Brad Steward
One of my more controversial beliefs in the brand space is that if you lead the horse all the way to the water, they will never drink. You’ve gotta get them about halfway there. Your brand needs to deliver about half of the aspiration that something magical, meaningful, and memorable will happen at your location, and then actually the rest has to happen to them.
Sebastien Leitner
Welcome back to The Turn Down. Today, we’re diving deep with Brad Stewart, a true original. Brad isn’t your typical hotelier. He’s a former pro snowboarder who helped bring the sport to the global stage. A film school grad, a marketing guru who worked with brands like Sims, Bonfire Snowboarding, and Amer Sports. Now he is the cofounder of Caravan Outpost, a place Forbes says big hotel chains should worry about.
Brad believes in creating magic moments, not just selling beds. He’s all about authenticity, connection, and letting guests build their own experiences. Forget marketing. Brad creates what’s real. Get ready to hear from a guy who says, I don’t know anything about hospitality. We’re artists, not for tellers.
Let’s welcome Brad Stewart. It is my pleasure to welcome Brad Stewart. Brad, it’s a pleasure to have you on the program. Welcome.
Brad Steward
Thank you, Sebastian. I’m I’m happy to be with you today. Excellent. Excellent.
Sebastien Leitner
I’m curious, and this is sort of our default opening question. What is keeping you up at night these days?
Brad Steward
Let’s start there. A little bit of everything. I wanna I wanna mention because of the timing, the safety of our friends and family in Los Angeles is a big concern. Sure. And and we’re definitely keeping those people in our thoughts, you know, people in hospitality, the people in our lives, the family and friends. That’s my big one right now.
That’s serious stuff. If you go to the other things which I can actually impact, the things that I can impact, you know, I think a lot about why, our customer is our customer, why our fan is our fan, and how do I keep them engaged in the business active. I also, typically, I think last night, woke up thinking about our housekeeping staff. And, I think about that team a lot, you know, because they’re they’re so critical to what we do, and and they really are the they shouldn’t be called housekeeping. They should be true they they should be called the people in charge of the first impression. Because they manage that a lot.
And so I think a lot about them and just if I am I supporting them correctly, and do we have our procedures in line, and are we doing everything we need to do? And, you know, we’ve never had any issues there at all. But, for the kind of operation we run, we have to contrast kinda two threads of DNA coming together to get kinda one good one, and that is a place that’s cleaner and more professionally ran than you thought and something that feels rustic and interesting. And the net net net result is kinda what I would call a rugged luxury experience. You you know it when you see it, but it turns out actually to be a tricky thing to create.
Sebastien Leitner
How would you describe your property? I mean, you have quite a unique property. But, you know, to the listeners of this program, where is it located? How would you describe it?
Brad Steward
Share share, I guess, the description of your property. Yeah. Yeah. Let me start with what it’s not. And and what it’s not is it’s not a glamping operation started by a bunch of people watching KPIs on the Internet and seeing that people want experiential travel. My wife and I are both designers and artists.
We work in the marketing world. We’ve been with, companies like Adidas and Salomon and Patagonia. And the insight for our place came out of looking at, talking to thousands and thousands of consumers all over the world. And when we would talk to them about the products we were creating, oftentimes, it would dribble off into, well, you know, I was wearing that jacket, but I I went to this one place, and I did this one thing, and it was really incredible. And then we met this guy named Tony, and he’s the third generation owner of the place, and blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Sebastien Leitner
So we started thinking about what what’s that kind of place building when we made the jump out of, let’s call it, corporate design for lack of a better word. We thought, what what can we do in terms of place building?
Brad Steward
So when I filter that through your question of describing what we are, I like to think of us as kind of something like a sculpture garden, something like a botanical garden, something like a retail display, something like a movie set, something like a hotel. We have brought all of these things together in a way that we feel is unique. Now the property itself, the physical part of the property, is kinda mind blowing. It’s it’s under one acre. There are eleven rooms total. They are arranged in kind of a communal cloverleaf setting, which we believe brings people organically together.
And, essentially, we’re a garden in the middle of a little city in California. What we think is kind of the last great old California city in Southern California. That town’s called Ojai. There’s around five to nine thousand people that live in the town of Ojai depending on the time of year. And then every weekend, around fifteen thousand Angelenos and other people from all over the world come our way. We’re sort of part if you’re coming from Europe and you’re gonna do that that kind of common great American road trip where you start out in Venice Beach and you drive up to San Francisco and then you go over to Las Vegas and then you fly home.
Ojai has become in the last five years one of the stops on that trip. So we have a lot of people who are just coming out of Los Angeles, driving up to Ojai, hanging out in Ojai. I always say that, you know, if America had Spain, it would be Ojai. I have olives. I have wine. I have everything growing near me, citrus, any anything you want.
Avocados are are a dime a dozen, you know, in town here. And, so that’s kind of the physical environment that we’re in here. The last great Californian city.
Sebastien Leitner
I mean, I I need to double click on that. Right?
Brad Steward
Like, how do you define that? What makes it the last, I guess, great Californian city? Great question. I think there’s a few things that are the ingredients of that. Mhmm. Number one, no freeway into the city.
That’s a big one. It’s a big one. One. And you could get into a whole urban design discourse there, which I’ll spare everyone. But if you start in San Diego and you drive through every great California beach town, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Malibu, so on and so on and so on. And and Malibu is a little different because highway one, you could argue, is is isn’t, at least it offsets its disruption with stunning beauty.
But Ojai has no major freeway into the town. We’re we’re a valley, and we’re a little bit unique. And the only other valley that actually is really like us in Southern California is Napa Valley, and the reason is simple. Basically, from Mexico to Canada, all of the major mountain range, mountain ranges run from north to south. Mhmm. There are a couple of spots in California where they run east to west, Ojai, Napa Valley, and so on.
So we have all sorts of unique phenomena because of that. Ojai is known as the valley of the moon. That was the meaning of the Chumash Indian word. It’s called the valley of the moon because when the moon comes up and moves through the sky because of our east west orientation on the mountains, we we never lose view of of the moon at night. It’s brightest can be on a full moon from the start of, moonrise to moonset. And so, I think those ingredients make it make it really nice.
It’s very walkable. We have a law in town preventing chain businesses. There are no McDonald’s. There are no Starbucks. There are no Taco Bells. And this is regulated by law?
Regulated by law, regulated by the city. No no Home Depot if you want something, you know, hardware store wise. You go down and you see the guys who’ve been running the hardware store for fifty years. And then I’ll I’ll quickly add, you know, two feet outside of the city limits. There is a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, and a Taco Bell, and, you know, they’ve they’ve they’ve gathered on the border, and done their and done their thing. But, you know, inside of the city of Ojai, it’s kind of mom and pop business.
Actually, not kind of. It is mom and pop business. Many people make their make their living here as kind of a traditional merchant or, in my case, an innkeeper, if you will. Mhmm. An innkeeper in the way in the way that you would’ve in in San Clemente in nineteen fifty five, you know, or or or some other era or some other time. So those are the things that I think make us the last great town.
The other thing is a little bit of a behavioral component. Ohio is Hollywood two point o. There there are many, many, many celebrities in town. No one in town cares. They’re seen as people who have a job working in an industry, which is called the film or music or entertainment industry. And so you’ll have funny little things like, oh, I went to the cafe today.
I had a cup of coffee and bumped into McFleetwood. Oh, okay. Great.
Sebastien Leitner
What’s he doing? Teaching his grandkids ukulele. Oh, yeah. They go to you know, there’s a small amount of school, so they only go to the school, that our kids go to. Okay. Great.
You have a a lot of weird little things like that that that just happen in town, and nobody nobody really cares. And I kinda I kinda love that. That is awesome. It sounds to me like your city is not a stop. It’s a destination. Right?
Brad Steward
You need to want to go there. It’s not gonna be on a on a road that you pass through and you just happen to get gas and a donut or something. Yeah. You you do not find Ojai. Ojai finds you. And maybe that’s another attribute of kind of classic California in a way.
But, you know, I grew up in the in the area surrounding Sedona, Arizona. When I was a child, Sedona was a dusty little town in my and, you know, being born and raised in Flagstaff there, my main memory is my mom saying, you know, please, you know, don’t take your new shoes out into the red dirt because it’ll stain them for the rest of your lives, you know, kind of thing. And and then one day, I remember my dad, you know, who had his little insurance office there in Sedona, coming and saying, hey. Get this. There’s a guy who’s gonna, you know, move in next door to me in the in the little mini mall there, and he thinks he could sell rocks for a living. That’s that’s kind of interesting.
He’s he’s got these, crystals, and he thinks he can he can make a store out of it. And that that’s kinda strange. And then boom. One year later, the guy with the crystal shop owns not only the entire strip mall, but has, you know, kicked my dad out of the out of the space and taken on the whole thing. And Ojai kinda reminds me of Sedona before everything hit, and and it it has kind of that magical place, element to it. It finds you.
You you’re on the Internet, now or Instagram or whatever. You see something about Ohio, Sedona, or some of these other special places. They they kind of find you.
Sebastien Leitner
So I I think that really makes, like, you know, pretty pretty extraordinary, pretty pretty rare. I must say I need to add it on my bucket list. I mean, clearly, you sold me, that’s for sure. You called yourself an artist. You called yourself a designer, I mean, by profession, or you’ve done it, you know, for major corporation. How does that transpire in your property?
Brad Steward
You equate it a little bit to a garden, to a sculpture. Is that what, as a guest, you should expect at that property? Well, the the, you know, the the dirty secret is I’m not very good at anything. And so because of that, I’ve had to kind of lightly master many, many skills. I’ve been a film director and directing TV commercials for, comedy for children, music videos. I played, kind of a seminal role in the creation of the sport of snowboarding.
I was one of the first professional athletes in snowboarding. Then I launched several brands in the snowboarding space. And, you know, part of the epiphany of starting the outpost was one day I was talking to somebody, and I realized that at the ripe old age of fifty at that time, between the ages of thirteen and fifty, I had never made a living from anything else other than standing up on a piece of wood and sliding down the side of a snowy mountain. And I kinda thought, I live within a bubble within a bubble within a bubble. I’m I’m in sports. I’m in a limited number of athletes.
I’m in a sport that is a bubble inside of other larger sports. I should probably see what’s going on in the rest of the world at about fifty years old. That was a little bit of the spirit of designing the outpost. Really, one of my main inclinations was create this like a movie set and make it feel like that feeling you have when you walk on a movie set where, things are in a particular place. There are what I would call five or six hot spots to the design, and the hot spot to me or an epicenter of the design is one or two locations or three or four locations on the property that really highlight what you do best. And the idea, you know, and this kinda came from my my wife and I’s, work in the apparel world was answering the question, what will our fans give us credit for?
If you look that direction and you see something amazing, do we get credit for that?
Sebastien Leitner
You know? And so, and and does that is that part of what emotionally ties them into the place? And then further to that, I’ll add maybe another layer down for my wife and I. Rather than having somebody build that, can can we do it?
Brad Steward
You know? And so my wife launched a whole series of apparel she designed as part of our hospitality brand. We believe apparel is essential to our brand, so that immediately just makes us different than every hotel out there. My wife discovers that avocado seeds, when you extract the liquid from avocado seeds, they create a beautiful organic pink dye. We dyed a bunch of stuff pink that matches this thing called the pink moment that happens here in town every day with the sun setting. And boom.
You know, you’ve got a a connection to the land, to the location, to to a product that you could purchase and so on. And a lot of people when they come to our place, they say, hey. You know, this is kind of like it’s kind of like a brand I’m living inside. It’s not really like a hotel, and I love that. And then the last thing that I’ll add is, you know, kind of the one of the highlight days for me at the outpost was we we got a phone call from a network and production company. We would like to shoot some episodes of The Bachelor at the outpost.
Everybody’s talking about it. We hear it’s amazing spot. We’d love to do it. The director walks on-site, looks at the location, and says, actually, we don’t need to do anything to address this location. And I thought that’s incredible having worked in the film business where, you know, cases you have millions of dollars and, you know, nine different people, you know, running around with bolts of fabric and, three different looks and furniture and on and on and on and on. They literally said, we we actually have zero decoration here.
We’re we’re good. Let’s shoot. And and to me, that that was really, you know, kind of a great feeling and something we’ve kind of tried to master. And, you know, like I said, I don’t I don’t wanna make this sound like we came out this with this genius idea in this road map of how to design and direct this thing. We we built it by hand. We we looked at a lot of things twice and tore them down and then built it up again and so on and so on and so on.
And I think we tried to leverage what we don’t know. And in general, I would say my wife, Sean, and I, who and Sean is really, you know, the significant creative driver, I think, of our business.
Sebastien Leitner
You know, we looked at it and said, well, how can how can we leverage what we don’t know? We know what we like. We’ve been a lot of places. We we’ve traveled the world, and and, you know, we know what it we know what it feels like to be in a in a really great space and how how can we make that here? That’s amazing. So what did The Bachelor do to your business?
Brad Steward
Is it now a wait list? Like, for somebody wanting to stay at your property, do I have to subscribe and maybe I get, picked as a lucky winner? I’m curious. No. I’m serious. Like, I’m I’m curious.
Well, that’s a great yeah. Yeah. That’s a great comment. You know, we’ve had a really interesting business. We’ve been open for ten years. The first seven or eight years of our business, you did have to book many, many months in advance.
And part of that was a function of just being small. The other part was there aren’t any other businesses in the city of Ojai that the New York Times is saying, hey. Here’s a top five or ten thing you must see in California. There there weren’t many other businesses that, you know, when Goop makes their list of favorite things and we’re on it, that drives a certain amount of traffic. COVID, like everybody, COVID hit and changed the rhythm of how people travel. What we did see in the past was we’re gonna plan a year and a half in advance to come to the outpost.
Okay. We don’t have rates open a year and a half down the road, but, you know, we’ll take your name and number, and somebody will be in touch with you in six months. Now what we see is those key beautiful dates, the the traditional times that people wanna stay in Ojai, they book out way, way, way in advance. And then the remainder of of the week, usually, the weekdays, the remainder can be pretty spotty. Every once in a while, seven people from France will show up on a Wednesday. We heard about this place.
We read about it in an in flight magazine on our way over. We didn’t know we were coming here.
Sebastien Leitner
You know, Ojai is still you know, to my earlier comment, Ojai is still emerging. You know, if you walked down to Venice Beach, grab somebody hip who knows what’s going on, and you said to them, what are the three places you wanna go to next weekend?
Brad Steward
Well, I’m either gonna hit Joshua Tree or Anza Borrego. I’m gonna I’m gonna may maybe, hit something around Temecula or Julian to have a little bit of wine, and then I’m going to Ojai, Santa Ynez, maybe. Maybe. K. You know, the it’s on the list. Now, if you go into let’s call it corporate LA.
If you go into corporate LA, where are you going? Well, Terranea, Santa Barbara, or Pismo. So there there’s kind of a a layering there. We have two restaurants in town that we also are are small investors in. My wife and I will go in on a Friday night. There’s no locals.
We don’t know anybody from there. It’s packed. It’s called Rory’s Place. It’s been been fabulously successful. And and the the owners, not my wife and I, the owners of Rory’s, Rory and her and her sister Maeve, they’re responsible for driving the success of that business. And, you know, but you’ll you’ll have weekends in town where it’s like the the locals kinda shutter the doors and, you know, five, ten, fifteen thousand people from LA have a good time.
And then on Monday, everybody crawls out of their shed and starts the starts the traditional town up again.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? So you’re on a forty eight hour diet, and then you can go back, you know, about your business. Yeah. You said something that was very interesting. The pace of booking has changed during COVID. Yeah.
Yeah. What do you mean by that?
Brad Steward
This sound crazy, but, you know, as I I often say, on almost any phone call I do around anything, I’m I’m giving myself the permission to say a few stupid things. And so having that permission, here’s what I think has happened. I think behavior around travel in total, not just related to the outpost, I think behavior around travel has actually radically changed. Before, I think that people had certainty. No no one is sick, especially in our area. No no one is ill.
There’s no pandemic coming. There’s no natural disaster or fire or anything out there. Let’s book a year and a half in advance. Now I feel like and keep in mind, you know, the America that that I live in is more or less a hundred percent blue. Now the the uncertainty, the general uncertainty of our customers and and kind of the foundation that they operate from, I feel has kind of destabilized in the last couple of years, and so travels thought about differently. And so I see kind of this weird thing, but it but it actually checks with all of my experience in design.
And that is about fifty one percent of the equation is totally rational, and about forty nine percent of the equation is completely irrational. We’re gonna book at the last minute, but we’re gonna spend three times what we would normally spend because we’re here. We’re gonna do this now, and we’re gonna have a blast. It’s difficult to control. It’s difficult to plan for the forty nine. It’s it’s very difficult very difficult to plan for.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? And then, again, being a kind of a brand guy, one of my more controversial beliefs in the brand space is that if you lead the horse all the way to the water, they will never drink. You’ve gotta get them about halfway there. Your brand needs to deliver about half of the aspiration that something magical, meaningful, and memorable will happen at your location, and then, actually, the rest has to happen to them. And, you know, I saw this directly in the sports world, happen in kind of a wonderful way. Never in the entire history of Adidas was there a page in a marketing deck or a design brief or anything that said, you know, we should find three guys from Queens who know how to rap, and we should put them in our shoes and have them sing a song called my Adidas by RunDMC, and we’ll launch a global campaign off of those three guys.
So can somebody go out and just kinda hunt for those?
Brad Steward
Or or never at Nike, would would you have ever seen? I know this, this, guy playing basketball in college. His name’s Mike. He’s he’s pretty good. He’s not the best in college. He’s pretty good, but I think we could launch a five to ten billion dollar brand off of him.
His last name is Jordan, so we could call it Air Jordan. And and I I I think we could do that. No. Think things happen. Nike gets into basketball. All of a sudden, the guy, you know, slam dunks it from the from the free throw line, and and, you know, Peter Moore is there sitting on the sidelines to watch it and says, wow.
Hang on. I have an idea. I got a thought on what we could do there.
Sebastien Leitner
So I I I kinda like to get people halfway there and then let them build the rest of that memory on their own. I don’t think it’s a controversial comment at all. You know?
Brad Steward
I was, as you were talking, I was listening to you. I was remembering a conversation I had my with my eleven year old son, and we were talking about he asked me how to kiss a girl. And I’m like, don’t do it the whole way. You know? Go halfway. Approach her, and then wait for her to come.
Right? I don’t know whether that’s the same thing. It has nothing to do with branding, but it has about That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. That that is a better example than my example. A one way kiss.
You can’t kiss someone. Like, you don’t do it. You approach her and you you basically show her that you care and then let her make the last step. Alright, Sebastian. I I I know I’m the guest, but I I’m actually stealing that. That’s alright.
That’s alright. I’m actually stealing that from you because it it it’s the perfect thing, you know, and here’s where I see that it’s controversial.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay? Because this is, you know, this is what I hear, and and you usually, you know, I’m I’m a contrarian for hire, you know, a lot of times when I’m at speaking events. But but, you know, usually, what I hear is, well, darn it. We’ve just gotta have a tech stack that understands the customer journey so we can get them in the funnel. And then and then here’s the problem with the funnel. Aunt Sally goes to Ojai, California, a town you’ve never heard of and never been been to, and aunt Sally went there because her friend Judy told her about it.
Aunt Sally calls you and says, hey. Have you ever heard of Caravan Outpost?
Brad Steward
No. Well, man, it’s right up your guy’s alley. It’s so hip. It’s so cool. It’s fashionable. I met this guy there who scored the movie chicken run, and he was sitting around, you know, whatever the thing is.
That’s true story here, actually. You you scored the chicken run. Yeah. I mean movie. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. True story. And, you know, at Sally shows up, and she’s not on anybody’s customer journey. She’s not in anybody’s funnel, but she actually turned out to be the driver. She sold the room for you. She sold the experience for you.
We kinda have two rules for how we think about this kind of two thinking constructs. And and one is that if you hear about the outpost from a friend or family member, it beats any marketing we can buy. So we try to do everything we can to influence it. Yeah. By the way, none of these are genius or require any high level thinking, but it does change the way you operate. So if if you can if you can hear it from somebody else, that’s better.
If they’re a loved one, that’s the that’s the golden piece for us. And then the second one, which is kind of an old saying that’s been around sports for a while, is marketing is what you do when you run out of good ideas. And we do believe that a little bit is, you know, when the good ideas when it starts to just not be interesting or compelling or or if there was no magic moment, you know, or or if you air kissed, you know, to use your story, and there was nobody on the other side, you stop you stop going and you stop doing it, and then you gotta market the damn thing. And, you know, we try to stay out of that, as much as we logically can knowing, that in a world of of kind of attribution model dynamics. I went to Instagram. I talked to aunt Sally.
Then I went to your website. Then I went to Booking dot com, Expedia, and a bunch of other travel agencies. Then at Sally bought us a gift certificate, then we use the gift certificate, and we called you directly.
Sebastien Leitner
I mean, that’s your journey. And, you know, how how do you how do you attribute for that? You you can’t. You just have to put the good energy and kind of be everywhere your customer needs to find you. Going back to your description earlier, that’s still the fifty one percent, though. That’s not the forty nine percent.
Yeah. You’re still you’re still in that in that fifty one. You know, one of the things we think a lot about, you know, kinda going back to the top a little bit of, you know, what are the things that keep you awake at night?
Brad Steward
I’m kind of bothered in a way. About seventy percent of our customers are women. I think that’s a fairly traditional number for women in travel, booking the people who actually click the buy now button. The decision makers. Yeah. The decision maker.
It’s like fashion. Fashion, women purchase at about six five to six x depending on on whose stature looking at. But, you know, in our little world, when women are seventy to eighty percent of the decision making piece. And I I look at kind of all of the tech stack and everything, and I wonder, did a bunch of dudes put this together for women? And if it you know, because just having a bunch of daughters, who who are all, you know, educated, technically savvy people, I think, you know, how how could this all look different? Why do men run the interface that actually the customer is women?
And what would that look like, and how would it be different? Would it be more luxurious? Would it would it, have a different look and feel? And, you know, certainly, if I’m designing a wallet, for a me a male customer versus a female customer, totally different products actually. Same function, but totally totally different product. And so, you know, that that’s one of the things I think a lot about is is there a way we could tap into that and do something really interested?
I’m not I’m I’m not interested in your journey and and all all of that stuff.
Sebastien Leitner
What I’m interested in is learning your behavior and how I can create an unfair advantage for my company because of something I know about how to create a fan for my business. And adding to that is who you actually are because you started with saying, you know, seventy percent of our bookers are female, right, are are women. Right?
Brad Steward
Like, accepting that as a truth and adjusting your, I guess, selling approach, your marketing approach to that is what matters ultimately. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s part of, you know, getting a business question right. And the biz one of the business questions for the outpost at the beginning especially was, if you don’t know anything about hospitality, what do you know about? Well, we know consumers.
We’re in the we’re in the market with multibillion dollar brands. We’re traveling, I don’t know, fifteen times a year back and forth to somewhere in the world, Totally exhausted with jet lag and dizzy, but we’re doing it.
Sebastien Leitner
So, you know, you you wanna have a a proper ramen in, Tokyo, we got the spot. You you want the best cheese in France?
Brad Steward
We’ll take you to the little spot in the next to the hatchet. You know, whatever whatever it is, we have that kind of specificity, and you have to build that specificity in a global brand. You you you have to know, you know, in Nashville, in that alley, the door with a polar bear sticker on it that says do not knock is the best speakeasy in town. So you’ve gotta you know, you have to have that specificity to be really be a decent designer and somebody who kind of understands culture. And so I I think a lot about, you know, how how how can we be customer experts, fan experts. I’m using the word customer and consumer quite a lot, but, actually, I like to think about building fans.
I’m not sure I know how to build a customer in hospitality. I do know how to build a fan, somebody who will advocate for you, and tell others. And so I I think we are pretty good at fan building because it’s our universe that we came from. And so that’s a, you know, that’s a big part of the construct of the business.
Sebastien Leitner
How can we leverage what we don’t know? How can we remain experts in consumers, consumer behaviors, and buying habits?
Brad Steward
And then the hospitality stuff from our experience has been kind of like Groundhog Day every day. It’s an ops manual. It’s a group of people who are super smart, that that run it. They’re better than we are at it, and, you know, we try to enable enable them to run it. Fantastic. There’s a couple of things I wanna go back to housekeeping.
Sebastien Leitner
We mustn’t forget to talk about housekeeping because it’s something that that that you mentioned earlier at the beginning. In our research, we found a quote in Forbes that Caravan Outpost is a place big hotel chains should be worried about. Yes. Why do you think that’s to be the case?
Brad Steward
I mean, beside regulation, clearly you have a city that works in your favor that is going to keep, I guess, the big brands from opening a property in in your town. I think they should worry about us for a few reasons. They should worry that I think my wife and I have a very valuable insight. We didn’t create it. We’re not the masters of it, and I say that with total humility, actually. But we have an we have an insight twelve years ago that where you’ve been is more important than what you own.
And that insight gathers in our mind how we build this hotel, where you have been, and what you have experienced is becoming more important than what you own. We saw it in sports because I’ll take the sport of skiing and snowboarding. If you go to Nanshan outside of Beijing or if you go outside of Seoul and and you you go snowboarding or skiing, all of the gear is rental gear. It’s all best in class. You don’t have to own it. You get on the train in Beijing.
You go to Nanshan. You walk down the little chute there. They set you up with all of your gear, and you go. You have excellent product, best in class service, a beautiful experience. You don’t need to own any of that gear anymore.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? So for people like me who are in the position of saying, well, you know, average net selling price for a pair of skis is snowboard is five hundred and sixty nine bucks, and lifetime value is a hundred and twelve thousand eight hundred and, thirty two dollars and fifteen cents if they learn to do our sport before their eleven. If they learn in college, it goes down to twenty eight thousand four hundred and thirty two dollars and eight cents. You know?
Brad Steward
You get out of you you know, you kinda get get out of all of that. And so I I I think what the hotel should kinda be worried about is my wife and I have taken on this personal charge to launch a location out of that. We we’re consumer marketers. The reason I think they have worry in that, by the way, is when you ask me what’s customer service, I never once sit there and think, well, it’s a checklist of amenities. You know, their their little basket in the room is handmade and has homemade chocolates in it. Ours will be even more handmade and even chocolatier, you know, or, you know, it’ll look even greener or even more eco or whatever.
Sebastien Leitner
You know, all all that’s kind of just lost in the wind to me a little bit. Or, you know, if they have, a certain brand of conditioner shampoo with as little type as you could put on a plastic bottle to actually communicate what it is, we’ll have even less type, and it will be in in in Swedish, you know, and that’ll that’ll do it. That’s our that’s our upgrade. You know?
Brad Steward
So I think they should be worried about that. I think they should be worried about the consumer, and maybe that’s the ultimate answer. They they should be worried about, you know, Sean and I and the outpost. They should be worried about what’s happening with the consumer. Behavior’s changing. What we saw through the nineties, two thousands, and so on was sport was a major driver of fashion, the major driver of cultural influence.
You have Michael Jordan, LeBron James. You have Tom Brady. You know, pick your favorite a rod. You know, pick your favorite sports star. And that and that’s kind of our universe in the lane we’re in. So, you also gotta keep that in mind.
But, you know, those were driving major trends, multibillion dollar businesses. I think two thousand five, the first generation growing up as digital natives, little bit of Gen x backlash. I don’t need to own all of this garbage. I just need to go to cool places. And you saw it if you looked into it. Well, hang on a minute.
So there’s this guy called Anthony Bourdain that every male from forty to sixty has some affinity to. They they watch him. He’s cooking. He’s experiencing things. He’s going place.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Great. So, yeah, Anthony Bourdain doesn’t he he doesn’t talk at all about what he’s what he owns. There’s no you know?
Brad Steward
It’s not lifestyles of the rich and luxurious that Robin Leach used to run through the eighties and nineties. It’s Anthony Bourdain getting down dirty in the alleys of Hong Kong or or Phuket. Okay. Cool. That that’s different. So I I think that customer aspiration has changed.
And what I’ve seen amongst kind of our competitors in this space is, you know, they’ve called us and said, wow. You, you know, you you kinda played a role in inventing glamping. That’s unbelievable. You know? You’ve been around for ten years, planning it for twelve. Wow.
You guys kind of invented glamping, and and, you know, we kinda filter that back, and we think, well, we’ve never once thought about playing any role in inventing an activity. We’re we’re, like, we’re all about the consumer. Our consumer I’m selling to the same consumer I started selling snowboard gear to when I was nineteen years old, and that consumer is the urban adventurer. It’s a person who lives in an urban environment. Typically, they work in a cubicle or a tech role or an entertainment role or something that that is a a role that generates decent income to be able to travel. They’re inspired by the outdoors.
They identify as an outdoor person, but, typically, they don’t work in that environment. And so they buy brands like Arc’teryx. They buy cars like Allvos. They buy, Audi’s or, you know, what have you. But that kind of profile of the urban adventure, it’s the same customer. I’m just selling them a different a different product now, a different experience.
And to identify them, the the critical question to your point is more where have you been versus what credit card you own or what house you own or how what’s your net worth.
Sebastien Leitner
Is that right? You got it. You got it. And and there’s and this is why I say the big hotels should be worried about the customer because probably one more generation, and we’re we’re much more like Europe. Most people live in apartments. The the quote, unquote American dream has been rewritten.
We rent or we own?
Brad Steward
Yeah. Yeah. And and so I think this overall mentality, you know, call it nineteen fifty to nineteen ninety. I need to own my space. Call it two thousand forward. Why why would I wanna own my space?
That would be a horrible use of my funds and my thinking. It’s a little bit like first round of software, you gotta own the desktop version. Second round of software, not only do I not own anything, the stuff I use isn’t even with me. It’s in a cloud. It’s sitting somewhere else. And why is it in a cloud?
Because what’s important to me is mobility. That’s what’s important, the ability to go to other places and see other things. You said that there was sort of a change in twenty ten, right, driven by technology.
Sebastien Leitner
What did you mean by that? I think there’s a loose bracket. Like, call it call it o five to o fifteen to two thousand fifteen. There’s kind of a loose loose bracket. I do think I do think technology was the driver. I think I think the impact of mobile computing is just radical.
You know, even today as I, you know, text with my eighty seven year old dad. You know?
Brad Steward
And I think that changed a lot of things because it untethered your imagination. It untethered you physically. You know, certainly, the burners came on it with COVID and, you know, whether you believe work from home is valid or invalid is irrelevant. All all you can do is just acknowledge that there are a large portion of jobs that don’t require a physical location or a commonality between people in their physical location. And so I think it about that era, you just have the first group of consumers coming into being who began to shape a different set of values. I don’t wanna own things, but I want access to them.
And you started to hear, you know, terms in fashion like, accessible luxury and things like that.
Sebastien Leitner
You know, though those kinda became buzzwords a little bit. You know?
Brad Steward
I can’t buy all of the Viton set, but I can get this one or two pieces. Or I would even, posit that that there was, like, a cultural mobility that even came on, you know, that we saw in fashion where kind of the old European fashion houses today are filled with hip hop and rap talent. And that cultural mobility, you know, in the nineties, early two thousands, classes didn’t have the ability to move that freely. And now now there’s a lot more mobility. Still a bunch to fix in the world, to be clear. But but there’s a lot of a a lot more mobility, and so I think there’s there’s a lot of change that happened there.
So the big watch out to me is, you know, I’ve had a few conversations with very large hotel chains. Many people have tried to purchase our business over the years. All all of them, with flags. I always get off on the wrong foot with them because they immediately say, well, hey.
Sebastien Leitner
You know, we really love your brand. We’d like to we’d like to add your brand, you know, to our stable. And, literally, I have had meetings where I’ve said to them, can can you explain to me what a hotel brand is?
Brad Steward
Because language is important. And my definition of a brand and your definition of a brand may be different. And if they are different, we’re off on the wrong foot. I bought and sold a few companies in my day, and these are the kind of very specific you know, before you kiss, you gotta go on a few dates, you know, to use your analogy. This dating period is pretty critical. And and, you know, I kinda come away from a lot of those meetings thinking, well, Marriott or whoever.
I don’t wanna single out a brand, but whoever the brand is, they have labels. These are labels that are kind of sewn onto a product. But in terms of a brand, the aspirational piece in the way that I know it from sports and outdoor doesn’t exist, or I don’t know anybody that lives or dies for Marriott or lives or dies for another brand. Now I do know people who participate in the loyalty piece. To me, I really wonder where that will go, on the long, long, long, long, long curve because as part of where you have gone is more important than what you’ve owned, there’s an overall devaluing, I believe, of transactional relationships happening. And so these old devices that worked, well, if you came to our place a bunch of times, if you flew on our plane a bunch of times, even though you don’t maybe like it all the time, but if you if you did a couple of million miles, we’d give you this little gold card.
Now talking to our guests, talking to my kids who are, you know, sitting in their twenties and doing stuff, Hey. I found a cheap flight to Iceland on x y z airlines or North Airlines is going LA to Reykjavik for two nineteen one way. See you later. There’s no loyalty anymore. Well, there is loyalty. It just shifted.
The the loyal the loyalty is I am loyal to the fandom. I’m I’m loyal to the activity, not the brand. Interesting. I I’m loyal to that. I’ll go to the ends of the world to experience what I want to experience, but But I don’t care as much about what brand I do it on. In fact, if I’m going to, Marrakesh, I’m digging online.
I’m finding a. I’m I’m meeting the guy in the alley, two AM, with a big backpack. I’m gonna feel a little bit scared. I’m gonna walk through the catacombs, come to the Riyadh, and it’s gonna be incredible. Do you think that Caravan Outpost could exist outside of your current location? I do.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it needs some tweaking. You know, we started the company and we said, well, you know, we should start kind of a copy and paste business. Mhmm. And we should we should be able to copy and paste this into other cities and it should work.
You always have to localize. We actually looked at that and said, well, localization means actually starting at the cap table. And, you know, without going too deep into the construct of the company, we said, you know, if you really wanna be part of the community, you actually have to be part of the community. You have to build a local cap table so that people really know what’s going on. You’re not just coming in and, oh, great. You know, new new hotel is here, and and we know the pathway for that.
Every three years, you gotta remodel the spa, and then you, you know, you get some influencers in and they talk about it and, you know, your business, you know, does that. And that’s the hotel world. And, you know, the battle is to not become jaded as you ride the seas of all of that. That’s not our world. What we see is we we feel there are ten to fifteen epicenter cities in the world, which really determine what’s happening, and and they guide the larger trends. And then underneath those ten or fifteen are kind of second tier cities, if you will, and those second tier cities are ripe targets for us.
Sebastien Leitner
So we might not be in London. We might be somewhere else because of the the rates of London or whatever. Or if we’re gonna come in London, we’re in the bad real estate. You know?
Brad Steward
We’re we’re in the place that the big chains aren’t gonna you know? They don’t go down that alley, or they don’t go in that place. You know? And I hear Bethnal Green is a good place for that. A great example. Yeah.
Yeah. Great example. You know, maybe one way of thinking about our fans, the people who come to our place we have a name for them. Sometimes we refer to them, Sean and I, as fifty fifty customers, fifty fifty consumers. Half of what they own is brand new, purchased on on more logical basis. The other half is tried, worn, true, secondhand, got it from grandpa.
Aunt Sally gave it to me. Looked really cool because the corner and the leather was sort of torn, and I had it sewed by a guy named Mario who’s a shoe man shoe repair guy down on the, other side of the river downtown where the, you know, train stop is. People want that that kind of fifty fifty, and I just don’t see you know, when I go into what what what I see is these kind of what I call, you know, corporate craft hotels, you know, where it’s a big chain. So, you know, they’ve all heard Liz Lambert, and they’ve all walked through the ACE, and they’ve said, well, any anybody could paint a bunch of flowers on the wall. We can do that. I know, you know, our our interior designer has resourced us fifteen people who can paint, you know, cool flowers on the wall.
And, you know, maybe if it’s a little edgy, we’ll do a a mouse with x’s in their eyes or something like that. That feels edgy.
Sebastien Leitner
Right, everybody? You know? Dead mouse on the painted on the wall. That’s cool. Yeah. It’s just a different What’s next for Brad Stewart?
Brad Steward
What what what are you working on? I mean, you must be working on something. Myself, first of all, trying to be a better better human every day. Better better father, better better husband, better everything, better friend, better kid to my parents. So I I I work on that I work on that daily. Really, what we’re working on is is trying to find a good partner for expansion.
We’ve had the you know, part of the story of the outpost has has been I don’t wanna say making errors, but, you know, not not being careful or as, as deep in due diligence as we probably should have been on on, choosing kind of some primary partners. That’s been a challenge for the business. And so I think the next step for us is finding the right people, the right capital, the right behavior, the right mindset, the right goal, you know, if you will, to the to the brand. Finding the right people and expanding with some purpose and some intention. We already know the concept works. You don’t come into the business, stay here for ten years.
We’ve been the number one rated hotel for almost in town here for almost every year we’ve ever been open, and we’re never more than one or two points away, from the Ojai Valley Inn, which is a five star luxury suite ran by a family that, you know, has hospitality in a multigenerational configuration in their family. And so I think it’s really about finding the right partners. It’s also about identifying the right cities. Really importantly, I think it’s about understanding what renewal looks like. The concept has to be fresh. We gotta keep it going.
We gotta we gotta keep changing with our with our fans and giving them kind of what they want and a combination of what they know they didn’t want or didn’t know they wanted. And so, but really finding finding the right capital partner and the right person to expand with, you know, we believe and and this is one of the things, you know, go back to my comment about glamping. Mhmm. Tons of people call me and, hey. You know, we have property in Utah. We got thirty five Airstreams.
We got a cool logo. We’re ready to go.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? We’re ready to go. We’ve seen you guys out there making tons of money. Well, first of all, nobody in glamping is making a ton of money. But but, but, you know, the second piece of it is, you know, I I just kinda see them. That that’s not our model, actually.
Difficulties we’ve experienced, and it was a real eye opener and a learning lesson for me and, you know, part I got out of my day to day in snowboarding to go learn, more and and and kinda give give a little more depth to my my knowledge. One of the things we’ve learned is that oftentimes we’re in the room with developers and land people, and we’re from the fashion business. We we might as well be speaking Inuit in these in these in these conversations because we keep saying to them, hey. Our history is, you know, from our kitchen table, we popped a thirty million dollar apparel brand in snowboarding, literally sitting around the kitchen table with a a new baby and a a couple of bucks in our in our pocket. We owned all of it. We launched it and and grew it successfully and and got it in the hands of Solomon.
And then later, Adidas partnering with them, they owned it, you know, so on and so on. So news flash, you know, Caravan Outpost is kind of a clothing brand that happens to have a hotel. Kind of a we’re kind of a retail store you can sleep at. I mean, they look at us like we’re we’re crazy. And then, you know, we come out of those meetings thinking, okay. The positive is we have one less chain to compete against.
That’s the positive. They think we’re nuts. They’ll never jump into this the way we’re jumping into it. Check the box. One less brand to compete against. The negative is, boy, it sure would be nice to have a few million bucks to get another location going.
Our customers are there. You know, I’ll give you a couple of quick stats that are just kinda, in inside baseball. You know?
Brad Steward
We have eleven rooms. We have a little over sixty thousand people in our email database. That’s amazing. That’s astonishing ratio. We have some months, where over ninety thousand people visit the website. So we get logged in.
Sebastien Leitner
Let me ask you this. Yeah. Why not partner with a fashion brand? Because that’s not unusual. That happens. That that was our original concept actually is, hey.
Let’s go find our friends at the North Face or Amer or Arc’teryx or, you know, especially in my my case, I participated in the in in the Solomon’s purchase of Arc’teryx, so we know these guys. You know?
Brad Steward
But just as I said, you know, when we get into these rooms with the hospitality developers and everything, we, you know, we we start talking about highest and best use of real estate, which I can’t think of any place that’s interesting that has highest and best use. You know? The Notre Dame, is that is that a great example of a highest and best use? I don’t I don’t know. Is the Eiffel Tower the highest and best use? Is any any almost anything you’ve seen in in Spain by Gaudi the highest and best use?
I I don’t think so. We get into those conversations, and that gets tricky. Then we come to the or the sorry, the fashion guys, and we say to the fashion guys, hey. We have an idea. Bang. Caravan outpost.
They’re like, wow. This is amazing. First thing is, let me grab somebody. We’d like to book a retreat for our creative team at your place. So we’ve done vans, Lululemon, GMC, Cadillac, Hyundai, Prana Yoga, Tinder, Match dot com. You name it.
We’ve we’ve done You’re all there. Brand. NBC Universal, whoever. So first thing is, wow, this place looks cool. We’re booking a retreat. You know, see you in March.
Okay. Great. Now, we don’t know how to operate a hotel. We we don’t know anything about this space. Looks like an amazing idea, Brad.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? We see you guys have had a couple of interesting hits in the past, and that that all looks good. Can we just marinate on this, you know, for a couple of years and see where it’s going?
Brad Steward
Whereas if to me, the obvious thing here and it and it’s happening, you know, with Aungarean guys like this. These are these are just handbags you’re sleeping. You know? This is this is just this is just the Hermes hotel. You know? You’re you’re you’re sleeping in this kind of folded and luxury kind of thing.
It’s coming, and and it’ll happen. And probably the first piece, not probably, what is already happening, the first piece will happen at the top tier of the market, and it’ll be the luxury brands having luxury hotels. I’m already getting decks pretty daily showing me the, you know, pick your favorite fashion brand hotel. It’ll happen at the luxury level, and then I do think it will probably come our way, you know, which is we’re not, priced like a five star hotel, but we’re a pretty expensive three star hotel. And so I think that that next layer of consumers will will come for us there. But you’re you’re asking people to crawl out of their spreadsheets and fashion, you know, and and unit economics of of, you know, ten ten million largest, fifteen million mediums, and twenty million largest.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? You’re asking them to kinda crawl out of that unit economic place and and say to them, alright. People wanna wear your your products, and people wanna come to your product in a different way, actually. They they want to wear your hotel spatially, not just physically, or they wanna wear your brand spatially, not just physically. It’s a little bit of a tricky concept to to talk with. If North Face opens an adventure hotel tomorrow, everybody will say, oh, man.
That’s obvious. You know?
Brad Steward
And we’ve been we’ve been talking about that for a long time. We had a lot of discussion with REI. They they didn’t get it at all. And then the cool little store down the street from them, EVO, went out and launched launched Lodge. It’s something that those bigger brands are gonna miss. It reminds me a little bit, you know, what’s happening in in footwear right now.
A good friend of ours started HOKA. HOKA was an idea that was shopped around and seen as a really bad idea. Are you kidding me? These chunky shoes? And our our friend Jean Luc, shopped them around, shopped them around, went around everywhere, started going to races for five years. Hey.
I’m telling you there’s something about these chunky shoes. This is an advantage. There are people out there who wanna buy them. No. They they look ugly. Okay.
I’m telling you in golf clubs, there are big golf clubs. In tennis, there are big tennis rackets. In every other sport, there’s a there’s a big example of design. Hey, Jean Luc. You’re nuts.
Sebastien Leitner
You know? Go go back to go back to teen in the mountains and hide. Boom. Deckers, a challenger brand who didn’t have a prayer to succeed with the brands they had on their their their roster. They take a shot. I had dinner with Jean Luca a few weeks ago, heading toward four billion, three and a half billion in revenue for HOKA.
That’s amazing. You know?
Brad Steward
And, and then you’re reading in in the press, Nike says, well, we don’t we don’t know what’s going on. You know? We we’re not sure what’s happening. Well, I know what’s happening. You you were worried about Adidas stealing twenty billion dollars of revenue, but what’s happening is is on, cloud and and HOKA and these smaller brands are stealing five billion at a time, and that’s what’s dragging you down. To go back to your root of your question, what’s Marriott gotta worry about?
Little little people like us with big ideas who do who don’t we’re not gonna start another Marriott. Yeah. You know? You you’re never gonna drive into a caravan outpost and go through the Rotunda with the overhead drive through thing like you do probably at a at a Marriott. But they’ve gotta worry about people like us peeling two, three, four hundred million dollars of customers off of the adventure travel segment. And if there were two or three of us that were doing that, you know, next thing you know, you’ve got kind of, like, a billion dollars of value that that evaporated out of the market.
Sebastien Leitner
Before we wrap up, I wanna ask one question which may be completely left field. How do you spend your day off?
Brad Steward
Right? Like, you you need to recharge at some point. Right? There’s a lot I never do. I I I I Okay. That’s fair.
Possible. I try so hard. I was up till midnight working on investor presentations last night with my wife. You know? Anytime you get the eleven thirty at night text says I love you, you know you know you should stop working. Okay.
And and, so I am kind of that that guy. I I do that quite a lot. My number one free time activity, I have two of them. One is being being with my family, my daughter, and my wife. And then secondarily, I’m the only guy I know in my neighborhood who does my own yard work. And Wow.
And I believe I believe nature is my gym. And I regularly have people roll through the neighborhood and say, hey. Do you have a card? I need some stuff swept up and some trees trimmed, and I’m out there with every piece of industrial equipment you can imagine. And so I I’m really big on being in the yard. We have, we live in downtown Ohio.
We we’ve got a little over an acre of kind of something that looks like the outpost that’s our house. And, and I’m really into plants and really into really into gardening. I do get out and snowboard every now and then, not as much as I used to, but I’m still a hundred percent a hundred percent in. And and I’m happy to report that all of my muscle memory is intact. Even if the muscles aren’t there, they know they know which How do they hurt a bit more?
Sebastien Leitner
Right? Yeah. They know which way to move. And, so, those are kind of the big things, but I I do have a there’s a therapist that I could probably spend a few hundred bucks an hour on talking about why I work so much, but I do really, really enjoy working. And I love the business we’re in. It never it never really feels like work to me.
I’m pretty passionate about it. You know?
Brad Steward
It’s pretty authentic to, you know, who I am and and and what I do. They’re they’re they’re actually pretty linked. You know?
Sebastien Leitner
You started with snowboarding, so you must have a favorite mountain or a favorite run that I’d love to just wrap up with. What is it?
Brad Steward
Whew. Well, my favorite one my favorite run is always the, you know, the next one I’m gonna do. That’s my general orientation is my my favorite run is that next one that I’m buckling in for. And and and so that’s probably hospitality actually is my favorite run-in that regard. Places I’ve been to in the world where I felt small, insignificant, and a part of a larger ecosystem where I had zero control. Myself and a few other people, went to Russia.
We were the first Americans to snowboard in Russia in the very, very, very early days of snowboarding. We got dragged into the caucuses on, Russian troop transport helicopters, and and, this was Freedom and Perestroika and those kind of things for for people over there was sort of pre that, which is now post that. But, but we spent a lot of time, up above, Gudauri in the mount or up above, Soviet what was then Soviet Georgia, Tbilisi up in the mountains at a place called Gudauri. That was mind blowing and absolutely surreal. And then I think almost anytime you’re in a helicopter in Alaska, you’re having what I call a once in a lifetime experience, which as an athlete means two things, means I only did this once and I died, or or this was so frightening. I might not come back.
And, so I’ve had some pretty pretty incredible pretty incredible experiences there. And, but my nature is when you’ve done it for a living, when you’re on the snow, call it three hundred days a year like I was for many, many years, three hundred plus. When you’re on the snow, you do get to this place eventually where you’re like, you know what? I’ll ride anywhere with anyone on any day, and I’m gonna have fun. I don’t care. And I always say people it’s like the old NBA basketball player who walks by the the court and sees a ball roll over to him from the kids, and they pick it up and shoot it, and they make it.
That’s the phase I’m in. You wanna go snowboarding? You got a mountain? You got a you got a ticket? You got a place to go, and there’s some snow? There’s no bad snow.
You just gotta do it. No. No. And we used to say in our company, there’s there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear. Mhmm. You know, maybe there’s a parallel somewhere in hospitality.
I haven’t thought about it, but, you know, may maybe there’s no such thing as as bad experiences during travel. There’s just kinda bad service and bad poorly executed hotels.
Sebastien Leitner
You know, I don’t I don’t know. Maybe there’s a parallel there. Yeah. Brad, thank you so much for your time, for your insights, for sharing your stories. It’s been an absolute delight, to talk to you. We probably could have gone on for another hour or so, but I’m I’m conscious of time and I’m conscious of of your time.
So, I added your place, to my bucket list. I can’t wait to see you gardening in your home, I guess. And and, I’ll go find you. I’ll track you down. Yeah.
Brad Steward
Well, thank you, Sebastian. I I appreciate it, you know, and, you know, I come to you via our our technology, partner with Cloudbeds, and they’ve been a key piece of teaching us some really interesting operational pieces and kind of learning how we manage our business. And you can only operate like we are where you’re kind of risking what you do with the consumer. We’re we’re a little bit like trapeze artists, and we’re flying through the air, and you gotta have a safety net. Cloudbads has been that safety net for us, and so we’re we’re thankful. And I’m appreciative that, somebody pulled me out of their Rolodex on a lucky whim and gave me a few minutes to to speak today.
So No. Appreciate that. Thank you so much, Brad. Okay. Thank you, Sebastian.
Sebastien Leitner
That brings us to the end of yet another episode of The Turndown. Huge thanks for all of you for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. Of course, this podcast wouldn’t be possible without the amazing team behind the scenes. A massive shout out to the producers, Palak Kahheirao, Linda Pejai, Lana Cook, Ricky Sherman, and Eilifakuhasen for the incredible research and preproduction work always keeping us on track. To Paulo Sanchez, thank you for your stellar audio editing and for making us sound so good.
And finally, thank you to Ying Liu for her organizational talents and keeping the season on schedule literally. Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcast and follow us for updates and bonus content. Until then, take care and stay curious.
