Episodios
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When Suzie Welsh Devine saw women struggling to find the answers they needed at overcrowded fertility clinics, she knew there had to be a better way.
At the time, Suzie was a women's health and fertility nurse, but she came from an entrepreneurial family. Seeing a gap in the market, she combined her business savvy, passion for women’s health, and personal insights into fertility treatments to create BINTO, short for “Bun in the Oven.” She hopes that the company will change the way we see women’s health, supplemental treatments, and the medical industry as a whole.
“Wouldn't we be better off focusing on preventative medicine over inpatient care?” Suzie asks in this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “Are there other ways of handling things before we move to prescription drugs? That’s really what we’re interested in.”
Suzie founded BINTO in 2016, with $20,000 she’d saved and without traditional investors. Initially, she targeted the supplements to women receiving fertility treatments. Using the industry-disrupting powers of direct-to-consumer selling, and personalized marketing and products, BINTO is challenging an industry that’s been tough to crack.
Since then, Suzie has started looking beyond fertility treatment, at other elements of women’s health that need a revamp.
“I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our potential, and what we want to be,” Suzie says.
Featured Challenger👱♀️ Name: Suzie Welsh Devine
⚙️ How she challenges: Through BINTO, Suzie hopes to provide women at all stages of life with monthly supplement subscriptions customized to their needs.
💊 Company: BINTO
💎 Noteworthy: Suzie knew she wanted to go into nursing after a trip to Malawi with the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance when she was 16. She got her nursing degree from the University of Virginia, and is still a licensed nurse.
🔍 Where to find Suzie: LinkedIn | Instagram
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Challenging your expectations of yourself“The world of wellness was always floating in the back of my mind as something I was passionate about and really interested in. Did I know this was going to be my career? No, not a clue.”
💡 Offering convenience is disruptive
“Five years ago, no one was doing what we're doing. We really believe in personalized medicine, and we’re direct-to-consumer. We aren’t sold on a shelf and we don’t use bottles: Everything comes in easy, grab-and-go daily packets. As a nurse, I know that medication adherence is huge, and that means your supplements too. Building the brand in a way that’s easy for customers is key.”
💡Taking on the market clichés“We're a scrappy startup, and we didn't work with an agency off the bat. It was just the team creating [the packaging]. In the fertility market, [the marketing] is a lot of baby bumps and hot pink. We wanted it to feel warm and fun and inviting, without having baby bumps everywhere.”
💡 Tuning out the background noise“People who haven’t built something think they know how to build something better than you do. I’ve had to learn that everyone has their two cents, and they think building a company is easy. Just take it with a grain of salt, and ignore it like white noise in the background.”
💡 The new way to advertise“We do traditional pay-per-click ads, and we do some influencer work. Social media has been one of the biggest benefits to starting a brand today. If you’re starting a brand, you need to be present on social media channels. Instagram has been a phenomenal way for us to gain customers for a lower cost.”
💡 Harnessing the disruptive power of personal connection“Word of mouth is really powerful. Any time that I can get in front of a group of women or potential customers, it sells. We used to do a lot of live events [before the COVID-19 pandemic]. Accessing fertility communities and doctors’ offices through B2B partnerships is also very powerful for us in terms of sales, because it speaks to trust. If someone’s doctor is telling them they trust a brand, they’re more likely to buy it.”
💡 An alternative to traditional investors“I'm really glad that we were able to test things without a lot of investors involved. A lot of running a startup is throwing darts on a dartboard, and testing, and figuring it out. We were able to do a lot of the testing and figuring out on our own, so that when we have fundraised, we haven’t had to go through many painful points.”
💡 Customers first, competition second“It's about our customers. If I get caught up in what other people are doing, then I forget about our core customers and I'm not serving them. Of course, it’s important to be aware of the competition, have a pulse on it, and know what's going on in the market. But we need to focus on our business and serving our customers, giving them what they need and creating products for them to move forward.”
Top Quotes:
“There's a lot of noise out there in the market and we just have to continue to cut through it and prove that we should be the trusted number one.”
“To a potential entrepreneur listening: There are lots of ways to start a business and gain access to capital.”
“When we started five years ago, no one was doing this. Now there are some indirect competitors in the market and women's health is really booming. It’s a good sign that other people think there's a lot of value to this market as well.”
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When Stan Chia joined Vivid Seats in November 2018 as its CEO, he was excited about giving the profitable online ticket marketplace a stronger consumer-facing identity.
Stan, who previously held executive roles at Grubhub and Amazon, joined the online ticketing company at a time when the secondary ticket market was growing by double digits year over year.
Then the pandemic hit and live events ground to a halt. As Stan puts it, events were the first “to shut down and almost the last to come back.”
On this episode of The Empowered Challenger, Stan talks about steering the company through the pandemic and how he’s positioning Vivid Seats to win consumers’ hearts (and dollars) as the pandemic moves into the rearview mirror.
With fans excited to get back to concerts, sports and other kinds of live entertainment, Stan says trust is critical when you’re the company selling people their tickets. Consumers want to be assured that gathering in crowds will be done safely and that purchasing tickets is a hassle-free experience from a provider that will stand behind purchases.
Even before COVID-19 upended life as we know it, Vivid Seats was building out its loyalty program, which enabled consumers to earn rewards on every transaction. Now, Vivid Seats has enhanced the program in an effort to make it “almost infallible from the value that we deliver to customers,” Stan explains. Now, anyone who uses the Vivid Seats platform earns 10% on every ticket purchase. Plus, the program looks for ways to add “surprise and delight elements,” such as exclusive parties and experiences.
It’s part of Stan’s plan to “emerge stronger” from tough times.
Tune in to this episode to hear more about how Vivid Seats differentiates itself in the online ticketing space through partnerships with Rolling Stone magazine and more, and why Stan doesn’t believe in focusing too much on competitors (even though he respects what they do).
Featured Challenger🧑 Name: Stan Chia
⚙️ How he challenges: As the CEO Vivid Seats, an online marketplace for live event tickets, Stan places a significant emphasis on building recognition among consumers looking for a safe and trusted place to get tickets online.
🎟️ Company: Vivid Seats
💎 Noteworthy: Stan was born in Singapore and served in the Singapore Armed Forces when he was 18 years old. He learned a lot about leadership during his military service, including the importance of leading by example — “I don't expect anything of anybody that I wouldn't be willing to do myself,” he says.
🔍 Where to find Stan: Twitter | LinkedIn
🔍 Where to find Vivid Seats: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡Fans are itching to get back to live events (safely)“What we look at is safety first and foremost, making sure that as we facilitate events like this, that we're really understanding and considerate of comforts and discomforts of customers, right? As the world tries to figure out what the future looks like … there is a huge amount of pent up demand after 14, 15 months of total isolation as we were in lockdown. What we've seen now across the spectrum — music festivals selling out and record pace … there's a lot of excitement from fans to get back, but I think, also, certainly confidence that they can do that and they will do that in a safe way.”
💡Leveraging a rewards program as a differentiator“One of the things we decided to differentiate ourselves on was a rewards program….we were one of the only rewards programs out there where every transaction you bought, you would earn something on that. And we said, Hey, also, we're going to build an amazing app. We're going to make sure all of these great personalization features are there. And between August of 2019 through February of 2020, we saw our app volume go from about eight to 9% to 40% of our volume. So huge adoption from consumers … they appreciated the design that our product and our engineering team had put into that as well as the value of our rewards program.”
💡People love buying event tickets online — but trust can be a challenge“The challenge in this industry [selling tickets online] … is this a safe industry? Is this a place where you can get tickets? Like, who am I buying from? Who's going to stand behind this? Is it hassle-free? Am I protected as a consumer? I think that's something the industry faces and something that we've really tried to get ahead of.”
💡Having a clear brand that resonates with consumers“We want our brand to be synonymous again with consumers when they think about live events. The emotions that we believe we represent to someone who wants to put their faith in us. So trust, value, service, all of these things … we want to make sure that truly our consumers feel that on the brand side … When you think of Vivid Seats, it's about experiencing it live, and celebrating the power of shared experience to unite people. That's what our brand is built on.”
💡On having the confidence to make long-term investments“We are actually first-transaction profitable. So we are profitable on every single transaction … I think if you didn't have as strong of a balance sheet or a P and L as us, you might be a little more handicapped. You might be a little bit more short-term oriented. Our view is certainly that of the long-term both from a psychological perspective, but also with the confidence that we have the balance sheet and P and L to support that.”
Top Quotes:
“We’re walking the walk. We’re not just giving ourselves a label that we can’t live with.”
“I don't focus so much on the competitors. … I want to make sure we are there innovating on behalf of our consumers, that we're really building things that they either currently want, or they don't know that they want — but once they realize it's there, they will appreciate it.”
“Through a really difficult and trying time, I think we stuck to our values. We stuck to what matters.”
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Michael Rich has been obsessed with sneakers for almost as long as he can remember.
Michael got his start in the shoe business at age 16 when he sought out a job selling shoes at his local mall. After college, he went on to work on the manufacturing side and traveled across the world making shoes in foreign markets.
For years, he dreamed of creating a sneaker brand of the future. Finally, he launched Psudo, a DTC sustainable sneaker brand, in 2019.
“These are your ‘running around shoes,’ not your running shoes,” Michael says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger.
Sustainability is core to the brand. The upper part of the shoe is made from recycled plastic water bottles. The sneakers are made in a Milwaukee-based solar-powered shoe factory, while its packaging is made from 100% recycled content.
Psudo shoes are also made entirely in the U.S. While shoe manufacturing is rare in the United States — Michael estimates less than 5% of the shoes Americans wear are created domestically — he was determined to make it part of Psudo.
And though it wasn’t easy, he’s found the benefits of domestic production to be significant: more control over the process, nimble response to customer demand, and shorter manufacturing runs.
Marketing the challenger brand hasn’t been easy — especially for Michael who didn’t come from a digital marketing background. He believes Psudo’s innovative design coupled with the brand’s commitment to transparency are key ingredients for Psudo’s growth.
Ultimately, Michael believes in the magnetism of a good brand narrative: “[P]eople will be reaching out more and more to do collaborations, to have the opportunity to do a podcast like this … I think one thing kind of takes care of the other.”
On this episode of The Empowered Challenger, he also discusses his plan for creating a “circular brand” that customers can return for repurposing and get a fresh look.
Featured Challenger🧑 Name: Michael Rich
⚙️ How he challenges: Michael is the founder and owner Psudo, sustainable sneakers that are made in the USA and sold directly to consumers.
👕 Company: Psudo
💎 Noteworthy: Michael has been immersed in the business of sneakers since he was a teenager. When he was 15 years old, he started trying to convince a local shoe shop owner to hire him.
🔍 Where to find Michael: Twitter | LinkedIn
🔍 Where to find Psudo: Facebook | Instagram
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡Starting a challenger brand requires persistence“Every entrepreneur, if you ask them at the end or in the middle: if you knew how hard it would be to get here, would you still have done it? And I've bet a lot of people probably might say no, but then when you're sitting here and you have this little nugget of a company and you want it to be something more, it just inspires you to push forward. There are a lot of highs and lows as an entrepreneur and running a business … It's making sure this UPS shipment got delivered … all that logistical stuff that goes into running a business.”
💡On creating a new product with a familiar feel (and a lot of of transparency)“The main thing that I wanted to do as an entrepreneur … I wanted to innovate a product that was unlike anything else that was on the market, but make it feel very familiar. And I also wanted to be very transparent about how I'm doing it, what I'm doing … that type of honesty doesn't exist. And when I look at our benefits and our branding and what we bring to the table, I think it has plenty of room for growth. And, what we call scale in this industry is what we're aiming for — and it doesn't happen overnight, and it certainly takes longer than anyone wants.
I'm sure all the other brands would probably say the same thing.”
💡A defined brand is your best customer acquisition strategy“We are working on Psudo 2.0 — what that looks like, what that voice is … dig deeper into the manufacturing and really tell exactly what we're doing … if you do that, then the other part of it — the customer acquisition, the business — will come. … we have proven the concept, people like the sneaker, the main thing is just really focusing on that brand ethos, voice … I feel like that third part, the business side of it, will just be there.”
💡When customers behave like customer service reps“What I love more than anything is when a customer might reach out and ask a question online. Maybe it's more of a general question not to the brand specifically. And then the reply comes from someone else in a real positive manner. That's the best, because that's way better than me answering that same question or anyone from my team.”
💡Creating a ‘circular brand’ for ongoing customer relationships“My holy grail, blue ocean is to create a circular brand where you buy a pair of sneakers, you return them back to me, they get recycled into a new pair of sneakers and to do that all locally. We have a path to do this. We have a plan to do this. And so that's kind of where we want to be.
I don't know how long that's going to take — maybe it will take three years, maybe it will take five years. But for all fashion companies, I think everyone is interested in getting to this type of process where you literally take your own product back and make it into something new. Because end-of-life is the biggest challenge for making any product.”
Top Quotes:
“I’d say it wasn’t necessarily luck, It was just a lot of determination to get [it] right — to get the fabric right; to get the sole right; to get the shape of the last, as we say in the shoe business.”
“I wanted to innovate a product that was unlike anything else on the market, but make it feel very familiar. And I also wanted to be very transparent about how I'm doing it, what I'm doing … as transparent as you can be.”
“The thing about one product that we make — it's not going to be for everyone — but I do know that we have put out a good product and we stand behind it and we're very transparent.”
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Known among her friends as the person to call for design tips, Ariel Kaye realized that she had an opportunity to use passion for interior design to start a home goods company.
But instead of creating just another brand that sells bed sheets, towels and other products for the home, Ariel wanted to create a company that prioritizes its relationship with customers — in a way she wasn’t seeing in the industry.
When she launched Parachute, Ariel focused mainly on bedding, emphasizing the value of quality sheets when it comes to getting restful sleep at night.
“Sleep is so important. [Bedding] impacts your life in such a phenomenal way,” Ariel says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “I knew that bedding was such an opportunity to build a connection and trust within the customer base to literally get in bed with them every night.”
Though Ariel was new to entrepreneurship, her background in advertising has helped her see an opportunity to be a guiding light in this industry. She knows how to put customers first, cultivating the kinds of consumer-company relationships that are unique and make her company stand out amongst the rest.
Tune in to this episode to hear how she changed career paths to fulfill her dream of challenging the home goods industry from the inside, as well as how she’s positioned Parachute to help people create their dream homes.
Featured Challenger👩 Name: Ariel Kaye
⚙️ How she challenges: With Parachute, Ariel aims to challenge the home goods industry by encouraging a deeper relationship with consumers.
🛏️ Company: Parachute
💎 Noteworthy: Ariel published her first book, “How to Make a House a Home,” in 2020.
🔍 Where to find Ariel: Twitter | LinkedIn
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 The courage to make a change“I was sort of realizing that I was hitting my head in the ad world at this big agency, and I wanted to do something different. It was one of those aha moments where I realized that I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial where I could have real control over the process.”
💡 Leveraging the professional skills you have“[Advertising] was a really great background for me to start my own consumer-first business because I had this experience thinking about how to motivate and inspire the customer. It’s considered rather untraditional to have my background and then move and to become an entrepreneur and CEO, but I think it’s part of my secret sauce.”
💡 Turning a passion into a career“When I was in graduate school, I started an interior design blog, and I was always helping friends decorate their apartments in New York and changing my own spaces and was really passionate about it. I saw this opportunity in the home space because I was really passionate about design and comfort and sleep and all of these things.”
💡 Starting from scratch and getting capital“Getting capital to fund this thing was definitely a hard one. I didn’t have savings for this; I didn't have family members who were going to provide me with capital to get the business off the ground, so I had to find outside capital to support. I didn't know anything really, except the types of products I wanted to sell and what they wanted them to feel like. I had some intuition around how to build a website that was going to be functional, but pretty much everything else was a challenge.”
💡 On how she sees the competition“We pay attention [to competition] because it's important to understand what's happening in the industry and the market. But we’re really focused on being uniquely Parachute and focusing on our quality and our design aesthetic and the products that we're introducing.”
💡 Balancing the hustle“I appreciate the hustle and the grind, but I think there's a way to have that excitement and enthusiasm and hustle, and also go have an evening to see your friends, on a bike ride, do whatever you want to do that is your hobby and brings you joy.”
💡 Quality as a product differentiator“Our products are designed to last. We don't use any toxic chemicals or artificial dyes. They're really, really well-made, and we're designing and manufacturing our products in factories that have been around for over a hundred years. It’s not stuffy, it's just comfortable.”
💡 Building a balanced team“I was doing this on my own up until about three weeks after I launched. I hired my first employee who had a financial background because I needed someone that could help think about our budget and placing orders early on, so I could focus more on the marketing and branding, and customer service. In any business, you're looking for people that can do just about anything and everything. By the end of the first year we had about eight employees, and really it was important to get that support.”
💡 Disrupters aren’t afraid to push the limits“We're constantly pushing ourselves. We make sure that we have a budget set aside for testing purposes and experimental spend. And some ideas might be busts and that's okay too. That's part of growing.”
Top quotes from the episode:
“I wanted to make a bigger impact. I had some friends join early stage startups and start their own companies, and I saw this passion and this impact and this excitement and it just clicked that I wanted to do something that I could have more control over.”
“We hear from our customers, ‘Oh, I love [your products] because they feel so Parachute!’ You can’t really pinpoint what that means, but you feel it. That brings me more joy than anything.”
“During the first few years [of starting a company], it's like you're on a rollercoaster. You get up and have these incredible highs, and then 20 seconds later you’re crashing. There was a lot of fear and self-doubt that came along with those early days.”
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Kim Malek built a successful ice cream business around one central idea: community.
As the CEO and co-founder of Salt & Straw, Kim disrupted the idea of a typical ice cream shop by building an inviting, accepting environment that showcases local artisans and unique flavors.
Kim's career started at Starbucks, where she worked in marketing when the iconic coffee brand only had about 30 stores nationwide. With previous marketing experience at companies like Yahoo!, Adidas, and (RED), she learned a lot about what it takes to build a global brand.
"I always like to say I learned enough to be dangerous about a bunch of different things — operations, real estate, branding, but most importantly… building a company based on people and how you treat people," Kim says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger.
During her years in corporate America, Kim kept her ice cream shop vision on the back burner. After a decade of toying around with the idea, she moved to Portland, Oregon, and was struck by the strong sense of community in the entrepreneurial city. She knew it was "the perfect vehicle" to bring her ice cream store idea to life.
She partnered with her cousin, Tyler, to figure out a unique ice cream making process. They shopped around town and found standout local ingredients — chocolate, salt from a local saltmaker, and cheese from local farms.
They realized they could foster a true sense of community by focusing on "farm-to-cone" ingredients, highlighting the artisans who made them.
One of Kim's favorite pieces of advice is to not take advice. She welcomes stories about the experiences of fellow business owners and entrepreneurs but, unless you're in her exact shoes, she doesn't want to be told what to do. If Kim had followed everyone's advice when she was starting her business, she'd never be where she's at today.
Kim started by opening a single store in Portland’s Alberta Arts District. Now, there are 25 more throughout the U.S., plus a successful ecommerce business.
Featured Challenger
👩 Name: Kim Malek
⚙️ How she challenges: As the CEO and co-founder of Salt & Straw, Kim disrupted the idea of a typical ice cream shop by fostering a sense of community with its "farm-to-cone" creations and expertly-trained staff.
🍦 Company: Salt & Straw
💎 Noteworthy: Kim was a recipient of Portland Business Journal's Woman of Influence Award. She has also received recognitions from the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and was on Inc.'s Female Founder's 100 List.
🔍 Where to find Kim: LinkedIn | Instagram
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Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 The hallmark of an idea worth pursuing"I wake up every day with a good healthy dose of fear that shoots me out of bed nice and early. I earn my keep every day. In terms of taking that leap … I had this idea for so long. I'd been carrying it around for so long, but I knew it was a good one — it wasn't a fleeting thing. It had been like 10 or 15 years that I'd been working on it, and I was able to start putting the pieces in place. Once I got the ball rolling, it was almost a foregone conclusion. I couldn't stop myself, it just drove itself forward, not that there weren't tons of challenges along the way."
💡 Fear can either freeze you — or fuel you"I think fear can either freeze you, or you can use it to fuel you — you have to make that decision. I experience a little of both, to be honest, but it mostly fuels me and drives me forward. I think the ideal thing that I always try to remind myself of is to not make decisions out of fear — that doesn't usually end up well."
💡 The easiest route isn't always the best"We were exporting that idea or spirit of Portland when we grew into different cities, and we carried that forward into every city … I find that people really embody that and appreciate it. It's fun for them to learn about other local artisans through ice cream. It's a lot harder, it's a lot more work, it's more expensive, but I think it's worth it."
💡 Putting customer experience above all else"Internally, we say ice cream is 49% and the experience you get at Salt and Straw is 51%. So when you go to our stores, we really try to transport you into a different environment and experience, take you out of your everyday life into a beautiful, warm environment. We overstaff our stores with a big team that's really well-trained, especially on connecting with people. We spend tons of time teaching folks how to read signs: if someone wants to get in and out, we can do that. If they want to sit and taste every single flavor on our menu and talk about the story and history behind it, we can do that."
💡 Never compromise on your values"Danny Meyer, who started Shake Shack, is on our board. He tells a story that I love. He says that, over the years, people would always say to him, 'The culture's changing.' And, as the founder, it's like a dagger in your heart when you hear that. Sharing with him stories and concerns of mine along those lines, and how do you grow and maintain your culture? He said, finally, he had this big lightbulb moment where it's okay if your culture is changing and evolving, that will happen. But what you cannot do is compromise on your values — you have to stay true to your values, you have to keep them at the forefront."
💡 You don't have to take anyone else's advice"I've sat across the table from too many people who have said, 'Make sure you can get out of your leases because this isn't going to work!', 'You should really do yogurt instead of ice cream', 'You can't do this — you can't invest in your people that way.' All of the really important tenets of what I was trying to accomplish, I was told were impossible. If I had listened to any of that advice, I wouldn't be where I am. So I think it's just so important to be really clear about what you're about and to learn from other people, but not take advice."
Top quotes from the episode:
Kim Malek:
Quote #1
"Fear can either freeze you, or you can use it to fuel you — you have to make that decision. I experience a little of both, to be honest, but it mostly fuels me and drives me forward."
Quote #2
"You wouldn't believe the letters I get from customers on a weekly basis about really incredible, life-changing stories and experiences they have with our team. That, more than anything, makes me feel like we're on the right track."
Quote #3
"I think the secret is when we onboard our new team, we spend a lot more time talking about the values of the company, hospitality, how we treat each other, and how we take care of each other than we even do about ice cream. It adds up to our team really feeling like this is more than a job."
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When Chuck Cohn was struggling with a difficult college calculus class, he had a hard time finding the right place to access resources to help him improve.
So he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Chuck launched Nerdy, a direct-to-consumer platform connecting students and subject matter experts, with $1,000 from his dorm room. Now, Nerdy is a publicly traded company with a $1.7 billion valuation.
In this episode of The Empowered Challenger, Chuck discusses the path from upstart challenger to industry leader.
“It might just be how I'm wired, but I've always felt like I had a target on the back or a little bit of a chip on the shoulder,” he says.
Even as an industry leader, Nerdy recognizes it must operate with urgency to continue to maintain its position as learning activities continue to go virtual.
Chuck explains: “We want to make sure we capitalize on this unique moment in time as learning shifts aggressively from offline to online — which of course in an online world where the best product is only a click away, you end up with power law distributions of returns and certain companies that seize that moment disproportionately benefiting from such a shift.”
When Chuck started Nerdy in 2007, people doubted the concept. But doubters are part of the challenger journey: “There were countless people I encountered that thought this was a little tutoring opportunity constrained by historical market dynamics that had historically existed, but they failed to realize how transformational the internet could be in this category,” he says.
On this episode, learn about how Nerdy approaches customer acquisition, how Chuck thinks about Nerdy’s competitors, as well as the product changes he thinks will continue to differentiate Nerdy in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
Featured Challenger👨 Name: Chuck Cohn
⚙️ How he challenges: As the CEO of Nerdy, a direct-to-consumer platform for live online learning, Chuck has created a marketplace where students can access experts across 3,000+ subjects.
📚 Company: Nerdy
💎 Noteworthy: Chuck started Nerdy with a $1,000 loan from his parents and built the company on the side for a while working in venture capital.
🔍 Where to find Chuck: Twitter | LinkedIn
🔍 Where to find Nerdy: LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
Highlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Finding inspiration in your own experience
“The genesis of Nerdy came when I was studying for a calculus class at college, and none of the material made sense to me and I realized that I needed help outside the classroom. I looked around online and just couldn’t find the help I needed. I had this aha moment where I realized that my experience wasn't specific to me, it was a universal problem. Finding the help that you need was just too hard, and there was an opportunity to better leverage technology and the internet to help people learn any subject anywhere, anytime.”
💡 Figuring out when to take a risk
“It was clear that there was a tremendous opportunity to continue scaling the business, but it was my time and attention and focus that was holding us back from growing. I can remember the exact moment I made up my mind and the next day walked in and thanked the managing partner of the venture fund for the incredible experience, but let them know it was time to move on because I was really passionate about what I was about to focus on full-time because I thought it was a once in a generation opportunity.”
💡Growing a marketplace
“In any marketplace, there's a chicken and egg dynamic and you have to appropriately balance supply and demand. In the original offline world [of education], that balance was hard, because you needed an expert in every single zip code in the United States. You're now able to ignore all geographic barriers and find the right expert for a given learner’s needs, regardless of geography. You’re able to leverage each expert on your platform to a much greater extent, because you're not limited to the people who happen to be nearby.”
💡 Streamlining talent acquisition to lead in the category
“There is no market for average quality experts or low quality experts, there's really only a market for experts in the truest sense of the word. People come to us looking for somebody with deep expertise in a subject who's capable of communicating in a way that allows them to learn effectively. Historically, finding those people and then connecting them with the learner who can best benefit from their expertise and their communication style and personality was incredibly labor intensive. And so what we've done that's so unique is figure out how to maintain that super high quality bar [for expert talent] through investments in software.”
💡 Standing out from the competition
“We try to operate with urgency, not because of anything specific to the market dynamic now, but because we are at a very unique moment in time where consumer enthusiasm has never been higher. The industry is shifting from offline to online at a very rapid rate, and we have a really good idea of what we need to do to make our business and our products even better. So we want to make sure we capitalize on this unique moment in time as learning shifts aggressively from offline to online. In an online world where the best product is only a click away, you end up with companies that seize that moment disproportionately benefiting from such a shift.”
💡 From upstart challenger to publicly traded company
“[Going public] was the goal from day one. Our alignment was that when we eventually got to the point where we felt like the business and the company was ready, we would take it public. So last summer, as we kind of looked at what we had accomplished, we started having conversations about the fact that we are now basically proving to ourselves we can be profitable. The business was humming. We had line of sight to how we could continue to drive growth for many years to come.”
💡 Seeing opportunity in hardship
“Contrary to what you might assume, we didn’t benefit from COVID at all from a demand perspective. When COVID hit, we saw a rolling fallout of demand nationwide, because professional testing went to zero and standardized testing went down and applications for universities started falling and schools shut down or went to open book testing so you didn’t actually have to know the material. That was a tough period of time from a demand perspective, but it presented the opportunity to clear out our product roadmap, think about what was most important and then lean into that very aggressively with relentless focus.”
💡 Expanding customer outreach strategy
“We launched this initiative oriented around providing a little bit of continuity to students called ‘virtual school day,’ where we wanted to make free online classes available to everybody even if they didn’t have the resources to pay for them. We ended up seeing this really interesting shift in the retention of all our customers. And the people that actually came in from these free classes ended up starting to buy products. We thought to ourselves, holy cow, this multi-product strategy is actually working to an extent that was well beyond what we expected.”
Top quotes from the episode:Chuck Cohn:
Quote #1
“The feedback we got from customers right off the bat was outstanding. The work was intrinsically rewarding. We were helping people and I could see a close connection to the products that we built and the investments we made and the feedback we got from customers.”
Quote #2
“I think we’re going to see the level of technological innovation occur in and around education that happened in many industries before us. This is this pivotal inflection point. We come into work every day to work on this problem and help a lot of people.”
Quote #3
“We have pretty dramatic improvements we expect to be able to make to the customer experience in our line of sight. We're going to be in a position in connection with a pending public offering that will allow us to lean into hiring around engineering, data, science, etc, that will allow us to more aggressively pull ahead from a product leadership perspective and provide our customers a better experience.”
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Burke Morley has worked in creative strategy for brands like Nike and Sonic. But as Vice President of Brand and Executive Creative Director at direct-to-consumer mattress company Purple, he’s had to create a marketing strategy to win hearts and minds for a product with a unique sales cycle.
“People don't really think about or care about mattresses until they need one. Then they care a lot about it, very intensely for a short amount of time, and then they kind of go back to not caring about it,” Burke says on The Empowered Challenger.
Though mattresses aren’t top-of-mind for most people on a daily basis, Purple’s passionate customer base gives the five-year old brand and edge — referrals continue to be its top acquisition channel.
Warm associations are critical for Burke’s approach: “I want to be in the ether,” he says. “We can't really anticipate when people are going into that buying cycle. So we have to be in the air with a positive impression so that when they do move into that buying cycle — where we're at the top.”
In this episode of the podcast, Burke talks about what it takes to market an upstart brand in a crowded and competitive market, how he incorporates the mattress’ unique technology into advertising — and how he’s setting the brand up to move out of the bedroom.
Featured Challenger👨🏻 Name: Burke Morley
⚙️ How he challenges: As the Vice President of Brand and Executive Creative Director at Purple, Burke has brought his unique approach to brand strategy to a company disrupting the world of mattresses.
🛏️ Company: Purple
💎 Noteworthy: Burke previously led marketing and creative campaigns at places like Sonic and Nike.
🔍 Where to find Burke: LinkedIn | Website
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Changing things up (even when they’re working)
“We had this campaign that was so successful, which can almost be handicapping in a way, because it's like we can't mess with it. We've got to stay on that, on that trail. I placed a pretty big bet when I first came on to do a campaign that was so different.”
💡 Rethink how you view your demographic
“[Our customer base] is much more about a mentality than a demographic with age and income and all of that. We call them the re-imagineers: the people who are looking at genuinely improving their lives and making the most of what they’re doing each day, and they’re willing to invest in some things that they believe are truly going to improve their lives.”
💡 Think outside the industry box
“At Sonic, we did a lot of work with what we call, ‘craveability,’ looking at what it is about food that makes it craveable. A visceral craveable reaction comes from things like steaming hot bacon sizzling on a griddle. We've kind of applied that craveability mentality to an industry that may not make sense at first blush, because there is something very craveable about crawling into bed. That craveability piece is important because we have a job to help people understand why Purple is different.”
💡 Word of mouth can’t be bought
“Even with all the money we spent on advertising, our number one marketing tool is referral. It’s the number one best-selling marketing strategy for us by a long shot. We’re lucky that when people try our products, they’re actually our best converters.”
💡 Imitation — and attack ads — is the sincerest form of flattery
“We actually gave high fives to each other after some attack ads came after us by the big dogs. We were like, That's awesome. That means we're doing something, we’re a legit competitor with some legit innovation and not just some hokey thing. Now, not only are they aware of us and have attack campaigns coming after us, but they’re actually coming out with their own versions or trying to do things similar to what we’re doing. All of that is quite flattering.”
Top quotes from the episode:
Burke Morley:
Quote #1
“I think most people think that the most creative ideas come from a blank canvas; a wide open space. But actually, I think the smaller the box you get pinned into, the more creative you get.”
Quote #2
“We won't release a product and say, ‘we did it.’ It's this ever growing pursuit to reinvent comfort, and to always be topping ourselves.”
Quote #3
“So many brands say, ‘Follow us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook.’ I always ask my team: ‘Where are we going to take them that’s interesting and improves their lives?’ The more brands have a purpose to take the people who follow them somewhere, the more compliance there’s going to be.”
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Luxury beauty doesn’t have to carry a luxury price tag.
That’s the concept behind Beauty Pie, a fast-growing and industry-disrupting beauty brand. Beauty Pie positions itself as the “luxury Costco for beauty products.”
For a monthly fee starting at $10, consumers get “backstage access” to premium products at lower costs, Rob Weston, Beauty Pie’s Chief Marketing Officer, explains on this episode of The Empowered Challenger.
“The very best products cost about $30 right out of the lab. The rest of it is the middleman margin — the flagship stores, the chandeliers, marble countertops — none of the stuff that makes your skin more beautiful,” says Rob.
“We want to literally share the beauty pie — essentially the spoils of the beauty industry — with consumers.”
When it comes to winning over customers, Rob, a marketing vet with more than 20 years of experience, says it’s about embracing the conversation.
Gone are the days when brands could place an ad and change consumer behavior. That’s why he appreciates Beauty Pie’s 14,000+ Facebook community. He acknowledges that some feedback on the page “keeps us on our toes,” but emphasizes the importance of brands and consumers having a two-way exchange.
Tune in to this episode to find out how Beauty Pie is changing the market for luxury cosmetics by being less greedy than the competition, how Rob thinks about spending his marketing dollars (new customer acquisition!), as well as how the pandemic affected Beauty Pie’s business and what comes next.
Prentice’s Takeaway👉 It’s amazing what can happen when a feisty challenger brand educates the marketplace. Thanks to brands like Beauty Pie, consumers are totally in control. Once the veil is lifted on an industry, we have no tolerance for middlemen anymore. Challengers like Beauty Pie don’t need marketing tricks; they don’t need a fabricated story; they don’t need convincing; they need to provide a great product, excellent customer service, and then educate the marketplace over, and over, and over.
Featured Challenger👱♂️ Name: Rob Weston
⚙️ How he challenges: As the Chief Marketing Officer at Beauty Pie, Rob puts customer needs first, providing luxury beauty products without all the excess markups.
💄 Company: Beauty Pie
💎 Noteworthy: Rob has been in the marketing industry for 25 years and has worked with brands like Unilever, Nike, and Samsung.
🔍 Where to find Rob: LinkedIn
🔍 Where to find Beauty Pie: Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Being a disrupter doesn’t always mean you’ll be popular
“No revolution was ever achieved without breaking a few eggs. We aren't making friends among the bigger players who are used to overcharging for face creams. It’s the big cosmetics conglomerates that are lining up to be annoyed with us.”
💡 The challenge of being perceived as ‘too good to be true’
“I have to undo years of indoctrination done by an entire industry or industries [who told people] that price equals quality. We’re coming into the market telling people that’s no longer true, and they don’t believe it. We have to convince people that we are not too good to be true. If you go online, you’ll find the internet answering on our behalf that we’re 100% legit. We have everyone behind us saying that we’re a proper disrupter in this space.”
💡 Small companies, quick decision-making
“One of the most liberating feelings at a smaller company is the speed of decision-making. If we decide we want to go try something, we try it tomorrow. It’s that speed that is key. There’s no point talking this thing to death.”
💡 Small company, big emphasis on customers
“It’s amazing how at a massive, public company you are consistently bound by quarterly earnings targets, and invariably you end up making decisions because of what you need to be announcing to the market, and not what’s right for the customer. Whereas in a smaller, founder-owned or venture-backed company, you can make more decisions that are right for the customer because you’re playing a slightly longer game. That is a really fun and interesting place.”
💡 Product is key
“Product is at the absolute core of what we do. We only launch products that we think are world-class. We independently test them before any of them get out the door and we benchmark their performance against the most expensive brands in the markets. And that is the foundation of the success so far of this business.”
💡 Trust can be hard to build over Zoom
“Zoom has been amazing for many things, but trust amongst individuals in business carries you a very long way. I think it just takes a lot longer to build trust over a virtual medium. We’ll try to make sure we meet as many of our employees’ needs as possible, but personally I believe there’s a balance between the human contact and the sort of trust that comes from the human dynamics, and then every once and a while being able to sit back at home and get the work done without interruption.”
💡 Marketing is a conversation
“As soon as you hand over an ad to the internet, it’s a conversation. It’s not always great, people will often have some feedback that keeps us on our toes, but we equally engage with these people for innovation. We’ve asked people for help naming our products, and people love that two-way exchange with brands. It’s a conversation, as opposed to just throwing something over the fence and making it work.”
💡 Having the instinct for the ‘next big thing’
“Our founder has an outstanding instinct for what the customer wants and needs. We always start not just by knowing the customer, but knowing the industry so you can see the trends on the horizon, what’s exciting and potentially the next big thing. It can be exciting to bring that to market because you’re meeting consumer needs but with a level of novelty and excitement that the luxury end of the market should be leading.”
Top quotes from the episode:Rob Weston:
“The world of democratizing luxury is pretty big. I’m fascinated by all these industries that overcharge. Wherever we can find a margin that’s unjustified, we can run in and create luxury products that cost what you should be paying.”
“Embrace agility. Uncertainty is the only constant, so invest in decisions that create option value for you. You need to be flexible and adaptable in order to survive, and you need to keep a finger on the pulse and be prepared to adapt. That’s when little companies are so good, they’re just prepared to see it and go with it.”
“It’s so incredibly empowering for consumers to experience that what you’re selling has to come first and then you market it. The product has to be the default choice, and then you begin to tell your stories. There’s no point in doing it the other way.”
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Waste management isn’t the most glamorous field. But Tom Szaky, the founder of TerraCycle, a company that works with other companies and governments to recycle what has been typically un-recyclable, saw opportunity in it.
“There's such an opportunity to innovate around the topic of waste,” Tom says. “It has been a very uninnovative category because it is, quite literally, shitty, nasty and gross.”
One of Tom’s niches that he didn’t see other entrepreneurs chomping at the bit to fill? Diaper recycling.
When TerraCycle figured out how to recycle diapers — which make up a sizable chunk of non-biodegradable waste — a decade ago, it struggled with getting diaper companies on board. Companies knew it would be beneficial to the environment if their products were sustainable, but they often weren’t willing to shell out the money to make it happen.
TerraCycle turned that hesitancy into a marketing opportunity.
“Everyone would prefer not to buy diapers. But while your kids are in diapers, you might choose Brand A over Brand B,” Tom says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “So, if Brand A is doing what it can to be sustainable and incentivizing recycling, that gives them a leg up. We framed the entire approach to diaper recycling as something that can drive market share.”
TerraCycle’s challenge isn’t having to rise above its competitors: it’s getting people to care about sustainability, and brands to realize the potential market value of embracing the environmentally conscious future. In doing so, not only is the company challenging companies to rethink their marketing strategies around sustainability, but it’s changing the game of entrepreneurship entirely.
Featured Challenger
👨🏻 Name: Tom Szaky
⚙️ How he challenges: As founder and CEO of TerraCycle, Tom created a business model that incentivizes manufacturers, retailers and consumers to recycle products and packaging typically designated for the landfill.
♻️ Company: TerraCycle
💎 Noteworthy: Tom fled Hungary as a child and emigrated to Canada after the Chernobyl disaster brought radioactive clouds to his home country.
🔍 Where to find Tom: Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram
Challenger Wisdom
Highlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 New ideas require both time and effort to take root
“[It hasn’t been until] the past four years that I’m starting to really feel like the world is ready. But I’m also thankful that we had such a long time to figure it out, because we’ve really figured out how to be able to do our craft and leverage sustainability in a way that big companies are willing to hear out and lean into.”
💡 Passion comes easily with purpose
“Passion is the most important thing. It's much easier to be passionate about something that is purposeful, helping the planet or society, than about making money, which is vapid. And you can’t fake it. So it’s really important to find something that you are intrinsically very passionate about.”
💡 But you need more than passion to sustain a business
“TerraCycle now has 500 employees in our offices, and I'm sure they all have various degrees of passion. We now have to figure out our construct work even for someone who has no passion but can still contribute and make the business grow. It evolves over time, but it’s very important at the beginning.”
💡 The challenge of maintaining people’s attention, even without competitors
“We don’t really have competition. There’s a little bit here and there, but not any direct one-to-one competition. So what fuels us is people caring about the topic. If people shift and say, ‘No, now something else is going to be more important,’ that could be challenging, because we are not a product. We’re a platform that enables your purchase to have a better end-of-life.”
💡 Finding and filling a gap in the market
“We are good at supplementing what a local government or city does. It is important to recycle, but about half of what we put in the blue bins tends not to be recycled. So we’re going to focus on what you can’t put in that blue bin, or what you shouldn’t have put in the blue bin, and we work in that area, which is in addition to everyone doing as much local recycling as possible. It’s non-competitive, because we don’t go out and collect aluminum cans or newspapers or things that you should easily be able to put in your recycling bin.”
💡 Why critical feedback outweighs positive feedback
“[You should] really honor critical feedback because it's hard to give and it's filled with nuggets. Positive feedback is easy to give and never teaches you anything. If an entrepreneur comes to me for advice and I want to blow them off, I’ll just tell them it's a great idea and I probably can’t help you because it’s already awesome. But if I like it, I'll set up a meeting and rip it apart for a half-hour. ”
💡 Leveraging content as a foundation for good PR
“TerraCycle generates 40 unique articles every day. That’s a ton of media. We have a small army of publicists at this point, and we really focus on making journalists’ jobs as easy as possible. That’s when you start acquiring media assets. And that's true negative cost marketing. You get paid to market yourself.”
Top quotes from the episode:
Tom Szaky
Quote #1
“What fuels us is people caring. The most important thing for us is that people care about solving the idea of waste.”
Quote #2
“You don’t want to seek failure, but failure is going to come. The more innovative you are, the more you push the envelope, the more failure you’re going to see. So honor the learning, right? The real screw-up is if you repeat the same mistake twice.”
Quote #3
“The world is in a pretty bad position [environmentally], but nevertheless, I’m excited that people are really waking up to this topic, and that’s creating a lot of tailwinds all over the world. People’s eyes are opening and they tend not to close once they’ve opened. You can’t unsee it.”
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Stuart — or “Stu” — Landesberg grew up in New York thinking that everyone used brown, recycled paper towels and had a compost bin in their yard. Then he found out the truth, which developed the young would-be entrepreneur’s ambition for changing the world through challenging consumer habits.
“My early childhood experiences left a huge imprint on me in terms of what I accept as normal,” Stu says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “I grew up with a lens that I still see the world from today, which is that the world should be more sustainable than it is. That’s at the core of Grove.”
Stuart gained private equity skills during his time at TPG Capital while still holding onto his passion for the planet. By combining his business skills (and a little bit of self-admitted hubris) with his environmentalism, he eventually came up with the Grove Collaborative, a company that produces and sells natural, eco-friendly home goods.
The road to success wasn’t always easy — Stuart says that if he had known how hard it was going to be to start a company, he “probably wouldn’t have done it.” But now Grove Collaborative’s products are found nationwide at Target, with more successes on the way.
More than anything, Stuart thinks about how important it is to disrupt consumer habits and make sure that doing the sustainable thing is the convenient thing, instead of the other way around. With easy access to sustainable, natural products, the path to permanently eliminating plastic waste is in the consumer’s hands.
Disrupter-at-a-Glance👱♂️ Name: Stuart “Stu” Landesberg
⚙️ How he challenges: As the founder of Grove Collaborative, a sustainable home goods company, Stuart challenges consumers to think about the kinds of products they’re buying. He also challenges other companies to think about their long-term impact on the planet rather than focusing only on their short-term profits.
♻️ Company: Grove Collaborative
💎 Noteworthy: Grove Collaborative is currently plastic-neutral, meaning anytime you receive plastic from a Grove order, the company collects and recycles the same amount of plastic. And it’s striving for more: by 2025, they aim to be 100% plastic free, saving tons of plastic from filling up landfills and the ocean a year.
🔍 Where to find Stuart: Twitter | LinkedIn
Challenger WisdomHighlights from the conversation appear below.
💡 Mixing ideology and business
“I think of myself as having a very healthy mix of a diehard environmentalist hippie and someone who really believes in capitalism and knows that the gears of business, when turning well, can drive huge change.”
💡 Using less promising ideas as a jumping-off point
“One of the things I noticed early on in college was the proliferation of a certain red piece of plastic, the red Solo cup. It used to drive me insane, because those things never get recycled at the end of the night, and there’s a compostable alternative made from plant-based plastic that just wasn't convenient at the places you bought beer. I actually thought that I was going to go into a business at some point selling sustainable Solo cups to college kids. Thankfully, that business never got off the ground, but it was the first time where the insight of convenience and consumer behavior being linked took root.”
💡 Building on preexisting social awareness
“Grove exists at a time where access to information because of the internet is widespread. We’re at this incredible moment where education and information is more available. Efficacy has caught up to conventional brands and awareness around the impact of packaging waste. It’s higher than ever. And so we exist in this moment that's really ripe for consumer transition.”
💡Taking advantage of shifting tides
“More than 80% of people in the U.S. want to take action on plastic pollution. That means Red Sox and Yankees fans agree on this. There’s very few things that 80% of the U.S. agrees on. Some issues, like climate change, have become contentious, but there’s very few people who are in favor of the great Pacific garbage patch, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat or don’t even care about politics. You understand that at some point we’re going to run out of space to put our garbage.”
💡 Grinding through the hard times
“For the first four years, we were unable to raise institutional capital. If you work at that startup for four years — more than half of my professional career at that time — and it doesn't work, that's not a startup experiment. That's bad judgment. So it was a high-pressure, depressing time. I definitely cut checks from my personal account to cover payroll. If I slipped past you on the street, I might pitch you. I'd take money from anyone in any amount. It was a challenging time.”
💡Relying on early customers for help with growth
“We got to 200-300 customers through our PowerPoint version of the website when we launched in 2012. We got to lay out $10,000, $20,000 a year of annual revenue by running the business in PowerPoint and Excel with no technology. And that allowed us to go at a pace that's way faster than if you're using finished technology. That’s one of the secret things about this company that's led to our strong consumer understanding to this day. I spent a ton of time directly with our consumers. I probably gave away $10,000 in Starbucks gift cards of $5 increments asking consumers to look at prototype versions of growth over the years.”
💡 Getting consumers to move past guilt and anxiety and take action
“There’s just no version of the world where we don’t have to talk about environmental crises, like the microplastics in our water. If you’re somebody who eats fish, it’s already in our bodies. It’s going to be in our bodies in 20 years in a way we can’t even fathom and this stuff is going to change consumer behavior. What I focus on is getting the data from the consumer to build brands that the consumer will embrace on the way to this transition. At some point, people will be like, ‘Oh, plastic waste is something that is dangerous and I know better now.’”
💡 Thinking bigger about your impact than other bigger companies
“Corporations have no incentive to account for the end of the life of their product in their operations. They account for the financial cost, but they don’t account for the environmental cost. So we announced that we want it to be zero plastic a year ago. And in the first year, we saved almost 10 million pounds of plastic. And we're a tiny little company, just a grain of sand on the beach compared to the big guys. But even we saved 10 million pounds [of plastic] last year, and we’ll save even more than that this coming year. I’m a believer that change is possible.”
Top quotes from the episode:Stuart Landesberg
Quote #1
“One of the foundational reasons I started Grove was my belief that, gosh, I've seen business have so much impact on society. Wouldn't it be better if business leaders gave a shit about the impact that their companies had on the world around them?”
Quote #2
“I’m someone who believes there is always a way through. It never occurred to me that I would die in the tunnel — even if it was really hard, I knew I would find a way through and that I could not stop until I got through.”
Quote #3
“Guilt can induce a one-time change, but it's much more powerful if you buy with your heart. If you love the product that we're buying, you're not buying it because we made you feel guilty. So we try to create products that are at the intersection of efficacy, consumer love and sustainability. We don't just make sustainable products. We make products that are genuinely better than everything else on the market.”
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Harriet Dwyer went from working as a grant researcher to revolutionizing support work in Australia as the Chief of Staff at Hireup. By removing the traditional agency middleman, Hireup’s online platform connects people with disabilities directly to support workers that fit their lifestyle.
Previously, people with disabilities in Australia had virtually zero control over how government funds were used for the support they needed. The money was usually given to nonprofit organizations that decided how the support was structured and who was sent to assist each person.
Hireup's co-founder, Jordan O’Reilly, witnessed his brother suffer through this inadequate system and decided it was time for a change. The rise in peer-to-peer platforms like Uber and Airbnb sparked an idea — what if receiving disability support was that convenient and personalized? Intrigued by the thought, he set out to remove the middleman of disability support care in Australia.
"What I think Jordan did really well at the start is he hired entrepreneurial people," Harriet says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. It was vital to be surrounded by individuals who could work together to figure out answers for challenges they had no idea how to approach, such as funding, regulation, and safety.
One of the most important — and at the time, controversial — decisions Hireup made was to hire its support workers as employees, rather than independent contractors like most other platforms did. Harriet says this decision "just felt right," as they wanted their workers to form longstanding, healthy relationships and feel valued.
Hireup describes itself as a "profit for a purpose" company. It was the first purpose-led business to top Deloitte's list of fastest-growing tech companies and its market share will only continue to grow as it empowers more people with disabilities to make their own support decisions.
Featured Challenger
👩 Name: Harriet Dwyer
⚙️ How she challenges: Harriet is revolutionizing support for people with disabilities as the Chief of Staff at Hireup, an online platform that connects support workers with those who need them.
🤝 Company: Hireup
💎 Noteworthy: Harriet isn't just the Chief of Staff at Hireup — she also serves as a disability support worker herself! She's one of the many employees you can find on the platform, ready to help people with disabilities if it's the right fit.
🔍 Where to find Harriet: LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
💡 The ingenuity of young entrepreneurs could be the key to success
"This is part of the novelty or fun about why and how [Hireup] has worked. It really was a sense of the ingenuity you can have as a young entrepreneur with not much to lose. You really think you can deliver something big and bold, and you don't realize at the time just how big and bold it is with not a lot of precedent, examples, or experience that it will work, especially at the scale we're at now."
💡 Enjoying the privilege of the challenge
"There are definitely instances where we came up against questions that were around quite serious, important stuff like funding, regulation, or safety. The sort of stuff that we didn't have an answer to when we were first asked, but we were just really good at quickly forming an answer. There are reasons and logic as to how we did that, but it's just that we really enjoyed the privilege of the challenge."
💡 The decision to hire people as employees instead of contractors
"At the core of Hireup, the support workers that deliver our services are employees rather than contractors. … Yes, it places more liability on the business and requires us to go above and beyond by comparison to a contractor model in all kinds of ways. … But how can we possibly ask a bunch of people to go out and care for other people when no one's there caring for them? There are so many ways you can care for a worker that isn't just the categorization of their work, but it felt like being an employee was a really important part of that — that we could maintain that control and standard that we wanted for our customer."
💡 Business ideas aren't always as obvious as they seem in hindsight
"We get this a lot now — 'Gosh, Hireup seems so obvious!' But, at the time, it wasn't. It took Jordan heaps to get the right kind of funding and to convince people there's a viable business in this, and that actually putting control back in the hands of people with disabilities and redistributing that power from big government organizations is worth banking on. It's worth saying there's an important product here that can be quite powerful."
💡 The value of being a tech-led, customer-centric platform
"There's a huge amount of value that being tech-led brings us — yes, in the software and scalability of that — but right through to the incredible changes that tech companies have brought to customer-centricity. Ultimately, we're here to serve people with disability to make changes that are empowering for people with disability. If that's not customer-centricity, I don't know what is."
💡 Capturing additional market share in a newly tech-enabled niche
"We have had phenomenal growth but we're still not a significant proportion of the market. There's still heaps we need to do in our core, so we're really focusing on that. … Hireup … is still not really right for the whole market. There are people with different types of disabilities and different types of living environments that the platform solution hasn't yet addressed because it is so much more hands-off. There's a value that case management, in the traditional model, has brought for people in different circumstances, so we're starting to think about what that looks like in a tech-enabled world."
Top quotes from the episode:
Harriet Dwyer:
Quote #1
"If there's anything that's worked to our advantage over the last five years, it's been ignorance. It never felt daunting. It always felt big, but it never felt overwhelming."
Quote #2
"As a business model, we call ourselves a ‘profit for purpose’ rather than just a traditional for-profit. We were the first purpose-led business to top [Deloitte's list of fastest-growing tech companies]. They were really thrilled to see this rise in purpose-led business."
Quote #3
"[Hireup is] a thing that needs to get done. There's a community of people that deserve so much better and you can see a really small light at the end of the tunnel. ... For that reason alone, It's worth withstanding whatever question or challenge comes your way."
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Aishetu Fatima Dozie, or Aisha for short, is a first-generation Nigerian American who’s always had big goals for herself. After almost 20 years working as a banker, a health scare helped her realize it was time to pursue her passion.
“Being diagnosed with severe hypertension was my wakeup call that I needed to change my life,” Aishetu says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger. “I didn’t feel like I was tapping into my purpose. ... I really felt like I had a destiny, and I wasn’t even close to it as an investment banker.”
Wanting to empower women to be their best selves, Aishetu considered going into the nonprofit sector. But after some careful thinking, she decided reaching her goals required a more entrepreneurial path — which led to starting Bossy Cosmetics.
“I felt incredibly strongly that I wanted to work with women, to be a part of igniting confidence in women,” Aishetu says. “I just want to be about everything that elevates women and gets us closer to having a seat at every single table.”
Bossy Cosmetics started out as a lipstick company but has since expanded. This doesn’t change Aishetu’s goals for the company, which she defines as a “women’s empowerment and mission-driven business that masquerades as a beauty company.”
One of the keys to Aishetu’s success is that she doesn’t compare her company to other makeup businesses. She knows Bossy Cosmetics is unique in that it doesn’t just think about how women want to look, but how they want to feel.
“How you select your makeup has everything to do with how you want to show up in the world,” Aishetu says. “There’s a very strong emotional connection between how women shop for their makeup and how they want to use that makeup to influence how they feel and how they perform.”
Featured Challenger
👩🏾 Name: Aishetu Fatima Dozie
⚙️ How she challenges: As the founder of Bossy Cosmetics, a makeup company that aims to empower women to look, feel and do good, Aishetu is shaking up the beauty industry by asking customers: what do you really want?
💄Company: Bossy Cosmetics
💎 Noteworthy: Bossy Cosmetics is a cruelty-free beauty company that sends a percentage of its profits to nonprofit organizations that help women around the world.
🔍 Where to find Aishetu: Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram
Challenger Wisdom 💡 Questioning what ‘success’ means
“I’d been climbing a ladder for 20 years [as an investment banker], getting to a place I’d never thought I’d be 20 years ago. And it wasn’t that exciting. I was doing a lot of thinking about what success is and asking myself if I should be changing my goals. When I fell ill, it was an easy answer: I was not living the life of my dreams.”
💡 Considering how to make a dent in the world: nonprofits or entrepreneurship?“I knew that I wanted to be a part of igniting confidence in women. And initially, I thought that meant that I needed to go work for a nonprofit that focuses on women. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there's actually a business model that allows you to have an intimate conversation with women, to get close to them, to establish a level of trust where they’re willing to have a conversation with you. And that’s the way to live out your purpose.”
💡 Struggling with — and overcoming — imposter syndrome“I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome my whole life. But one thing I always tell myself is that the greatest partner of imposter syndrome is inertia. When I feel that sort of chill, that anxious anxiety of imposter syndrome, I just tell myself to go find the solution. I’m incredibly solution-oriented.”
💡 Building a great team that you can rely on“One thing I’ve learned is that I don’t have all the answers, so I really try to work with the best of the best. As a CEO, yeah, you’re the visionary of the brand. But I’m not the one who cooks up the lipsticks, I’m not the one who paints the bottles. I have really amazing members of my team and we work together. The reason the team works well is because everyone is empowered to do what they do brilliantly.”
💡 Having faith in yourself as a challenger brand“One thing that’s really important as an entrepreneur is this almost crazy notion of believing in yourself. No matter how difficult or impossible things seem, or saturated a market looks, nobody’s doing it the way you are doing it. And the only way for that to be true is if you do it in a way that is so authentic to you.”
💡 Listening to your customers — and getting personal“Initially, I felt like people didn’t want to hear about what was going on in my life, but when the pandemic started last year, I asked our customers if they minded if I shared with them how I felt because it was really weird just talking about makeup when it felt like the world was melting. I was shocked at how appreciative people are about that. It’s been humbling to now have hundreds or thousands of women who feel like they’re co-creating with you. It’s amazing.”
💡 Celebrate your team’s successes, and take responsibility for the losses“When there's a win, give the team the credit, give the exact person that credit, and thank them. I want to be very, very clear about this as a leader, because, yes, I started this business, but there is nothing that I've done in this company that I did by myself. Everything is as a result of the team. So if there is a win, you have to give the win to the person who did it. If there is a loss, I have to take it. And that is the burden of leadership.”
💡 Juggling what can and cannot be put on the backburner“I definitely don’t have [work-life] balance. I don’t even know what that word means. If there’s a master class on balance, please send it my way. I am just constantly trying to figure it all out. But I think about it as glass and rubber balls. My glass balls are my family, my friends, myself and God. Then I have millions of rubber balls that I’m juggling all the time, and many times I drop all the balls that are not glass. And when I’m done, I pick them back up and keep going.”
Top quotes from the episode:Aishetu Fatima Dozie:
Quote #1
“Comparison is the thief of joy. I'm not looking at what competitors are doing, I just look forward. And to be honest with you, I actually don't know who my competitors are, because I don't think anybody is doing what I'm doing.”
Quote #2
“The ultimate goal of imposter syndrome is to get you so bewildered and afraid and petrified that you don't move. I kind of let those feelings wash over me, because you can't escape them. And then once I accept them for what they are, I start moving.”
Quote #3
“I don't want to only sell [our customers] beauty products, I want to sell them a notion: how can I be a better part of your day? How can I make your day better so that you're more productive when you use my products?”
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Andrea Brimmer was once asked how she got her CFO to give her the greenlight to allocate half a million dollars for a customer giveaway during the week of Thanksgiving.
“I said, ‘I didn't ask her because I don't have to,’” Andrea says. “And that wasn't me being facetious or cocky and saying I don't have to get permission from anybody to do anything. But it's me saying she believes in that program as much as I do.”
Andrea is CMO and head of PR for Ally Financial, a completely online financial services company. With the promise of 24/7 support and unique virtual reality (among other) offerings, Ally strives to create meaningful and lasting connections with its customers — and all of Andrea’s work is driven by that mission.
She’s doing something right, because Ally’s CEO has received letters from CEOs of other banks commending the company for its “brilliant” ideas. Because the Ally team is constantly taking risks and concocting creative messaging, Ally’s customers are on board when the bank takes new leaps.
The hallmark of the brand is customer centricity, and with everyone from the CEO to call center employees committed to that core value, Andrea believes the company will continue to succeed.
“My team made Ad Age's 2019 Marketers of the Year list, and the reason I was so proud of that is, as I looked at that list I thought … we're showing up on this list with Apple and with Burger King, and with Allbirds and all these brands that are out there and are doing all this crazy and interesting stuff,” she says.
“We've cracked the code, because we've gotten consumers to think of us in a really different way because of our actions.”
Featured Challenger👱♀️ Name: Andrea Brimmer
⚙️ How she challenges: As the CMO and head of PR at Ally Financial, a financial services company offering car finance, online banking via a direct bank, mortgage loans and more, Andrea isn’t afraid to take risks to engage with customers in a creative way.
💻 Company: Ally Financial
💎 Noteworthy: Andrea’s many honors and accolades include being named a winner of Adweek's 2020 Brand Genius awards for marketers who have skillfully led their brands' messaging to new heights. She was also named to Forbes World's Most Influential CMOs list twice.
🔍 Where to find Andrea: Twitter | LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom
💡 Take a risk and it just might pay off"We launched in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And I can still remember so clearly so many people saying to us … ‘Why are you launching a bank right now?’ And that really did become the driving force for us, that idea that the world didn't need another bank, it needed a better bank. And it seems crazy to say this right now, but the year that we launched was the same year that Apple launched the iPhone. So we took this giant bet that everybody was going to bank in the palm of their hands. … the thinking that really charged the brand was, how do we sell for all of these pain points that have existed in the financial services category for over 100 years, that nobody's ever really done anything about? They've talked about it, but they haven't ever really done it. And how can we come to market with some really strong deeds? And not just words?”
💡 Standing out by incentivizing customer service to be truly helpful"We offer 24 by seven service. And we were the first and are still today, one of the only banks that offer 24 by seven service 365 days a year. So at any point in time, you can pick up the phone, and you can talk to a human being. And what we did that was really differentiated is that we rewarded our call center advocates on first touch resolution … most call center advocates are rewarded on how many calls you take throughout the day. Ours were like, look, even if you only answer one call, and it takes you eight hours, as long as you solve that customer's problem in that eight-hour call, you're going to get rewarded or compensated. So those were two really big things we did to create trust.”
💡 Your team’s devotion to the mission is crucial"Everybody owned it. It wasn't just me, it wasn't just marketing. It was the collection of all of the experiences that made the brand the original disrupter that it still is today. And we all feel like our brand is a weapon in a good way. And we need to lean into it. And we need to feed it, and we need to continue to protect it and nurture it. We just have never, as big as we are today — over 10,000 people and multiple locations — lost that focus and that attitude.”
💡 An entirely digital infrastructure requires a new kind of customer connection"We have this incredible digital experience across all of our products, but you know when you're in that situation where I need to talk to somebody, I can't figure this out, or I can't do this without human interaction, that you can do that in a really simplistic way without having to go into a branch. So I think it's really about finding that balance so that you're working on the customer's terms, you're not working on your terms. And I think that's what a lot of brands overlook, oftentimes, which is customer-centric brands think like the customer 24 hours a day. We start every meeting by reading a letter from one of our customers, whether it's good or bad, and just grounding ourselves in this is the reason why we exist. So what are the things that we need to do to push to the next level now?
💡 Don’t box yourself in to one growth strategy"We say our target is anybody with money. And that makes it pretty simple. We're not discriminating in that regard. And as we look to grow, I think it's more of, we're looking to grow across our product set. Today, our savings products are obviously the most dominant product for us. But we have these incredible other products like our invest platform, our mortgage platform, we have personal lending products now. And so that's really where we're looking to grow as to deepen relationships with existing customers, bring more people in, that are open to a wider swath of digital products beyond just parking some money with us, and really kind of growing out that customer set and continuing to acquire new customers in that regard.”
💡 Transparency within a company breeds success“You need to learn how to create followership. I mean, look, we do a lot of pretty out there things from a marketing perspective. And there have been times where my boss has said to me, ‘oh, you're making me very uncomfortable, but I trust you.’ And a lot of that comes from spending time with my business partners, and really letting them understand our strategy and why we're doing what we're doing. spending a lot of time with my CFO I in fact, she and I just had an hour and a half call together last week. And we do that on the regular, where I'm not trying to move the deckchairs around or hide things from her. I want her to have full transparency into everything that I'm doing and why.”
💡 How to get your customers to engage in creative ways"Disruptors have a really simple brief: find interesting ways to get people to engage with their money. And so we've done things like hid 10 Ally-branded pennies in 10 cities across the country, and created a scavenger hunt for those pennies. We've done things like creating a virtual reality game, that was an app that you had to download and you had to tell us your savings story. And the catch was that the app only worked during the commercial breaks of the Superbowl, so it was a really cool way to interrupt people's Superbowl commercials. We've done interesting things like … create an island on ‘Animal Crossing’ last year that actually was so popular, it broke the game for three days. Those are the things that I'm most proud of, because they were all highly focused on getting people to engage with their money in interesting ways. And they have created a very different place for this brand than any other brand in this category.”
💡 Remaining centered in your personal life centers your business"I'm a person that believes in a couple things. One, I believe in deeds, not words. And that's a personal ethos that drives me every single day. And I think you have to demonstrate through your actions what you preach. And I think when I do that, I'm at my best. I'm a big believer in a strong body equals a strong mind. So I think when you keep yourself physically fit, physically strong, I think it creates creativity, and it creates inertia for you. I think that there's just something about that physical strength that gives you mental strength, where you don't worry. And lastly, I think I drink a lot of wine and that definitely helps.”
Top quotes from the episode:Andrea Brimmer:
Quote #1
“We don't think like bankers. I don't think like a marketer. I try and think like a human being. What do I want? What do my kids want? What do my parents want from a banking experience? And how can we create those experiences or those solutions, and that really was the key for us.”
Quote #2
“Our CEO, Jeff Brown, always says ‘money is one of the most important things in a person's life, and the care for that is entrusted to us. It's a big responsibility, and we have to be mindful of that.’ And that's the approach that we really try and take when we're trying to create these relationships with customers.”
Quote #3
“I think [bravery] means living your life leading from the front. And I think it also means leading your life and your career with gusto and not fear.”
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I’ve always admired Brian Scudamore - both personally and professionally. A high-school dropout, Brian scaled a junk hauling side-hustle into a $300+ million business empire. His commitment to being an exceptional leader and a dedicated family man is unparalleled. Listen as Brian shares invaluable tips on how challenger brands can transform a business from ordinary to exceptional through consistent hiring practices, excellent customer service and taking time to learn from other industries.
Top 3 QuotesI'm a happy and optimistic leader and I wanted that same feeling for my entire company.Open your mind. Be open to opportunities and new ways of doing things, but at the same time not giving up focus on what you've got.It's all these little things that add up to an easy experience for the customerShow Highlights[01:52] How Brian became a self-declared minimalist[03:40] Baking compulsive servitude into the company DNA[05:37] The things Brian is most proud of[07:11] Consistent delivery equals delightful customer journey[09:53] The narrative thread towards success[10:55] Daily habits and maintaining them[12:28] Learning from an earlier incident[13:55] Brian's competitive advantage[14:42] Make meaning vs. Make money[15:59] A personal WHY[17:00] Marketing tactics to grow the company[19:02] Was it a challenge to make junk sexy, relevant, and interesting?[20:13] Entrepreneurs Organization (EO)[23:11] Finding inspiration outside your own industry[24:30] Did Marie Kondo single-handedly increase Brian's revenue?[25:32] What's next for Brian?[27:22] Prentice's Challenger TakeawaysResourcesO2E BrandsConnect with Brian on LinkedInConnect with Brian on TwitterConnect with Brian on FacebookWTF?! (Willing to Fail): How Failure Can Be Your Key to Success -
Enrico Frezza went from testing skincare products in his kitchen (and sometimes burning layers of skin off) to building the number one acne brand in Sephora North America.
As the founder and CEO of Peace Out Skincare, Enrico is challenging the clinical, unappealing acne industry with unique, effective products and a brand centered around “acne positivity.”
Initially, Enrico's goal was to find a solution to his own acne problems. After trying every acne spot treatment in the drug stores, he set out to make his own product by mixing hydrocolloid wound care dressing with salicylic acid. He left it on overnight and when he woke up his pimples were gone, but a layer of his skin was gone, too. It wasn't great, but it was a start and Enrico knew he had found a solution.
He approached 65 different labs that all told him it wasn't possible to mix active ingredients with hydrocolloid dressing. Undeterred, Enrico (who worked in cybersecurity and had zero scientific background) researched patents and found one with a mix of ingredients that gave him hope his product was possible to produce. He met with the business that held the patent and they started on the R&D process.
Together, Enrico and his husband, Junior, who has 20 years of experience in consumer marketing, built the Peace Out brand — as in "peace out" to your skin imperfections. After seeing how clinical, doctor-driven, and sometimes scary acne marketing was, Enrico wanted to build an upbeat, engaging, and simple brand while bringing breakthrough technology to the industry.
From the start, their goal was to launch with Sephora. On this episode, Enrico shares how Peace Out got its startup brand into the multinational cosmetics retailer, and how it became the number one acne brand at Sephora North America.
Featured Challenger👨 Name: Enrico Frezza
⚙️ How he challenges: Enrico is challenging the clinical world of acne products by building a community around acne positivity with his revolutionary skincare company, Peace Out Skincare.
☮️ Company: Peace Out
💎 Noteworthy: "We were really the first to bring acne positivity in the marketplace, where we understand what it feels like to have acne and we are here to support you. Having acne doesn't make you any less beautiful."
🔍 Where to find Enrico: Twitter | Instagram
🔍 Where to find Peace Out: YouTube | LinkedIn | Instagram
Challenger Wisdom💡 Shooting for skincare gold — after 65 labs said it wasn't possible"There were a lot of burning phases and turning my kitchen into my own personal lab. Once I found what I thought was the best percentages to mix the ingredients at, that's when I started looking into different labs to make the product. I thought it was going to be easy, but it wasn't easy to start a new business with something that wasn't ever developed before. Nobody ever mixed any active ingredients into hydrocolloid dressing, so it was challenging to find someone that could integrate these active ingredients into the patch. After contacting 65 labs who all said they couldn't do it, I started researching patents because I thought if anyone was able to mix anything with hydrocolloid dressing, then maybe they can mix mine."
💡 Reinventing a clinical product category to make it more relatable"Once we had the product, Junior, who is my husband, and I started working on the branding and coming up with the brand ethos. The name Peace Out came about to say 'Peace Out' to your imperfections. We started looking at what else was in the marketplace and saw that the acne category was extremely doctor-driven and very clinical in kind of a scary way in terms of marketing strategies. So we wanted to bring something that was fun and that's where Peace Out came about to make it not scary, simple, one step, and effective, while still bringing breakthroughs and first-to-market technologies but not being scary, too clinical, or doctor-driven."
💡 Bringing ‘acne positivity’ to market (and helping consumers feel better about their skin)"I think skincare, in general, has always been very scary in a way that the marketing tactics back in the day was to make you feel bad about your own skin imperfections so you would purchase the products. I felt that was pretty bad, especially in acne, where there wasn't any embracing around acne. That's where I felt we were really the first to bring acne positivity in the marketplace, where we understand what it feels like to have acne and we are here to support you. Having acne doesn't make you any less beautiful."
💡 Building a meaningful community around your product"The acne shouldn't define who you are, so you should live your life and be yourself and not let acne hold you back, which is something that I did. The reason why we want to build a community where people can talk about the struggles with acne and the toll it takes on mental health is because I didn't have that when I was a teenager. Oddly enough, in Italy, there really wasn't anybody with major acne … for some reason, in my group of friends and in my family nobody struggled with that type of acne so it was hard to find support or somebody to talk to about the toll it was taking on my mental health."
💡 Launching with international cosmetics giant Sephora"Our goal was always to launch with Sephora. We got an intro to Sephora via email and we sent some presentation materials and samples of the products … It was hard, it took a while — from the first time we communicated with Sephora, it took six months to hear back. Then we had our meeting and, in the first meeting, we were discussing pizza acne as the first product and the brand. They were like, 'We love all of these — we love the acne positivity, we love the product, et cetera, but come back when you have a full brand.' So we went back and we came out with Peace Out as a brand with a pipeline of six products … We pitched it back, then we got the yes from Sephora and launched in July 2017."
💡 Transitioning from cybersecurity to skincare"[The transition from cybersecurity to skincare] was definitely not natural. It was really challenging. There was so much that I had to learn and I didn't have time to learn it. Also, you have no room for mistakes, it's not like, 'Oh, I'm going to make a mistake and learn from it and move on.' There were definitely a lot of challenges and, still now, I'm always learning more things. I'm grateful that I started the company with just me and Junior because I literally know how to do everything in the company and it allowed me to learn all of it."
💡 Passing on paid product influencers (free products instead)"We don't believe in doing big paid influencers, just because a lot of times it doesn't feel authentic. We'd rather partner with influencers in seeding free products out — that's always been the strategy on social media. With Tik Tok, at the end of 2019, we started to look at it because it was a growing platform, especially with gen-Z which is a big part of our consumer base, and acne categories were huge on Tik Tok … We started putting our social team into finding influencers, micro-influencers, and non-influencers to seed products out for testing and share the experience if they liked it."
Top quotes from the episodeQuote #1
"I knew the product kept improving batch by batch. It was already better than anything else I had ever tried in the marketplace. Knowing that I could put something on the marketplace that could help so many other people to treat their breakouts and acne that I wish I had in high school was a big motivation."
Quote #2
"Nowadays with social media and faking perfect skin with face tune, it makes it even more challenging for somebody in their teenage years to feel okay with their own imperfections."
Quote #3
"Being bootstrapped allowed us to focus our financials in great investments that had good ROI and keeping our vision and priorities on track without having to listen to other voices or directions."
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The COVID-19 pandemic has business owners and public service providers worrying about infectious diseases more than ever. Lisa Tecklenburg, Chief Marketing Officer at R-Zero, wants to help ease some of those concerns.
R-Zero’s flagship product is the Arc UV-C system, which uses ultraviolet-C (UVC) light to kill pathogens in the air and on surfaces in just a few minutes. It sounds like science fiction, but according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), UVC light has been used as a disinfectant for decades. It’s been shown to disable the SARS-Coronavirus, which is similar to the virus that causes COVID-19.
Lisa is aware that one of R-Zero’s challenges is education around the potential of UVC. The company was founded in April 2020, so identifying the brand as an authority is crucial, especially given all the snake oil salesmen benefitting from the pandemic.
“Getting third-party testing that said, ‘This kills 99.99% of coronavirus and MRSA and influenza’ was critically important, especially in the UVC market, because some of the products aren't up to snuff,” she says. It helps that in addition to having a chief scientist with infectious disease experience on the team, Lisa herself has a background in microbiology.
“I was really looking for an opportunity that did two things: fundamentally changed healthcare and saved lives,” she says. “I came across R-Zero and immediately thought, I have to be connected to this company.”
Featured Challenger
👱♀️ Name: Lisa Tecklenburg
⚙️ How she challenges: Lisa is the Chief Marketing Officer at R-Zero, a company founded during the COVID-19 pandemic. R-Zero’s Arc UV-C system uses UVC radiation to kill pathogens on surfaces and in the air.
☀️ Company: R-Zero
💎 Noteworthy: In 2016, at age 35, Lisa was diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer. Her initial response was to accept the diagnosis and make the most of whatever time she had left. But when her brother pleaded with her to at least try treatment, she changed her mind. “I promised him that I would fight, and it really changed my attitude from [seeing cancer as] something that was thrust upon me to something that I had to fight through,” she says.
🔍 Where to find Lisa: LinkedIn
🔍 Where to find R-Zero: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
Challenger Wisdom 💡 Go Hoosiers!
“I studied microbiology: I actually wanted to do an MD-PhD. But I was on the Athletics Committee, and we got to rebrand the entire athletics department at Indiana University Bloomington. I asked someone, ‘Can you do this for a job?’ I applied directly to business school, and that started my journey down this marketing path.”
💡 Setting a goal and scoring it“My soccer coach in high school said to me, ‘You're never going to be a varsity soccer player. You should just go run cross country.’ Being brash and 14 years old, I said, ‘I'm going to prove you wrong.’ Four years later, I was a high school all-American with a soccer college scholarship. It's those things that inform how you address your life and challenges, and figure out how you're going to go forward.”
💡 The science behind the Arc“R-Zero’s flagship product is the Arc. It’s a UVC device, and it's about six feet tall. You roll it into a room and it will disinfect all the surfaces and all the air in a 1,000 square-foot space in seven minutes. It leverages UVC light, which is a type of light that doesn't come through the atmosphere. It changes the DNA or RNA of pathogens, so that they're totally inactivated. You can eliminate all the chemicals and the processes that it takes to disinfect things, and do it really quickly.”
💡 UVC is tried and trusted but its potential is just getting started“Hospitals started using UVC in about the 1930s. It's been used much more dramatically since 2010. Hospitals that were implementing UVC saw a reduction in infections, but these systems are really expensive. What is awesome about R-Zero is that we can make these to a higher quality that puts out more light, creates a much better ROI, and allows us to use this amazing technology much more broadly. And what better time than when there's a pandemic where we have an increased need for disinfection?”
💡 Sticker slogans stick“We have found that some of our customers are leaving the Arc out, and they're using our stickers and our placards that say, ‘Protected by R-Zero hospital-grade disinfection.’ That's making people feel a lot better, because they know that their company or their local store has been really taking care to protect them.”
💡 Small means speedy“One of the things that's great about working for a small company is that we are able to move very quickly. We can jump on an all-company call once a week and be very nimble in the way that we operate. It allows us to adapt to customers and to the marketplace, and test and try things and make it better literally on a daily basis.”
💡 Infectious diseases won’t end with COVID-19 — neither will R-Zero“We believe in serving our customers and we believe in our vision for healthier, safer spaces. And even if COVID ‘goes away,’ there are still infection threats out there. So we're going to continue to innovate.”
Top quotes from the episode
Lisa Tecklenburg:
Quote #1
“I had this attitude of, ‘You think I can't do this? I'll figure out how to do it.’ That's been the way I've always approached things.”
Quote #2
“From a marketing perspective, it's not helpful to spread yourself super thin across every market. One of the markets that we've recently focused on is education. We want to make sure that’s good enough before we go on to another market.”
Quote #3
“The system is super simple to use. It is worth it, even if you have to redo your plans, because it is a sustainable solution. I feel good about the different ways it provides value to any organization.”Quote #4
“We don't just launch a customer and leave them. We have a full training program, we're working on their marketing and communications. We have remote monitoring to see how the Arc is working, how often they're running it, so we can talk to them about that.”
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Craig Dubitsky is a self-described lifelong entrepreneur.
Craig founded Hello Products, a friendly, all-natural personal care brand, and he now works as the Chief Innovation Strategist at Colgate (after Colgate acquired his brand!).
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone more obsessed with packaging and design than Craig, who believes there's no such thing as a boring category — only boring execution. As a testament to this belief, his first product at Hello was toothpaste.
While browsing through the typical chain drugstore one day, Craig was struck by the sudden horror of how doom and gloom toothpaste packaging was. For instance, he noticed that most of them included ingredients banned by the FDA in other products that didn't even go inside your body. (Plus, why do they always show graphics of teeth falling out? Don't we want our teeth to stay in?)
"If it's going in your mouth, it's going in your body," Craig says. This pushed him to create something that was natural and highly effective.
The first thing Craig did was trademark "Hello" in a ton of different product categories to ensure he could truly promote the friendliest brand possible. Then he got to work with a formulator with "more degrees than a thermometer."
Craig's brand journey is the exact opposite of your typical direct-to-consumer brand: he started out in Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and other major retailers because he knew his brand held certain credibility just by being inside those brick and mortars.
Craig is all about humanizing brands and making the world a friendlier place. "I never use the word ‘consumer.’ I don't use the word ‘customer.’ I'll use the word ‘people’ — we're all people, we happen to consume things. I think a lot of companies — a lot of larger brands — spoke to people as if they were just consumers and that, to me, was the opportunity," he says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger.
Featured Challenger👨 Name: Craig Dubitsky
⚙️ How he challenges: As the Chief Innovation Strategist at Colgate, Craig is working to make everyday retail products (like toothpaste) beautiful, friendlier and healthier.
👋 Company: Hello Products
💎 Noteworthy: Since his brand's website first launched, Craig insisted on having a Skype line that went directly to him so he could answer and talk with customers — and yes, it still exists!
🔍 Where to find Craig: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom💡 Humanizing your brand and talking to consumers people"It was sort of like we can't have a brand voice — that's for advertising! The product can't do that! … And that to me, some might argue that provides a lot of flexibility — I think it's an antiquated way in a lot of cases of thinking about your brand. I like to think Hello is a brand people join, not one they consume or one they buy on a promotion or deal — it's kind of like it's talking to them."
💡 Overcoming long-standing cues of product effectiveness"There are definitely cues [on a product's effectiveness] that we're used to, and a lot of those cues come from decades of storytelling and advertising that we're exposed to. Like mouthwash — the more it hurts, the more it works, but things don't have to hurt to work. So, anyway, there've been a lot of tropey storytelling messages we've been bludgeoned with but it takes a little time to get people over that. I think a lot of bigger purchases have gotten us used to the idea that something a little more natural doesn't mean it's not going to work."
💡 Don't disrupt a market — change the world"If it's all about ‘we're going to raise a bunch of money and then look to bother someone so that they have to come buy us,’ that's not really building a brand. That's not really building a business; that's like you want to be a pain in someone's backside. That's a business model I guess, but that's not what gets me fired up. Tell me how you're really going to be changing the world, not disrupting someone."
💡 Making personal care personal again"Talking about humanizing the brand, I wanted to make personal care personal again. Ever since we launched — literally day one with the first website we had — there was a Skype button on the website. Now, Skype is going to sound a little antiquated now since we're all Zooming our way into the future but at the time, Skype was pretty cool. There's still a Skype button on the website and it comes directly to me and I always — unless I was on a plane or with a retail partner or family — I pick up. People were always shocked that it was real."
💡 Profitability comes down to how you can make people feel"Getting the profitability, getting people to believe — a lot of that comes from how you make other people feel. That's what marketing is, that's what branding is. How do you elicit an authentic set of emotions — hopefully not just one emotion — with people at scale? And do it in a way that doesn't put their bullshit meter in the red, because I think people can tell. They're smart, and if you can feel something and you get a sense that it's real … That's what it's about."
💡 Making everything just a little more friendly"It was always ‘Hello Products’ — it was never ‘Hello Oral Care, Inc.’ because I had this idea that basically anything and everything could be made a little more friendly. Full stop. And part of being friendly is, to me, a combination of ethics and aesthetics, and how can we bring that to a lot of other categories?"
💡 An entrepreneur is anybody with an idea who makes it real"To me, an entrepreneur is anybody with an idea who makes it real. If you have an idea and you can make it real, why does it matter if it's on your own and you're a disruptor or you're inside of a big company and you're a challenger inside your company? I just make fun of challenger and disruptor a lot, sorry. But if you have an idea and you make it real, in my mind, you're an entrepreneur. If you can take that idea and make it real and make it profitable, then you're a good entrepreneur."
Top quotes from the episodeCraig Dubitsky
Quote #1
"I never use the word ‘consumer.’ I don't use the word ‘customer.’ I'll use the word ‘people’ — we're all people, we happen to consume things. I think a lot of companies, a lot of larger brands spoke to people as if they were just consumers and that, to me, was the opportunity."
Quote #2
"What I have really always loved is design and art and people — I love people. I think people write their narratives through their things and their experiences and, quite frankly, they're not given a lot of really great things. What gets me excited, truly, is to try and make things pretty ... but make them affordable."
Quote #3
"If you have an idea and you make it real, in my mind, you're an entrepreneur. If you can take that idea and make it real and make it profitable, then you're a good entrepreneur."
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Early on in his life, Matt Salzberg knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. After earning an MBA from Harvard and seeking out jobs at venture capitalist firms to help build his professional network, Matt was ready to begin his entrepreneurial journey.
Matt is the founder and chairman of Blue Apron, the pioneering brand of meal delivery services. It’s essentially a household name at this point but if you aren’t familiar, the service partners with farmers to source high-quality ingredients for meal kits delivered right to your door.
Blue Apron was born as a result of two key things: Matt’s personal need to cook unique meals at home with his now-wife; and his sharp business acumen after noticing that grocery and food held less than a 1 percent share of the e-commerce market penetration at the time.
During his research phase, Matt came across a business in Sweden that offered a similar service and learned that around 7 percent of the country's population used it to cook at home. He thought to himself, "Wow, if 7 percent of the Swedish population could use or want a service like this, boy, could it be successful in the U.S.!"
Blue Apron's early marketing programs focused heavily on trials and referrals, but not in the typical sense. Because the concept of ordering meal kits online was so novel at the time, Matt created a unique referral program to help assuage concerns.
Here’s how it worked: Blue Apron would send free deliveries to loyal customers for their friends to try. The program turned out to be a major hit.
Besides this referral strategy, Matt credits Blue Apron's early success to nailing down the unit economics. Figuring out costs and profit for food, shipping, production, packaging, and labor helped to justify scaling the business while giving it a strong financial profile.
Matt built Blue Apron up from nothing to earning $900 million in revenue in just six years and then took the company public. Since its inception, many customers have claimed that Blue Apron changed their lives and saved their marriages with its easy, delicious, sustainably sourced meals.
"Some people tell you your business ideas are dumb, but actually the more nefarious thing is most people just smile and grin at you about your business idea. They say, 'Oh yeah, cool, I'd buy that.' There's a very big difference between that and 'You've changed my life,'" Matt says.
Featured Challenger👨 Name: Matt Salzberg
⚙️ How he challenges: As the founder of Blue Apron, Matt challenges traditional grocery stores with high-quality, responsibly sourced, chef-designed meal kits delivered right to customers’ doors.
🍲 Company: Blue Apron
💎 Noteworthy: Matt's MBA from Harvard isn't the only impressive thing about him. He's also been named as part of Inc. Magazine’s 35 under 35, Fortune’s 40 under 40 and Crain’s 40 under 40.
🔍 Where to find Matt: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn
Challenger Wisdom💡 Finding validation from abroad — in Matt’s case, Sweden"I came to the idea for Blue Apron looking for brands and opportunities in retail e-commerce grocery, but really finding a personal need and desire for a service like Blue Apron. ... So [I] started exploring this idea of how we could make it easier for people to cook at home and discovered a business in Sweden actually, called Linas Matkasse, which was not exactly like Blue Apron but similar in that they help people cook at home — completely different operating and fulfillment model, completely different digital marketing ... but something like 7 percent of the Swedish population was cooking with a service like this and that really struck me as, 'Wow, if 7 percent of the Swedish population could use or want a service like this, boy, could it be successful in the U.S."
💡 Design a unique referral solution to overcome customer fears"One of the reasons that our early marketing programs were really focused on trial and referrals [is] because, at the time, not a lot of people had bought food online and had it shipped to them in the mail. I would say that [the] consumer perspective was the most difficult hurdle we had to overcome because people would go on our website and say, 'OK, this looks good, I get it, I understand the value prop but is it going to taste good? Is it going to be fresh? I'm used to showing up at the grocery store and touching my food.' What we were able to do is we designed a program … to overcome that objection."
💡 Build relationships with investors early on"[Building relationships with investors] was one of the things I was spending my time on while I was at Bessemer doing venture investing. I think one of the reasons venture investing was a useful stop for me and my career was I was able to build relationships with other angel investors and people in that ecosystem over time so that when I was ready to do something, I had a group of individuals that I knew, who knew me, who invested in early-stage terms."
💡 Calculate unit economics before anything else"The other big thing that we did that I think was really important was thinking about the unit economics. To me, making sure we had a strong unit economic engine could justify scaling the business and provide a strong financial profile to it. … I think the thing that wasn't obvious was can we make money doing this? And can this be a good business? So the very first thing after those other things that we did was sketch out on a piece of paper the unit cost of a delivery. ... How much profit we make per delivery — and then tying that back to how many orders did we think an average customer was going to order from us in terms of frequency and repeat rate."
💡 How shareability helped grow Blue Apron’s business"The business just grew exponentially. That was both because, one, we were retaining people very strongly and two, the referral program we created, as I described to you earlier, made the business grow exponentially with very little marketing dollars. ... And the business itself is naturally shareable, right? In some ways we're making the product, but actually you're making the product with labor — you are literally cooking a dinner yourself and, when people cook the dinner themselves, they are proud of what they made … They'd tell everybody, they'd post it on social media, tell all their friends, talk about it at work, and brag about how great of a meal [they] made. That combined with the referral program really did cause the business to grow exponentially in the early days."
💡 Focusing on different marketing channels during different stages"Interestingly enough, referrals and the organic, direct [marketing] — even to this day and even up through when we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing — were still the biggest acquisition tactic for us, which is indicative of the fact that we had a product people truly did love and like. … We became significant online advertisers — Facebook, Google, whatever — we became significant podcast advertisers at one point. … We had found that podcast advertising was great for what we do, similar to the reason why our referral program was good for what we did, because an explanation of our product from a trusted user or a trusted name similar to influencers was always very valuable for us."
💡 The challenges of product evolution and staying relevant"As we got bigger and bigger, little companies would pop up that became bigger companies that would focus on niches in particular, like plant-based, or paleo, or really cheap, or really expensive, or whatever it was, and we were going after the mass market. I think for us, it was a challenge to bring in more consumer segments into our product and satisfy more groups as we got bigger and wanted to add more and more subscribers. The challenge with that, of course, is we had to continue to evolve our product and offer more options and things … We had to invest a lot in capabilities to allow us to evolve the product — to personalize it and bring more people under our umbrella."
💡 Pick something that's relevant, because not everything sells itself"It does come down to picking something that's culturally relevant, with tailwinds, and picking something that is worth a conversation. So I think it starts with what are you doing? Maybe a marketer would say you can market anything, but I actually don't think you can market anything. There are certain things that are just easier to market because they sell themselves."
Top quotes from the episode:Guest name: Matt Salzberg
Quote #1
"At the earliest stages of the company, it is very useful to have investors want to back you, not your idea, because early-stage businesses often do evolve and do change."
Quote #2
"Being relevant is important. So having a product that has the right moment in time, culturally, I think is a big one. You want to go after someone with tailwinds and where there's something to talk about that people care about."
Quote #3
"Some people tell you your business ideas are dumb, but actually the more nefarious thing is most people just smile and grin at you about your business idea. They say, 'Oh yeah, cool, I'd buy that.' There's a very big difference between that and 'You've changed my life.'"
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Amy Risley feels that she has always been an entrepreneur at heart.
Because her father worked in manufacturing for Estée Lauder, she became obsessed with all of the "lotions and potions" he brought home during her childhood. She also met Estée Lauder when she was five — and according to Amy, seeing a woman in such a powerful role left a lasting impression.
After graduating from Princeton and spending years doing marketing for beauty companies like L'Oréal, Estée Lauder and Jo Malone, Amy became a stay-at-home mom — although she knew she’d eventually return to work one day. Serendipitously, she met the woman who owned the recipe for Skinfix balm, which ignited Amy's entrepreneurial spark.
Amy read customer testimonials from people who tried tons of outlandish remedies for serious skin issues, from diabetic foot ulcers to psoriasis; they claimed this healing balm helped alleviate their symptoms and enhanced their quality of life. After seeing these reports, Amy was 100% in.
The first order of business was to update the branding and create a highly targeted message. "When something does everything, it does nothing," Amy says. She took the brand from being an "everything balm" to focusing on eczema.
Amy knew Skinfix would be taking on major players like Aveeno and Cetaphil in the eczema category but she felt ready for it. This may have been a bit naive, but "I think you have to be naive and sort of a dreamer to really survive as an entrepreneur," Amy says.
Landing an early partnership with Target was crucial for Skinfix's brand development and ultimate success. Target helped nurture the indie brand, providing guidance on what was important for its target market, such as being dermatologist-recommended and clinically proven.
From $100,000 in annual revenue to being carried exclusively by Sephora, Amy built a company that challenges household name beauty brands. She'll never stop giving consumers "what they want and what they need at the right price, and delivering a solution that's actually going to help."
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Featured Challenger👩 Name: Amy Risley
⚙️ How she challenges: As the founder and CEO of Skinfix, a beauty company that creates daily moisturizers, eczema treatments and other skincare products, Amy is taking on household name beauty brands with products that are clean, effective and backed by scientific studies.
🧴 Company: Skinfix
💎 Noteworthy: Amy hosts the podcast Total Skin Nerds, which features conversations with top medical experts and skincare authorities about how to best care for skin.
🔍 Where to find Amy: LinkedIn
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Challenger Wisdom 💡 Shifting brand positioning from everything to just one thing"[The branding] was the part that I felt I knew how to do because of my experience at Lauder and L'Oréal and Coty [Prestige]. So I hired a design agency in New York and felt we really needed to upgrade the branding to make it a little more standout and also take the formula and really understand how we were going to position it. It was sort of positioned as an everything balm, and when something does everything, it does nothing. So we really thought we needed to figure out how we were going to focus and target the message, and we decided eczema was the category we wanted to play in."
💡 A little naivety is vital to surviving as an entrepreneur"We really felt that taking it to drug stores and mass merchandisers where we could compete directly with the CeraVe and the Aveenos and Cetaphils in that eczema category was where we wanted to go. I mean, you call this the challenger podcast, and we truly were bold and brazen enough to think we could go up against these big companies. Naive, maybe? … If I had known what it was going to be like, I probably wouldn't have done it. So I do think you have to be naive and be sort of a dreamer to really survive as an entrepreneur."
💡 How an early partnership with Target helped with early success"[Target] is very similar to Sephora in that they believe in indies, they help nurture and develop indies, and they give you a ton of guidance — they're like consultants. They were the ones who stepped in and said, 'Can you say [dermatologist] recommended because that's really important in this category? Can you say clinically proven because that's also really important in this category?' A lot of the things we still stand for today were because Target really led us there, so it was an incredible retailer to land."
💡 Meeting the demands of highly informed consumers"I think millennials, and even Gen Z, are so informed — they're so much more informed than we were — and they're so much less wooed by price and luxury and all the trappings of a luxury brand. They really want something that's healthy for their skin, that's more sustainable, something where there's transparency of ingredients and the levels of ingredients."
💡 The (often immeasurable) value of influencers"Over the course of the year, the thing we've learned about influencers is that there isn't necessarily a direct sales attribution. I mean, there are affiliate programs where obviously you have a direct factor attribution, but there's so much more value than just the sales. We had a conversation with the head of influencer for Sephora last week actually, where she said, ‘We certainly look at sales over a certain number of weeks after the post, but there's so much more value than just the sales and it's not always so immediate.'"
💡 The long game of working to get dermatologist recommendations"We worked really hard to do some pretty significant clinical studies and prove the efficacy of our eczema products, our rosacea products and our keratosis pilaris products, and started to really get them on board. We actually have five studies that have been published in our peer reviewed dermatology journals, and I don't know of any other skincare brand — certainly at Sephora — that has published studies. There aren't a lot of skincare brands, period, that have published studies. So the work with the dermatologists was sort of a long game because it didn't yield a direct sales channel initially in terms of their recommendation. It was a lot longer and harder to get them on board with the products, get them to prescribe our products and talk about the products to treat certain concerns, but it was a really important thing for us to do."
💡 Staying on top of your game when fast followers start to rise up"We were, for a number of years, really the only brand doing what we were doing — creating products that were really problem-solution focused on skin issues, clinically proven — but there are people starting to trod on our territory. Sometimes it's easier to be a fast follower than it is to be the first, because you learn the lessons from the first. So we've got to constantly stay on our game and make sure we're delivering the best proposition for the consumer and giving him and her and them what they want and what they need at the right price, and delivering a solution that's going to actually help them.
💡 When being ‘clean’ and ‘sustainable’ isn't enough"Many brands are standing on top of being clean and being sustainable, and I don't think that's enough. For us, it's constantly educating the consumer about the importance of how we formulate and the fact that we truly are clinical in the sense that we consider every ingredient — not only what it's doing for the specific skin concern, but also what it's not doing, how it's not further exacerbating and trying to communicate and educate around the importance of clinical validity."
Top quotes from the episode:Quote #1
"If I had known what it was going to be like, I probably wouldn't have done it. I think you have to be naive and sort of a dreamer to really survive as an entrepreneur."
Quote #2
"Sometimes it's easier to be a fast follower than it is to be the first, because you learn the lessons from the first. So we've got to constantly stay on our game and make sure we're delivering the best proposition for the consumer and giving [them] what they need at the right price, and delivering a solution that's going to actually help them."
Quote #3
"I think a lot of times beauty companies take a lot of liberties in using the term clinical, throwing that around — it's a hot, hot buzzword right now in skincare. Everybody wants clinical, or ‘cleanicle’ as they're calling it, clean clinical. … Lots of people like to use the language, but [don't] necessarily deliver the goods."
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Despite living in the fashion capital New York City during and after college, it was an eventful trip to the Gobi Desert that inspired Matt Scanlan and his co-founder Diederik Rijsemus to start an ethical cashmere apparel brand Naadam.
The pair had planned to travel around Asia, but through a series of miscommunications, they spent a month living with nomadic sheep herders in Mongolia. After returning to the U.S., they started Naadam to help their new friends sell their cashmere for a fairer price.
Matt explains that buying directly from the people caring for the goats means Naadam can guarantee that the herders — and their goats — are treated with respect, unlike other companies that don’t offer transparency over their supply chains.
And Naadam doesn’t just buy the cashmere. The company contributes to community projects that help the herders and their families — and, yes, their goats. For example, Naadam has helped to advance initiatives designed to stop desertification (the loss of grazing land), provide access to vets and build a play park.
Far from being self-righteous, Matt is self-deprecating and funny, which is how he wants Naadam to feel. “I assume everybody else in the room is smarter than me, and that's who we want to be as a brand. I think people subconsciously identify with that. … We don't think we're better than anybody else. We think we're equal with everybody else.”
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Featured Challenger👱♂️ Name: Matt Scanlan
⚙️ How he challenges: Matt is the co-founder and CEO of cashmere apparel brand Naadam, working directly with goat herders in Mongolia to purchase their cashmere at a fair price and on community projects.
🐐 Company: Naadam
💎 Noteworthy: It was while working at a venture capital firm on Wall Street that Matt decided he needed to see the world beyond the concrete jungle. “I hadn't really done much traveling: I was a pretty sheltered person. We were going to go to Beijing and Shanghai and Southeast Asia, and I was going to experiment with drugs,” he says. “I never got to.”
🔍 Where to find Matt: LinkedIn | Instagram
🔍 Where to find Naadam: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
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Challenger Wisdom 💡 Finding unexpected similarities with different kinds of people“A lot of people don't stray far enough from home to recognize that there are similarities between them and people they think are different. In this crazy political climate, these truths are more relevant than they've ever been: If we seek to understand people that are ostensibly different, there's a lot of equality. That ideology and the value system that comes with that is ingrained in Naadam.”
💡 Focus on the why before what“We’ve struggled at times to figure out the how and the what of what it is we do, like what kind of sweaters we make and how much they cost. But what's never changed are the reasons why we do it. And for a brand, that is the most powerful thing in the world — really understanding, at your core, why you exist. We exist because we have a value system that we think other people will believe in.”
💡 To identify gaps and inefficiency, process information as outsiders“We didn't know what we were doing. It was this process of understanding all these pieces as outsiders, to really understand how to make it more efficient. We've definitely maintained that idea that we're outsiders. We’re always looking at what makes the most sense.”
💡 Go with the most ethical option“Everyone needs a v-neck and a crew neck, and everyone should have it in cashmere, and if you're going to do it in cashmere, make sure you get the most ethical option possible. There's a lot of stuff out there where the people who are manufacturing it don't know anything about where it came from.”
💡 The story sells the sweater“My gut instinct was to tell the story, stop trying to be what other people think your brand should be. If I just put a sweater in front of somebody, they don't understand. It's when I tell the story that this sweater becomes more valuable.”
💡 Help that’s actually helpful“We don't ever come in and give them more than they need or are asking for. We don't want to disrupt the ecosystem. If you go to any ecosystem and you give it more than it needs, it becomes reliant on the thing that you're giving. So we work within what the ecosystem can actually handle.”
💡 Know that entrepreneurial success doesn’t happen overnight“Building a business is really hard, and our success is an overnight success seven years in the making. The reality is it was a lot of hustling and hard work and some very scary moments. We were on the brink of failure for a long time and we made a ton of mistakes — and we still do. That's the entrepreneur's journey.”
Top quotes from the episode
Matt Scanlan:
Quote #1
“Brands should be like people: living things that are changing and evolving. They should have complexity and personality.”
Quote #2
“Very rarely does the first thing entrepreneurs ever do work so perfectly that it explodes overnight. It takes time to really identify product-market fit.”
Quote #3
“I love this brand. I can't imagine not doing what I get to do.”
Quote #4
“It’s obviously been very rewarding for me personally. When I was getting thrown out of my first boarding school at 16 years old, I never thought I'd be doing this for a living.”
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