Bushbalm CEO Reflects on Dragon's Den

Bushbalm CEO Reflects on Dragon's Den Speaker 3: You guys were on Dragon's Den. It's a Shark Tank version in Canada. Speaker 1: When you go actually pitch, how long is that entire process? I've heard that sometimes you're in there for like over an hour. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we were probably in for like an hour and a half. There's no like cut, do this, do that. It's literally just an hour and a half where they talk to you. And I've got respect for the show, but then the way they edit it is crazy. Like they can do whatever they want. They can move things around. Speaker 3: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today we're joined by David, who's the co-founder and CEO of a brand called Bushbalm. And if you live in Canada, you probably saw them on Dragon's Den recently. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about the beauty industry, some of their tactics when it comes to DTC, retail, and some unconventional ways to selling, you know, beauty products in the market. David, thanks for joining us today. For those who may not know you or your story, we'd love a little bit of background and kind of what you've been up to. Speaker 2: Yeah, right on. So I'll start kind of how I got into Bushbalm. So before a long time when I was a kid, my dad had a DTC brand that he started in like 1990. So he sold hardwood flooring, direct to consumer, manufactured it, made it, sent it. So that kind of, I grew up with DTC before it was even a term. So that was kind of my upbringing. And then I went to school actually in New Jersey here and I took marketing. And during that time I took my dad's businesses onto Shopify. So he had these websites. That was when Shopify was that like slime green, like the old Shopify. That ended up getting me a job at Shopify. So my first like out of school career, I started there and Shopify was always about like starting a business. At the time, I didn't know what business made sense. I didn't really have an idea. It just happened, Tim and Mel, a couple, good friends of mine, They had this idea for Bushbalm that they came up with on their honeymoon. Mel had Razorburn. It was this whole thing. Just saw Tim at a work event weeks later, and he said the idea, and I was like, I'm in. This is a great idea. Speaker 1: Without any research, you're just in. Speaker 2: Yeah, no. At the time, I legit just wanted to do marketing, because my job at Shopify wasn't really marketing, so I wanted to really jump into what I went to school for. So the brand, so Bushbalm, we started 2016, and the idea originally was like, we'll make something for Razorburn. We didn't really know how big the market was. We were just kind of making a product. Originally we thought it'd be Bushbalm like a balm but that was just like more complicated to make so we went with an oil to start and the whole business kind of morphed and now what we do is we call it bikini line skincare. So we think this is like a category on its own. Like everyone has razor burn, ingrown hairs, so shaving, waxing, sugaring, that's like our bread and butter. And what's great about it is there's not that many people trying to do what we're doing. You kind of go to Walmart, Target, Ulta even. The shelves are like very outdated. The product category is very outdated. So we're finding like a pretty Sizable niche in the market in different ways. Speaker 3: I love that. Are you, when you kind of look back, was that the intent to kind of serve this market or did you guys kind of like stumble upon it as you were building, you know, the first rendition of the product? Speaker 2: Yeah. So the first product was actually called Bush Oil, which is a funny name that, cause at the time we were kind of thinking maybe this is it, maybe that's it. And what's great is it was like a part-time gig for a long time and we started the business and by not having like all these obligations, it meant we could just go slower. And the moment that changed everything for us, there was two moments. One was we did an, you know, Etsy? We did like an Etsy in-person show. And I remember the first day we did the show, our signage said something. And then the next day we like taped a new sign on it with like different language. And the first few days, like, we had pubic hair oil, pubic oil. People were like, this sounds awful. Like, this isn't, I'm not interested. Day, the final day, I think we changed it to ingrown hair prevention and daily skincare or something like that. And people were like, oh yeah, like I've got, I've got ingrown hairs all the time. So that's what really changed. Speaker 1: And then the next- So you had AB testing. Speaker 2: Yeah, sort of. Yeah, yeah. In person. The next thing that was huge for us was we actually had a waxing salon. Locally who came up to us and we were talking with them and they said you have to make a better version of this specific product and at the time it was 10 skin which is like an alcohol-based product for razor burn. It literally smells like vodka and it burns your skin. So she said make something better and I'll buy it from you and that was like a huge moment because that market is a lot bigger than than we thought. Speaker 1: I mean when you guys started it, did you have like a vision for how the brand would look or how you'd be positioned? There's a lot of kind of outdated stuff on the shelves. Was there a plan there to stand out? Speaker 2: Yeah, if you look at the brand when we first started versus what we got to, it's like totally different. When we first launched, we thought it would be very unisex. So kind of an upscale packaging. There was a lot of blacks and a lot of whites. There weren't really colors. And now like the brand's really evolved and changed. Like the packaging, the kind of look, it was always meant to be Relatively upscale in appearance, but we always said we want to be masty, so we want our price point to be still like super affordable. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So we kind of did that, but it took us till like 2020 to like even get like four years to even get close to what we are now. Speaker 1: Now it looks great. Speaker 3: So we have some of the product here. Would love to kind of go through it. Speaker 1: Can I just tell a story about this product right here? Real quick. So this is like a rolling rescue soothing serum. It's like a roller. It's not for your face. So a couple weeks ago, we had some of this product sent here. We usually do that before these pods just to kind of see the product, do a little unboxing, and then we get some raw kind of behind the scenes content. I was doing it with our third co-founder, Ron, who's usually on this show. Ron doesn't read anything about this, doesn't read the box or anything. He takes it out. He reads something about razor burn, he starts putting it all over his face. And our producers were just watching us do this. And I cannot wait, because now I know what this is, to tell him about this. And I can't wait for this episode to come out. Everybody knows about this. But yeah, he was taking this, which is usually for probably intimate parts. Speaker 2: Yeah, everything is, we call it face quality ingredients. So like I use that on my face too. So it won't feel as bad. Speaker 1: All right, fine. Fair enough. It's not as bad, but it's not what it was intended for. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: All right, we can move on to the product. Speaker 3: I mean, the packaging looks amazing, right? And you kind of went through a few iterations to get it to where it's at today. I know at Avi, we've gone through several renditions of our packaging to kind of have it work for DTC, then have it work for retail. What was the journey for you guys? Primarily, probably started on DTC, right? And then moved more into the retail placements, but How does the packaging change, you know, when you when you're primarily online to kind of in the store and on the shelves? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's changed a lot. Actually, when we first started the classic DTC in 2017, 2018 was like Clean fonts, very minimal look. Speaker 1: Logo and nothing else. Speaker 2: And then we ended up launching with retail at Ulta. Nationwide, this was a huge deal to get packaging right. So when we did that, we changed everything. And to be honest, I think we'll probably do another packaging revamp in the next two to three years. But yeah, we changed it to be logo much bigger than it was. The other side of it is we used this naming convention because we wanted to mix fun colors with Not to say more medical, but like if you go to a drugstore, you kind of see these like check marks. So we added this like formulated to improve the look of and then it tells you exactly what it does. So that was a big change. And then a huge part of the brand is we're Gyno and Derm approved. So every packaging has that like kind of front and center. But yeah, packaging is honestly, it's every time you do a new thing, it takes like six months or three months to get rid of all the packaging. And then now you have so many products. It is really a big challenge. But yeah, we'll probably do a revamp in the next like two years, I guess. Just out of style changes too. Speaker 1: Of course. Speaker 3: So the road from DTC to retail, at what point in the journey did that happen? Speaker 2: So I worked at Shopify at the same time. So caveat back is I didn't quit my full-time job at Shopify until about 2021. So, at that time, I think we had no employees and we were doing like 2.5 million in revenue. So, we were like scaling with literally no employees at all. None of the founders were full-time. We all had full-time jobs. So, what happened, and this is kind of luck in the right ways, every couple of weeks, I used to get like a waxing salon DMing us or sending us an email. They'd say, hey, do you guys do wholesale? And not to say I was, I just kept getting the email over and over again. So one weekend I just made like a new site and it was our, we called it our professional program. We started it. And then I think it was about 2022 where we just looked at like the data and all of a sudden we were like, oh, we've got like 500 accounts that order regularly. Like it was crazy. Speaker 1: That's great. Speaker 2: And we didn't have anyone on that program working on it at all. So the pro business really, we started to focus on it. We had like one employee and then now we have quite a few. So that was a big moment, probably 2022. And then 2023, we kind of fell into Alta, where basically what happened is someone at Alta said, oh, the shave section is not very good. We need to make it better. And we just happened to perfectly fit the need they were looking for. So that launch was a huge deal for us in 2023. Speaker 1: That's awesome. And we were talking about this a little bit earlier off camera, but can you just talk about kind of how your brand block started in Ulta and how you expanded that? Speaker 2: Yeah. So everyone, when you go into big retail, everyone's like, you got to sell, otherwise you're out and you suck and all this stuff. It's really scary, I found. We started with just four products. Like it was very much our core, like the perfect four, that was it. But we actually did like really nice signage. So that was like a huge part of it. And our sell-through actually proved to be quite good for such a small brand block. So now we've actually added, originally we added one more SKU, so that made it five. And then we recently got our trimmer in, which made it six. And then we've just added another product that we had to be, they said you can maybe have this much space. We ended up doing a double product. It's like a two-pack. So it has our oil and our scrub and it's like a bigger box. And what we've realized is like that trimmer, because it's a bigger box with a big logo, actually really helps people like see the brand and find it. And it's actually been one of our best sellers in Ulta, which is kind of, it's the only trimmer available in Ulta. And I think previous ones they've had have been like low quality, so they didn't sell through that well. Or you could find them at like a Target, Walmart, kind of everywhere. Whereas we're like genuinely the only product in the store. Speaker 3: I love that. I mean, there are a few brands that come to us and the first question they ask is like, how do you get into retail? How do you, do you just approach, you know, Walmart? Do you have to get a broker? You know, the, at least for us that we've, we've kind of gone through it a few times at the brands that we've worked with in the past. So we have an idea, but for those who are like looking to get B2B up and running for their brand, right? It sounds like, Kind of selling into maybe these salons or maybe these mom-and-pop shops is the best way to at least start. So I'm curious for those who are listening, what would be the best way to really get this up and running and seeing if you can dabble in that space? Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I think what I used to say and always say is if you grow a brand in DTC and it booms, it really just makes everything easier. So I still think you've got to really build the brand, the Instagram. Buyers do care about that stuff. And then you're totally right. The one side of big retail It's genuinely like someone's career is on the line. That's kind of how I think about it. And I find some brands, they're like, ah, Alta said no to us. And to be fair, it's like, yeah, it's literally their job. Like their job is on the line. If they screw up too many times, they bring in somebody who doesn't sell through, like they get fired. Like that's how it goes. We've always thought we kind of did it because we would get no's from different places. We landed a few other small retailers. There's the waxing salons. Then we had some actual small retailers. And some of them are no longer with because it just doesn't make as much sense. But in the early days, it was perfect because you could actually like see, test, change signage. It was a lot easier. Whereas once you get a big player, like you might be able to change signage once a year, maybe. So the flexibility kind of goes down. But you need proof to get those big players. That's kind of the truth. Speaker 3: I want to transition into marketing. So you guys were on Dragon's Den in Canada and for those who don't know what Dragon's Den is, it's a Shark Tank version in Canada. Walk us through what that was like and kind of the impact that that had on the business. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was fun just like preparing for it because you just I find the worst nightmare of the show is you don't know your numbers or you don't know how your business works or so we actually like did a lot of work in our finances and even though we were small at the time. The prep is just useful. Even if you don't get on the show, it's amazing to do. The show, our episode of all episodes, I watched a few of other episodes. The Hush Blanket one was a premiere. You watch it and you're like, okay, let's try to make ours happen like this. Ours, legit, there was barely any tension. The deal we got was exactly what we asked for. It wasn't like we took a cut on anything. It was literally exactly what we asked for. So yeah, the deal went great and it really did help our Canadian market. Canadians love us. They know us. They've seen us before. But in the US, yeah, it didn't do anything, obviously. But it was good, yeah, just to make the brand real. And I think we were on in like 2020, so I still worked at Shopify for like a year and a half after that. It was just crazy. Speaker 1: I've heard mixed like things about the Shark Tank version, but when you go actually pitch, how long is that entire process? I've heard that sometimes you're in there for like over an hour. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we were probably in for like an hour and a half. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: They they really just like ask you questions over and they just keep asking more and more questions And I think they're just obviously trying to get footage, but someone told me Actually Harley at Shopify. I asked him for advice because he was like a guest dragon once yeah, and he was like honestly just Focus on making it as positive as possible because they can't edit negative. If you're positive the whole time, it can't be negative. So I was like, that's a good idea. And he said, don't even worry about it. It's really just like, if it could be a TV commercial for you, that's amazing. So just be positive and have fun and know your stuff, obviously. But yeah, on it, there's no cut, do this, do that. It's literally just an hour and a half where they talk to you. Yeah, I've got respect for the show, but then the way they edit it is crazy. They can do whatever they want. They can move things around. It's a bit nuts that way. Speaker 1: Oh man, that sounds scary. Speaker 3: So when this episode went live, what was the impact that you guys saw? I mean, we've heard stories that episode goes live, sends a ton of traffic to the website, and overnight this becomes a seven-figure brand. Did that happen? Speaker 2: It was like, we had like two or three, like 30 grand days in a row. And at the time, like we were small, so that was like pretty sweet. And then it kind of went back to normal. And then you got to just keep building your traffic. I'm sure it does help with like just ongoing conversion rate. That's very helpful. But as far as the spike, like it's just nowhere as big as Shark Tank. Like Shark Tank, genuinely, you might have those like a $500,000 a day, which is nuts. Whereas, yeah, it's just smaller. You just don't have as big of an impact there. Speaker 3: So from Dragon's Den, moving into I'm assuming maybe more paid channels, influencer, what was the main channels that you guys kind of started up on? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we mostly like obviously like Facebook ads. So I'm kind of the story of the founder who was trying to learn Facebook ads. So I like dabbled, worked on it and we like grew to Dragon's Den basically and then at that point we started to bring on someone. We had kind of like a consultant agent on the side that did it part-time from another job as well. And now he's actually moved full-time with us. But we ran mostly Facebook and we were doing so well, like scaling, growing. I think we went basically one year was like 1.8 million, the next was like 8.3. So it was like a huge jump, but mostly on Facebook and that's kind of all it was. So that was like how we scaled and then as time's gone on, like you would know, we've done tons of influencer, like Facebook ads have gotten a lot harder, our tactics have changed. Even now our marketing budget looks a lot different than it did. It's still not super diversified across We still don't even really care about TikTok ads right now. We have potential to go there, but it's just not really something. We've done it. We don't really care to do it right now. Speaker 3: I want to double down on the influencer marketing. There's a lot of brands that want to do it. They're trying to get it up and running. Sometimes the program kind of falls flat and you get creators that are asking for way too much. They don't deliver the right content and it just becomes like a cost center, right? So any tips and tricks around, you know, finding the right influencers? Getting them to actually make the right content and actually seeing the scale of the brand. Speaker 2: Yeah, we've had different folks in the role to like really focus on influencer. At one point, we didn't have much experience in there working through it and it ends up being you kind of think the influencers, they know the best, right? Like they're the experts. It's what they do all the time. Of course, they'll know what converts and we had a quick realization. I think it was like two years ago. Actually, you kind of really do need to equip them with the right information and the things to say. Not totally scripted, obviously, just like there are main, like for us, the difference of someone saying Like gynecologist approved and not is like a pretty big deal. It's like a big brand pillar. So really working on the documents you send them. Like if they're really cool, like a pitch or whatever it looks like, if it's really nice, the influencer will immediately go, wow, this is a really good brand, right? And I've realized sometimes they don't read everything, but there's certain things that they do read and the quick glimpse, you see it and you go, wow, I should probably say that word because it like sounds cool. And then for us now, we used to do like influencers to try to get revenue. Now we mostly focus on whitelisting and that's primarily like all we do. But yeah, we'll probably get like 15 paid programs a month going and then the whitelisting could, depending on how it works for certain people, it could live on for actually quite long. And that's just like our DTC side. The other side of us now is We have this professional waxing salon business that's like doing super well, growing really well. They're the best brand advocates. And sometimes we like whitelist their content. And that's just like a different, it's not influencers because we're not typically doing programs with them, but we'll do like a whitelisting program or even just a lot of them talk about it. Like they have to talk, not to say they have to talk about us, but they're selling the product too. So they want to talk about us like every single day, which is just crazy. Unknown Speaker: Chew on This is sponsored by. If you want to build a profitable e-com brand these days, then you need retention. 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Speaker 1: I know you guys probably send a lot of products out but are you guys sending it in any sort of special package or is there like a PR kit or influencer kit? Speaker 2: Yeah, I wish I could say yes. This is something we've struggled with over the years of like what's the best approach. We recently spoke with some bigger brands that have huge programs for it. So one thing we always do with every launch, which we have, we'll probably do like 12 to 15 launches a year. So we'll do those and we'll send them in a kit and it's branded and it looks really nice. So that's like probably like 50 gifts to DTC. Maybe we'll do 75, 100 to like the pro side. But otherwise they're like always on gifting. We just haven't quite figured out the right approach. One thing we're now doing more is We're not doing any like one-off gifting. Typically now it's like building a relationship over time that that person like falls in love with the brand. They really use it because we found that like long term is what you get the best content. You get the people who genuinely care. So yeah, we're still working through like what that even looks like. Speaker 3: I love that. I think the one thing that we also realized was relationships are so crucial, right? The one-offs, you probably get like a post on Instagram or TikTok where it's like, oh, thank you Avi for sending this or whatever. And that's like not the stuff that's going to convert, right? I think actually building that relationship, the PR packages, Kind of like just make that whole experience way more special and it's like oh well This is like truly meant for me. I'm gonna actually spend some time and make some content right you can also see like. Speaker 1: Who really cares about making good content for you because they do it in such a consistent way for us versus who's doing it for the one-off and then you just never hear from them again. Speaker 2: Right, yeah. Yeah, no and one thing we're doing too that's kind of different kind of the same is we do a limited edition scents every like three months. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So we constantly will just if someone loves us we constantly get them those scents and they're in like the cool boxes with all like the scent designs and And those we're finding because it is a consistent thing that they like expect, they rely on, they see. It's led to a lot more kind of just people organically talking about it from our like gifting list, you could call it our PR list. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 3: So for marketing efforts for DTC and then versus retail, what does that difference actually look like for you guys and how are you kind of doing everything all at once? Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some like tougher parts to it. So what we originally did was we separated DTC, DTC, Amazon, and Alta. So everything was separate. We never sent a DTC email that was like, you can also find us in Alta, which at the time when we started, we really were like trying to make sure we were profitable, kind of really grinding through kind of that ROI on DTC. So that is something now, there's such a big halo across all of them that We're about to expand so people on one email for DTC, they might also see a button to go to Amazon. They might see a button to go to Ulta. So that's something we're just starting to do more of and kind of switching the script. And then retail in store, the term like trade marketing, like there's people who are, that's what they do. They're like trade marketers in store. We're navigating it and our team is actually doing really well, like figuring out options and This year is the first year we've added like much more budget. When our Ulta buyer says, hey, we have this program coming. It's really exciting. We want you in. It's $35,000. At least now we have a budget that we can potentially pull from if it's the right decision. But there's so many options from like at Ulta, you can do like towers in the middle of the store. There's this much money. Speaker 1: That off shelf stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah. So there's a lot of that. But the big investment we're making mostly right now is around signage. We just did it with the pros. We got them these tent card things that are in different products they can put on the shelf. And then Ulta Beauty, we're going to do way more signage, which 1,400 stores times $100 a shelf, like it's very expensive, but worth it for a 12-month period versus a two-week campaign that might be on shelf for two weeks, right? Speaker 1: No, I'm glad how you said that because I feel like a lot of people ask us, is it worth it to do all that signage and those off-shelf displays and things of that nature? We're not retail experts, but I feel like the general consensus from people who have been in retail and have done well in retail is it is totally worth it. Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%. Speaker 3: The retail marketing efforts, right? It sounds like the most effective campaigns are happening at the store level versus kind of like, you know, running ads to the stores or running, you know, influencer marketing and things like that. Is that what you've seen typically just do better overall? Speaker 2: So hard to say like even sometimes like you don't notice the store stuff like work or grow volume. We've had it a couple times now where like genuinely an influencer goes like semi-viral on TikTok and it actually will like drive significant store sales like it's kind of shocked me. And then the other side of it is like Ulta Beauty whenever they do a sale or promotion like they genuinely drive tons of traffic themselves. And then if we drive directly to their website, it's almost like Black Friday where you send an email to your clients, you do retargeting ads. Like they buy online at Ulta because Ulta's got a good marketplace. That's really what they're strong for. Similar to Sephora, like whenever there's a sale, In-store I don't think actually pops up a ton, but online goes crazy. People are like stocking up. But yeah, we haven't really done much that's like go to the store, go here. However, our store locator has been terrible forever. I think everyone's is. But we just got a new store. We got a new store locator. They're like locals to us actually, ex-Shopify guys, and they can actually show like what products are in stock at the store. So it's just all of a sudden more useful. Then a store locator that you probably haven't updated in three years, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's been a big change the last like month that we implemented. Speaker 3: One thing that you mentioned was, you know, for DTC, it's not like you're gonna send an email and say like, hey, we're at Ulta. We did the same thing. We actually made that mistake of doing that. Speaker 1: Oh yeah. Speaker 3: We launched into Walmart and we were super, you know, gung-ho about it. Wanted it to be everywhere on the website and all of our email marketing and our Facebook community. And we said, hey, we're live here. We're live here. Go shop now. And that's where like DTC just took a nose dive. Right. Your retention kind of ...suffers because now you're available where you are pretty much shopping every week for your groceries and you can just pick up off you whenever you need to. That too at a cheaper price point. And so I'm curious, did you guys go through that? Did you just avoid it all together? Speaker 2: Yeah, well you guys, did you guys do different, same product, different price? Or is it smaller size? Yeah, so we do like map pricing across the board. So we haven't done it yet, but we're about to, we're calling it like our omni-channel project. So the goal is like, let's just raise all of our online sales. So that would be Ulta, Amazon and DTC. We see there's tons of overflow anyway to like, especially Amazon. So yeah, we're not sure what's gonna happen. One thing I can say though, about just retail. So for us now, year over year over year, it continues to grow is the percentage of sales on our DTC business that have been referred to us by a professional waxing salon. So like a year ago, it was like 3%. Now it's like 15% a month. So it's like obviously people they hear about it there, maybe they buy there. They kind of flip-flop between, like if you go to your appointment you might buy it but maybe in between you kind of need it online. So that's become like a new channel for us that's the word of mouth and people have told us that about Ulta is like if you're in Ulta people see it there they might not buy it but then they see an ad and then they buy online. So yeah we're not sure what's gonna happen with this like new approach of like Putting Alta in a lot of spots, but I think it's for the better long term. Just because a lot of people don't think about retail this way is DTC, you've got to fight to get the client back, right? You legit have to retarget and then you can only retarget so much and email marketing, the inbox is so stuffed, it's really hard to get them back. Subscriptions, sure, if you can figure it out, it's really tough. Whereas Amazon and Ulta, they actually run programs like crazy to get people back and then people are coming to the store every six weeks. So you're getting a visual, they're seeing your brand there. So long term, Ulta might actually, for us, have way better retention than our DTC channel just because it is so hard to get them back. Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense. DTC, salons nationwide, Ulta nationwide. What's the next step for you guys? Speaker 2: Yeah, so long term, our big focus is the professional waxing salon channel. So we think we can get actually like around 50,000 accounts, which is crazy. We're just past 7,000, but my favorite stat I always tell people is there's like 10 times more waxing and nail salons in the US than Starbucks. So they're like everywhere. There's so many independents. Speaker 1: Makes sense. Speaker 2: Everyone thinks of European Wax Center as like the big player. They've got like a thousand stores. So like they're huge. They're publicly traded. Don't get me wrong. But we're focused on like the smaller players, the one location, two, three. So we want to build the best products for them. We have our DTC line, but we also have our professional line. So we sell a premium hard wax only to waxing salons. It's an amazing product. We have in-service back bar products. So we're going to focus on a lot more products for that channel in general. And long term, we think it'll be probably 80% of our revenue. And the rest will be, say, Ulta, DTC. But just the outlook on that channel and what it's doing, how quickly it's growing, we've kind of got this like cult following now. It's just where most of our investment is going. And it's looking a lot different than DTC, right? It's like trade shows, like in person. There's a lot more new tactics we've never done before. Speaker 1: That's so awesome. So different from kind of anything anybody else is doing. I feel like gyms would possibly be something like that for us, but not really because we just aren't that jimmy. Speaker 3: I love this idea though, like even if we could get into like, even like hair salons and things like that. I mean, even when I go get my hair cut, they have like Nutrafol is there. Speaker 1: Yeah, they have supplements for it. Speaker 3: I think it's such a untapped market, but I do think it requires a lot of, definitely requires a lot of work. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: I mean, with that being said, how do you guys structure the team to actually grow something like this? Speaker 2: Yeah, so at first everyone was separate teams, right? Or everyone was on the marketing team that did everything, right? Whereas now as we're scaling, we're really focusing like more of a pro only team and they focus on pros. Like the pros has its own Instagram account, ad library, like everything's separate, website's separate. And just in general, it's now getting bigger and bigger. So if you're focused on everything, it's really hard. So yeah, we're trying to like separate it out. The tough part is, Sales. A lot of people think, oh, Bushbalm, you probably got 7,000 accounts by calling everyone and doing that, but we really didn't. We built funnels. We built new programs. We'll do seven trade shows this year, which is crazy. So we're doing all kinds of marketing activations and getting our lead funnel built for it. And then as far as onboarding, all that, long-term account management, We've really built a lot of like one-to-many solutions, whereas right now we legit have one account manager. We're hiring another one. We probably need four more, but we can pretty well scale it without having an account manager that does 200 accounts like a lot of other folks. Speaker 3: And then in terms of like marketing, are you Doing anything to kind of teach these places to sell the product? What does that look like? Speaker 2: Yeah, we do, and I always keep pushing for more, so the team probably hates it, but we do webinars, we do demos. We have an in-house esthetician, so she'll do like wax demos. She'll show people like how it's done, how to use it. We just did our first ever live shopping event. Yeah, we did that in last quarter and it was, I think we had 800 people on it, which is crazy. All waxing salons, estheticians. So yeah, you do need to invest in what that looks like as well as we've had to invest a lot in actual signage and you can't just like send it to everyone. So we've had to like try to get it on every order and get them as fast as you can. And then the big thing for us is you guys have like a wicked community. We've started to build like the separate Instagram with education with different content. We've got like the Instagram broadcast channel is a cool feature now. Ours is like popping. There's so much activity in it. Yeah, it's been It's been big just because they crave education and if you can give it to them, they'll like really appreciate that. Speaker 1: It's always cool to see where everybody's community is because ours is on Facebook. Then you're talking about Instagram and the broadcasting channel, which I don't think we've ever really tapped into, but that's so cool. Speaker 3: Are you doing any like contests for like top selling salons, you know, giveaways, things like that? Speaker 2: Yeah, we've dabbled in that stuff. We did something last year for the first time and we just called it our top 24 of 2024 and it was like our top selling accounts and we just like did a thing for them. We sent them like a gift. It was really nice. But it's kind of just starting. We barely did it. We want to give more value back to the pro community. It's just figuring out how do you do that? What does it look like? But yeah, I think there is a world where we can do a conference where a thousand estheticians come together in person. What's crazy is we're not that far away. It might be next year that we do something like that. It'd be crazy to see. Speaker 3: I mean, it's like the real-world version of like TikTok shop where it's like you have like these brands that are offering their creators like insane incentives to hit certain, you know, GMVs. It's like, you know, get a Rolex or get a handbag or get a car. I mean, you kind of apply this in real life and it's like, you know, you kind of push people to sling product for you guys, which is really interesting and I love the I love the just kind of like the the idea here where it's like you're not solely relying on DTC, right? Where I think other brands are like We're constantly in the Facebook ad account trying to make things work, right? So do you see this shift kind of, I know we briefly talked about it before, but do you think over the next few years that shift is going to move from DTC to these salons? Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. The only thing is we don't know what the circle back is going to be. So obviously right now our product roadmap, what we're giving, we're trying to give more value to the pro to grow it even faster. But as time goes on, does potentially that pro business increase like the DTC more so organically? So how we look at it is like our business at call it 35% of revenue spent on marketing. It's like not that sustainable. So if we can just keep doing the right things that it eventually gets down to 10% because the pros are so great, the retention is so high. That's like the win. But will that decrease DTC revenue? Probably not. It might increase it. It's just at what rate, we don't really know. But long term, yeah, we're not trying to Push and blow DTC out of the waters right now. We're really trying to get this like sticky channel and get more back to those those real kind of salon accounts. Speaker 3: So the future for Bushbalm, right? You mentioned that you guys pretty much took over the category in Ulta because there really wasn't one to begin with, right? What does the future look like for you guys? Are you going to continue kind of innovating and building out this category and kind of leading it? Like how do you guys think about that for the future of the business? Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So that book, Play Bigger, we all read it and it was this basically how to build a category. And we were kind of distracted at times. We launched like a body cream and a body wash and it was really far from what we actually thought was our category. So we've now this company-wide mandate. We're laser focused on what we call bikini line skincare. And long term what we think is that needs to be a category. It needs to be a full range of products. But traditionally, the category of razor burn relief, fingernails, it was like there was one product and that was it. You'd have this product, that was it. Whereas we're trying to build like a skincare line that kind of fits that mold. And then the other mandate of the company. Waxing salons and DTC and Ulta, we would tell our customers, oh Bushbalm, they're the bikini line skincare experts. One layer above that is what we say to the esthetician and what we're building for them is truly like a one-stop shop for professional hair removal. So we sell them wax, we sell them the aftercare and that product line in the future I don't know how many products it would be now, but it will triple and grow way more. Whereas with DTC, with Ulta, it's pretty hard on Ulta to get two shelves, three shelves. Whereas at a waxing salon, genuinely, we can have many shelves. We can have the back bar shelves. We can do their soft wax, hard wax, their wax pot. Whereas with Alta and online, like you would know on DTC, it's hard to focus on like one line of products, let alone two different categories, three different places. So yeah, we're really trying to build what we're calling bikini line skincare. So when a buyer at Alta, wherever, They name that category and people know, oh, Bushbalm, yeah, they're like the bikini line skincare experts, like that's a thing. Whereas right now, it's not a thing. It doesn't exist. We're trying to build that up. Speaker 1: That's literally building or creating a category. Speaker 3: I mean, when you build this category, right, you're also building demand for it. Are you seeing competitors pop up? Try to take advantage of that. Speaker 2: Yeah, we see a lot of like the odd competitor pop up on places like Amazon where they quickly make this or they run a million Facebook ads to like our trimmer as an example. We're seeing that. The thing long-term we've realized is our moat is, first off, these folks aren't in Ulta. Getting the shelf at Ulta is super hard. The odds of them even getting there is really rare. So we're trying to build up Ulta and then we're gonna launch in Shoppers Drug Mart in Canada. Kind of covers our two countries. And then the other piece is it's really hard to get in 7,000 waxing salons. So that's kind of our moat. But yeah, there's competitors especially popping up on Amazon. For like very like copycat style products just sort of happens. You said that I think we think build the moat even bigger and the brand recognition. We're just we're still early I would say with the business. Speaker 1: I love seeing those copycat products. We just remember the eBay China one of ours. We ordered one. And it's just like, dude, I have no idea what's in these capsules. And this label was just the jankiest thing I'd ever seen. But I'm sure you get a bunch of those for this as well. Speaker 2: The frustrating part is like, we're super regulatory compliant. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Because we're trying to build this long term business. No one else is. Amazon, all of our competitors are saying whatever they want. So it just makes it harder to like market, which is quite frustrating. Speaker 1: You got the waxing. Speaker 3: So for the category, I mean, where do you guys see yourself kind of being situated? Do you call this beauty? Do you call this wellness? Where do you fit in all of this? Speaker 2: Yeah, the tough part with categories in retail is they don't have what, like a bikini line skincare category, but they do have hair removal. So right now with retail, that's kind of what we've been positioned as. However, at Ulta, we were on what they call the wellness shop. And I think Ulta is amazing. They're growing and doing super well. Wellness is still very undefined. So even at Ulta like I do think there's an edge of us that's wellness for sure. Certain products especially you're like oh yeah that is more of a relaxing product you're using or the scents you could argue like oh that's a wellness product. But on the wellness shop at Ulta it's There's still products that you're like, I don't know. I don't see it. Whereas there's like supplements. You're like, yeah, that's probably wellness. There's candles. Oh, that's probably wellness. But I think it is this interesting category where people aren't quite navigating what it means. And you can really spin your narrative. Speaker 1: Anything can be wellness. Speaker 2: You just have to put wellness in the brand name. That's really all. Speaker 3: First off, I want to thank you for joining us today. I mean, this was super insightful and just kind of understanding your strategy of building the brand and building a category. Just super inspiring, right? And I feel like for brands out there that are, you know, trying to, you know, wiggle their way into B2B and even for us, right? There doesn't have to be a traditional route of like going to a broker, getting into a store, this and that. Like you can just go and do things and just go and reach out to To mom and pop shops that could offer your product and get in front of your audience. So kudos to that. I mean, it's incredible what you've done. Before we go with love for one last piece of feedback for the audience. Anything that the viewers and listeners can take back and implement in their business today, what would that one thing be? Speaker 2: Probably the biggest mistake we made, probably because we didn't raise money or do any of that stuff. Early on, I was just tweaking the web theme all the time. The thing back then is you literally have no traffic, so it doesn't matter. The big thing is I would say if you have an idea, if you have a business, go talk to people. Ask them like what do you think of this idea? What do you think of this product line? Because it makes a huge difference getting that like real-life feedback. Speaker 1: Chew on that. Speaker 3: 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.