The Goodwipes Playbook for Scaling in Retail

The Goodwipes Playbook for Scaling in Retail Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today, we have Sam Neville, who is co-founder of Good Wipes. And if this is a brand that you haven't heard of, you're probably living under the rock. And Sam flew out all the way here to Kearney, New Jersey to tell us about how he's building one of the most killer brands out there, but also a product that's been developed with a lot of intention, a lot of purpose, and some really killer branding. So first of all, Sam, thank you so much for making it out here. For the few people who don't know you, give them a little bit of your intro. Speaker 2: You bet. Thanks for having me. This whole time I thought it was Kearney, New Jersey, so I'm humbled to be corrected here, and we are in Kearney, New Jersey. Chew on This, baby. Sam Niebel, co-founder of Good Wipes. We founded the company 12 years ago. We are premium, actually flushable Clean. And I really am grateful to be on here. I've been a fan of you guys for a long time, so thanks for having me. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 3: The king of all wipes. Speaker 2: That's him. That's me. So silly, I forgot to say that. Speaker 3: Have you met Sean Reilly? Speaker 2: I have. Yeah, I have. I have. Speaker 1: I'm glad we just broke up the seal right out of the gate. Speaker 2: Yeah, the seal. He's a beautiful man. He has beautiful long hair and a great brand. There you go. Speaker 3: There you go. 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 I.V., ThirdLove, 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 Q4 coming fast, now's the time to triple your email sales. Book your demo at instant.one slash chew and see how much revenue you've been leaving on the table. That's instant.one slash chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. Sam, I think one of the coolest things about your brand has been the fact that you've been building with the same level of energy. From when I met with you, we even got the opportunity to invest in you. From every moment and all these years that I've been able to interact with you, read your emails, look at you on social, see the brand, the energy level is as if you just started the brand yesterday. How do you keep that going after so many years? Speaker 2: I love the question about energy. I get a lot of, I would say, hype and props for my energy, but the truth is oftentimes it comes from the energy of other people. So it's really, what's that corporate word we like to use? Synergy. It's the interaction of other people. And so a lot of where my energy comes from now is The amazing work that other people are doing, so the work that our team is doing, the work that maybe our brokers are doing, the feedback that we're getting from consumers or influencers. And what's really cool about the evolution of a brand, like you guys know and a lot of your guests know, is the evolution of how a brand in the first year is different from year three and then year five. So it's almost like you have a new business, even though it's the same one, even though we're 12 years later in the game. Speaker 1: It's incredible. At the ethos of what you've started, right, is there's a truth to, you know, Wipes weren't invented by you, right? They've been around. That's true, that's true. But right after a guy leg invented, you brought them to a market in a really fun, exciting way, in a way that feels approachable for all types of people, right? And you're going up against a market like toilet paper that's been around and is still one of the most commonly, consistently purchased items in every grocery list. Why'd you want to take on that challenge? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a number of reasons that we want to take on the challenge. Earlier, you said if you haven't heard about good wipes, you're living under a rock. I like to think that if you're wiping with toilet paper, you're pretty much wiping with a rock. It's ineffective, it doesn't work, it doesn't clean. Even people are starting to say that bidets may work now. We find study after study, anecdotally or otherwise, that if you use a bidet, and then right after that, you need to use a good wipe after, and you're still gonna see that you're leaving something behind. So we know that the most effective way to clean poop off of your butt is as simple as you could say it, is by using a flushable wipe. Speaker 1: Incredible. Speaker 3: Wow. It's good to know. Speaker 1: Yeah. And then talk about a little bit of the fact that, you know, when you guys started this to where it is today, and let's talk about even the last 12 months, right? You know where people typically buy this product is retail, right? It is in stores. It is where people make the decision between toilet paper, wipes, maybe nothing or a bidet. Now, when you started though, you also have the DTC portion, you also have Amazon, you have all these other things. Tell me a little bit about the composition of the business when it started versus where it is today. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a great question. A lot of people used to ask us during the heyday of DTC when Dollar Shave Club would start, and then Harry soon after that. Hey, why aren't you guys on DTC? This is a no-brainer for subscriptions. Trying to make us feel stupid for going brick-and-mortar retail. Well, haha, who's laughing now? Because Dollar Shave Club's out of business, I think. No, I'm just kidding. Really, the real reason that we started to go brick-and-mortar, and you're right, about 63% of our volume is brick-and-mortar. The rest is a mix of e-commerce. It was really just an organic thing. That's what our skill sets were. I was talking earlier with some folks in your team, and obviously you guys are the e-commerce experts in the DTC space, right? We just were good, Charlie, my co-founder and I, were better at being in a room and engaging with people and figuring out how to work a sales program. So we really stuck to that and said, we know this is going to be a long sales cycle. We got to figure both out at the same time and kind of let the chips fall where they may. And it really just made sense for us to focus on brick and mortar retail. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And what were you doing before? You were at Complete Nutrition. Right. Speaker 2: That's right. Speaker 3: Why do I feel like a lot of people we know started at Complete Nutrition? Speaker 2: Well, obviously you guys over-indexed probably in knowing people from the supplement space. I don't know. I would love to know who you know, but that is where we started our entrepreneurial endeavors about 13 or 14 years ago before we made the transition fully into Good Wipes. Speaker 1: Amazing. You know, I want to jump into, I think, selfishly, what we want to know more about is retail, right? This game is incredible. It is some of the most powerful things that you can, like, go and set up because it compounds if the product's good. And then on top of that, you have what people don't realize, you have the accessibility to hundreds of thousands of doors, right? And it's almost like you can gamify your own business by just saying, hey, how much can we go and open today? You know, part of it is personal, part of it is product, part of it is sales, and then there's marketing. Tell us a little bit about how you cracked your first door to how you've cracked the last door. Speaker 2: Yeah, I just want to talk about for a second the way that you think about retail. There's a word that you said, power. It's so powerful to think about compounding your business or think about when you were growing up. And when I was growing up, I lived in Florida, so I would shop at Publix, go to the grocery store with my mom about three days a week. And I just remember going to the bakery and getting that chocolate chip cookie. Then all of a sudden, 25 years later, I'm starting to sell to those same people. So it's a very interesting and odd dynamic. But once you understand the magnitude of power, like you said, that a retail environment has, and the level of appreciation that you have to have for it by going into the stores Understanding all the complex layers of the supply chain and logistics to getting your product onto a shelf, it really gives you that sense of appreciation for the scale that is retail and the possibility to get in hundreds of thousands of doors possibly. So I love that and I think that's what brings the awe and the excitement for going to retail and then just seeing, oh my god, now you're selling hundreds of thousands and millions of units a week. In retail environment is crazy. But the way that I like to think about it and the way that we approach it was genuinely starting small. We wanted to have conversations with Target and Walmart and Kroger, but we knew that in order to win, we had to start with retailers that had a more geographically specific footprint. I'll give you a few examples. One, Raley's, 110 stores out of Northern California and Northern Nevada. Two, Market Basket, 88 stores in mainly Massachusetts, but the greater New England area. Three, H-E-B. We all know H-E-B. I think a lot of people listening, I'm sure, know H-E-B. The kings of Texas, 360 stores. Texas, a little bit of eastern New Mexico as well. And building out a footprint there is so important. And that's where we decided to start going and investing in. And by the way, we didn't just invest in those smaller footprint retailers and then ignore them to go to Walmart and Target. We still dedicate resources to those retailers today. So having meetings with those folks, you get insights from them. You're trading insights and giving them insights. You're giving them opportunities. They appreciate it too. They want to learn from you. It's a sincere synergy that you can develop with multiple retailers besides just one or two that I think are really important that definitely gets overlooked in the marketplace. Speaker 1: 100%. Speaker 3: That's great to hear because we just got into HEV. Speaker 2: Cheers to that. Cheers. Yeah. Chew on that. Speaker 1: No, it's so true. I love how you guys thought about it. So many people say, oh, be strategic, you know, really think about where you want to go first, build the story and then go and then you find out like people launch into Walmart as their first retailer. It's not good or bad. It's about did you really want to do that? Or, you know, what's the story going to be now when you're trying to go to Target next or you're then going to try to open up the HEB? So, I'm curious, you talked about like investing in the right resources, you still, even the smaller 88 store New England chain versus, you know, a 4,000 chain in Walmart or 1,400 in Target, you're treating them what seems like relatively the same, okay? What does that look like investment-wise, right, in terms of, you know, is it like you have a person per account, you have a field team, Break down marketing to us because I think that's the one place that we struggle with too. Because especially coming from a DTC world, everything for us is pay to play, performance, results very quickly, iterate, and then test again. Whereas with retail, it's like one thing can take three to six months. Speaker 2: Three to six months. Speaker 1: Only to find out like you got to go and remove the SKU and potentially replace it with something else. Tell us a little bit about your setup and structure. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's, you know, the beauty of an omni-channel business, as you guys have shared in your learnings over the past few years, is the marriage of both, I think. It's taking those DTC learnings and then sharing them back with the retail, getting the retail learnings and bringing it back to the faster-moving DTC. And that is, I truly believe, the true beauty of what you can build with an omni-channel business. There's two ways I can answer the question about dedicating resources to winning at a retail account. There's the way that I would want to in a perfect world, which is, you know, unlimited budget. And then there's two, which is the reality of what we've done, which is a little bit more bootstrapped. And we took the approach, let's take an example like ShopRite, Wakefern, here in New Jersey, baby. We love Wakefern Co-op, ShopRite, 200, 275-something stores. And what we did is we just went year by year, made as many investments as we could. We partner up on the appropriate promotions with the retail buyer, work with the social media team, and no, we don't have one person per each account. We have one VP of sales and we work with specific brokers that are specific to that different retailer usually. Specialists. Yes, specialists, right? And so what we would do to build up ShopRite, for example, is I would fly up and we would come up for events on our own. So we did the LPGA tournament and And set up a booth and passed out samples. So we just said, how can we bootstrap this? How can we be as guerrilla as possible? Not only to actually engage consumers, but show the retailer that we care. Like, hey, I'm coming from HQ. I'm coming from Atlanta to Ocean City to do the Atlantic City to do this event because we care so much about building a business here. And now we are the number one brand and have the number one SKU at ShopRite. And we're not done. And so like I said, we keep investing in that. We continue to bring programs and partner with retailers in that capacity. So that's just one example. But that's how I like to think. That's how we like to think about working with retailers is what are the ways that we can do it without just throwing thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars or people at it? Because we don't have that capability to do it. Speaker 3: As far as like product architecture, like you talked about, you know, you started in the HEBs of the world and then now you're kind of everywhere, right? So how do you treat H-E-B and Walmart separately? I know somebody's got to get the hero SKUs. Somebody's got to get the better pricing. Like, how do you make it fair for everybody? Because I think that's a problem that we struggle with as far as, you know, we have our FDM accounts and then we've got our grocery accounts and, you know, some, the bigger accounts want the lowest price. So, like, how do you kind of go through that? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's really difficult. You have to find a way. It is honestly probably the most difficult part of retail because you want to give them that customization, but customization could also break your business. SKU proliferation can break your business. You have to end up rationalizing. You want everyone to have the hero SKU. So one way that you could do this is As you start reaching certain scale and volume across the entire board, if someone says, if there's, let's say, an example, Walmart, who says, hey, give us this exclusive, you guys agree, or a group agrees, hey, you know, we could do this for 3,000 stores, and it's a six-month exclusive, that way they're getting exclusivity, but you're not sitting on a hero product, not allowing it to get out to the rest of the market, then you could scale it out from there. That's one way to do it. The other way to do it is just making sure that, hey, HEB, what is it that you want? What are you looking to do? You're looking to grow your category? Well, here's how we're going to help you do that. And you actually back it up with what you're saying. You do the marketing events. You do the sampling events. -specific retail programs with them, and you make sure you bring them SKUs. Speaker 1: That's great. I'm curious, you know, when it comes to You know, invest in our golf tournament, or you'll see stuff like go on Walmart Connect and invest there, or you'll see options like give us a good promo price, or do these end caps, or you know, do social media support, or do these billboards for us, show us that you care, right? The thing that becomes tricky to understand is How much are you investing and how much incrementality are you getting? Or are you just doing something to make someone happy, to keep you on shelf? And then, you know, how have you guys, any lessons you've learned, any mistakes you've made in finding out those answers? Speaker 2: I think there's a few. The CEO of Jones Beauty, his name escapes me, he's on DTC Twitter. Yeah, that's right. I remember he, in the operator That podcast, he sent out, he was part of an email newsletter this week and he's talking about some sort of online incremental measurement. And so that, what you just said reminded me of that, where you have to be able to gauge some incrementality. I'm kind of a yes guy at heart, like I'm sales driven. So the idea of doing all these programs at one retailer, I would love to do that, right? And so actually one time there was a specific retailer that we had done a number of Bogos with them and really just won a year. And they said, you know, you're retaining customers every time you do this. You actually don't have to do this. And we were like, wait. What? And they're like, you don't have to do this promo. You're getting a lift. You've done this the past three years. You don't have to anniversary this because you're retaining customers. I could clearly see it. They show us their velocity ramp. And we're like, oh, OK. So that was kind of a wake up call to say, yeah, not that we weren't measuring, but just that You can be mindful and you can give and give and give, but you don't have to do every program under the sun. I also do think it's really important to get a grip as early as you can on the financial metrics per account, all the way from not just the COGS, but the specific freights, the chargebacks. There's brands like Confido, I'm sure you guys are aware of, that you might partner with on the trade spend side to really understand and evaluate what the lift is over time. It's also looking at the velocity ramp after, like you said, there's a lag time. You might not know how great your year performance was for six months after, and then you have to kind of figure things out. So how do you evaluate in real time? It's really, in my opinion, looking at exponential velocity ramps to see how much are you really moving the needle over time and seeing that smoothing scale. Speaker 1: Someone hands you a half a million dollar check and says, hey, go and scale in Walmart. You're already in Walmart. How are you spending that? Speaker 2: That's a good, that's a good. Speaker 1: I know it wasn't on the sheet. Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of these weren't on the sheet. These are honestly, these are awesome questions. Speaker 3: These are just for us. Unknown Speaker: These episodes are for us. Speaker 2: These are awesome questions. With 500k, what I would do is I would take 100 and figure out a way to say, I want to get in an end cap is what I would do with a hundred and whether that's a merchandise end cap and you're doing some sort of some sort of drop-in with your own merchandising on it or if it's just product on the shelf which you have to sell. Speaker 1: Do you always want end caps in the best stores or do you also want end caps in the ones that are struggling so you can get more visibility in the struggling ones? Speaker 2: That is a good question. Speaker 1: A selfish question. Speaker 2: I would say that you want to at least, I'm sure we both live in a finite world, probably start with the best stores because they have higher foot traffic with more of your consumer. And you can see that through the Walmart, what's their backend program called now? Connect. Yeah, you can see it in that database. I'm sure they're going to want some Connect investment to parlay with that, which I think is totally fine. And then I would take $400,000 and do a massive awareness play. That's what I would do. And whether it's a big podcast like advertising on Chew on This or working with a few key influencers that are literally just saying go to Walmart because then They'll go, you tell them the aisle to go to, and hopefully they at least just are grabbed by the NCAP that you paid for. And whether or not they make you pay for it, but I would still say, here's $100,000, let's work an NCAP deal out, or if it's part of your merchandising strategy, and then use the rest to call it out. So that way you get the awareness, you drive them to store, and then you can see it. Speaker 1: That's really smart. Speaker 2: Y'all got 500K, I'd love to borrow. Speaker 1: 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 date is 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 start unlocking all of that lost revenue. That's instant.one slash chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. I'm very curious now, like you touched on a little bit of the awareness play, okay? Awareness play, right? You have geo-targeted ads, you have out-of-home advertising with billboards, etc. You have digital with Connect and stuff like that, and then you have influencers, and then of course you have in-store demos and stuff like that. Now, with that awareness stuff, what's something that you have a high confidence in something that works well versus what's something that you're like, hey, you just got to kind of spend on this and You don't know if it works, but it's good to have because it makes the brand look bigger. What's your overall opinion in some of these buckets? Speaker 2: Sometimes I like to think about it like a time to money trade-off. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So what we've kind of built into our DNA as a company, again, coming from that under-resourced bootstrapped mentality over the past five years that we're now starting to overlay some marketing investment over, is the idea of things that take a lot of time but don't cost as much money. An example, we might do 300 to 500 gift PR boxes that you're really only paying for the, and it's a nicer box, and maybe we'll put T-shirts in it. So we actually just did a summer beach bum box. So right here you can see the Good Wipes Beach Club, Juicy Booty. We did about 300 of those, sent them to influencers, and we actually measure how many of those influencers. So we get, I think this one we had close to 60 to 70 percent of the influencers we sent to posts and these could be micro from 5,000 to 5,000 all the way up to several hundred thousand followers to see who posts. It's a high post rate. We get to see who posts And, you know, how the quality of the posts, obviously, like if you show the hat and then you like turn around, like, thank you. But we're looking for people to say, like, open the box and say, I love good wipes. Right. So we measure those. We track all those in a spreadsheet. The ones that consistently post, we keep them on that list. So the next holiday box. So maybe that will be something in the fall. And then obviously. Probably a Halloween box for us. We do that consistently year-round no matter what. So we always have something that's hitting somebody that creates some sort of organic and it's really low cost for dollar investment. It is a lot of time curating and crafting and putting energy into it, but it pays off because of the high post rate. So we have high confidence in that. You never know anything. It's mostly going to work in marketing, even in performance, even based off evidence from before, but you get some sort of directional inclination. Then if we can lay over something a little bit more big bets after that, we might look at something like Big TikTok influencers or start looking at podcasts. And even though we don't do that much on DTC, we still have an Amazon business. People search in GoodWipes or then they start to see it at Target and Walmart. So for us, advertising on podcasts is actually a way that plays. We're comfortable saying we might not know or be able to track the full ROI on that. It's good to hear anecdotes. I mean, when you start getting feedback, people text people on the team saying, oh, I heard you on this podcast. Then you at least know people aren't skipping ads. But on top of that, you just have to trust, okay, we know that this podcast is getting hundreds of thousands of downloads. If you run it enough times with them, it's your target audience. You have to have faith that over time that that will grow. That's how I think about it. Speaker 1: That's really cool. I love that. I've been curious about this because, you know, You have a brand and I always find this with even with like this some of the sexual wellness brands and stuff. It's like you have this balance between like being cheeky but also professional. You know, you don't want people to buy you because you come off gimmicky and it's fun first. You also want it to be a high utility product that they feel proud about talking to others. How do you find that balance and what have you guys done over so many years to perfect brand messaging so well? Speaker 2: Ron, do you have access to our Canva brand playbook? What's going on here? So we have an acronym that we use, PEACH. So Playful, Empowering, Approachable, Cheeky, and Honest. And that's the tone of voice that the brand likes to keep. I have my own tone of voice, and I very early on, I would say, separated myself from the brand. I'm good at talking how I like to talk. Sometimes I might be more edgy. Sometimes I might be more approachable. But the brand, led by our creative director, Maria Gilbeau, who's been with us for 10 years. Yay, Maria! All the branding is done from her. Thank you so much. She has mastered and perfected and crafted the beautiful tone of voice that we have and really archetyped How we talk in Engineered so it never goes too much in like a preachy way and it never goes too much in like an over-the-edge way. And that has really worked. It's a really good balance. Could never have imagined doing that myself. Like I just basically admitted I couldn't do that, right? She could do that. And so now she has a team along with our SVP of Marketing, Meredith. That really manage that tone of voice and we find influencers that you can't script what an influencer does or says but you can do some research on how they talk and if they're a good fit then we send them product and then we get the message typically reflected that we want to hear from them. Speaker 3: So before you had a creative director what did this look like? Speaker 2: Before we had a I mean it was Charlie and I well, so she's again. She's been with us for 10 out of 12 Okay, so it's pretty much. I mean before that it looked like shit That's the truth we're getting vulnerable here on chew on this guys come on You know I want to I want to touch on a little bit on like. Speaker 1: Being a business that's above 10 years, and I forget who was here, which founder it was, and it stuck with me since he said it, is you're not a brand until you've been around for at least 10 years. And you guys eclipsed that. You've gone through waves of different parts of the environment. You've seen iOS changes. You've seen COVID. You've seen it all. What was the most trying time in your business and why? Speaker 2: I had an answer that I was thinking of earlier. I think the answer that I was going to, I don't remember the one I was going to say, but it was some bullshit gimmicky answer. But the real answer is I remember it was because you mentioned COVID, we were supposed to get an investment and we got slow played by this investment group. We were supposed to have actually gotten wired the money and they didn't even sign the term sheet. They didn't sign the deal documents and I kept following up. Hey, where are you guys? Radio Silent. I'm thinking this is extremely unprofessional for a multi-billion dollar real estate conglomerate. And then ultimately, they finally, the day after Trump announced that there was going to be the lockdowns or the day of national emergency, I think it was March 16, 2020, they said, oh, actually, we're not going to do the deal. And I'm like, guys, well, every day matters for our business at this time. If you knew this two weeks ago, you should have just said it. And then they kind of dragged us along like, well, maybe, but we're not sure. And then we found out they were still doing real estate. So anyway, It was just it was kind of like a just a moment of lack of integrity. And I think that's that's going to be my biggest pet peeve in the industry is It takes a lot to get me mad or irritated, but lack of integrity across a vendor landscape is, I think, really what makes me upset. But taking that lesson and also saying, hey, at the end of the day, you have to persevere no matter what. You can't just rely on other people. And you have to be good at vetting those partners too, but you have to rely on yourself and your team to lift each other up during those times. And also, if you can train your brain, it's very difficult to do, to not be surprised by anything. So tariffs shouldn't surprise us that much, especially because Donald Trump's been talking about it for... He wants to do it. So to kind of prepare your business as best you can for these horrible events or saying, hey, there's going to be things in business that are completely outside your control, completely outside the scope of your industry that may or may not affect you, iOS changes, that you just have to prepare for and say, okay, swallow that big boulder and figure out what are we going to do next. Speaker 1: I have one question for you before we jump to that, which is when it comes to product innovation, I think when you call yourself something like good wipes, or even you look at Sean calling it dude wipes, there's something really cool about that where it keeps you probably relentlessly focused on just making really good wipes and maybe iterating a little bit on that. But then there's also this bucket of like, you've got people where you want them to be, stuck in a bathroom holding your packaging inside of there, and you have real estate in people's homes, right, above eyesight, not being in a cabinet typically. Do you get the interest of like, I can do, I can get in, maybe I can start selling soap, maybe I can start selling this stuff, I can start getting more places in the bathroom, but then you go and look at your brand name and you're like, we're good wipes. Speaker 2: It's the age-old question of focus versus the innovation extension. And I do believe in innovation. There's a time and a place. But I think people just have to expand their time horizons and get really comfortable with that. Like you said, 10 years minimum to build even a whiff test of a brand, right? You really should sign up thinking that you're going to be running a brand for 15 or 20 years. Maybe it gets to 500 million in eight years and you sell it, that's fine. But you need to be ready for thick and thin that you're going to be running a brand, if you want to start a company and care about it in the American ecosystem, that you're going to be running it for a pretty good chunk of your life. Because it's not software. It doesn't just scale. You can't go in a straight line in one year, right? There's retailers that you're working with. There's production that you're working with. So I think it's really important to scale out your time horizon. I genuinely, you may not believe me. Audience, you may not believe me. But you can ask people that I work with who laugh at me because I think in decades. I think as good wipes in a 20-year project life cycle and where are we going to be in 20 years. And so I'm comfortable knowing that we can come up with innovation later down the line if we have to. As much as I would love to do a botanical bliss smelling candle now, we could, yeah, maybe we could test that. But that will take away focus from focusing on building and what we need to build. Speaker 1: Love that. Great lesson for a lot of times. Great advice. Speaker 2: It's tough. It's tough. And every brand is different. I genuinely believe every brand is different. But for us, I think we have a really strong path ahead of us that we are comfortable staying focused, knowing that we can bring innovation later, because I'm going to be doing this until I'm 75. Speaker 1: Maybe 85. Amazing. Well, let's kick off with some rapid fire. Anki, do you want to kick it off? Speaker 3: Yes, this is the rapid fire round. All right. First thing you do if you had to start over tomorrow. Speaker 2: Damn, I thought about this one. All right, we got two minutes. I kept asking for it. I forgot my answer. Anyway, what would I do if I had to start over ahead of time? I would Do two things one. I would go very hard on Amazon. I would go very very very very hard on Amazon too I would start talking to Three to five select retailers right away. One big, three to four regional. Three, I lied, I'm gonna do three. Three, I would do field marketing. Even if it was me just walking outside and passing out good wipes all day every day, those are the three things I would do. Speaker 1: I love that. What's one thing you've never told anyone about your brand? Speaker 2: What's one thing we've never told anyone about our brand? I think we have to go to another one. I don't know. I don't know. Speaker 3: It's such a crazy question. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, it's a really good question. Speaker 1: So think about it. Speaker 2: I will. Speaker 1: You're coming back. Speaker 2: Okay, we can come back to that. Speaker 1: You can't fly out of it. Speaker 2: No, don't edit this out. I want them to see the struggle and the vulnerability. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 2: I'm an open book. Speaker 1: What's one entrepreneurial myth you're sick of hearing? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that the entrepreneur is the hero. It's not about the founder. It's the team does so much of the work. The consumers do so much of the work. The retailer does so much of the work. I'm literally a communication vessel, right? And an energy vessel that I can do things. Speaker 3: When was the last time you used a good wipe and thought, damn, I'm proud of this? Speaker 2: All right, I'm flipping the answer. I use GoodWipes all the time and I'm always proud of it, especially after a mix like coffee and baked beans. But when we heard that both Mark Wahlberg and DJ Khaled and Dwayne Wade use and love GoodWipes, that is when I knew that we had something. Speaker 3: What a lineup. Speaker 2: That's a lineup. Wow. Speaker 1: You did not have to go that hard on that. Speaker 2: I had to go hard. I had to go hard. Speaker 1: That is insane. The lowest point in your journey and the small thing that you pulled out of it. Speaker 2: The lowest point is having been rejected by Publix. Here I am, vulnerable. I'm crying. Five seconds left. Publix being rejected multiple years in a row. We are still not in Publix, but what lifted us up is getting in Walmart, Target, Albertsons, Kroger, Safeway, HEB. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: Everybody, baby, go buy Good Vibes if you like them. Thank you. Publix. Speaker 3: How are you not in Publix? That's like your hometown. Speaker 2: That is what makes it sad. Speaker 1: I think it's going to be like the last retailer you're getting. Speaker 3: Oh, is it the final boss? Speaker 2: I think so. It's the final boss. It's so difficult not being in there, especially when my family's in Florida. I'm from Florida. I went to Florida State. I didn't even know that there was another grocery store in the world other than Publix. Speaker 1: This episode is going to get public. Speaker 3: I feel like I know how to pitch. Remember we were pitching Price Chopper last week and I was telling them, because I grew up in upstate New York, that's where all the Price Choppers are. They're nowhere else. And I was like, you know what, I grew up on this. My mom shopped here, did the whole, you know, story. And he's like, you know what, I'm going to really try to get you guys in. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Speaker 2: Shout out Price Chopper, Schenectady all day, man. There you go. Speaker 1: Last one. Speaker 3: Uh, yeah. Uh, I'm gonna switch it up a little bit. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: Karate or ceramics? Speaker 2: Ooh. Alright. Ceramics. I think I'm gonna be able to get back into ceramics. Speaker 3: Would you like to tell everyone why I asked that question? Speaker 2: Yep, you're asking because I am a current, even though I haven't done it for 20 years, award-winning ceramic artist. Best in class. That is right. I actually got the number of a coach, a ceramics coach, and I saw them at an Atlanta art festival, and she was like, yeah, I'll coach you. Come on in. I get you in whenever. Yeah, I'm lonely in there. I have space for you. I have tons. I have kilns. I have everything. She gave me her card. I texted her that day. I haven't heard back yet, but I'm determined to get back into ceramics. Speaker 3: I would not have ever thought ceramics. Speaker 2: I'll make you guys something. I'll make you guys something. Speaker 1: I would have assumed you bought. That's amazing. Speaker 2: Award-winning. Award-winning ceramics builder. Speaker 1: We found our title for this episode. Speaker 2: Award-winning ceramics builder. Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna close off with the last question. What's one thing that nobody knows about your brand? Speaker 2: I think it can't be the Publix thing. It's got to be better. Speaker 1: It's got to be good. Speaker 2: It's got to be good. All right, give me a second. Speaker 3: The Publix thing would have been good. Speaker 2: What's one thing that nobody knows? What's like an example? Speaker 3: Something like when you guys were starting it and nobody knows about it. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 3: You know, when you were carrying those Ziploc bags around. Speaker 2: Yeah, there's so many of those like little stories. I need to remember one. Speaker 1: Like we used to get products returned to us and then ship them right back out to other people. Speaker 3: I'm just kidding. Speaker 2: That's like an example, you know? Yeah. Oh, I'm trying to think of like a really good story because there's so many of those. Speaker 1: Tell us a story. Tell us a story about the brand. Speaker 2: I could do one and you could tell me if you like it. I was talking to someone about how amazing podcasts are and how important it is to have awareness and I told the story and I actually hadn't told the story to anyone. So there's a podcast called Mind Pump and it was eight years ago. We were in Cincinnati for this startup accelerator and our product was not great at that time. So I'm admitting that. And there was definitely poke through in the product from batch to batch. So like your finger would go through the wipe, which you don't want. And I was telling someone that the power of a really strong podcast or someone with an audience, that they could literally say anything, as an example, this product isn't good, and you will still get sales. And I remember in 2016, where Adam Schafer from MindPump, and I'm, you know, I'm friendly with them, and they are awesome. And I sent them samples and he started going off on it the first minute. He's like, oh, we got sent these samples, this cool brand, this guy named Sam, good wife. He's like, it wasn't that good. Like my finger went through it. And I look at our website. And again, this was like year two or three. And we had so many orders. And I'm like, he literally just said the product sucked and we still got orders. And so that's why I'm so passionate about the power of awareness. So that's a story that I hadn't told before. Speaker 1: Amazing. Speaker 2: Yeah, our product is amazing now. It's super strong, very soft. 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, Garret Popcorn and Karen Kane have tripled their abandonment flow revenue since going live. You could be next. Book your demo at instant.one slash chew. That's instant.one slash chew and open up a whole new revenue channel today. Now, let's get back to the episode. Sam, the way we like to wrap this up is, by the way, crazy energy, amazing episode, super tactical, very, very, very passion-driven, and we love you as a founder. Speaker 2: Appreciate it. Speaker 1: But if you had to leave everyone with one thing to chew on, one thing, one piece of advice that you have for founders today, what's that one thing you want to leave everyone with? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's finding that inner peace and finding something or areas of your life outside of the business that you can find fulfillment in, whether it's family, whether it's a hobby, whether it's something else to kind of accelerate your mind, even if it's just, I like to walk every day, but something that you could put progressively Towards your mind and your life that you can find gains in because, as you guys well know, there are times when you're gonna get your teeth kicked in in business and it might last longer than a day. It could be year-long droughts of XYZ, for example, us publics, right? You spend such a long time working on X thing and it just doesn't materialize or you really get, you know, suffer serious losses in learning lessons. If you have something else in your life that you're winning in, it'll keep your confidence whole and grounded that you can then translate to your business. 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.