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Russell Saks is the founder of Campus Protein, the only one-stop shop for college students who want brand name supplements and vitamins for affordable prices.
In this episode you'll learn how he built out a rep program that spread nationwide and helped him build a multi-million dollar business.
We'll discuss:
- How to build, manage and motivate a nationwide rep program.
- What kind of guidance to give your first salesperson.
- How to identify the areas of your business that will have the biggest impact on your growth.
Listen to Shopify Masters below…
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Show notes:
- Store: Campus Protein
- Social Profiles: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
- Recommended: LeadDyno, Yotpo, Nosto, ShipHero
Felix: Today I am joined by Russell Saks from Campus Protein dot com. C-A-M-P-U-S-P-R-O-T-E-I-N dot com. Campus Protein is the only one stop shop for college students who want brand name supplements and vitamins for affordable prices and was started in 2010 and based out of New York, New York. Welcome Russell.
Russell: Thanks Felix. Appreciate you guys having me on today.
Felix: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. Tell us a little bit more about your story. What are some of the most popular products that you sell?
Russell: Definitely, so started the company back in 2010 when I was a sophomore at Indiana University. At this point I had never lifted a weight a day in my life. I never went to the gym. Joined a fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, at Indiana University and they told me, and I realized pretty quickly, what they said was if you want to get with girls you better start hitting the gym.
These guys take me to the gym and it's my first time there. I keep going back with them and once per month they're stopping at our local vitamin store and spending 250, 300 dollars on supplements each. This was really shocking to me because these are the same guys that are complaining about not having enough money for beer on the weekends.
I was surprised that this was such a priority to them. I asked them afterward, I said, "I'm so surprised that you guys aren't just buying this stuff online. I'm sure it's cheaper. I'm sure that there are plenty of online places you could go." And they said, "It is cheaper, however, we need it today." What I figured out what college students really aren't the best planners and they're a little bit lazy.
I thought that if we could combine competitive online pricing with same-day delivery we would have a home run. That's exactly what we did at Indiana University. We set up a storage unit. The first delivery of supplements ever was to my frat house and then we moved on to the storage unit, but we literally hand-delivered every single order. The orders would come through on the website and we would hand-deliver them to the customer. Same-day delivery.
Felix: That's very cool. That's very wise of you to recognize that there was opportunity too. Were you in school for business or entrepreneurship? What gave you this kind of business mindset to recognize that this was an opportunity to pursue.
Russell: Sure, so I've always had an entrepreneurial mindset. In high school I had a couple very small businesses, a couple of e-bay businesses, and my family's very entrepreneurial. On my dad's side they own luggage stores in the city, in Manhattan. On my mom's side they own women's shoe stores in Manhattan as well. I always really wanted to do something on my own and this was … I felt like my shot or my opportunity.
Felix: Hmm, makes sense. When you were getting started with this, what were some of the … I think listeners out there, I'm not sure how many of them are in college or are going to school or anything, but what some of the pros and cons of starting a business while in college or in school?
Russell: One of the hardest things was, obviously, balancing school and this new business. What I quickly found was that my life was pretty much consumed by this business. It was something that I really wanted to pursue and really wanted to make it as big as I possibly could. My first step in doing that was realizing that I couldn't do this alone. I needed a sales guy. I reached out to my best friend, he went to Indiana University, he lived in the fraternity across the street, and pretty much knew everyone on campus. He was my go to sales guy.
I reached out to him. He said that he would have no problem selling supplements and within 2 weeks we had sold out of our entire batch of inventory from our first shipment. Thanks to my now business partner, Mike Yewdell.
Felix: You recognized that you needed a sales guy. How did you understand this fact? The reason I'm asking is because I think a lot of entrepreneurs out there, when they do get started for the first time, and are starting their own business as a solo founder, they feel like they have to be the sales person. No one else can take the reins necessarily because it's such an intimate activity, I guess, that they feel like they should be the ones out there pitching and saleing and bringing in the revenue for the business. You recognized that this was something you needed and you were able to hand … Not necessarily hand it off, but you were able to bring someone in to help out with that part. How did you recognize this and did you ever have any hesitations about bringing somebody in to run the sales for you?
Russell: I realized that if this was something that we wanted to, at least, expand to the whole Indiana University campus; it wasn't something I could do on my own. That's 35,000 undergrad students. Very big campus and in my eyes the easiest target was fraternities. These guys work out a lot. They're trying to get with girls and the whole reason why we started this business was to help college students look better naked.
I realized that, again, there's no way I could do it myself. I think it's important to figure out what your personal strengths are and really focus on that. I think one of the most important things is hire people who are smarter than you or better than you in certain areas that you're not so great at.
Felix: When you hire your first sales person … Or when you did hire your first sales person, what kind of guidance do you … Should you give them to make sure that they are growing the business appropriately?
Russell: Sure. In the beginning I think it's really tough to gauge that, especially with a new business. You don't really have a lot to go off of. I think just closing as many sales as possible, building as many relationships as possible, making sure that those relationships are nurtured too are some of the most important things.
Felix: Was there a way for you track or manage all this or were you guys just hustling and trying to get everything out there?
Russell: This was just us hustling. We were doing everything we could to grow the market around Indiana University. We would hand out flyers, sticker dorm rooms. We would do tables at the gym. We would do everything that we could in order to get the word out there. At one point we had both of our fraternities go to the gym just wearing Campus Protein tank tops, so at the very least if you didn't know what Campus Protein was, you probably at least googled it because you saw so many tank tops at the gym.
Felix: When you got started with this … Earlier on in the podcast you were mentioning that you had just gotten started lifting weights and just got started to understand the supplements and the supplement business. Did you feel like you knew the market well enough by the time you guys started?
Russell: Truthfully, I don't think I knew the market as well as I probably should have. I was learning a lot as I went along. Truthfully, in the beginning we weren't making any money on any products and in fact we were losing money on selling some products just so that we could really build up this reputation that we do have affordable pricing and we do also provide this awesome convenience of same-day delivery.
Unfortunately what we figured out was that the same-day delivery wasn't scalable. Just to rewind a bit, that summer I went home, told my best friend from high school Tarun Singh about the business. He went to Boston University. He saw a lot of the same problems at Boston that I saw at Indiana. He said that, "he thought he would be able to expand the model." He took it back to Boston University and it was a big success there.
Since Boston has so many schools, it's so densely populated with different colleges, he was able to quickly expand Campus Protein to a bunch of colleges within the Boston area.
Felix: Very cool. If you didn't know the market well enough, what did you … And I think it's perfectly fine too, because I think … A lot of entrepreneurs do wait too long to get started, wait too long to get moving, because they feel like they need to understand everything before taking the very first steps. If you were to give advice to somebody that is just thinking about getting started, what do you think you need to know about your mar- … Like how much do you need to know before you can comfortably … Not necessarily comfortably, but you can at least know enough to not fall flat on your face.
Russell: Definitely. I think some of our biggest strengths were knowing which products are popular. We would go around, engage our pledge brothers and our friends, seeing which products were in the highest demands. That was really crucial for us because we didn't have a lot of money at the time. We were mostly investing in inventory and if we invested in the wrong inventory then we wouldn't be able to sell it and we'd be out of business. I think one of the most important things is knowing what's hot, knowing what the hottest trends are, and that was a big strength for us early on.
Felix: I think that's important because a lot of time we all think that if you start a business you have to basically reinvent the wheel and do something completely different, but there's definitely a lot of very crucial information to be gleaned just from understanding what people's buying habits are currently. Because once you learn that you can kind of figure out how to insert yourself or at least figure out how to replicate that kind of demand for your own products or at least get the kind of supply that people are already actively looking for.
When you hired a sales person and they were out there hustling and getting the sales for you, were you also running with sales or what was your responsibility early on, when you did have a sales person?
Russell: Absolutely. Yeah. Sales were key. Sales were the most important thing, so anyone that was involved in Campus Protein early on had one main goal and that was sales. If you weren't great at sales, at the very least, you had to build awareness. Yes, we were selling wherever we could. We'd sell at the gym. We'd take orders over email and put them back into the website when we got home. We would do everything we could in order to get sales. I think sales is key early on and sales is one of the most important things for us and probably most businesses early on.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). When you say we, is it just … Was it just you and your sales person? Or were like your fraternity involved? How many people were involved in this operation?
Russell: It was me and my best friend from college, Mike, who ended up becoming my business partner at this time. Later on after that summer, my friend from high school … My best friend from high school Turan he joined in. It was really the 3 of us.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let's rewind a bit. When you guys have decided you have this market you're trying to serve, you have these products that you know people like, and you are generating these sales offline, how did you transition this into an online business? What were the next steps towards scouting this up and actually turning into an e-commerce business?
Russell: Definitely. We always considered ourselves a virtual retail store, right? Because you can buy the products online but we were delivering them to you the same day. Like I was saying, unfortunately it wasn't as scalable as we thought.
To give you some brief history on how we really grew, we were trying to make this our full-time jobs post graduation. When we started off none of us were really into lifting. It wasn't that important to us, but as we developed this business we realized that health and nutrition are really important and we became really passionate about it. This may have started off as let's help college students look better naked, but we realized that we actually, potentially were in a fortunate spot to have the ability to touch a lot of people and to help change a lot of people's lives.
We wanted to do everything in our power to make this our full-time jobs post graduation. What we started doing was looking different ways to raise money. We were looking at different business competitions, we were looking at venture funding, angel funding, and as fate would have it we stumbled upon a business competition held by Indiana University, just by faith. It was the world's largest business competition held by a university. It was right in Indiana. It was the fist year they were running it. You had to be senior to enter. We were like, oh man, this is meant to be.
We entered this competition and basically, imagine Shark Tank, but for college students. Basically a bunch of successful Indiana Univeristy alumni came together to start this fund. Matt Ferguson, the CEO of CareerBuilder, Scott Dorsey of ExactTarget, and the year after Mark Cuban joined into the competition and they put together this fund so that entrepreneurs could come out of IU year after year. They continued to promote entrepreneurship post graduation. We were fortunate enough to win a seed investment and win the competition.
Felix: That's amazing. What did you feel like you needed the capital for? Because I think this is an important point too to discuss for other entrepreneurs, because I think there is always this nagging thought that I need more funding for my business but sometimes it's not. It might not be the right direction to go in. How did you guys know that you needed capital for the business? What did you need it for at the time that you started looking for it?
Russell: Definitely, so there were a few things that we needed. The first thing is we needed to increase our gross margins. Our margins were super thin at the time, again we were buying products from our distributor and the margins weren't great. We really wanted to go direct. In order to go direct, you really had to place some big purchase orders. That was one area for us.
A second area was creating a private line, which we now have. We have a pre-workout called Fuel and it's really designed for college students. Everything down to the marketing, to the taste. One of our most popular selling flavors is called Jungle Juice. Our latest flavor is Orange Soda. That was a really big part for us. It was really important because that was really going to increase our gross margins.
The last piece of it was our rep program. At that point we were at Indiana University, we were at Boston University and we were looking to expand the model to as many colleges as we possibly could. In order to do that we wanted to invest in a sales rep program. As of today we are represented at a little over 275 college campuses across the country and we have a little over 1200 campus reps.
Felix: That's amazing. I definitely do want to talk about your rep program, but before we get there, this competition you won. Can you say how much you won from this business competition?
Russell: Definitely, yeah. We won a seed investment of 100,000 dollars. That was in 2012, so that was the year we graduated. We've grown organically, fortunately, since then.
Felix: That's amazing. When you did get this. When you won this competition, you got the seed investment. You knew it was sitting in your bank account, your business bank account. What were the first things you started to do with that funding?
Russell: First thing we did was reach out to a couple key partners. A couple key vendors that we wanted to really build our site up with. That we thought their messaging, their marketing, and their overall messaging really appealed to the college demographic. They were up and coming brands. We were fortunate enough to really get in early with a lot of these brands and built some really incredible relationships with them that they come to us to get their products into college students hands. Ages 18 to 24.
Felix: With the funding … I guess, with the competition, what do you think you guys did right to help you win the competition?
Russell: I think some of the things that we did correctly were to show a real … I don't know want to say proven way, but a way that seems very feasible to scale this business and for us that was by expanding to more schools and hiring more sales reps. We were able to figure out that on average each sales rep would bring in X amount of dollars. If we hired X amount of sales reps at each school and we had X amount of schools, we could pretty confidentially project our revenue. We could say there's pretty much a direct correlation between our revenue and the amount of sales reps and colleges that we're represented at.
Felix: I love that you did or you were able to create a system or at least some kind of process for scaling this up and launching a new market. Speaking of that, I think a lot of store owners are looking to new markets to grow their business, to grow their top line revenue. When you are planning, or when you guys were planning to launch in new markets, is there … Is it possible to build a scalable model? Is it very easy to replicate the launch plan for one college onto the next, even if it's in a completely different part of the country?
Russell: Sure, so kind of what you're saying. We thought it would be easy. Turns out it wasn't like everything else. Every schools a little bit different. We found that the demands in one area are very different in another area. For example, at Indiana Univeristy they were more into hard core supplements and more into powdered supplements that you mix yourself. Where at Boston University they were really into ready to drink stuff. Stuff that's premixed that you buy out of the gym fridge basically.
Felix: That's interesting. How did you learn that this was the case?
Russell: It wasn't too hard for us to figure it out. We would basically get tons of messages whenever a certain product was out of stock from one region. They'd say why is this product out of stock or when are you getting it back in. Slowly but surely we started to figure out which areas demanded which products. Today we built out the rep system so that we actually have 4 territory managers across the country.
Felix: I guess when you talk about this business it sounds like it's obviously very offline marketing heavy, especially with the rep program and especially how you guys got started initially. When you do start off a business that way, offline that is or the biggest focus is offline and you're generating the sales offline, what were some of the more difficult challenges to turning it into more of an online business? In actually driving sales or driving traffic to an online store rather than just to their local rep?
Russell: Sure, so we always made it a focus and we always wanted to make it a focus that in order to make your purchase you had to come online. You had to come to our site. You had a … Unless the rep was putting the order in for you or it was early on and we were putting in the orders, we really stress that you had to come to the site in order to make the purchase. I think it would have been a lot more difficult had we not done that early on because wouldn't have seen us as such an online e-commerce based business
Felix: Hmm, makes a lot of sense. You said that when you got the funding or when you were thinking about going after funding you wanted to do for 3 different reasons. Larger purchases, a private line, and then, of course, the rep program that helped you scale things up. Did you launch all of these at the same time? How did you prioritize which of these and for different projects?
Russell: We had a strategy. We had a plan. We definitely didn't do it out all at the same time. At that point it was just the 3 of us and we could barely handle one of those things. We really prioritized which things were most important to us. The products that we knew that everyone already wanted from our third party vendors, we thought that would was one of the … Kind of a no-brainer for us. We needed higher margins on those products and we're going to approach these vendors that we hopefully can build really great, long term relationships with. That was the first thing for us.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let's talk about this because I think that this is a great strategy for a lot of businesses in different industries to get funding so that you can make larger purchases to decrease, to improve your margins, and then sell your own products. Create your own line like you guys did and of course those rep programs.
Let's break this down a little bit. With the improving your margins, dropping down the cost with your vendors. Talk to us about it. How did you negotiate better prices? Is it just coming to the table with more cash? Or like what else is involved?
Russell: Yeah, so again, I think it's selling the story. Selling our vision. Selling to these vendors what we think Campus Protein can be in 3, 5, 10 years. We were the ones who may have recognized that gap in the industry that nobody was marketing towards college students, which did make up such a large portion of the market. All we really had to do was bring it to their attention for them to realize that this really is a great [inaudible 00:21:38] and if we could be that exclusive partner that's able to bring supplements to the market to college students, then they had no problem with it.
Felix: Hmm, so do you feel like these vendors … Because a lot of them, I'm assuming, are kind of pitched these stories, right? You have a lot of businesses will come to them and say invest in us because we're going to go places. Did you feel like they've heard it all or did you bring any hard cold facts that were convincing? How were able to speak to them in a way that made them realize that this was legit business with a lot of potential, rather than just a one trying to sell their pipe dream.
Russell: I think you have to have passion. We definitely have some facts with us, not a ton honestly. For us it was … We really sold on emotion quite honestly and fortunately it ended up working out. Again, it's not an easy thing to do I don't think. I think we definitely got a little bit lucky and we were fortunate enough that there wasn't anyone targeting college students. It was an easily recognizable thing, we just really … We were the ones that brought it to their attention.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I want to take a quick little detour before we talk about the private lines. Because you mentioned that there was no one out there that was targeting college students, but there are tons of big brands, tons of big retailers today that already very much entrenched in the supplement and vitamin business. Were you guys ever concerned that they could just rear their head in, look at what you guys are doing, just come in and dominate the market that you guys had discovered?
Russell: Yeah, we always had that in the back of our minds, but at the end of the day we did know that no one knew our customer better than us. We were college students ourselves and no one knew better how college students thought than us. All the marketing, all the market research we did, all the research we really did in general, it was … We would go to our fraternity brothers, go to our friends, go to our sales reps who are college students, and figure out what they want and figure out what the best blend is between those things and so far it's worked out really well for us.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Makes sense. Cool, so now moving on to the second reason why that you wanted to get funding, which was to create your private line. Tell us a little bit more about this. Is this a private line of supplements as well?
Russell: Yeah, right now we have one product it's called Fuel and it's a pre-workout that you take before going to the gym. You take it about 25 minutes before. It gives you energy, it gives you focus, and it gives you a pop. Think of it as a energy drink specialized for just when you're working out.
Felix: Okay, makes sense. What are some skills or things you had to learn when you moved from buying and selling other vendors products to now creating your own private line?
Russell: Sure, so I think this goes back to knowing what your strengths are and finding people around you that have strengths that you don't have and ways that you can compliment each other. My business partner, Mike, he is our supplement guru. This guy knows every ingredient that you've never heard of before. He was really crucial in helping us formulate and really formulating our private line product Fuel. We took a look at a lot of the products that were out there and again we figured out which ones were our favorite, which ones were our friends favorites, and we did the best job that we could. We kept tweaking it and tweaking it until we had something that was really, really awesome, and that was Fuel.
Felix: Awesome. What's the process for creating your own supplements? How do you identify what ingredients to put in? How do you test it? How long is this entire process?
Russell: Sure, so it's a decently long process. We have a third party manufacturer that manufactures everything in a lab. One of the hardest things believe it or not is the flavoring of the product. Anytime we want to come out with a new flavor we fly down to our manufacturer and spend 1 to 2 days figuring out exactly how we want it. For example, the last flavor that we came out with was orange soda. We really wanted this to replicate our favorite childhood drink growing up. Everyone loves orange soda. Especially orange soda that gives you energy and has no calories. We had to get the carbonation exactly right and we had to make sure the orange was just perfect. Even for jungle juice when we were making the jungle juice flavor, my business partner Turan actually concocted his own jungle juice that he used to make when he was in his fraternity, minus the alcohol, and we literally just kept testing our version until we had it exact.
Felix: Do you beta test this with customers? How do you know that it's going to be a flavor they wanted before you place a large order?
Russell: Sure, so we talk to our reps. We don't really talk to our customers, but we talk to our sales reps that are on the ground who do talk to some customers, a very select few. We like to keep it as private as possible. We talk to some close friends and that's really it. That's really how we gauge the [inaudible 00:26:47] on most things that we do.
Felix: Were you able to work with existing vendors that you had brought from previously when you were ready to launch your own private line or did you have to find completely new partners?
Russell: Yeah, it was a totally different relationship for that part of our business.
Felix: I see. How were you able to find a partner like this? What were the steps involved? How did you determine that it was going to be the right partnership.
Russell: It goes back to actually having really good relationships with our vendors. We were actually referred to a couple different people and we figured out which manufacturer we liked the best. We did a couple samples with each of them and that's how we figured out who we thought we'd like to build a really long lasting relationship with.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Cool, so now I want to talk about the third reason that you needed funding. I think this one's going to be really interesting because you … It sounds like it's what really helped explode the growth of the business. Your rep and your affiliate network, your rep program, tell us a little bit more about this. How does it work?
Russell: If you never heard of Campus Protein before and you were at the gym with one of our Campus Protein reps, they'll probably come up to you and tell you about Campus Protein. They'll maybe give you a sample, maybe give you some work out tips, so they're trained in everything from health, nutrition, exercise, all of that. They each have their own individual link. For example, Campus Protein dot com slash Felix. Once you went to that link it's cookied into your browser and they're your customer for life. If you came … If I came to the site through you link and you would get credit for that sale.
Felix: Awesome. Make sense. I think one important thing that you mentioned was about how you guys are able to train them to understand how to talk with the product, how to educate the customer. What's that process like? How do you make sure that there's quality reps in your program and not someone that's out there that's spreading the wrong message or basically potentially tainting the brand?
Russell: Definitely. Yeah, again focus is really important for us and maintaining our brand image and having a consistent brand image is super important for us as well. The rep training program is something that we spent a long time on. At one point when we were early on we were just reaching out to friends to friends. Basically anyone that we could talk to that wanted to be a Campus Protein sales rep. At this point we have basically a bank of thousands and thousands of college students who want to be Campus Protein reps. We've built out technology that actually will go through that … Will go though those applications and filter them basing the criteria that we feel is best to be a Campus Protein rep. From there we take it to an interview process and from there they go through a bunch of training.
Felix: Very cool. Do you provide them with any other additional material or … Other than the training of course, are there other ways to prepare a rep to basically present or pitch your product well?
Russell: Absolutely. We provide them with everything that they need to be successful. Flyers, stickers, door hangers, banners, anything that you can imagine marketing wise we provide them with. It's really up to them how successful that they're going to be.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Is there, because it sounds like a lot of these reps are on colleges because obviously your demographic is highly targeted at colleges, there's obviously going to be a lot of turnover right? Because every 4 years at the most these people are leaving colleges and … Maybe they're still working with you guys, but basically the market changes over so … It seems at least kind of rapidly. Is that an issue?
Russell: It's actually more … It's more of an asset to us actually because we do have … Not only do we have every year, although there are some really great campus reps that are leaving, the really, really great ones we have the ability, since we do have such great relationships with our partners to place them in full-time positions, if it's not with Campus Protein, at one of our top vendors. We've done that with numerous reps at this point, so we've gotten a lot of our reps kind of their dream jobs which has been really humbling for us.
Felix: Makes sense. If someone out there is thinking about going down the same path and wants to launch a rep program, what are the first steps? How do you even begin to build out a rep program?
Russell: In the beginning it's definitely tough, right? You don't really have any basis to go off of. There's no initial starting point. The most important thing is getting a couple of really, really great ambassadors or reps early on. Those people are really going to be the foundation and structure of your program. Those are the people who are going to contribute, not necessarily in a sales or marketing, but maybe more routes. We have a ton of sales reps who maybe aren't the greatest at sales, but they can provide really good feedback of actual health and nutrition or somebody who's going to be competing or weight lifting.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). In general what should you look for in a successful rep. How do you identify if someone is going to be good at sales?
Russell: It's a tough thing to gauge because some people who think will hit it out of the park don't, and other people who are super shy and you may not have a ton of confidence in end up being some of your key players. We found that true for ourselves. Trial and error is really the best way to go about it. When the reps originally are applying for the position we ask them a couple of key questions that we think will at least kind of gauge for us if they will be a good fit or not.
Felix: Are there any kind of general questions that you think that the listeners might want to ask their reps if they're building out a rep program?
Russell: Hmm, that's a tough question.
Felix: Do you ever gauge them on how much they know about the company? Or does that matter as much as other factors?
Russell: We found questions such as how much they know about our company … If you have somebody who's …. Look, we've had people contact us who are super passionate about Campus Protein, really want to become a part of it, end up becoming a rep, and then don't really do anything. Then on the other hand we've had people, like I was saying, who don't really know about Campus Protein and we're able to educate them through our rep program. I think what it comes down to having a really good education program and really making sure that your messaging and your focus of your company is consistent.
Felix: I think you touched on something important here about how you might think a person's going to be a good rep early on, and then they might not turn out to be the best. What's the protocol there? Do you ever cut off reps or like, I'm not going to say reprimand them, but how do you course correct, I guess, a rep that might not be going down the right direction?
Russell: Yeah, so we have territory managers who manage different parts of the country and they're really in charge of that, but we definitely give people benefit of the doubt. We realize that sometimes coaching is necessary and coaching is needed, but after a certain period of time if you're not holding your own weight then maybe this wasn't the right match for you.
Felix: Okay. I think, did you mention earlier that there's a rep program in almost 300 colleges? Was that the number?
Russell: Yeah, that's correct.
Felix: That's amazing. What's the hierarchy needed to run a program like this. Because I know you mentioned that there are these regional, I guess, reps that … or territory reps. How does it all built out. Can you walk us through the hierarchy?
Russell: Definitely, so my business partner Mike, he heads the entire program. Underneath him there are 4 territory managers across the country. We have it split into demographics that make sense for our business, so based on where our top colleges are. Underneath them are the reps right now, but we're actually in the process of breaking it out even further into sub-territories, so underneath the territory managers we'll have sub-territories as we continue to grow. Like I said, we have over 1200 reps and the more reps you have the tougher it is to manage and really maintain that consistent messaging that I was talking about earlier.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you were to launch this entire program over again, are there things that you would do differently that would make things easier today when you're operating at this scale?
Russell: Yes! I think that from day 1, and we didn't have this from day 1, having a center … A one all-inclusive center where all the information you will ever need is there as well as a place to communicate and collaborate with your peers. I think that's super important. We found that it's super beneficial to the reps as far as getting new sales ideas or get new marketing ideas. A lot of them are able to learn from each other. It actually takes a lot off of the management side when they're able to self service and learn from each other.
Felix: Yeah, I think that's a great point. Connecting people together I think is very key to making sure that there are these ideas, you know opportunities to discuss different ways to improve what they're doing in your case improve how they're selling the product. With the rep program, once you guys launched that, can you give an idea how quickly this grew the business? How successful has the business today?
Russell: Yeah, I can't unfortunately break out the exact revenue figures, but I can tell you that we are a 7 figure revenue business.
Felix: That's amazing. Now in terms of actually running this rep program, are there particular tools or applications that you used that are readily available for others out there that they can also take a look at?
Russell: Definitely, I would highly recommend taking a look into LeadDyno. They've been really good to us. It's a really great program. It simplifies everything a lot and it's able to do a ton of different things and really lay it out in a neat and simple easy to use way.
Felix: One other interesting marketing channel that I saw you guys operating in is with Pinterest. I don't think you guys are nearly as active on there as like, for Instagram for example. Which I think is probably the most popular social media platform for you guys. You still have over a thousand followers on the Pinterest page. Pinterest is typically associated more with the female demographic and when you think about supplements and working out, fitness, obviously it's I guess, inclusive of both males and females, but it's typically seen as a male dominated demographic. How are you able to make it work with Pinterest when it's not necessarily typically considered the ideal demographic for your type of product?
Russell: Sure, so Instagram actually is decently big for us. We have a little over 50,000 followers on Instagram and it has been for us a really great converter to sales. We see one of our highest conversion rates actually coming from Instagram because our products are so visual and because transformations are so visual and because a lot of the products we sell have some really cool flavors. We sell one product that's called sour batch kids and you know you can imagine what it tastes like after your favorite candy. Those things are really visual, but to Pinterest we recently started on Pinterest actually because of Shopify's integrated buy button. That's been really successful for us.
Felix: What are you … What's your strategy on there? What are you guy pinning? I'm looking at it now and I do see that you kind of do cater to the more of the female demographic on here. Is it because that you recognize or you've seen the statics where it is more of a female dominated platform?
Russell: Yeah, and we have tried catering to males on Pinterest, it just didn't work as well for us. Instagram seems to work really well for males for us. There is a really big growing portion of our business which is the female market. More women are looking to take supplements and are looking to get toned and are not looking to just … Maybe they are looking to just run or something like that, but you can take a pre workout for that and really enhance your workout.
Felix: I think this is an important topic then because if you do start off your business focusing on a specific demographic whether it be based on sex or based on whatever it is and you decide to start, not necessarily change the direction, but including or growing the scope of your target demographic or your target customers. Does that mean you have to change the way you brand? What does it mean when it comes down to the marketing itself when you do want to essentially go after an equally large demographic?
Russell: Definitely. We over time kind of changed the direction. At one point we were saying should we be more like an Axe, like very male dominated brand. What we figured out was there is such a growing portion of females using supplements and wanting to use supplements and wanting to learn more about them and wanting to do that, that it doesn't really make sense to completely exclude that part of the market. There had been certain marketing campaigns that we have done a few years ago that maybe we wouldn't do today. I think that if you took a look at the look and feel of our site over time, you would see that it's kind of slowly evolved to be more neutral for male and female.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that makes sense. Speaking of your site, I saw a couple cool things on there that I wanted to touch on. One thing is your top 25 page. Tell us a little bit more about this. What is a top 25 page and how did you come up with the idea to display this page?
Russell: Sure, so for us it's social proof, right? You want … When you're working out, when you're doing anything really involved in fitness … Whether people want to believe it or not everyone's kind of looking at each other at the gym. Everyone's kind of wondering, what's that guy doing? What's that girl taking? How did they get to that size? How did they get so cut? How did they so shredded? The best way for us to display that is in a top 25. These are our top 25 moving products that your peers are currently taking. It's actually one of the … Next to our to our stacks page. We have a page called stacks, which actually takes different top products from different vendors and combines them at a discount for the customer. Next to that page it is one of our highest viewed pages on site.
Felix: Yeah, I really like this because I think a lot of times people just want to know what's the best. They don't want to spend too much time learning about all the specific details and they don't want to have to think about it. For example, whenever I go shopping for something that I'm not too familiar with, I don't want to … I don't have the time or I just don't have the energy or don't care enough to dig too much into details. I just want to know what's the best. What's everyone else using. I'm just going to stick with that.
I think that's the reason why I wanted to bring this up because I would like the idea of laying it out this way and showing people, like you're saying, there's social proof behind it. Showing what other people are buying. I think that helps take away a lot of the analysis paralysis that comes with shopping for products like this. Because there's just so much to learn. Going to be so much education that's required, but when you lay it out like this and say, hey these are the most popular products. Don't have to think about it too much. I think that helps a lot with a buyer when they come shopping for your products.
Russell: Definitely. From what we found, people just want to see the products that work. If you'd stacked us up next to our biggest competitor, we only carry about 8% of the brands that they carry. I think having just a really simplified and really focused product mix is important. Because why carry anything but the best. If these are the best products then there really no reason to carry anything else.
Felix: Speaking of this, you said that you only 8& of the brands that your competitors carry. Do you spend a lot of time cutting out products, adding new products in, and see how they do and cutting them out. What's your process behind that?
Russell: Constantly. We've actually built up a proprietary method in which we use to select a product. Let's say we're bringing on a new vendor. We won't bring on the entire line in one shot. We'll bring in one product at a time and there even are some brands on our site where we don't carry the whole spectrum of products that they sell. The reason is that our demographic's super specific and we think that's one of the really great things about our business. We really have a niche and we know our customer really well. We also know which products they really aren't going to like that much. It helps with inventory turnover obviously as well, but it also just helps our customers figure out which products are the best and we've already done a lot of the work for them.
Felix: Hmm. Amazing. What's your day to day like? When you step into work in the mornings how are you spending your days?
Russell: Honestly every day's very different. I do everything from sales, marketing, meetings, basically I still wear a ton of hats and my business partners still wear a ton of hats as well and it keeps us all really well versed on what's going on in different parts of the business.
Felix: What do you think you add the most value for the company? If you could only pick one thing to spend your time on what would that be?
Russell: Growth strategy. I think for me, figuring out how to take our business to the next level, and what areas we need to focus in in order to make that happen, I think is one of my strengths.
Felix: I like that you do focus on growth strategy because that's such a high leverage activity. Because if you spend your time on that end, the sales, the revenue comes through your doors. It solves a lot of problems for the rest of the business. How do you figure out where … What's the process that you go through to identify what areas you should focus on to grow the business faster.
Russell: Definitely, so every quarter we kind of take a look at all of our different channels. Where do the most sales come from. Did they come from the reps this quarter. Did they come from all my marketing strategies that we've been doing. Or maybe they came from some place that we totally didn't even realize and it's something that we really need to focus on. For example, we all of a sudden started getting a bunch of really, really big orders. We thought at first oh man, are these maybe some fraudulent orders, but no it turns out that a bunch of colleges and universities themselves were looking to purchase products from us. We figured out that it's definitely worth spending our time and building that out and seeing what other colleges and universities we could work directly with.
Felix: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Makes a lot of sense. You mentioned LeadDyno earlier on. Are there any other apps or tools that you or your team relies on heavily to help run the business?
Russell: We found that for reviews Yotpo works really well. We use Yotpo for reviews. We're testing out this feature for them it's image curation, so you can actually take a photo of the product or if you do take a photo of the product on Instagram, we can tag it directly to that product's page. We found that the pages that it's on it's converting really high, so that tool works really well for us. Nosto which is a product recommendation tool similar to kind of the one Amazon uses. It's been working really well for us and our conversion rate on that is also very high. Let's see. Off the top of my head I think those are some of the most important ones that we're utilizing. Actually there is one other one that we recently picked up that's been great for us as far as fulfillment and inventory management, all that stuff. It's called Ship Hero. It's kind of an all in one solution where they do inventory management, they do bar coding, and scanning and they also do label products. Instead of having bunch of different tools it's kind of an all in one solution, which has so far been really great for us.
Felix: Very cool. In terms of the next year, what are you guys focusing on? What are some goals or what are some things that the listeners can look out for from you guys?
Russell: Definitely, so we're looking to expand our private line of products again. It's going to fun. It's going to be college focused like we always have. We're going to be expanding to some to more colleges and schools, so look out for that. We recently just landed an agreement with licensing some college logos, so we've been working on that a little bit as well.
Felix: Very cool, so thanks so much Russell. Campus Protein dot com again is the website. It's a store. Anywhere else you recommend our listeners check out if they want to follow along what you guys are up?
Russell: Definitely check out our snap chat. We have different take overs every day. We have different reps, different vendors taking over and the handle's just Campus Protein for that. Check out our Instagram as well. We've got a ton of great content on there. Everything from recipes to any new products that are coming out. The handle for that is just at Campus Protein.
Felix: Awesome. Thanks so much Russell.
Russell: Absolutely. Thanks so much Felix.
Felix: Thanks for listening to Shopify Masters, the e-commerce marketing podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs. To start your store today visit Shopify dot com slash masters to claim your extended 30 day free trial.


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February 23, 2016
Contact: Andrew Jerome, 202-314-3106
WASHINGTON (February 23, 2016) – In response to legislation introduced last week by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to set up a federal GMO labeling system, National Farmers Union (NFU) President Roger Johnson released the following statement:
"National Farmers Union (NFU) represents 200,000 family farmers and ranchers across the nation who employ a wide variety of practices and philosophies. Many of our members have chosen to incorporate genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into their production methods, while others have made different choices. The rights of GMO and non-GMO producers should be respected as equal while public concerns about GMOs are evaluated by federal agencies.
"NFU also values consumer rights, including the ability of consumers to have access to as much pertinent information as they want to know about their food. We support mandatory labeling of foods derived from genetically engineered plants, although we do not have policy on what such labeling should look like. As such, NFU opposes the proposed GMO labeling bill in its current form."
National Farmers Union has been working since 1902 to protect and enhance the economic well-being and quality of life for family farmers, ranchers and rural communities through advocating grassroots-driven policy positions adopted by its membership.

subset: commoncrawl


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For the first time, MIT researchers have enabled a soft robotic arm to understand its configuration in 3D space, by leveraging only motion and position data from its own "sensorized" skin.
Soft robots constructed from highly compliant materials, similar to those found in living organisms, are being championed as safer, and more adaptable, resilient, and bioinspired alternatives to traditional rigid robots. But giving autonomous control to these deformable robots is a monumental task because they can move in a virtually infinite number of directions at any given moment. That makes it difficult to train planning and control models that drive automation.
Traditional methods to achieve autonomous control use large systems of multiple motion-capture cameras that provide the robots feedback about 3D movement and positions. But those are impractical for soft robots in real-world applications.
In a paper being published in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, the researchers describe a system of soft sensors that cover a robot's body to provide "proprioception" — meaning awareness of motion and position of its body. That feedback runs into a novel deep-learning model that sifts through the noise and captures clear signals to estimate the robot's 3D configuration. The researchers validated their system on a soft robotic arm resembling an elephant trunk, that can predict its own position as it autonomously swings around and extends.
The sensors can be fabricated using off-the-shelf materials, meaning any lab can develop their own systems, says Ryan Truby, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) who is co-first author on the paper along with CSAIL postdoc Cosimo Della Santina.
"We're sensorizing soft robots to get feedback for control from sensors, not vision systems, using a very easy, rapid method for fabrication," he says. "We want to use these soft robotic trunks, for instance, to orient and control themselves automatically, to pick things up and interact with the world. This is a first step toward that type of more sophisticated automated control."
One future aim is to help make artificial limbs that can more dexterously handle and manipulate objects in the environment. "Think of your own body: You can close your eyes and reconstruct the world based on feedback from your skin," says co-author Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "We want to design those same capabilities for soft robots."
Shaping soft sensors
A longtime goal in soft robotics has been fully integrated body sensors. Traditional rigid sensors detract from a soft robot body's natural compliance, complicate its design and fabrication, and can cause various mechanical failures. Soft-material-based sensors are a more suitable alternative, but require specialized materials and methods for their design, making them difficult for many robotics labs to fabricate and integrate in soft robots.
While working in his CSAIL lab one day looking for inspiration for sensor materials, Truby made an interesting connection. "I found these sheets of conductive materials used for electromagnetic interference shielding, that you can buy anywhere in rolls," he says. These materials have "piezoresistive" properties, meaning they change in electrical resistance when strained. Truby realized they could make effective soft sensors if they were placed on certain spots on the trunk. As the sensor deforms in response to the trunk's stretching and compressing, its electrical resistance is converted to a specific output voltage. The voltage is then used as a signal correlating to that movement.
But the material didn't stretch much, which would limit its use for soft robotics. Inspired by kirigami — a variation of origami that includes making cuts in a material — Truby designed and laser-cut rectangular strips of conductive silicone sheets into various patterns, such as rows of tiny holes or crisscrossing slices like a chain link fence. That made them far more flexible, stretchable, "and beautiful to look at," Truby says.
Credit: Ryan L. Truby, MIT CSAIL
The researchers' robotic trunk comprises three segments, each with four fluidic actuators (12 total) used to move the arm. They fused one sensor over each segment, with each sensor covering and gathering data from one embedded actuator in the soft robot. They used "plasma bonding," a technique that energizes a surface of a material to make it bond to another material. It takes roughly a couple hours to shape dozens of sensors that can be bonded to the soft robots using a handheld plasma-bonding device.
Credit: Ryan L. Truby, MIT CSAIL
"Learning" configurations
As hypothesized, the sensors did capture the trunk's general movement. But they were really noisy. "Essentially, they're nonideal sensors in many ways," Truby says. "But that's just a common fact of making sensors from soft conductive materials. Higher-performing and more reliable sensors require specialized tools that most robotics labs do not have."
To estimate the soft robot's configuration using only the sensors, the researchers built a deep neural network to do most of the heavy lifting, by sifting through the noise to capture meaningful feedback signals. The researchers developed a new model to kinematically describe the soft robot's shape that vastly reduces the number of variables needed for their model to process.
In experiments, the researchers had the trunk swing around and extend itself in random configurations over approximately an hour and a half. They used the traditional motion-capture system for ground truth data. In training, the model analyzed data from its sensors to predict a configuration, and compared its predictions to that ground truth data which was being collected simultaneously. In doing so, the model "learns" to map signal patterns from its sensors to real-world configurations. Results indicated, that for certain and steadier configurations, the robot's estimated shape matched the ground truth.
Next, the researchers aim to explore new sensor designs for improved sensitivity and to develop new models and deep-learning methods to reduce the required training for every new soft robot. They also hope to refine the system to better capture the robot's full dynamic motions.
Currently, the neural network and sensor skin are not sensitive to capture subtle motions or dynamic movements. But, for now, this is an important first step for learning-based approaches to soft robotic control, Truby says: "Like our soft robots, living systems don't have to be totally precise. Humans are not precise machines, compared to our rigid robotic counterparts, and we do just fine."


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Release Blitz: Crowned by Hate by Amo Jones
Crowned by Hate by Amo Jones
Series: Crowned Trilogy #1
Genre: Dark Romance/Thriller
Release Date: November 14, 2017
Some would say I have a privileged life. Daughter of the current President of the United States, wealthy, famous, and all things that some girls wish they had.
Only I'd dream of having a simple life. A life where I wasn't marrying the scariest man I have ever met. Well, I thought I had just met him, but it turns out, there's so much I don't know about myself. That's all thanks to a past so twisted, so warped, that no amount of money, or presidential status could wipe it clean.
I'm the rebel child. Or as some may see it, the disappointment. I've never cared about expensive wedding gowns, or how much someone paid for a tailored suit. I don't care if your wedding dress is from Walmart, or if it's from some fancy, upscale designer line.
So why am I marrying the devil dressed in a thousand-dollar
I'm about to find out how I got here. To marrying one of the most powerful men in the country. The road to finding out, though, is paved with darkness, painted with the blood of innocents, and it leads my ass straight to hell. Only this hell is a multi-million-dollar penthouse suite in New York City where Bryant Saint Royal, sits on his throne.
Purchase Links
Author Bio
Amo is a full-time writer from New Zealand who loves long romantic walks to the wine cellar.
She loves to write like how she lives, hanging on the edge of insanity with a wine glass in one hand and her morals-or lack thereof- in the other.
Those are not my monkeys, I swear....
Oh those hellhounds? Yeah, those are mine.
Author Links


text:
An Ohio judge has told a man who threw an iguana at a restaurant manager that he's not allowed to brag about the crime.
Forty-nine-year-old Arnold Teeter pleaded guilty Thursday to cruelty to animals and resisting arrest.
Painesville Municipal Judge Michael Cicconetti (chik-oh-NET'-ee) sentenced Teeter to two years of probation. The conditions also include that Teeter cannot live in a home with animals for five years.
In April, authorities said Teeter pulled the 2-foot-long (0.61-meter) iguana from under his sweatshirt, swung it around by its tail and threw it at a Perkins Restaurant manager but missed.
The iguana suffered a fractured leg but recovered.
The lizard had ended up with Teeter after getting away from its rightful owners while they were moving. It has since been returned to them.
The Associated Press contributed to this article


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The triple whammy: towards the eclipse of women's rights
DENIZ KANDIYOTI 19 January 2015
Caught in the cross-fire of political opportunism, neo-liberal triumphalism and geopolitical adventurism, feminist platforms are in retreat. Only a politics of coalition building can avert their eclipse.
Eclipses are rare and mercifully transitory phenomena. They come about when planets enter into a specific alignment that plunges us into darkness. Had there been a political equivalent of such phenomena I would venture to say that women's rights- which have ostensibly never enjoyed greater international visibility- are heading for dangerously turbulent times. No single or dramatic incident presages this possibility. It is, rather, the persistent drip-drip effect of a myriad of apparently unrelated influences that feed into a "feminism-phobia" that, sadly, has become quite a la mode.
You may well wonder what led me to this gloomy prognosis at a point in time when a leading UK newspaper declared 2014 as "the best year ever for women", celebrating it as " a year of feminist insurrection against male violence: a year of mounting refusal to be silent, refusal to let our lives and torments be erased or dismissed" There is little room for such complacency. On the contrary, there is a strong case to be made that a trio of influences is impoverishing the debates relating to women's rights and constricting the discursive spaces for a feminist agenda.
Before embarking on a discussion of these influences, I would like to draw attention to an apparent paradox. Between 2011-2014, we opened aplatform on openDemocracy 50.50 to monitor and analyse the gender effects of the 'Arab spring' and of protest movements in the Middle East more generally.
One of the most hopeful features of youth-led protests, which tookunprecedented forms for the region, was their anti-authoritarian and anti-patriarchal thrust and their recognition of the primarily political nature of gender based violence. Not only were women taking part in street protests and being vocal in the public domain, but they were joined by many men of their generation in an unprecedented display of cross-gender solidarity. These movements were not clamouring for an Islamic state, nor did the parties of political Islam play a key leadership role despite their initial prominence in successor regimes. Notwithstanding the devastating developments that followed, there were unmistakable signs of heightened aspirations and a demand for inclusive citizenship, gender justice and equality in the protests themselves.
Dancing in Gezi Park. Credit: Uriel Sinai
Yet despite evidence of grass-roots mobilization in pursuit of a broad range of rights, including women's rights to freedom from violence and to public participation, at the level of academic, political and popular discourse, feminism was being increasingly discredited and dismissed as either irrelevant or passḗ or, even worse, as the handmaiden of imperialism and of overbearing security states. How can we explain this disjuncture? How did the struggle for women's rights- which started out as one of the emancipatory movements of the past two centuries alongside the fight against slavery and racism- end up being kicked about and maligned not only by right wing misogynists or clerical establishments demanding a monopoly on the regulation of gender and sexuality, but by authors and commentators who consider themselves left-wing or liberal? Could we conceive of being told that the fight against racism had "gone too far" or "gone wrong" (except in extreme white supremacist quarters)? Yet it is quite commonplace, even banal, to hear this charge in relation to feminism. How did we get here?
The ugly sisters of feminism: the global nexus and its perverse appropriations
There have been at least three defining encounters between women's movements, which are historically diverse and context specific, and powerful global influences.
The first is the encounter with the global "institutionalization" of standards and mechanisms for gender equality through the workings of the United Nations (UN) system and major international donors. Leaving aside the broader debates on the shortfalls or merits of international human rights law, it is important to acknowledge the diverse ways in which women's rights platforms became depoliticized through co-optation by donor- assisted governments (most glaringly so in the case of repressive, non-democratic regimes). In the case of the Arab uprisings, the previously opportunistic nature of engagements with gender equality platforms contributed to their rapid derailment and demise and to attempts to claw back existing rights.
Jumping on the gender equality bandwagon was a "soft option" used by numerous authoritarian regimes to indicate their commitment to ademocratization process they had no intention of honouring. The same logic applies to other attempts to co-opt liberal norms in the realms of gender and sexuality, such as pinkwashing Israel to boost its democratic credentials, thus deflecting attention from the human rights abuses perpetrated against Palestinians.
Do these appropriations of liberal/egalitarian norms turn women's rights activists using international frameworks as a point of reference into uncritical dupes? What is there to be gained from a nihilistic approach to rights enshrined in international law? And what are the risks involved? These are questions that cannot be dismissed lightly.
The second ill-fated encounter took place after the global turn to neo-liberalism since the Regan-Thatcher era. Whereas initially many women's movements were explicitly committed to social justice and redistributive goals, their incorporation into donor-funded machineries in the neo-liberal age produced both an 'ngo'isation of political movements , with women's ngos often acting as contractors for governments and donors, and the de-radicalization of their objectives, now transformed into technocratic fixes for the "empowerment" of women within the parameters of a market economy. In the West, this gave rise to a triumphalist boardroom or corporatist feminism extolling the virtues of the capitalist market for women who "make it". In the South, meanwhile, the spaces left vacant by evaporating state provision and the dearth of social welfare were occupied by actors and social movements with conservative agendas and roots in faith-based organizations (whether these be Catholic, Evangelical or Muslim). Populist and religious movements claiming to speak on behalf of the poor, the marginalized and the powerless in different regional contexts increased their appeal regardless of the often authoritarian or dogmatic overtones of their political messages. The drifting apart of gender justice and social justice goals was to have grave consequences: it marked out women's rights as the alleged preoccupation of a privileged elite, especially in societies where top-down modernization agendas were implemented by authoritarian regimes. Losing sight of the fact that feminism cannot be divorced from a broader social justice agenda was to exact serious costs.
The final and most devastating encounter was yet to come. It took shape in the geopolitical context of the War on Terror following the 9/11 events in the United States and Operation Enduring Freedom that led to the overthrow of the Taliban. The invocation of oppressed Muslim women as part of the rationale for military intervention provoked predictable outrage in the face of the naked instrumentalism behind the feminist conversion of the Bush administration. This spawned a veritable cottage industry of critiques of feminism as imperialism (about which I shall say more below) and of the place of women's rights as tools in this arsenal of oppression.
One of the inadvertent consequences of these critiques, is to deligitimize the struggles of women in Afghanistan who attempt to expand their rights by whatever slender means at their disposal (including references to international conventions such as CEDAW and participating in donor-funded projects). Could they do so now without incurring the risk of being accused as abetters of imperialism? Does the fact that Western powers used the plight of Afghan women as propaganda material to drum up public support for the NATO intervention turn women into "native collaborators" when they opt to fight for their rights in the framework of international law? Or would they have been altogether better advised to keep silent or even find virtue in what the Taliban has to offer them - something that some Western commentators did in fact suggest at a point when negotiations for a political settlement with the Taliban were on the table.
Such powers of dissuasion and intimidation can be overwhelming in polarized and conflict-ridden societies. This intimidation is already being perpetrated, by force of arms, by formations such as the Taliban; a Greek chorus of critics denouncing feminism as imperialism can only add to their woes and boost the propaganda arsenal of those opposing them. But why is it that women are being made to face such perverse choices?
Beyond feminism-as-imperialism
Critiques of feminism as imperialism are neither new nor the product of the War on Terror. Indeed, as early as 1984 Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar used the term "imperial feminism" in the British context to argue that the pretensions of white-middle class women's movements to represent global "sisterhood" were based on a denial of racism (and difference) and of the more general oppression of Third World women by relations of imperial domination. Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, became the foundational text for feminist post-colonial scholarship which has a long and distinguished pedigree. This legacy is now being built upon by Anti-Imperialist-Transnational-Feminist Studies (AITFS), albeit in an intellectually messier way since anti-imperialism is sometimes made to serve as the "silver bullet" to address all oppressions.
No one is contesting the fact that the colonial feminism perpetrated by European powers rested on the Orientalist trope of a backward and misogynistic Muslim world whose women needed liberation through the agency of an enlightened West. Indeed, this came to constitute the "original sin" of women's movements. The entanglements of feminism with the politics of colonialism meant that women activists and early reformers were left with impossible choices. Those who sought an expansion of their rights under nominally secular post-colonial regimes were under enormouspressure to conform to anti-colonial nationalist priorities that singled women out as the repositories of cultural authenticity, even before resurgent Islamist tendencies got into the act of upping the stakes even further. Feminists engaging with Islam and attempting to unsettle patriarchal interpretations of the Sharia were undoubtedly seeking a way out of this sterile bind.
But, alas, far from alleviating this enduring predicament the current conjuncture has led to a further hardening of positions. During the long history of anti-colonial movements, from the Haitian revolution of the 1790s to the independence movements of the 1960s and '70s in Asia and Africa, the struggles against colonialism did not rely on a wholesale repudiation of the revolutionary ideals of the West. In the polarized context of contemporary geopolitics, however, anything assumed to emanate from the imperial West may be considered as tainted goods by theoretical purists who denounce the products of the Enlightenment, most particularly secular humanism, as the fount of all evil. I followed this line of argumentation with a mild degree of intellectual curiosity at first, followed by mounting ennui (given the repetitive and almost formulaic nature of restatements of this position) until I got my wake-up call: never mind secular rights activists, even Muslim feminists endeavouring to find an indigenous voice for change and reform were now in the crosshairs of critics. To the extent that they fail to repudiate the principles of egalitarianism enshrined in international law- another tool of empire- could they not be similarly tainted with liberalism and, by association, imperialism?
This logic may, of course, equally apply to any attempts at reform within Islam since Western powers are not only interested in, but actively, and quite ineptly, promoting the search for a so-called "moderate" Islam as a means of containing jihadi tendencies seen as a terrorist threat. To add yet another rhetorical question to my list, I would like to ask, again, : should the poisoned atmosphere of geopolitics permanently muzzle secular, ( or, indeed religious) dissenters in the Muslim world? Those voices, by the way, have always existed and been systematically persecuted. Let us not add to their burden.
Playing a weak hand
We have now reached a disabling cul-de-sac that must be overcome if we wish to open up rather than constrict and constrain the spaces within which diverse feminist voices and positions can find legitimate articulation. The exchanges on imperialism and feminism featured on openDemocracy between Deepa Kumar, Meredith Tax, Saadia Toor and Afiya Zia, point to the urgency of transcending the parameters of these discussions. The protagonists - all women, all on the left, all pacifists and none inimical to women's struggles for their rights - were not, in my view, arguing about imperialism per se but ultimately about the types of alliances feminists might entertain, condone or refrain from in pursuing their objectives. Even the all pervasive tensions around the secularist/Islamist dichotomy appear to me as surface phenomena concealing the deeper messiness of politics in countries like Pakistan. Here, a US- funded military has nurtured jihaditendencies for its own geopolitical and domestic ends, tendencies which have destabilized the entire polity and become the target of the US War on Terror.
Where does one even begin to draw the lines of entanglements with imperialism in such a context? With women's NGOs benefiting from WoT funding largesse under Musharraf's military regime? With feminists- and other groups- giving qualified support to the military for finally turning against jihadi groups with US assistance in the hope this may jolt the noxious nexus of Pakistani politics onto a new track? Let us face the fact that women's rights activists are frequently thrust into impossible situations not of their own making and must muddle through, making pragmatic choices and alliances in order to play what is an extraordinarily weak hand. Because this is exactly what we are talking about; not the fiction of a powerful movement with the might of empire behind it, but the reality of weak and politically marginal constituencies whose meagre legal and political gains are at the mercy of political forces over which they have very little control. And whose rights, tenuous and fragile, have long been and continue to be the punching ball of male-dominated politics.
It may serve us well to go back to basics and remember the words of British suffragist Rebecca West when she said "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." Let us not delude ourselves that this objective has been achieved. We do not need anything as dramatic as the IS slave markets of Mosul to remind ourselves of that fact. We only need to inject some common sense and realism into our evaluation of where women's rights really stand when we take a broader perspective. Let us not overlook the fact that there are powerful transnational alliances cutting across continents and world religions aiming, above all, to establish the principle that matters relating to sexuality, to the control of female bodies, and to reproductive choice do not belong to the sphere of civic deliberation, public choice, or human rights but to a domain of non-negotiable morality defined by doctrinal imperatives. Such is the momentum of these platforms that the UN failed to pass a resolution for a Fifth World Conference on Women from fear of the consequences of re-opening international agreements on women's rights. Furthermore, this kulturkampf over the politics of gender does not readily map onto North / South or Christendom/Islam divisions. While some mobilize for gay rights in the US, others are busy bombing abortion clinics. And it is not only in Uganda that gays fear for their lives. No region, country or religion holds a monopoly on fanaticism or plain bigotry. Nor do these positions necessarily pit men against women since there are cross-gender alliances on both sides of these arguments; this, in short, is about politics. Ultra-conservative forces, diverse as they are, are better established, better organized and better funded and many are not adverse to the use of violence. It is time to join the dots of this challenging conjuncture and creatively seek political alliances that can help to make the most of the weak hand most women's rights movements and sexual liberties platforms have been dealt around the world.
To return to my astronomical metaphor, unless some planets rotating blindly in their set orbits are knocked off their course through our deliberate efforts and our skills at coalition building we shall unwittingly be expediting and legitimizing an eclipse of women's rights. The principal ray of hope in this difficult landscape is that the sociological realities of many societies are running ahead of the ideologies of social control and authoritarian governance that power holders wield.
A younger generation with new sensibilities- women and men, secular and religious, diverse in backgrounds and sexual orientation- is speaking to us with a new voice. Their demands for bread, freedom and dignity are still unmet. Let us listen with humility and open our minds to new possibilities.
Read more articles on 50.50's platform Women and the 'Arab spring' monitoring and analysing the gender effects of the 'Arab spring' and of protest movements in the Middle East more generally.


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Other information which can be viewed on these pages is listed on our committee home page including how to download our new app for tablets and smartphones.
If you require any information regarding these pages please
Democratic Services.


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Nobel Prize genius Crick was under the influence LSD
when he discovered the secret of life
By Alun Rees
Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.
The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.
Crick, who died ten days ago [2004-07-28], aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD, then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy, to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.
It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon, a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary, who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing 'acid' in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth £2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrested. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and Release.
"They have a philosophy," Harker told me at the time. "They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.
"Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.
"It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and
probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man
like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD,
then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration."
Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge. He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: "Print a word of it and I'll sue."
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NFPA 70 National Electrical Code (NEC)
ID 6882 | | Visite: 7839 | Documenti normazione ENTI | Permalink: https://www.certifico.com/id/6882 |
NFPA 70 National Electrical Code (NEC)
Ed. 2017
Adopted in all 50 states, the NEC is the benchmark for safe electrical design, installation, and inspection to protect people and property from electrical hazards.
90.2 Scope.
(A) Covered. This Code covers the installation and removal of electrical conductors, equipment, and raceways; signaling and communications conductors, equipment, and raceways; and optical fiber cables and raceways for the following:
(1) Public and private premises, including buildings, structures, mobile homes, recreational vehicles, and floating buildings
(2) Yards, lots, parking lots, carnivals, and industrial substations
(3) Installations of conductors and equipment that connect to the supply of electricity
(4) Installations used by the electric utility, such as office buildings, warehouses, garages, machine shops, and recreational buildings, that are not an integral part of a generating plant, substation, or control center
(B) Not Covered. This Code does not cover the following:
(1) Installations in ships, watercraft other than floating buildings, railway rolling stock, aircraft, or automotive vehicles other than mobile homes and recreational vehicles
Informational Note: Although the scope of this Code indicates that the Code does not cover installations in ships, portions of this Code are incorporated by reference into Title 46, Code of
Federal Regulations, Parts 110–113.
(2) Installations underground in mines and self-propelled mobile surface mining machinery and its attendant electrical trailing cable
(3) Installations of railways for generation, transformation, transmission, energy storage, or distribution of power used exclusively for operation of rolling stock or installations used exclusively for signaling and communications purposes
(4) Installations of communications equipment under the exclusive control of communications utilities located outdoors or in building spaces used exclusively for such installations
(5) Installations under the exclusive control of an electric utility where such installations
a. Consist of service drops or service laterals, and associated metering, or
b. Are on property owned or leased by the electric utility for the purpose of communications, metering, generation, control, transformation, transmission, energy storage, or distribution of electric energy, or
c. Are located in legally established easements or rights-of-way, or
d. Are located by other written agreements either designated by or recognized by public service commissions, utility commissions, or other regulatory agencies having jurisdiction for such installations. These written agreements shall be limited to installations for the purpose of communications, metering, generation, control, transformation, transmission, energy storage, or distribution of electric energy where legally established easements or rights-of-way cannot be obtained. These installations shall be limited to federal lands, Native American reservations through the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs, military bases, lands controlled by port authorities and state agencies and departments, and lands owned by railroads.
Informational Note to (4) and (5): Examples of utilities may include those entities that are typically designated or recognized by governmental law or regulation by public service/utility commissions and that install, operate, and maintain electric supply (such as generation, transmission, or distribution systems) or communications systems (such as telephone, CATV,
Internet, satellite, or data services). Utilities may be subject to compliance with codes and standards covering their regulated activities as adopted under governmental law or regulation.
Additional information can be found through consultation with the appropriate governmental bodies, such as state regulatory commissions, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission.
(C) Special Permission. The authority having jurisdiction for enforcing this Code may grant exception for the installation of conductors and equipment that are not under the exclusive control of the electric utilities and are used to connect the electric utility supply system to the service conductors of the premises served, provided such installations are outside a building or structure, or terminate inside at a readily accessible location nearest the point of entrance of the service conductors.
Book sulla NFPA 79 norme elettriche nordamericane per macchine industriali
Descrizione | Livello | Dimensione | Downloads | |
NFPA 70 - National Electrical Code 2017.pdf NFPA 2018 |
7248 kB | 24 |


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St. Albert Standby Generators
Whenever harsh weather, faults at power stations and damages to electric transmission lines cause your St. Albert home or business to lose power, don't you hate the helpless feeling that sinks in once you realize that this won't pass in just a couple of minutes? We rely on power to get through our days and in the event that you are forced to go without it for an extended period of time, how do you plan on getting by? Well, you won't have to rely on your survival instincts if you invest in a standby generator.
You never know when a power outage will arise. If you don't want it to affect your home or business, then you need to be prepared with a backup power source and standby generators continue to be one of the best ways to have it when the main grid can't supply the power you need.
If you want to invest in a standby generator for your St. Albert home or business, then contact Jem Electric Services today. We have been proud to install and maintain standby generators for homes and businesses all over the area for an affordable price. We know that our clients need their standby generators to be reliable, which is why they continue to seek us out for our services as one of the most reliable electrical companies in the area.
To discuss what you'll need out of a standby generator, give Jem Electric Services a call today.
How Do Standby Generators Work?
By and large, standby generators consists of two very important products: the standby generator itself and an automatic transfer switch. The two work together so that when your home or business loses power, it will only be a matter of seconds before the backup power takes over.
Both the standby generator and the automatic transfer switch are professionally installed by members of Jem Electric Services's skilled team to your building's existing wiring. The generator will sit constantly at the ready and when the system senses that there's been an interruption with the utility power flowing through your home or business, it takes over within seconds. And once the generator system senses utility power is back online, power is automatically transferred back to utility power and the standby generator shuts down until the next time it's needed.
Types of Standby Generators
Standby generators are largely divided into two categories: natural gas or liquid propane and diesel or gasoline.
Standby generators that run on natural gas or liquid propane are connected directly to supply lines. These tend to be more efficient systems, but if the municipal gas supply lines become damaged during a natural disaster, the generator will not work.
Diesel or gasoline generators might require the installation of a permanent fuel tank, but at least gasoline is typically easy to find.
Contact Us Today
For all your residential and commercial standby generator needs, look no further than St. Albert's most trusted professionals at Jem Electric Services.


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You have a website – great! But that's just the beginning. Now you need to create great content that ranks in search engines to build traffic. And that's what we'll be covering today. Learn everything you need to know about WordPress SEO so your website ranks in search engines.
Use a Great WordPress Theme
First things first – get yourself a great WordPress theme. For example – the Total theme. Nt only is this theme full of powerful site building features (drag and drop page builder, parallax backgrounds, header styles, bbPress & WooCommerce support, fully responsive design, and more) but it's also coded for speed. Total uses semantic and vlid code, built-in schema support and offers custom options within the themes panel to easily disable features you're not using with a click. Just run the demo through your favorite WordPress speed test tool too see for yourself.
Optimize Your Content
When writing posts, keep SEO in mind. This includes:
- Make sure to use proper headings (H1 for your post title, H2 for sub headings in your post, then H3, H4, etc.)
- Use internal links to your own posts and well as external links, outbound to authority third party websites
- Add your keyword naturally throughout your content, in your post title and in image titles
You can take advantage of an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to help optimize your content.
Speed Up Your Website
Site speed is of the utmost importance, for your real readers and for search engines like Google. There's a lot involved, but these are 3 quick ways to speed up your site fast.
1. Great Hosting
Your hosting can make or break your site speed. It's important to take the time to find the best WordPress hosting for your site's needs. We recommend a managed hosting plan from WP Engine to keep your site blazing fast. Of course, affordable hosting such as Bluehost (which starts at just $2.95/month) are still a good option if that's what fits your budget – but you just can't bet the speed that comes with a managed hosting plan.
2. Use a CDN
Cache your site with a CDN to speed things up. A CDN (content delivery network) essentially stores a copy of your website at different data center locations (for example in Los Angeles, New York and London) then displays your website to visitors based on which data center they're closest to. So if a person in New Jersey visits your site it would be via the CDN located in New York.
Best of all you don't have to spend a ton of money – using a free CDN works great. In fact, we recommend using Cloudflare to speed up WordPress sites.
3. Optimize Images
Big images can really slow down your website. Instead of uploading a giant 3000px wide 8MB image, edit your image to be the size you need (if your site width is 980px, then a 1000px image is great) and compress it (a lossless compression can reduce a file size by up to 50%). If you don't want to pay for a service, there are plenty of free services and plugins to compress and optimize images.
Or consider using one of these lazy load plugins to optimize how images are loaded on your WordPress site. With lazy load, images and other resource heavy on page elements will be loaded after your quick loading text.
Use Google Analytics to Track Your Stats
Optimizing your site is great, but it means nothing if you don't have statistics to keep track of. There are plenty of tools you can use to see your site stats but the most popular (by far) is Google Analytics for WordPress.
The easiest way to integrate Google's services with your WordPress site is with Google Site Kit. With this plugin you can access all of your Google tools (Analytics, PageSpeed, Adsense, Tag Manager, etc) right from WordPress – to staying on top of your traffic and SEO is quick and easy.