Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite’s CEO Jonathan Foltz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When does the acquisition happen?

Jonathan Foltz: After that, I was thinking that e-commerce is the way. We did $5 million in a month. Then I decided to raise money. We send the pitch deck out. We got a lot of interest. We came across a family office. The family office loved what we had. We gave them the story.

They said, “We love your company, but we only invest in public companies.” I never really thought about being a public company. I was always okay being private. I can do it, but do I want to do it.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level?

Jonathan Foltz: We did right under $10 million in 2020.

Sramana Mitra: These conversations are happening in 2021?

Jonathan Foltz: These are happening in 2020. All of a sudden, one of the representatives calls me. She says, “Jonathan, I have the perfect deal. You guys are marketing experts, but you don’t know anything about jewelry. I have a third-generation jeweler that’s public that doesn’t know anything about marketing.”

That’s when she introduced us to Bergio International in the third quarter of 2020. We went through pretty deep audits. By 2021 of February, they acquired us. They acquired 51%. They gave me stake. They gave us 30% of the company because were doing more revenue than the public company itself. They took on our debt.

Sramana Mitra: It was still a fairly small public company.

Jonathan Foltz: Yes. In Russia, they were a much larger entity.

Sramana Mitra: What about Aphrodite’s? What kind of revenues are you doing?

Jonathan Foltz: We did go down last year. We went down to $7 million, but we did massive changes. We had the largest shift ever in digital marketing in Facebook and Instagram. Let’s say Apple declared war on Facebook. We had to restructure the company. We had suppliers that we weren’t using before. We only have our own products.

We went from all different types of metals and very little silver to either silver or gold. We ended up getting some pretty good momentum. We did $1.1 million in December. We could have done much more, but our Amazon channel took off. We couldn’t get the product to Amazon on time because they were selling so fast.

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that your business is going to shift from Facebook-driven to Amazon-driven business?

Jonathan Foltz: That’s what we’re doing right now. The auction houses have gotten way more expensive. Their data is not segmented as well as it was earlier. We’re shifting the majority of our focus into Amazon and Etsy.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. The world under Facebook is shaking. This story that you described, can you imagine how many companies that are going through this shift.

Jonathan Foltz: Gear Bubble is the company that we acquired under Bergio. They had thousands of sellers through Shopify utilizing Facebook ads. When iOS 14 came, it wiped out almost all of them. A lot of these companies that can’t get the proper data, they can’t afford some of these programs.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time. I loved listening to you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Dealing with Major Market Shifts: Aphrodite's CEO Jonathan Foltz
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