How Perfect White Tees Uses Customer Listening to Improve Ads, Email, and Acquisition With Johnny Hickey

Johnny Hickey is a retired firefighter turned e-commerce operator best known for helping grow apparel brand Perfect White Tees to eight figures. He also runs a trade show called Shop Local Fair and several other brands, handling media buying, creative strategy, and customer experience himself.

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Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn

- How to build a living 'voice of customer' database from reviews, ad comments, DMs, and surveys — and use it to guide every marketing decision

- Why AI tools hallucinate when parsing customer feedback and how to use them safely with batches of 25–50 entries

- How rewriting a product page based on review feedback cut return rates by nearly 50% on a hero product selling 10,000 units a month

- What 'creative diversity' actually means — more shoots, more models, more footage — not just more graphics on the same images

- Why long-form video ads (10 minutes to 2 hours) on Meta are an underexploited placement most brands ignore

- How to build an AI tool that pulls a competitor's entire ads library, transcribes it, and generates a script adapted to your own product

- Why capturing behind-the-scenes content from day one — including lawsuits, ad account suspensions, and supplier drama — builds the most compelling brand story

In this episode

Johnny Hickey, retired firefighter and growth operator behind Perfect White Tees (scaled to 8 figures), shares how obsessive customer listening — through reviews, ad comments, customer service emails, and surveys — feeds every layer of marketing: from ad creative and website copy to product improvements. He breaks down how he organizes thousands of customer touchpoints in a master Google Sheet, how he uses AI carefully to extract insights, and why creative volume and diversity (not just more graphics on the same photos) is his #1 paid acquisition lever today. He also covers long-form video ads on Meta, building an AI tool to analyze competitor ads, and the importance of capturing behind-the-scenes content from day one.

Resources mentioned in this episode

- GPT (ChatGPT)

- Claude (Anthropic)

- Meta Ads Manager

- Meta Ads Library

- Reddit (r/Ecommerce)

Quotable Moments

> "When you listen to the customer, things that you might not come up with on your own become super simple and obvious and you're like, oh, we should do this."

> "Words that you see on our website come directly from reviews — things you would think that maybe we made up and we didn't make it up."

> "Reviews saved us a lot of money in some cases. I rewrote a page on the website based upon reviews and we lowered our return rate on a certain product by like almost 50%."

> "I'm not talking about telling your creative strategist come up with three more concepts this week — I'm talking about you having 9,000 images every two months instead of making 3,000 ads out of 500 pictures."

> "I have videos that are like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour, two hours running right now."

> "Turn the camera on in the morning, put a microphone on yourself and just start recording — because the first time you get sued, the first time you get knocked off, all those things are interesting and you should be capturing them."

Action Steps

1. Start a master Google Sheet with tabs for reviews, customer service emails, ad comments, and survey responses — add to it continuously and label it your 'voice of customer' doc.

2. When using AI to analyze customer feedback, feed it no more than 25–50 entries per session and cross-check outputs by running the same prompt in a fresh session to catch hallucinations.

3. Rewrite your highest-traffic product pages and descriptions using exact language pulled from reviews — look especially at return reasons to find unclear or misleading copy.

4. On your next photoshoot, hire additional models and photographers, keep cameras rolling through lunch and travel, and aim to capture at least 3x more raw footage than you think you need.

5. Test a long-form video ad on Meta (aim for 10–15 minutes minimum) that tells your brand origin story using existing behind-the-scenes footage — most competitors aren't running these.

6. Start filming your business journey now — lawsuits, ad account suspensions, supplier issues, wins — and plan to use this raw footage as future ad and content material.

Episode Transcript

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 00:43

Today, get ready. I'm chatting with Johnny Hickey, a retired firefighter who now does a lot of things, including helping grow parallel brand perfect white tees to eight figures, a trade show called Shop Local Fair, and, well, a few other brands.

Now, today, we'll be talking about how to better listen to your customers, to improve your ads, your email, and your entire acquisition strategy. I'm your host, Raphael Paulin- Dagle, and I'm the founder of Splitbase.

This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now, this episode is brought to you by Splitbase. At Splitbase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands, such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Amica, grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. We pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money, and then, well, we help you fix it. The result, you get increased conversion rates, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably.

We've been at it for over a decade and can you help you manage the entire process from A to Z? So if you need help with conversion optimization, go to splitbase.com to request a proposal and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

All right, Johnny, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, so as you know now this podcast is all about going deep and dissecting one key growth strategy So our listeners can get as much value as possible right away And now I know from following you on social for a while that you love to experiment There's there's you know, you have some very interesting takes as well on media buying on creatives on email, but I think before we even get to creatives and and talking about meta and anything like that I think I want to start with the foundation and I know you're a big fan of Listening to your customers getting customer feedback and using that to feed everything else so Can you just maybe tell us a bit more first?

You know, kind of what's the strategy? What does it look like when you say listening to your customers? How do you listen to them? What are kind of the activities? And how do you typically use that feedback? Let's start there and then we can kind of dive deeper.

Johnny: 03:19

The number one channel for listening to customers is reviews. Typically, I think the number is one in a hundred people leave your review. So you're going to get a pretty even feedback of good and bad. Maybe the middle doesn't really come in as consistent, but if people hate you, then you're gonna hear from them most likely, and if people love you, you're gonna hear from them too. So the people that give you a two and a half to say 3.75, you're probably not gonna hear from them. But those people that are at the extremes, you're gonna hear, and then you can kind of figure out what's in between. So I would say the number one channel is reviews.

Customer service, customer service channel, we monitor, I monitor the channel, just pull a couple of random reviews. Sometimes we also pull the reports, we have a meeting every week. for an hour with customer service. I look at the ad comments, ad comments help a lot, messenger. As you grow, I used to handle everything myself. I handle not only customer service, ad comments, DMs, I handle a lot of stuff in the beginning for at least portions of the week. But as time goes on, it gets so big that one person can't handle it, then two people, then four people, those are the most. And of course, we do service too.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 04:27

And how do you like keep that organized? Because OK, we're talking about a lot of sources. And eventually as you scale, like you said, OK, you have more people that are kind of going through that.

.Like, do you have like a central place where everybody just kind of writes their insights, their takes? Like, how do you organize and make sure that those insights are documented and used? Especially when like, you know, in the beginning, if it's you doing the ads as well as much as you're looking at feedback, it's pretty easy. It lives in your head. But at scale, how does it look like and how does it live in a company?

Johnny: 04:49

For us, the primary means of cataloging customer communications is a Google sheet. It started out, I think, at 3,500 reviews or so. Once it got really crazy, we were just upload 3,500 reviews to a Google spreadsheet maybe three, four years ago, and we put them on there.

And then, at some point, I went through customer communications with customer service, and I took all of the emails and just condense them and through them on a second page on that same sheet, second tab. And then at some point, I was like, oh, wait, Judge, you know, Rich Panel had reviews in there as well. So we took those out and put those in. And then we started putting survey responses on new customer surveys, existing customer surveys. So at this point, that sheet has like 15 tabs on it.

And it's called the reviews to dock. I don't know why we named that, but thousands of entries from customers over the years of everything. Ad comments are on there. So at one point I had somebody just go through all of our ads and strip all the comments out to a spreadsheet, move that over.

So all of those communications are there. I wouldn't say there's any insights on there. There's no, like, we don't put anything in there, but we do what we do is we'll take 50 and bring it out to a GPT and analyze it. I think we were building a tool recently with Claude to scrape it. enmass, but I don't know what the output of that was yet. And my typically over the years, whenever I tried to put too many reviews into anything, you would just get mushy stuff back. So I like to stick with 25 to 50 entries.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 06:29

We kind of do the same thing. We actually built our own review scraper as well and you have to be very careful when using and I think this goes for anyone who wants to like use AI to listen to your customers. AI tools are so really really bad at parsing through customer surveys and feedback. It will hallucinate the shit out of the responses and then yep. Yep.

Johnny: 06:55

You know, what's a great trick, dude? Sign out. Sign out and do it all like, you know, put your input in.

Get your output and then sign out and do it on the next one and the free version, whatever. And then see if you get the same thing. That's good check.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 07:02

Yeah, so I think it's good for people to know otherwise you're gonna get a lot of bullshit that you're gonna run your company with and You know the way to do it what we do is we we used to do all of those manually right? We are a CRO agency and we had to do that before AI even really existed So we kind of built our own tool just it has multiple gates of it it counts different themes and it's it's it also costs a shit ton of tokens It's like almost five bucks just to analyze 5,000 reviews But, you know, just for people to know, don't put surveys directly in Claude and expect good quality stuff. It'll make you think it's good, but it isn't. Johnny, now how do you use this feedback? So you, okay, so you kind of go through this, you get some of the insights. How does customer feedback trickle down into your marketing activities? How is it being used by you, by different teams, by different people in the company? And what kind of benefit do you think it has over maybe just And I think, you know, one of the objections for people not listening to customer feedback is because they say, it takes time. And in the meantime, I can just test a million more things. I don't believe that's a road approach. You're gonna test a million things that are not relevant. It's no better. But I'd love to know your thoughts. How do you use that? And how do you know it's worth the time and effort?

Johnny: 08:43

I would say literally there is no time, but the right right now to start. We I was getting feedback in person when we first received the first samples and the first production because I was delivering them by hand in some cases.

You know, we're of six foot rack and people be walking into our store where we had a boutique that we sold other brands in. I'm a six foot rack was right by the door. And if I happened to be in the store and somebody came walking out, I was like, oh, have you seen our new brand Perfect White Tee? And I just wait and listen, you know, give it to them and wait, listen what they would say.

As far as where we use it,  I have this new ad format and I just took a bunch of reviews and I threw it onto a static image. and not the graphics. I took all five or six reviews and stuffed it into the primary text and then just ran it as an ad. So you have the image and then you have five reviews and it's just in there in the primary text.

Over the years, we obviously would take customers' words, literally write the words that they say and just drop it right onto an image. That worked really well for a while. We did the little bubbles. Those were great for a long time. Some of the words that you see on our website come directly from reviews.

So there are certain things that we say in descriptions of the product or, you know, there's captions, things like that that you would see things you would think that maybe we made up and we didn't make it up. We actually like just ripped it right out of a review.

You know, I would say that reviews saved us a lot of money in some cases. A couple of years ago I rewrote a page on the website based upon reviews. and we lowered our return rate on a certain product by like almost 50%. Yeah.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 10:19

And that was by using the voice of customer? Was by addressing something specific that was unclear, that was mentioned in the reviews? How did it actually play out?

Johnny: 10:51

It was just a direct criticism of the product. And, you know, it was one of our hero products. It wasn't like an item that you were reducing 50%, but it doesn't mean much because we don't sell that many of them. And it was sound like 10,000 of this thing a month. And, you know, and it was like, it makes you feel stupid though. I'll be honest with you. Like, when you you're getting crazy high returns on something and it's we when you listen to the customer things that You might not come up with on your own become super simple and obvious and you're like oh We should do this, you know, we never would have thought of it on our own, but we changed it and boom I'm talking about like things like material composition Cuff length things like that, you know like how wide the neck should be on stuff how long it should come down on the where the where their hem should hit or this, you know, the seam should hit on jeans.

All of that stuff is not that intuitive sometimes. You know, some of it is, but when you get to the end user, they're gonna have feedback to you that you didn't know was coming.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 11:36

I love that you're saying that because sometimes I feel like people have a hard time, you know, they need a landing page. They need to like fix their website and they kind of have the blank page syndrome, right? Where do I start? I always say, look, if you actually look at your reviews and your customer feedback, you don't even have to guess where to start.

They tell you where to start. They tell you what to write. Just use what you're getting there as a starting point. And seems like that was pretty successful for you guys.

Can you tell me more about, you know, what you're exploring, what you're seeing work when it comes to acquisition from a paid side. Because I know you're big on that.

You have a lot of opinions. And I want to make sure we go through some of those takeaways that you've got. What's working best today when it comes to paid acquisition? Maybe mostly paid social. I know that's what you mostly talk about, at least on socials. And I kind of want to get your thoughts on. Yeah.

Johnny: 12:45

I run the media buying myself. I still, you know, daily log in. I'm running the budgets. I decide what the budget is and when to pull back or right now, actually, I don't think I've reduced, I haven't changed the budget in 35 days on our main campaign i was looking at the other day i was like man i should i change the campaign because it's just swinging and it's just doing really well so i'm like ah i'm not best with it um

I would say that listening to the customer and delivering back to them what they would want is just the main main thing to do that is literally the main thing to do so if if i'm reading ad comments and people you know we'll feed back with things like It's always sold out and you're just gonna make sure that you order enough to restock or where that item has a flaw in it, then we address that concern.

For instance, very common in T-shirts with certain characteristics of T-shirts is there'll be a flaw in the construction. And then you get that feedback from the customer and they're like, hey, I don't like the T-shirt because of this. And then a lot of times, that's a feature of the t-shirt. That's not a bug.

So then we have to explain it to them that the reason this is a best seller is that this t-shirt does this. But in the way you're using it, it also does this, which is not good. And I don't want to give away the thing because some of these items, we sell like 5 or 10 million a year of it. And if I gave you that, if I gave you that exact description, competitors could probably use it to carry the ball into the touchdown zone

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:10

You're pretty convinced that creative volume is one of the number one things that makes paid ads work today. Can you tell us why I believe this? And what should people who are only launching 50 ads a month do differently? Yep.

Johnny: 14:12

Let's say just, you know, first of all, I'll just take more pictures, run the video longer, don't press cut so soon, you know, don't press power off, keep the cameras going. As far as creative diversity, I'm not talking about telling your creative strategies come up with three more concepts this week.

You know, that's definitely not what I'm talking about. Not nope. You have more photoshoots. So the firstly, higher more models, higher more photographers, release more styles and more colors. So if you just start with like the average Ecom women's power brand, when they do a photoshoot, they choose one photographer and one model.

That's like their set up. And they might have hair and makeup or stylist. And when you're first starting out a lot of times, you don't have the budget for all that stuff so they'll go with a photographer who's good at makeup and styling and one model you know where they'll be like oh my intern is here too or the the founder will be like I'll jump in the photo so you're working with one person capturing content and two people in front of the camera so I would just say let that camera roll for a lot longer when you guys go to lunch shoot at lunch when you're in a you know if you're going from location to location don't turn the camera off in the taxi cab just continue to shoot more content that's what I'm talking about when I say creative diversity.

I'm not talking about you know, break out, break through advertising and be like, okay, we're in the five stages of awareness and we gotta come up with three more emotional angles. That's not what I'm talking about.

Like, don't get me wrong. I love the book and I've been through the workshop and I know, you know, I read everything the guy puts, but when I'm talking about creative diversity, I'm talking about you having 9,000 images every two months instead of I'm making 3,000 ads out of 500 pictures because that's what most people do. What they'll do is they'll take a set amount of pictures and then they're just like, okay, we're going to put more graphics on these images that we have. It's not what I'm talking about.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 16:32

What isn't working anymore? What used to work say a year ago when it comes to media buying that just isn't working today and that you see a lot of brands still operate with that old model or that old mindset.

Johnny: 16:34

UGC, I would say does not work as well as it used to in my estimation, you know, because I have a lot of UGC running and it's running, but it's not doing great. But I'll have, you know, I launched a campaign recently, a brand new campaign with 145 ads in it, 30. I think this 30 adsets and it's a particular type of content and it's doing really well. So I would bet that most apparel brands are not shooting it.

It's not in my ads library. It's in a white listed page that doesn't have our name on it. And it's a new format. So it's different.

There's like a lot of new stuff going on in our meta right now. I don't know if you've seen the new, are you an ads manager? Do you have a video ad running right now? Okay. So your typical video ad people are doing like 15 seconds to 30 seconds, something like that.

Right now in meta on certain placements, you can run up to 240 minutes. So, you know, what would I do? Okay, so I go grab all of the footage I have and throw it onto, you know, an editing software and just tell the story of the brand. Like, you know, let's... show some baby pictures of yourself, you know, throw those up and be like, when I was five years old, I always wanted to own a clothing brand.

And then you start right there and just start narrating how you got to where you are. So you fill up as much time as you possibly can. You know, you probably won't be able to get 240 minutes, but you know, you could get like a 10 minute ad or a 15 minute ad. And almost nobody's running those because I'm going into people's libraries and I look and I don't see many long, long videos. I have, I have I have videos that are like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour, two hours running right now.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle 18:40

You're right. That's pretty rare. I don't think I've seen any of those run recently at all.

Johnny: 18;50

Yeah, I know that the thing is I think that sometimes people's minds are so bound that they don't understand that there's other people who are more creative out there than them. So when you say a word like creative diversity, like when Meta said the word creative diversity, I looked at that thing and was like, okay, you know, what does this mean? And I just came up with like, I think it was like 88 ideas that we could do different types of ads. And I wrote it down on the document and we started exing them as we went. And I'm probably at like 12 right now, 13 maybe. And I skipped ahead to a few. Like for instance, I don't know if you've seen on Twitter recently, I dropped this one. We're making these like little episode ads now where yeah, where we start with like a good thing, like you have a model shot. But then, you know, we go 30 seconds earlier, you know, and it's like, you see coffee on the floor. And, and, you know, one of the, one of the interns is like, you know, having, having an episode of allergies and some things or eyes all swallowed up. And she's like, I have to leave, you know, and we got that on video and all this stuff. So we're putting all this stuff out there. To me, yeah, that's what I'm talking about when I'm saying make more ads. And I think people just think I'm talking about like, make 75 review statics with different reviews on them. With the same picture, too. I definitely don't think people understand that there is bounds to their own creativity when they say that you can't make more ads. Yes, you can. You just have to take more time off and hire more creative people than yourself.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 19:07

And I think people are so used to just like, media buying needs this one thing, right? Like, short ads, it's sad I could video. And I do think there's probably a syndrome of like, People looking at other brands too much, but 90% of brands, if not 99% of brands, also don't know what they're doing. So you just end up having a bunch of people copying each other, thinking they're doing something new, but really they're just rehashing something that probably stopped working a couple months ago.

Johnny: 19:34

We built a tool recently to copy other people's ads. We built like a motion type tool or atria that it's attached to an API that goes to the ads library and you could put a brand in and it pulls their whole ads library up and transcribes their ads and then, excuse me, it's a little like a little button and you press that button and it drops down a menu and it's like pick a product on our website and you press that and it sucks all the information off the website, URL, like that particular landing page. and then creates a script with their concept and it breaks it down into like this is what the concept is and it tells you this is you know this emotional angle so we just did that and we've never copied ads from anybody ever before and I would say that maybe two years ago I spent some time in an ads library of another brand who competes with us and was looking at it.

I didn't take any of their ads and knock them off. I just looked at it and was like, oh, let's see what they're doing. I haven't seen any of our competitors. I'm not jealous of their ads. I don't have a single competitor where I look at them and go, oh, shit, man, we should be doing that. Why aren't we doing that stuff? There is one competitor who's much smaller than us that I'm impressed by their abilities, but I still wouldn't copy their stuff. I think our team is creative enough that we don't need to copy anybody. I would leave a camera running all the time. That's the one thing I mean,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 22:46

Johnny, we're pretty much out of time, but my last question for you is if you had to kind of restart growth at, you know, Perfect White Tee at any other brand that, you know, you've run, what would you do differently today?  

Johnny: 23:06

I would leave a camera running all the time. That's the one thing I mean, the amount of content that we didn't capture over the years the stuff that went on that we should have gotten is just add a control You know turn the camera on in the morning put a microphone on yourself and Just start recording because you know the first time you get sued the first time you get knocked off the first time You know your ad account gets suspended or your credit card gets declined some supplier steals your stuff All those things are interesting and you should be capturing them And I think that the consumer loves to see that stuff too. We tried to present the polished image too much. That's what I would say.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 23:46

We've been talking with Johnny Hickey now, Johnny, if people want to learn more about you, follow you, hear your takes, where should they go? Where can they learn about the brands as well?

Johnny: 23:55

I'm on Twitter, John Hickey1970. That's where I probably spend the most amount of time also on Reddit, physicalanteater. And when I have a little bit of time, I've bounced back and forth between those two platforms. And when I don't have time, I erase them off my phone so I don't see anything.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 24:19

Awesome, Johnny. Thank you so much for all these insights. Thank you so much for being here.

Johnny: 24:27

You got him, man.

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