing in Q4. And I was like, what is happening? We put so much effort into like all these other ads.

And so yeah, like just text sometimes simple is simple simplicity. I think we shouldn't lose sight of simplicity in, in our ads as well. Yeah.

William Harris 37:17

If I remember correctly, you're also using a mix of us and overseas teams, right? Are there overseas teams also for creatives or for other things?

Brandi Dugal 37:26

Oh yeah. For a lot for creatives. Our overseas team, we have two video editors. We have graphic designers, marketing designers, our customer service. Like we have a lot.

We have a lot of our team and they're amazing. They actually, there is a, I would say there's a bit of a gap between in creatives, especially for like meta ad creation, but They're really quick witted and really quickly come around to what's working. And they're studying the meta library and they're, they, they have come up with ideas that have actually outperformed my ideas or, you know, are my head of creatives idea who's based in the US in some circumstances. So yeah, it's pretty amazing. Once you get someone in, they really start to understand the brand.

And, and yeah, so creative.

William Harris 38:14

The thing that I love about that Is when we talk about having diverse creatives, one of the best ways to have diverse creatives that are truly like going back to Andromeda level and diverse, right? Which has to be significantly enough diverse. The best way to have that is to have diverse thoughts. And one of the best ways to have significantly diverse thoughts is to have people who did not even grow up in the same country, coming up with ideas, because their entire world has been very, very, very different. The TV shows that they watch, the language that they spoke, the foods that they ate, right?

Like all of these things played a big role in like, their brain literally just thinks in a different way.

Brandi Dugal 38:43

Yes. And I have to say another thing to that is talking to other founders to do audits of my meta ads, and I do audits of theirs. And we have vastly different ideas to tell each other, and that's really good as well. When you're too close to something for too long, like you, you, you just don't see things, right? You get too detailed or too caught up in little things, but like from an outsider, you're like, just say that and it's going to work.

And it does. So yeah, like different minds, different different views on things. People who have kids don't have kids, educators. Non-educators. It's all so helpful.

Yeah.

William Harris 39:19

How, how did you get in touch with the right people who were willing to spend time there? Other founders, they're busy, you're busy. Like you just reach out to founders that you like. You're like, I love your ads. Can we do like this little share?

Or is it like this, like Instagram pod that you're in? He's like, oh, it's invite only sorry, you can't get in. Like, how did you end up finding like this group?

Brandi Dugal 39:37

I really want to create a group because I think it's so valuable, but I've been so lucky in my ecom journey. I have met people along the way who have kind of stuck beside me and has helped, like have helped me. They've everyone's, you know, now everyone was always above me and they were meeting with me monthly. One, one amazing e-commerce group. Very special games.

At one point, I think they were meeting with me every other week and they were helping me with everything. And then now there's people who are doing, you know, now I'm kind of mentoring and passing on what I've learned. So I'm gathering and collecting people as I meet them at masterminds, at events, and then I just stay in touch and I'm like, hey, you know, this quarter, do you want to jump in and do a review for each other? And I really think those relationships are super valuable, and I want to give back as much as I've been given.

William Harris 40:28

So you have another really good mentor too. Yeah. Doug and Melissa. How did that one happen?

Brandi Dugal 40:34

Yeah. So Melissa is incredible. It's actually I was doing a mock Shark Tank pitch, and one of the people I invited was like, I need to introduce you to Melissa for Melissa and Doug toys. And she did. And Melissa so graciously was like, I can mentor you.

And it was just amazing. I mean, what a blessing. It was crazy.

William Harris 40:56

What's one of the best pieces of advice she's given you that you're like, oh, that.

Brandi Dugal 41:01

Oh, she gave me two really good pieces of advice. One is fire fast or slow. And then the second one I would say is no one can copy as fast as you can create, which has been really helpful for a brand like mine where we launch something a year later, we have all the copycats come out and we can protect and we do protect, and we have a team of lawyers that really keep things going, and we have patents and trademarks, and we do everything we possibly can, but we also just are like, we're going to keep creating, you know, we're going to keep creating. We're going to keep doing things that, you know, there's unique molds and there's unique things that don't make it as easier to create. But that was good advice.

Those two things have stuck with me for a really long time.

William Harris 41:49

It's brilliant advice. So how do you operationalize that? How do you operationalize the idea of just creating new games fast?

Brandi Dugal 41:55

Well, we've nailed it. We've when we created our math line, we created one math game every week and we had a wow. Yeah, we had a sample in hand. Like we came to the idea. And by the end of the month we would have a sample in hand from our supplier.

So we we have mastered that with my team. I think we're crazy. And you know, I pushed the team to another level, but we just figured it out to do it.

William Harris 42:22

Like in order to come up with that many ideas, this is the first thing that popped in my ADHD brain when you said that. Yeah, I'm picturing Ace Ventura in the second one when nature calls and he's like, oh, all righty. And I'm like, you're just over here in like the Zen moment in these games are just hitting you left and right and you're like another game idea.

Brandi Dugal 42:42

Oh my gosh, you're gonna laugh. I literally have dreams. And I wake up in the middle of the night and I, like, write down the dream. And then I voice note on Slack to Jessica and I'm like, I just had a dream about this. We need to do this.

And yeah, I do all the game play and Jessica really aligns it to the curriculum. We're just this perfect mix where the perfect ying yin and yang like in the company. So it's great. But yeah, I do. I literally get ideas.

I'll be in nature, I'll just sit down in the park and then I'll look at leaves and rocks and I'm like, we need to do that, you know, like a certain game. So yeah, it just comes to me. I love games.

William Harris 43:19

But but some of them fail. Maybe all of them, you know, it's like maybe one out of ten. I don't know how many like end up hitting and working, but it's like, so how do you determine you're like this one? Like you've got a bunch of prototypes. You're like, okay, this is the one that we're going to go for.

We're going to go ahead and make this happen. Like, are you talking to other teachers, talking to kids? Are you doing like a lot of work on it? You're just like, nope, gut feeling. This one's the one we're going to go with.

Brandi Dugal 43:38

Well, it's a lot of gut feeling. We've only discontinued one product.

William Harris 43:43

Wow.

Brandi Dugal 43:44

So we've like we and I think and people keep asking to bring that product back to life. So we need to revamp it. So I don't want to let it go yet. I hold on too tightly. It's like a little baby.

I'm like, I can't let it go. But what we do is we, we will launch it. We will then do groups with teachers and we send to parents and we send to our advisory board and we have everyone test it, fill out feedback for us. And then for the next mass production, we will get feedback from our customers, from everyone. So that's what we do to not delay it for like six months, right?

Because if you're waiting for feedback and getting samples to everyone, it's too long. So we just do a low, a low amount production, launch it, see what the feedback is from everyone, and then reiterate if we need to for the next mass production. But sometimes we launch, sometimes we launch and we sell out and pre-order.

William Harris 44:37

That's amazing. That's so good, you know? So yeah, you're finding something that people like. Do you remember the movie big with Tom Hanks? I guess I'm aging myself on this.

Okay, good. Yes, I like that was his job was like, even though he was like a grown up, but as a kid, like his job was to basically like, test out toys. And I'm like, yeah, I kind of want this job. Like, I want, I want, I want to be the kid. Like there's like, do you have a full time kid employee who's like, your job is to test out all the fidgets.

Brandi Dugal 45:01

Well, like my niece and nephew have to every time. And, and then we have our affiliates and their kids have to test it out every time. And they give us feedback. So they're, you know, they're kind of getting paid. I hope so.

William Harris 45:15

That's a good idea. I think you should put up job opening up for just one kid.

Brandi Dugal 45:19

A kid.

William Harris 45:19

Their full time job.

Brandi Dugal 45:21

Yeah.

William Harris 45:21

This is it. Full time. You're in the office. Sorry. 60 hours.

Brandi Dugal 45:24

That'd be great. That would be great.

William Harris 45:27

You mentioned part about not being in the classroom anymore, though, right? And like, that is hard. Like a lot of founders struggle with this idea of like maintaining that closeness to the problem, to be able to know what the solutions are that they need to have. What are the ways that you are making sure that you're staying as close to this as you can?

Brandi Dugal 45:45

Well, I, I actually start in for the next school year where I'll be going into classrooms and just volunteering in like a low income schools here in Texas, where I'll be working in small groups with kids just a few hours a week. So that's one thing that I, I recognized in myself, like, I'm getting too far away from this. I need to be back in the classroom. So that's what I'm going to do. But my chief of product, Jessica, she goes into her school that she used to work at, and she tests all of our products in small groups with kids they like have given her full pass to go and do that.

So she loves to do that after she gets a sample. And then we're in constant communication with the teachers and principals at her school as well, which is really nice to be like, this is what we need, this is what we don't need. And then the reading Advisory Board that we created are a lot of teachers and educators, and they're constantly giving us feedback. So like, that's where we're trying to keep close to everything. And any email we receive with feedback on any of our games, like it's putting a channel on Slack, we go through it, we have a call about it.

Like we're, we're really intentional about whatever feedback we get. We definitely consider changing our games based on that feedback. Yeah.

William Harris 47:01

But how do you know which feedback to use? Because a lot of people can have feedback like, okay, so it's, yeah, it's intuitive.

Brandi Dugal 47:08

Like we're, you know, if someone says something, we're like, they don't understand the mechanics behind like what's going on in production. That's not really that possible. But some teachers are giving great things like, could you change this into a more cooperative game? My kids are really being too competitive with this, and we do have cooperative games and we're like, oh, that's easy. We can just do a cooperative and competitive game and they could choose, you know, choose cooperative or competitive gameplay.

That takes us two seconds to change the instruction on it, you know, stuff like that where like, oh yeah, we should definitely do that. And teachers are great because they're in the classroom. Like they know, they know what's best. Yeah.

William Harris 47:47

Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. Well, I want to get into a little bit of the who is Brandi Dugal because I think it's fun to get into the human being. Yes. I understand that you are a person who enjoys doing puzzles.

Brandi Dugal 48:02

Yes I do, I love jigsaw puzzles. I feel I'm, like obsessed with it.

William Harris 48:09

Okay.

Brandi Dugal 48:10

Yes.

William Harris 48:10

So always have been like new thing.

Brandi Dugal 48:14

It's I would say like in university, I was obsessed with jigsaw puzzles. Like instead of going out on weekends, I wanted to just do my jigsaw puzzles. So I feel like jigsaw puzzles. I know such a nerd. I feel like jigsaw puzzles are a way for me to really, really, like, make sense of life.

And sometimes I even take a problem. And there was one time it's so funny. I was like, why have I not found like the right life partner yet? And I couldn't finish a dumb thousand, like thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. I attempted it like three times.

And I'm really good at jigsaw puzzles, but I really feel like I take problems in my life, you know? Then I went to therapy and then I did it in like a day and I was like, okay, we figured out what was going on there. But I really think it helps me like solve problems as I'm working on it. You know, I think life is a jigsaw puzzle.

William Harris 49:10

I mean, it is, right? Like you have to find where this piece fits and you have to see the patterns and like, like it is very much so do you.

Brandi Dugal 49:17

So you have to fill the borders, and then you have to fill in the pieces of yourself trying to understand who you are. Like, who are you, you know?

William Harris 49:25

And the picture comes in like little like spurts, like, okay, so I don't know about I'm not a, I'm not an expert puzzler. My wife does a lot better with these. But I do like doing the borders, right. Like I, I go around the edge first and then and then we typically will like find color groupings, right? It's like, okay, there's a lot of color groupings.

So we're going to group these over here. We start solving one color at a time. Is that like how you're doing them too?

Brandi Dugal 49:46

Yes. Yeah. That's how I do it. Yeah.

William Harris 49:48

So it is like life like that, right? Where it's like one part, one part of your identity shows up here and it's like, okay, this purple part over here is like, this is my poet side and this is my, this is my analytical side. This is green over here. And it's like, it does show up. And it's like you develop those different pieces and eventually it all starts forming like this, this whole person.

Brandi Dugal 50:05

Exactly. I think we are all parts. I think we have. I think we rarely walk into a room where there is an adult. I think we have like our 11 year old that's triggered.

And like I, I rarely think the adult is in the room. And so yeah, it's just all little parts that are, that are at play. And we have to figure out like when we can take over and like, you know, be, be self, be the adults. It's hard.

William Harris 50:27

I don't want to be an adult.

Brandi Dugal 50:29

Yeah, yeah I know. Well, that's why I'm still making games.

William Harris 50:32

Yeah. Going back to international stuff, you taught in six different countries. You've got some experience in Bahrain and Vietnam. Like tell me a little bit about like some of these experiences and how they've helped shape what you're doing.

Brandi Dugal 50:45

Yeah. Well, I, I have to say, I really had a hard time with the education system. So I taught in private schools, public schools, severely low income, like a closet in Indonesia, like where there was nothing. And I recognized through all my experiences that two things really made kids engaged and like their eyes spark. I always say that, like the education system literally kills the spark in kids, and you can see it in their eyes.

And it was when they're doing art and when they were playing games, and that's it. That's where I would see like the spark come back. And, you know, in a typical week of school, that's like a very small amount of time we give for kids. I also think kids should be outside like 80% of the day. Like by far, I really think they should be running around and having fun.

And little boys should be literally just going crazy all day, running around and climbing things. So it's crazy to me that we like, throw kids in a room and we're like, you have ADHD. It's like, this kid needs to go run. Like his body needs to move. So anyways, I had, I have a lot of issues with the education system.

I think it's very flawed. But after going to all these different countries, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, US, Canada all over and seeing that same trend happen, I was like, okay, why are we not gamifying? Why are we not playing games? Why are we not making this exciting for kids to actually learn? And then, you know, I go into the deep research behind it and the way a child correlates learning and reading and math, it follows them forever.

They literally will be, they will have an aversion to reading, to math, to learning. If they, at a young age felt a lot of stress, a lot of fear. So, you know, we're doing a huge disservice to the kids who are struggling, which is a lot in the classroom. So anyways, then I gamified learning in my classroom. My kids thrived, their grades were outstanding.

And that's kind of how I created The Fidget Game. It is how I created The Fidget Game.

William Harris 52:50

You experienced some interesting things though too. If I remember correctly, you had a dad spit on you.

Brandi Dugal 52:55

Yes I did, yes I did in Bahrain, I did. That was, I have to say, those kids were one of my favorite classes though. But I was in Bahrain, I was teaching in a private school and I, I actually had a student that was in the hospital and I, you know, all my kids wrote letters, as you do when you have a kid in the hospital. And I went and brought him the letters, talking to his mom every day. And I went to the hospital and his dad was there.

And I didn't ask him permission to see his son outside of school. So then he, like, screamed at me. He spit on he spit on me. And it yeah, it was a whole thing. He also like, there was a lot, a lot of stories, but it was it was a really interesting moment.

I was like, whoa, I am not I'm not in Kansas anymore. Like I am.

William Harris 53:48

Not.

Brandi Dugal 53:48

Yeah, this is this is a whole different experience.

William Harris 53:51

Cultural differences are so hard because things that we think might be completely normal could be rude to somebody else. And things that we think are rude is completely normal to somebody else.

Brandi Dugal 53:59

Yeah. Yeah. So that was, that was, you know, like I was just a teacher bringing all the cards and bringing gifts. We love you. We miss you.

We're thinking about you every day. Like so innocent. And yeah, a big reaction.

William Harris 54:15

Yeah. You know, we do have sometimes things that are just good intentions that can be taken out of context so easily. Yeah. You also told me that you had a tough childhood with bullying. What was it like for you?

Brandi Dugal 54:34

School was was not good. If school was a really, really tough time for me, I would say it was like a typical like B student, even C student. Most of my younger years, like elementary years, I didn't have like great teachers. I, I, I had like my home life was also was pretty rough. And so, but school bullying was really, really difficult for me.

So I was made fun of. I had a lot of freckles as a kid. Like I, they'll still come out in the sun. So I would be called like cheetah. And the boys were just awful to me.

My whole like really from grade three is when it started all the way to grade eight. And it was it was a really tough time. So I would go home and I would like imagine that. Well, I would also tell them like, I'm going to look like Britney Spears when I grow up. And like I was, you know, I had like a little feisty personality, but I would imagine, I would imagine that like, I would be something one day, you know, like I would imagine that they're all going to regret that they were awful to me.

And I'm, you know, there's a lot of therapy in that because entrepreneurs really, there's like trying to prove something to the world, right? It's, there's something there's something to that I'm glad that I found a way to do to, you know, to obviously I needed to figure something out, but I did it in a way to help others as well, which I think is important. But bullying was, was really tough.

William Harris 56:05

There's a lot of research out there that I believe I've heard and read that suggests that you need some amount of trauma to propel you to do some of these things, to get out of your comfort zone. And there has to be almost like a little bit of a chip on your shoulder to say, yeah, I'm going to endure the pain of becoming an entrepreneur because it's not easy. No. And so there has to be something.

Brandi Dugal 56:23

There has to be something like really off, I think because you're, you're doing your, you're like, you are risking, you are, you're putting yourself through like an insane amount of pain. You have to have like this weird self-belief in yourself as well. There's, there's a lot of strange things with entrepreneurs. And I, I've noticed just meeting entrepreneurs and like, you know, there's a lot of people that are still passionate about it, but there's, there's a lot beneath the surface on that. But thank God, we need, we need entrepreneurs.

We need people who are. Yeah, yeah.

William Harris 56:54

But it wasn't just kids who were kind of mean to you. You had some rough teachers too.

Brandi Dugal 56:58

I had some really rough. I had a teacher that made me wear a garbage bag. In what grade? In grade four, because my shorts were too short, but I was in grade four like my parents dressed me. And so I had to wear a garbage bag all day.

I had a teacher that asked us to grade her and I gave her an A+, but said like it wasn't fair that this boy was always sitting next to her desk and she showed the class and everyone's like, That's Brandi's writing. And she like, screamed at me and in front of the whole class, that's like, you asked me to grade you, I graded you, and I loved this teacher I had. Yeah, teachers where I get something done and I'm really proud of myself. And they're like, who did you who did you copy from? When I show them my work, I, yeah, I've had, I've had, I've had some, some pretty.

Yeah. Not good teachers.

William Harris 57:48

Is that why you decided to become a teacher? Because you were like, I could do this better.

Brandi Dugal 57:52

Yeah. I have so much empathy for kids. Like I, I don't, I, I almost like wanted to heal that in myself by not by making sure every kid felt they were loved and they were intelligent and they were seen and they felt good about themselves because my experiences were just so, so poor.

William Harris 58:11

You redeemed that though, because you were a great teacher, from what I understand, you had kids that were reading years below their grade level and you got them to above grade level. Tell me a bit about like, what did you do? How did you change that for them?

Brandi Dugal 58:24

Oh, okay. So I walked into a classroom. This is my favorite story to tell. 90% of my kids were reading at a kindergarten level, 90% at a kindergarten level in grade three. So it was a grade three class.

And what I did is I could not figure out these kids. I had ESL students, I had all these different types of kids in the class. So I decided to gamify. This is how I created The Fidget Game. I took all fidget toys, all the things the kids were loving at that time.

I gamified the entire classroom for math and literacy, and I. If you walked into my classroom and said, what's your favorite subject? They would have said literacy block. And I had the kids and they had passports and they would stamp throughout the year and they would go to each center and learn different things. And it was all with fidgets.

And at the end of the year, in the standardized assessment, 95% of kids were reading at or above grade level. It's my biggest success story. It really is the huge turnaround. Yes. And and that is through gamification.

And then their parents were like Brandi over the summer break. Can you send. Can you create games for us? Like, we will buy them from you. And that's where I was like, oh, I need to take this out of the classroom walls.

Like, I think this is something. So yeah.

William Harris 59:44

I feel like you are somebody who studies a lot. You think about a lot of different things in a very deep way. And this idea of things that are almost unconscious in us. Is there a quote that you live by?

Brandi Dugal 59:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah there is. It's by Carl Jung. It's it's the unconscious quote, why can't I? It's not coming to me right now. It's it's.

William Harris 1:00:12

Until you make.

Brandi Dugal 1:00:13

The. Make the unconscious conscious. It will direct your life and you will call it fate. So this quote is so important to me. So until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

It's just showing that really we are living in such an unconscious way. We follow rules, we do things. Even teachers, education system, everything. And if you start really digging underneath all of that and you bring it to like the light of consciousness, I think that's where we can see growth in humanity and growth in ourselves.

William Harris 1:00:45

I think that's huge. And I'll even say like the unconscious, like the biological unconsciousness, right?

Brandi Dugal 1:00:52

Yes, yes.

William Harris 1:00:52

The, the episode that we just released last week, Rita Ainsworth talks about like going from like the different states that we have within our brain, like this regulated state. But then you've got like, I forget what I'm forgetting what they are. But but like part of the different, like stress states that we are. She told me the names of them, but I don't remember the names. But like one of the things there is, it's like all of a sudden when you start experiencing that stress, it's like you're releasing these different chemicals basically in your body that are causing you to react certain ways, and they're actually bodily things you can do.

Like she showed us, she showed us this one where it's like, you can put your hands on your eyes and it's like this ocular reset thing. And you're like, there are these things that are biologically taking place. They're unconscious, right? They're non-conscious, whatever, but they're affecting my conscious. But it's like, but if I can recognize them now consciously, I say, wait a minute, I know what's going on with me right now.

I feel this way because I just read that email. That was really mean. And so this chemical was being flooded into my body, and I could do this to help reset me like that. Also, like, that's not what Carl meant here. But I think that that also plays into this.

Brandi Dugal 1:01:55

It does. And another thing I do brainspotting in therapy. And that's where where we look is actually where you can spot trauma in your brain. So if you're talking about something, you know how you notice sometimes you start talking about something and you you're staring at a point when you start talking, you just like automatically. Yeah.

So that's that that's directly correlated to like something in your brain. You're recalling the spot in your brain is what you're doing.

William Harris 1:02:18

Interesting?

Brandi Dugal 1:02:19

Yes. And Brainspotting is really fascinating. And, you know, I have processed a lot of trauma through Brainspotting is when I start talking about it, I know exactly the spot to look at, to recall that memory. And then you hold it and you feel where you're feeling it in your body, and then you can process it.

William Harris 1:02:36

I need to look into this a little bit. I'm also a little nervous now because I've recorded I recorded myself a lot and I'm wondering if anybody's like recording. They're like, oh, I know his weak spot now.

Brandi Dugal 1:02:49

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know where he. So I started recognizing on airplanes. I actually always sit on one side because I, I'm more comfortable looking one way than the other because another actually there's like a trauma spot there that's really deep in me. And yeah, it's really fascinating something to look into.

I'm not an MB Turner.

William Harris 1:03:05

That's from Zoolander. All right. You care deeply, though, about protecting kids, not just in helping to teach them and educate them, but protecting them. If you zoom out 20 years. What impact do you actually hope this company has made?

Brandi Dugal 1:03:21

I would hope that our company has really advocated for gamification in the classroom. And we see majority of schools and school districts adopting our curriculum because we are moving into gamification of like the full curriculum, not just like separate little resources for skills. And I would say that I would hope that I have figured out a way to mandate body safety for schools from K to 12, basically to keep kids safe and understanding their body and body safety, because that's something that's not regulated and not mandated in schools. And I think it should be. So that's where I would hope to be.

William Harris 1:03:57

I have to be honest, I've never even heard the term body safety.

Brandi Dugal 1:04:00

Body safety. That's so that's like really teaching kids. Like who your safe people are really, really saying the words of what a body part is because things can get really blurred there. It's something that we're not talking about enough, but our statistically, we're seeing 1 in 3. 1 in 3 women are sexually abused.

They're like the amount of statistics we're seeing, I think it's a really big part of actually helping to protect kids in, in these situations. And there's a lot that's going on and we're not really educating children about it. And I think we can make a massive difference if we could. So I think I want to gamify all the subjects, and then I want to totally advocate for body safety courses in classrooms and teaching men and women. It's important to teach both.

William Harris 1:04:49

Yeah, that's really good. Again, I have three daughters. I think I mentioned that right there. Yeah, 16, 13 and ten. And so I'd like to think that we did a pretty good job of trying to help them.

That and you always wonder, it's like, are you are you teaching too much? Are you telling them so much that it's like now they can't, you know, sleep at night because they're thinking about like the bad things that can happen to you and you're just like, where do you draw that line? And so yes, if there was a game that could have made that a lot easier.

Brandi Dugal 1:05:14

Exactly. Or we just It's just always in the back of their head because like, it's kind of like teaching math. It's like, it's really simple. And then it gets more advanced as they grow up. So it's a natural understanding of things. And it's not an uncomfortable conversation because parents get super uncomfortable about these conversations.

And it should be like, you know, if a body part hurts, it should be like, my eye hurts, you know, whatever's hurting on your body, it should be as, as non awkward as saying, my eye hurts. And I just, yeah, I think there's a lot to that. And if we can start young, it really imprints in both men and women, right? Like both, both the minds. So that’s That's a big goal of mine.

William Harris 1:05:52

There's things that I don't think about. I grew up with all brothers. And so like, there's just things that I've never thought about my, my wife and I. Last night we went swing dancing at this really fun little place downtown, and it was a lot of fun. And we had, we had our drinks, right?

It's like I set my drink down on the table and then we go back out there and she's like, you can't just set your drink down there. I was like, why not? She was like, because somebody could do something. And he's like, what's somebody doing to me? Like, I don't know.

Nobody's gonna do anything to me, right? But it's like, I never thought about that. It's like in her mind, like, this is a thing that she knows. She's like, no, no, no, you don't, you don't set your drink down and leave and go do something and come back to it.

Brandi Dugal 1:06:23

It's like there's a whole level of anxiety, right, that women are dealing with that men don't even realize is there like 24 over seven? But yeah.

William Harris 1:06:32

Running in the background.

Brandi Dugal 1:06:33

Yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, you have. Yeah, if you could just really start these conversations early, then people can also like feel in their bodies, like what they're feeling. And there's natural urges and there's natural ways of, you know, like little boys how uncomfortable when little boys are like hitting puberty, how awkward that time is. Like we should really start to like break down the barriers of that and just be like, you're a human.

This is very natural. Let's talk about it, you know? Yeah.

William Harris 1:07:02

So if you were going to give one piece of advice to other founders who are listening, who might be at the stage, you know, just just below you, right? And they're just trying to get to where you are. What is the this doesn't have to be the number one thing because I feel like if somebody says like, what's your best thing? I'm like, best, I don't know. And I gotta really, let's just one thing that you would want to tell them.

Brandi Dugal 1:07:23

Just trust yourself, trust yourself, build out time to meditate and connect with yourself because yourself, don't listen to my advice or anyone's advice. You know what's best for your company. You just built this. You just brought this into the world. You know what's best.

Honestly, that's you'll get good advice and then filter it through you and figure out what the next direction is. Because I think there is a lot of noise and a lot of like, you know, people have a lot of great advice, whatever, all this stuff. But if you sit and you actually listen to yourself, you'll know. You'll know.

William Harris 1:07:59

One of my business mentors, Dave Mortensen, he's the founder of Anytime Fitness. If you know the gym franchise, I remember him talking about almost like that gut decision. Like as a founder, you have to be able to you have to learn how to listen to your gut and make those decisions. And I remember we were at the restaurant and it's like, I tend to be like, I want to look at everything that's on the menu, right? It's like, okay, that okay, now I'm going to weigh that against this.

And it's like, well, I like these two things. But he's like, you're going to take like 30s. You're going to look at the menu and as soon as you see something you want, that's the thing you're going to get right. It's like just your gut kind of knows, but it's like you have to learn to be able to start working on like, okay, gut decision, make it.

Brandi Dugal 1:08:36

And your body literally, your body literally will say yes or no. We all know it. If you can silent like you literally feel a yes and a no and it's in you. I think the thing that's hard is that risk sometimes feels like a no because you're trying to stay safe. If so, it's really trying to figure out that is probably the most difficult part of it because you're like, is this just because I'm fearful of growing and changing?

But, you know, you kind of have to you have to figure it out. Go to therapy.

William Harris 1:09:05

Yes. Brandi, it has been so fun talking to you, learning from you. If people want to work with you, follow you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Brandi Dugal 1:09:13

I would say The Fidget Game Company @teacherbrandi on TikTok. Yeah, even my Instagram, it's Brandimarie111. I post a lot of content there and I do answer DMs as much as I can. It's just usually delayed. So yeah.

William Harris 1:09:29

That's great. Well, again, thank you for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today. It's been a lot of fun.

Brandi Dugal 1:09:33

Thank you so much. This was great, I loved it.

William Harris 1:09:35

Thank you everyone for listening. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:09:38

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

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