Beardbrand's Experience with Shark Tank

Beardbrand's Experience with Shark Tank Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we have a special guest, Eric Vandals, who's founder of Beardbrand, a brand that he represents really well. Look at that beard right there, but a brand that's been around, that's grown. You've seen it probably on Shark Tank. You've seen Eric talk about his journey, but what's really cool is Eric's here to share some of what he's done to build a brand to where it is, bootstrapping his way and building a brand that's built on a lot of great discipline. So first of all, Eric, thanks for taking the time out to join us here on Chew on This podcast and sharing your journey with our audience. Speaker 2: What is going on, Ron? I'm excited. We're going to have a good show today. Speaker 1: I'm excited too. You know, one of the things, Eric, I think it'd be really great for the few people who may not know you, a little bit about your background. What made you get started into Beardbrand years ago? And just tell people a little bit about you. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I'm the classic ideas guy, entrepreneur, really good at coming up with ideas, really not talented at executing on ideas. Before starting Beardbrand, I had a whole wake of failed projects behind me. I have like a vinyl wall graphic e-commerce business. I tried my hand in executive recruiting. I had a little, you know, marketing design agency. I had some like kind of non-profit groups that I had together and it wasn't until Beardbrand and really until I was able to connect with my business partners, Jeremy and Lindsey, that I finally found success. You know, to a certain degree, it's a little bit of suffering for a long enough period of time. But I was a financial advisor kind of right before I started Beardbrand. And the thing about working as a financial advisor is they want you to kind of look and dress a certain way. And this is back in 2000, I think 10 or 11. And the way they wanted you to look there is shaved face, you know, classic haircut, suit and tie. And, you know, I can understand the suit and tie, but, you know, not growing a beard just kind of seemed like weird arbitrary rules. And I can't handle that kind of stuff well, where if it doesn't seem like it's based on logic. So I quit working there. I grew out my beard. And during that time process, I got called Duck Dynasty, Grizzly Adams, ZZ Top, all cool, gnarly dudes, but these hands were made for keyboards. They were not made for axes. And that's when I realized there was a whole community of guys that didn't fit the traditional stereotype of what a bearded guy was and started Beardbrand as a way to give those men the tools and the confidence they needed to grow and maintain a beard. Speaker 1: Before we get started, a quick word about today's sponsor, Instant. As a brand, you know you're spending real money to drive traffic to your site. Problem is, 90% of the traffic is anonymous. You don't know who they are, and once they leave, it's pretty much impossible to get them back. That's where Instant comes in. It identifies up to 10 times more of those lost shoppers, so you can send more abandonment emails, build stronger retargeting audiences, and actually win back that lost revenue. Liquid IV, Third Love, Truly Beauty, these massive brands use Instant to get an average ROI of 21.7X and Instant guarantees you a 4X ROI or your money back. That's right, 4X ROI. With the start of Q4, there's no time to waste. Triple your email sales and lock in smarter retention today. Just go to instant.one slash chew to claim 50% off your first 60 days before this offer expires. That's instant.one slash chew. Now let's get back to the episode. That's incredible. You know, I feel like when it comes to products and brands for males, right? I feel like there's a different challenge to it and I think it's more so around there aren't too many examples of it. You'll see women's health and wellness probably dime a dozen, but when it comes to men's health and wellness, you can probably be like, it'll take you a while to name five brands. Did you find that to be one of the points of like, Consideration of like, okay, should I go into a category that maybe doesn't have that much going on? Or do you look at that as pure opportunity? Speaker 2: No, I mean, I wish I was a smarter person than I was, Ron. But basically, you know, Beardbrand is an extension of To a lot of degrees, me and my needs. So as I grew out my beard, I knew nothing and I went and I went online and I found online communities and connected with other bearded guys and I started blogging and making YouTube content. I didn't really know what products there was. For me, Beardbrand was always about trying to build this community and trying to help guys. Actually, I kind of visualized it more as a lifestyle brand, so more like bags and wallets and belts, almost like a ridge, but kind of for like bearded hipsters at the time. And what I realized is I just didn't have the skill set to develop those kind of products, nor did those products have the margins necessary for my We were in a financial situation at the time, just didn't have the budget to invest in a lot of products with tighter margins. And what we found is we started in the early days by reselling other beard care products and realized that that's what our customers were looking for. So rather than fighting our customers and trying to push products they weren't interested in, we went down the rabbit hole of kind of developing beard grooming products for them and their needs and really listening to our customers about what they want. As we developed things. Speaker 1: It's incredible. You know, I'm excited to see the journey unfold. The one piece that I love is you're what now 13 years into building this? Speaker 2: It's been a long journey, still doing it. Speaker 1: Incredible journey. Bootstrapped from day one. And besides maybe that $8,000 in startup capital, is there any additional capital that you ended up having to put in or raise? Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think even saying that $8,000 for my business partners was not really a necessary investment. It was more of like just an equity thing to make sure that we're all kind of fair to each other. And I think maybe even. Both of them made, for one for sure, you know, made that contribution by just taking less pay. So for us, we've entirely, I mean, I've got credit cards, so it depends on how technical you want to get about it, but we don't even have a line of credit. We've never taken any kind of loans, even when we financed our target order many years ago, seven figure PO, we self-financed that. And yeah, we still carry no debt. Speaker 1: That's incredible. What's that taught you from, you know, discipline standpoint for your brand? How many things do you say no to because of that versus, you know, discipline in general? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's... So the reality for any business out there is we all have scarce resources and we all want to do bigger things than we have resources available for. Bootstrap is just a hyper You know, focused way of building the business where it's like, I can only carry the products that have the margins. I can only sell it at this price. And if our customers don't want to buy it at this price, then we cut it. We have a lot of products that we've cut over the years just because they weren't moving well enough. To justify and of course, people get upset or sad when they find a product they love. But you know, the reality is my number one goal is building a sustainable business. So I also say all that and with the The sense that I don't feel limited because I think when you come into a business with intentionality, our core values, freedom, hunger, and trust. For us, building a business might be a different goal than a lot of companies. We're not trying to build for an exit. We're trying to enjoy the journey. So for me personally and my business partners, we enjoy the journey when there's cash in the bank and we don't owe people anything and we can scale up or down. As needed. So we don't have to scramble to get money. We don't have to, you know, do cash falls, things like that. And subsequently, it's been a nice business to run and operate. It's not to say we haven't had our downs in these past couple of years have been some major downs, but we're able to get through it and persevere. So it's, you know, knowing your core values, freedom, hunger and trust for us. Understanding like what kind of business can I build that will allow me to do that? You know, like if I want to, you know, build a rocket ship, then, you know, I have to be in the most southern parts of America. So that's where they're in Houston and Brownsville and in Florida. And it's like, well, if I don't want to be in those places, I shouldn't start a rocket company. So it's kind of the same thing. It's like understanding what are your core values as an individual? What do you want out of life? You know, for some people, it is like growing and building the largest company. Well, if that's the case, then you really have to do a lot of market analysis and understand where the potential is. Where is the, what do they say, total addressable market? You know, those things were never considerations for us because we just want to serve cool people and we're okay with Wherever the business goes, if it goes to 100 million or if it goes to a million, we were going to be able to figure out how to enjoy that journey. Speaker 1: That's incredible. A good lesson in the sense of trying to really identify where you want to go, not just what's the goal for the business from a revenue standpoint, because I think everyone nowadays talks about it like, what are you guys trying to do next year? When are you trying to sell and what revenue do you want to get to sell? Maybe zoom out a little bit more like where what do you want to be right? And what do you want to do? I think that's really really powerful. Speaker 2: Well, I feel so much gratitude to live in America and have the opportunities that we have in America and the reality is it does not take a very big business to effectively give you anything and everything you want in life. It's not a huge company that you have to build. You can build a million dollar, five million dollar company, run it well with, you know, 15 to 20% profitability on that. And then all of a sudden, your house is paid for, your cars are paid for, you're traveling, you're spending time with your kids, you know, you're taking your wife out, or your husband out every once in a while. It's like, it's easy to have a good life, but you have to understand That's what you want and you have to be okay with the fact that your value isn't built around do you have a Rolex or do you have a Lamborghini, but it's built around have I built relationships with people that I love doing the things that I want to do when I want to do them. Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. Very, very powerful. Thank you for that. So, two pretty fundamental things happened early on in your guys' journey. You guys got recognized in the New York Times. You're the beard expert. And then you also had the Shark Tank journey where you're asking for $400,000, 15% equity, I believe. These are two pretty monumental things from just an awareness play and then an authority and credibility play. Give us a little bit of color how this shaped the trajectory of the brand and how each of them played an impact into the brand early on. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like anything in business, part of it is, you know, just like that luck aspect, you know, doing, being in the game long enough or being willing to persevere long enough to kind of have it when things hit. And I think Beardbrand was lucky that we kind of fell into a brand new category that was growing, no pun intended. And there weren't a lot of people in this space. So I still remember, you know, going to trade shows talking about beard oil and people would be like, what is beard oil? You know, why do I want to put oil on my beard and da da da. And the first time that somebody asked me, it's like, well, what's your beard oil different than this other beard oil? That kind of blew my mind. I'm like, oh, nobody had ever heard of anything else before. But now I'm kind of transitioning from this Completely, what do they call it, a blue ocean. So we're getting a little bit of blood in the water and a little bit of fight. And then now where we sit in 2025, it's just about as bloody as you can imagine. You know, I think it's the New York Times was nice because back in the day, search engine optimization was great. So having a link from New York Times added a lot of, you know, authority to our website. And then we were able to, you know, utilize that to get links from like Men's Health, Men's Journal, GQ, Forbes, and all that kind of like blasted us up to the top of Google's results. And we had a ton of organic Sales in the early days, and I think that's probably why we were able to bootstrap. The best customer you can get is like a word of mouth referral where you spent nothing. So you think about, and to be fair to us, we intentionally thought about how can we create a business that creates an incredible experience for our customers that they would want to tell their friends. So we kind of I don't think there's a saying like under-promise, over-deliver or something like that. I think in today's market, if you under-promise, you're not going to get any sales. So you have to appropriately promise and then over-deliver or over-promise and over-deliver on that over-promise. So we did a little bit of that by including some freebies. So one of the things here, I got this in my drawer, this is the book of reminders. And you can see the nine different reminders that we have. And we included this little booklet and our orders for free. And it's kind of like how I see the world. And it kind of helps us differentiate from all the other companies that are just products, you know, just liquid in a bottle. And it's about, you know, You know, how to become a better person. Our tagline is keep on growing. So trying to live what we preach has been kind of important to us as well. Speaker 1: That's really cool. And what's the size of you guys' team now? Speaker 2: I'm six foot five, but most of the other people are kind of around six foot. Speaker 1: I love it. Speaker 2: I love it. We're a pretty small team. We got about 10 team members. Speaker 1: Nice. Quick break to talk more about today's sponsor, Instant. Are your abandonment flows making at least 20% of your site's revenue? If not, you're in trouble. Most retention tools have bad short-term memory and even worse opt-in rates. If you don't catch an email opt-in within hours, that data's gone forever. So why pay for someone to be on your list if your abandoned emails never fire when they come back? Instant fixes that. It captures those emails, remembers them forever, and then sends shoppers the exact messages they need to come back and buy. It takes minutes to go live, there are no contracts, and they even have a 4X ROI guaranteed. Or simply your money back. Try it now at instant.one slash Chew and receive 50% off your first 60 days for a limited time only. That's instant.one slash Chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. I'm curious, you know, one of the things when we had Sean Reilly from DudeWipes come on. He had said something that was really powerful and it stuck with me. He said, we're finally a brand. And I was like, what do you mean finally a brand? And he'd said, you know, we finally just hit the 10-year mark. And, you know, he elongated to say, until you're 10 years in the business, you're just finding product market fit. At the 10-year mark, you're probably finally a brand that is here to stay, stick around, potentially talk about legacy, etc. What's your thoughts on brand? When did you guys feel like we're a brand to stick around? We're a brand that people know. Was it a number? Was it a year? Was it a revenue milestone, order milestone, customer testimonial? How do you look at The fact that you guys were a concept idea to now a brand that's been around for a couple of years. Speaker 2: Yeah, I might have a slightly different take than him. I kind of view a brand as a promise and how that promise is conveyed through execution of the products, execution of the imagery, and a consistency to that promise over a long period of time. And maybe you could argue it's that consistency over 10 years that kind of makes your brand. For me, I think business has been quite humbling over the years because as much as I know everything about Beardbrand and what we've been doing for the past 13 years, I can walk up to anybody on the street and they still haven't heard of us. So like Beardbrand doesn't have a brand. And maybe that's because we're a smaller company than Dude Wipes. I guess like if I were, it's almost like, Institution to America is where I would define, you know, being a brand, where you go up to any general person on the street, and they've probably heard of your brand or heard of your company. I think that would be You know, at the end of the day, I don't think you're ever going to be satisfied as an entrepreneur, but that would be a nice milestone. Or if I could just go up to anybody and they're like, Oh yeah, I know Beardbrand. Oh yeah. You know, I know Starbucks. I know McDonald's. I know Coca-Cola, you know. Speaker 1: I appreciate that viewpoint. Um, tell us a little bit about, about the, you know, let's, let's fast forward into what the last 12 to 18 months have been like, right. Um, being a DTC brand and, and being a brand that is, has the online perspective as something that's driving the growth, how are you guys right now focusing on tackling some of the challenges you guys may have? And we'd love for you to share some of them if you're open to it. But whether that's meta and rising CACs or website and optimization, what are some of the things you guys are really, really focused on trying to solve in the last 12 months? Speaker 2: Yeah, so, I mean, if you've tuned into our story long enough, you know, basically our company got cut in half. We lost Target. We made a series of operational mistakes and packaging mistakes. And for basically like two years, we were hemorrhaging a bunch of cash as we worked to, you know, really plug the holes in the boat. And I would say over the past, you know, 12 to, really 12 to 18 months, you know, our focus has been on meta. Unfortunately for us, like we've never done paid ads exceptionally well. So it's been a lot of suffering as we try to figure out what works and what doesn't work. One of the things that we're up against is that bloody ocean that I talked about. So our existing products, you know, As much as I would disagree with it, they don't really stand out in the marketplace because there's 1,500 other beard oils. So it's very hard to separate what our product does versus all the other brands out there. So we've developed a couple of, in my opinion, innovative products and that's something that I love doing. So here I've got our new cologne we just rolled out. This is MCT-based oil. Most colognes are going to be a spray cologne. This is a rollerball. So you're not going to lose any of the product like you do with a spray cologne. Half of your bottle is going to go up in the air with an alcohol-based cologne. This you get 100% on and you can travel with it. And MCT oil is going to be moisturizing and conditioning for your skin versus alcohol, which is basically going to nuke your body's microbiome. So we've got a lot of talking points with this product, our Utility Dirter. I don't know if you guys can see this too. I've got a Short here, this is a deodorant stain. of pretty much any product out there is going to stain your shirt. Ours, you can spray it directly on there. It's not going to stain shirts. It's aluminum-free. Lasts all day. Smells amazing spray. It's a spray versus a roller, so it doesn't have propylene glycol, which can be irritating. Sorry, I'm going on like a little product rant. I do love this product, and I think that's like what's really fun is I think with the utility deodorant that we have and the cologne that we have, you know, they're Obviously, we're a beard care company, but what we've been saying lately is basically Beardbrand is a We are a fragrance house disguised as a beard care company. Our products go right under your nose, so we absolutely have to nail fragrance. If we don't nail fragrance, people aren't buying our products. And we've nailed fragrance in a big way. We have some incredible fragrances that our customers talk about the amount of compliments. It's like, I can wear a Temple Smoke and just people will come up to me and compliment me. It's a unique, the way we formulate it is different than most perfumers. Not constrained by the same thought process that I think a lot of perfumers do where they try to build accords and just kind of make nice mass market stuff. We make things that we think are cool, that have a cool story to tell, and then if people like it, Dope. And then if people don't like it, we accuse them of doing drugs because you got to be doing drugs not to like our fragrances. Speaker 1: I love it. That's awesome. No, I mean, I love the passion and the intention you're building product with. I think a lot of us sometimes forget. I was at a conference this past week in San Diego, Commerce Roundtable. And I, and you know, even sometimes when people are talking about some of the challenges they're going with, with let's say DTC growth and meta growth, I think I need to run more ads. I think I need to do this. I think I need to do that. They're always talking about top of funnel, top of funnel. And then the first question I always ask is, well, what's your retention at? And they'll be like, oh, well, it's 10% to 20%. You can work on acquisition as much as you want, but if you're not focused on making sure and figuring out why your product's not getting people to come back and buy more, right, at 12-month retention of 15%, no matter how well you get at acquisition, you're not going to be able to build an actual brand off of this. And so I think being able to kind of zoom out again and say, hey, what is a product? Why does it exist? And what is it really going to be known for? I think that's super powerful. I'm curious, in the early days, you built the website yourself, the logos, you talked about the sense stories and stuff like that. How important in today's market do you believe design and storytelling is in terms of when someone's starting a brand today? Speaker 2: Again, you're going to get a biased answer from me because it's something we value a lot at Beardbrand is storytelling. Great copy. If you subscribe to our email newsletter, you'll just see the wit in our email. It's not just promos, like a lot of companies can kind of fall into that trap. Again, it goes back to my philosophy of trying to build a business that I love. And if you're going to run a business for 13 years like I have and hope to run it another 13 years or 20 years or 30 years, at the end of the day, you have to love doing it. And if you don't have a purpose behind the company and if you don't really feel like you're doing something worth telling a story about, then You may be able to last, but I just don't know if you're really going to enjoy the journey like you could. So I think of it less as like a strategic thing, like, oh, you got to tell a story for your customers and the brands that stand out. No, I think you need to do it for yourself to have that purpose. I tweeted recently, I think it was the Airbnb founder talking about telling founders it's a great time to sell your business. And my retort to that is it's a great time to build a business that you absolutely love. Because just think about it, if you just have a business that you love that you can work at for the rest of your life, and it puts a roof over your head and food on the table and allows you to do the things with the people who you love, when you want to do them, like what else is there in life, you know, so work on and think about having that purpose with your business. And it's just going to be a lot, lot more A lot better journey, in my opinion. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, you're speaking from true experience, which I really, really appreciate and great, great advice. I think you've been known for giving straightforward advice, as you just did. I think you've asked founders a simple question like, would I buy from this site, right? Why is that ultimate gut check for like any entrepreneur and do you still stand by that every day? Is that something that you would tell a founder? If you're talking to a founder who's like maybe questioning what they're building, what is the best way to gut check to see if this is something that you should be continuing on with? Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know if I ever even think about, like, what I buy from this website. I think about, can I make something that's cool? Like, can I create something that I'm proud of, that I'm excited to share with the world? You know, even if it's not perfect, and we certainly created things at I'm perfect, but it's like, man, I'm excited to share this. I'm excited to talk about this because the things that I did were with intentionality. It wasn't just like, oh, I got this problem, do this, or, oh, I heard this is cool. But just things that get you excited and talking, I think would probably be more of a guiding light to me rather than would I go there and buy from it? Speaker 1: I love that. Eric, you've been giving such incredible advice, thought processes of how to really think about and do things with attention. I want to take a few minutes to be able to go through some rapid fire questions for people to know who's under that beard. So let's get started. What's one decision you made that felt risky but ended up paying off massively? Speaker 2: I don't know. We'll go all the way back to the early days. I mean, I gave up half the business for my business partners. I don't think I'd have this business without them. Speaker 1: That's incredible. Do you have a favorite beard product or grooming tip you swear by? Speaker 2: I mean, it's actually kind of hard because all my products are kind of my babies. Beard oil is like if you don't have a beard oil, that's kind of a basic, but I do think the utility deodorant and our EVP are two really innovative products that You don't even need a beard to try. Speaker 1: I love that. How did you pregame for your Shark Tank pitch? Speaker 2: Oh, my God. I said my pitch probably a thousand times. I think I was dreaming about it. And, you know, the one thing I didn't plan on was them interrupting my pitch. So before I even finished it, they interrupted me and the conversation started. But yeah, I was just, you know, for weeks on end saying that over and over again. Speaker 1: Incredible. Who or what inspires you outside of business? Speaker 2: That's a good question. Who inspires me? I think I tend to take individual things from individuals. You know, I have, so rowing is one of my hobbies. I love to take advice from rowers who are better than me. My weightlifting coach, you know, I take advice from him and his techniques on weightlifting. So obviously, you know, if we're talking about people who are known, I can't but marvel at What Elon Musk has done. With the same time that I have in the world. It just blows my mind. I have no comprehension of how you can do it. Speaker 1: I'm on the same page with you on that. If you had unlimited resources tomorrow, what bold move would you make for Beardbrand? Speaker 2: You know, if I had unlimited resources, I think there's a lot of products I'd like to develop. There's a lot of channels that I'd like to market in. There's a lot of talent who I'd like to hire. I would probably say that would be my answer is just building a team of remarkable people and just kind of giving them a direction and letting them run with it. Speaker 1: Before we wrap up, just a quick reminder about Instant. A good abandonment email can make all the difference, but 88% of shoppers never get one. With Instant, you can send up to 10 times more retention emails and use AI to personalize every single message. Fast-growing brands like Higher Dose, Garrett Popcorn and Karen Kane have tripled their abandonment flow revenue since going live. You could be next. Don't miss out. Book a demo today at instant.one slash Chew and receive 50% off your first 60 days. That's instant.one slash Chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. Eric, this is incredible. I'd like to wrap up like we always do, which is if you can give our listeners one thing to chew on, something to take away, what's that one thing that you have to give to everyone? Speaker 2: Can I narrow it down to one? Speaker 1: Yes, I know. It's tough. It could be two. Speaker 2: Let's see here. I don't know if you guys can see this painting up here. It's this jolly fat. And in his mind, he's got the saying, haters gonna hate. And I've carried this with me for years. And it's kind of been a motto for me is Haters gonna hate, you know, like you only have one life. You only have so many years on this planet. You have the ability to create a life that you want to build. You don't have to do it for anybody else other than yourself. So follow your passion, follow your dreams, work with intentionality to create that life that you can. And then for anyone who's a hater, haters gonna hate. Speaker 1: Chew on that. That was awesome. Unknown Speaker: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.