Idaho

How a Truck Bed Storage Company Drives Customer-First Product Innovation with Help from AI

An interview with Taylor Straley, Vice President of Commerce at DECKED, a truck bed storage solution company based in Ketchum, Idaho.

Four images ofTaylor Straley, Vice President of Commerce at DECKED, a truck bed storage solution company based in Ketchum, Idaho.
2 min read

The original concept for DECKED came from this observation that there was a gap in the truck bed storage market. Handymen, construction workers, and DIYers had been making plywood drawers for years because these trucks are largely overengineered except for their beds. We were founded based on that idea and also the belief that everyone could use more storage and access. Our goal is to organize America.

Over the past eleven years, we’ve scaled significantly, with about 50 employees in Ketchum and now manufacturing in northwest Ohio and southern Utah with over a hundred employees, as well as doing all our warehousing, shipping, and manufacturing in-house. This commitment to being American-made, and creating American manufacturing and labor, is a crucial part of who we are.

Being customer obsessed is at the core of everything we do. My role of leading both our e-commerce team and customer experience team is a bit untraditional, but the goal is to ensure the customer is central to our advertising, product development, and improvements. Owning our manufacturing allows for real-time iteration and quality control, so we can better serve the customer and get products out to market faster. For example, we've made over 30 product updates to our Drawer System since its fall 2023 relaunch.

We collect massive amounts of feedback—over 6,000 website chats, 2,000 emails, and 800 phone calls monthly—and use AI to sift through it and provide those real-time improvements, whether it’s on the product or our own internal processes.

I’ve been leaning into Google NotebookLM for social listening, feeding in reviews and comments from social media and forums to understand sentiment and trends. It’s been an incredibly powerful research assistant, allowing us to distill large amounts of information that have been traditionally untapped.

Taylor Straley, Vice President of Commerce at DECKED

Since 2018, Google Ads and YouTube Ads have played a critical role in driving the business. They now account for 30% of our customers. Since our product is a one-time purchase, we’re always seeking new customers, and Google has been instrumental in reaching those unfamiliar with DECKED.

Traditionally, we run everything in house because we really believe in building out our teams and keeping that strong connection to the brand. Adopting Google’s AI-powered Performance Max ad campaigns was pretty impactful for us from early on, allowing us to scale and react pretty quickly with so much efficiency. We can simply upload all of our headlines, assets, and content, and let the campaign optimize for growth.

We have such a visual product, so traditional search advertising often falls flat for us because it’s hard to describe what a truck bed drawer system is in fifteen characters or less.

Being able to pair an image or a video with a headline or descriptions with Google’s AI-powered Performance Max campaigns is so powerful for us because it takes the customer and brand awareness to the next level by providing some education, all in the same medium. With help from Google, our revenue grew by 40% in 2024, with year-over-year growth at 50%.

Taylor Straley, Vice President of Commerce at DECKED

Ultimately, we’re focused on our unwavering commitment to our customers and upholding our brand mantra, “building for tomorrow,” and that means focusing on continued revenue growth, getting as many products into customers' hands as possible, and remaining American-made. Google is helping us keep that vision alive.