Good Morning and Good Evening Team IASP!

The official Quarterly IASP Update:

Sales Strategy:

So we analyzed the stats from all of our sales channels: it’s fairly obvious that our usual XX% OFF sales strategy is no longer a strong performer. While our expenses and revenue scale higher during sales months vs non-sales months, the total number of products sold per customer per year is about the same. Essentially, our customers have “learned” how we market, and so the overwhelming majority of them simply sit back and wait for a sale, and only buy what they think they need.

Customer growth:

While the USA and International market's did enjoy a fantastic spike in sales during March-May 2023 (first sale in a long time, rebranding), the overall sales for the first half of 2023 were solid in general, beating the performance of the same Q1/Q2 in 2022. Great growth, mostly from new customer on-boarding. We’ve noticed a different trend during the past 3 months though. While new customers are signing up at approximately the same rate, and social media engagement is also gently increasing, the overall purchase volume is trending flat, irrespective of sales promotion. More on this below.

The Philippines market has continued to build exceptionally well through its second year of operation, and is now well-positioned to introduce an OTC Supplement range into the market in Q1 2024, as well as take over the hosting of the IFBB pro show in October 2024.

India has had a solid year of re-consolidation, rebranding, and price remodeling to incorporate the OTC range and expanded its distributor base significantly however, headwinds have recently appeared with the Geo-political standoff with China and interrupted supply lines for direct shipping - we are circumventing this with shipping raw product from the Philippines.

What we’re doing right (according to the customer):

Internal:

Product quality and customer service are both excellent. Delivery speed and carrier reliability are more solid than they’ve ever been. Complaints are at an all-time-low, essentially all but having disappeared.

External:

We routinely look at the offerings of our top 10 competitors. While we don’t want to become complacent – it’s the same story every time: none can come remotely close to matching us on price/discounts, range of products, or consistent quality of products.

The upcoming challenge

While the world economy is being torn to shreds with inflation and political manipulation, there is still plenty of opportunity in this market. To survive and even thrive, we must continue to evolve and streamline our business and also make special provisions to side-step some very important risks, most notable of which is to gradually and substantially increase each operation’s raw stock buffer (in anticipation of severe supply chain interruptions next year due to wars, elections, or whatever they decide to throw at us) case in point: China and India.

What’s new:

[Engagement]

Our company image presents well online, especially after the rebrand. What is clearly missing however, is strong engagement. Engagement requires a few important components:

A concept or idea that triggers not only attention, but emotion(s).
A concept or idea that is not familiar to the customer. Familiar is boring.
Well-executed design (media) that easily conveys the idea.
Follow-through from the business to make the idea a reality for the customer base.

We’ve decided to allocate more staff/financial resources + business priority to ensure we make substantial progress on engagement here in the short term.

[Team Expansion]

Our media / design team has recently expanded! Through good team collaboration and much better planning, we will ensure our stellar design team have some truly hot ideas to work with, which will allow them to create deliverables that result in:

Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok live broadcasts.
Generative AI images/videos (Midjourney etc)
Dopamine-targeted advertising
Fear/weakness-targeted advertising
FOMO / time-pressure advertising
Product-specific “teaching” advertising
Mass-emails that result in fewer unsubscribes
Anticipation-based advertising (save that $$ for Black Friday folks)

While all of this sounds fantastic, it’s not a one-stop click n done. We’ll do the follow-up analysis to find out what’s working, what’s meh, etc. before engaging in the next promotion.

[Merchandising]

Caps
Sandos
Jewelry
Key rings

[New OTC Products]

If IASP products were on Amazon, we would gain more visibility, right?

Introducing: OTC Supplements!

Philippines Market:

We have multiple flavors of 4 core products on-track for release in February 2024:

Pre-workout
BCAA
Mass Gainer
Whey
Whey Isolate
Creatine

…we will package these products locally in the Philippines from raw and pre-mixed materials sourced out of mainland China. A full, final range of samples is on its way into us here so we'll be able to do mass sampling at the IFBB show at the end of October. The initial product quality was very good, the pre-workouts were strong and hit hard, and the protein flavour / smell beat most of the commercial brands (even though I do say that myself).

India Market:

While we do have an existing IASP Supplement line in India, the retail price is too high due to middle-man markups. We’re looking at on-shipping from the Philippines (or China) to India next year depending on which makes more sense financially and logistically.

USA Market:

We’re currently working through logistics and pricing on this one – main requirement is the import license, though we might be able to figure out a “special line” shipping solution to skirt customs. End goal will be to have these products listed on Amazon, eBay, etc. to serve mainly as advertising which back-links to the real stuff (i.e. the gear on our website), though if economically feasible this could turn into a viable USA business.

[Strategic Planning]

Over the next few months, we will be experimenting with some project management and collaboration tools at HQ to develop some creative ways of managing all of our upcoming projects – whether it be process change, automation, new products, new marketing, our goal is to make things that require a lot of communication and information exchange a bit easier to get a grasp on. On the plus side, we’ll be able to move away from using Signal for literally everything!

Recap

Coming out of a tough 2.5 year pandemic, 2023 has been an excellent year of growth and repositioning for us in a very tough economy. The Team (everyone reading this message) has produced a brilliant outcome on product quality, product delivery, customer service, branding and IT -- all of which have set us up to be unstoppable in 2024 (well done and thank you) and hopefully, far beyond…unless of course Russia and the USA nuke the fuck out of everything.

Marcus