How a Kardashian-Backed Competitor Accidentally Helped Honeylove Grow

I would love to start. So first off, Igor, Betsie, thank you for coming. This is nice. We're in person. We're here in Austin. Yeah. Can we just start with the number one, Honeylove, the name? Where did that come from? And then number two, what is Honeylove? A lot of our audience is like young men in e-commerce.

Totally.

May not be your customer. Yeah. So we have to explain things for them first.

Okay.

So maybe take us away there.

Yeah, so when I chose the name Honeylove for the brand, I wanted something that wasn't gonna put us into a corner. I wanted something that could, you know, allow us to expand. So even though the first product was shapewear undergarments for women, the name Honeylove felt like something that if we decided to expand, it would be able to hold that. And then the name itself, it was like a nickname that my mom had for myself and my sisters. And it was like, I don't know, it just felt kind of sweet. It was like a very like, this is for women. Yeah, just kind of like pay respect to my mom. She's amazing. And it just kind of rolls off the tongue.

Cool. And how long ago? So when did the company start? What year?

We were formed in 2016 and that's a whole story, but we didn't launch until 2018.

Okay.

So I can tell that whole story or—

Yeah, let's do it. Tell me, tell me like what's the gap?

Yeah.

So in 2016, I had just— I'd actually been working on the ideas a little bit. I was like ready to like get going, open up, you know, the ability to work with other people and pay people and that type of thing. So I formed the company, but then I get a phone call from Armin van Buuren, who I don't know if you know who he is. He's—

I'm an EDM person.

Amazing. Okay, cool. I'm good today. Great. Love that. Okay. So he's like one of the top DJs in the world, DJ producers. And he's like, hey, you know that song we did? I wanted to see if you want to come on tour with me. So it's going to be some 40-some countries. We're going to tour all over the world. And this is like right when I started Honeylove.

Okay.

So for the first 2 years, it's about a year and a half I was on tour. I was actually out on the road with Armin and I was working on Honeylove like backstage. I would have a 2-hour break between the 2 songs that I performed with him on that tour. And I was back there like being a nerd in my, in my dressing room, like Working on sketches, talking to factories, working on the kind of initial community. So—

I've never had somebody tell me their side hustle was while they were on tour. That's a first. That's gotta be a first for sure.

I know. We were talking about how a lot of direct-to-consumer companies like are unconventional founders, but that I kind of take the cake.

Yeah, you're definitely the weirdest.

I'm the most unconventional.

Yeah, you're definitely the weirdest. We get these research briefs beforehand and I started reading and I'm like, really? Like, this one's new. Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah. What is the— so let's just like personally then. So you're— so your degree in math, love arts and music, and that's your whole thing.

Yeah.

How did you come up with the— so why the idea for the company though? So like, I get the name, but like, what was the thing that you saw that made you want to even start this?

Yeah, no, this is like the weirdest part. I think like Me starting a shapewear company is the most surprising thing to me and to everyone else I know. The idea for Honeylove really came from wearing shapewear on stage. So I wasn't wearing it in my day-to-day life, but I was performing in front of these audiences of like tens of thousands of people. And I wanted to look my best. I wanted to feel confident. I wanted to think about how I looked. So I was like, oh, shapewear, that's a good idea. The first time I tried shapewear, it rolled down in the waist. It created like a rubber band around my stomach.

That sounds not good.

And it was like, you know, cutting off my breathing. And I—

Oh, and as a singer, that's not useful at all.

That's not good.

No.

Yeah, you don't need that.

So like the whole purpose of shapewear is to make you feel confident, to make you feel kind of tucked in, and it did the complete opposite. So I tried a bunch of other shapewear. I— they all did the same thing. They all worked the same way. They all rolled down in the waist. And, um, yeah, that was the catalyst, just like something I could wear on stage, and quickly realized that lots of other women wanted functional shapewear to wear on dates and to work and just in life.

And you had never made physical products of any kind before. This is like new to you, like making things?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

And Igor, your background, you had been in consumer things before, if I understand it correctly.

That's correct.

Yeah.

So where, what categories and where, what's your journey to get to Honeylove?

I started out, my, my, uh, my training is in engineering. I have 2 degrees in engineering. But what was interesting is the particular field of our study was aerospace engineering. And you have—

Also lends itself well to shapewear.

Very, very strange. But you have to put yourself back in like, this is like early 2000s. And today SpaceX and all these drone companies make aerospace engineering really interesting. But I was right at the time when the only interesting game in town was like just building like military aircraft. And, uh, you know, those are like decade-long projects and everybody's just like working on a little screw and a little panel, like at the end of the airplane or whatever. And you spend your entire career doing that. And I very quickly upon enrolling, I realized I'd made a horrible mistake. And, uh, there were aspects of engineering that I liked. And so I decided I was going to stick with it. I was going to get my degree. I was going to learn. This is going to be useful for me later in life, but I knew I was not going to be an aerospace engineer. And so I got very lucky that my college roommate felt the same way, and him and I very early on started thinking about like what is it that we want to do with our lives? We want to finish our college degrees, but we want to do something else. We started a company in college, and that didn't go anywhere, but it just like the minute that that started, I mean the you know the it was there. I just could see myself doing this for the rest of my life, and honestly, I used my time in college to just. sort of like experiment to like, you know, learn how to build a business, to try out different ideas. By the time I was finishing my master's degree, something landed and it was good enough that it turned into a company. And then that company took a little bit of time to turn into an actual business that was generating enough revenue to pay my salary. So I actually did take a job in aerospace engineering for about 2 years.

Okay.

I would work from, you you know, 9 till 6 or 7 or whatever, come home and then like spend every waking hour like working on the startup at night. And after 2 years of doing that, we started generating enough revenue. I ended up paying myself, quit my job, finally ended up in the same location with my co-founder, my college roommate. His name is Eric. He's absolutely fantastic. He's my best friend today. We still work to this day after 25-something years of working together. We went from that startup to the next one to the next one and he's now in Honeylove too.

No kidding.

Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. But we ended up getting acquired. The startup that you were talking about, the name of the company was Calorie Count, and it was an early calorie counter. So today, a lot of people use apps like MyFitnessPal or what have you. We were there before MyFitnessPal. This was before mobile apps. This is, you know, the Web 2.0 time.

Sure.

We're old enough to remember that.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right. Me too. And those are the days of just like doing like SEO, you know, back in the day when SEO worked. And I mean, I guess it probably still works today. I just haven't touched it in a very long time. But back then we managed to scale the company to 8 million members and ended up getting acquired by the New York Times. And it was a phenomenal, like absolutely a mind-blowing start for someone who knew nothing about business. I mean, the real move would have been to raise venture capital. The real move would have been to hire a lot of people and to turn this into MyFitnessPal.

Sure.

mature, experienced, senior version of myself would have probably taken the company further.

Like a larger vision and a bigger thing.

Bigger appetite for risk, like a vision for how this actually can keep generating money and keep growing. And honestly, like the very first time that somebody approached us and said, do you want to do this? We're like, heck yeah, of course we would.

Yeah, Jason's advice, just take the damn money. You know?

I heard you say that and it literally was going through my head. And you know, like I thought back and no regrets. Ended up meeting Betsy. It put me on the path to continue to do this for a very long time without any type of like, you know, fear of risk or failure. It really like, you know, led to the next 20 years of just really loving what I do and just engaging in startups. And the journey took me through Y Combinator and raising venture capital eventually and all that fun stuff. But that's kind of like my story. And so by the time that we teamed up, Betsy had this like incredible creative background and I had come from just being Anywhere from a CEO and project manager and also like, you know, working on the engineering side of things and everything. And I think together as a team, we, um, we, we came with 2 different sets of skills that together I think blended pretty nicely.

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Yeah, and you're— what's funny is you started off talking about Honeylove as like it wanted something that didn't pigeonhole me, and meanwhile your first company was like calorie count. It was like there was nothing else that this thing was ever going to do but count calories.

Very true.

You know, there was a dash in between. That was a dash. There's a calorie-count.com. Speaking about being a college student and telling yourself, can I afford to buy this domain name? And those are the days of, you know, choosing bad domain names. Was it—

could you— Honeylove, just as a combination of words, was that actually an easy domain to get?

Trying to think. No, it wasn't that easy. Um, you had to do a whole, uh, crazy process.

We started with .co.

Yeah.

Okay. Igor did this actually. So yeah.

We started with .co. That was, I think, roughly like $2,000.

Uh-huh.

For the .com, we hired a broker.

Yep.

And I don't know much about that space other than you need a broker cuz you don't wanna be the person reaching out and saying, hey, I, I, I run honeylove.co. Would you like to sell me your .com?

Because we were already a pretty good size by the time we wanted to buy the .com. Yeah, we had the .co for a while. We had pretty good traction at that point. If they had done some research, um, we would've paid a lot more. We got a really good deal. I don't remember how much it was, but yeah.

So yeah, can you say, I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours.

Yeah. It was, it was, it was, it was like just under $10,000.

Oh God. Yeah. No, we, we, we bought Lomi, which is unfortunately a 4-letter domain. Uh, I think we paid $190 through a broker. Some random guy in India owned it. Like, dude, like, took a while to track him down. I'm like, no, no, I need it to be 4 letters because we were going to be very heavy. We knew, like, television, like YouTube and TV were going to be where we played, right? Uh, and I'm like, they got to be able to spell it.

Yep.

Like, it has to be like, you see the domain, you just punch that in. I'm selling to, like, old people. You know, like 55 plus, like, let's just make it simple. The domain actually paid itself off in the, uh, so, you know, in Chrome, you're a nerd, you're gonna like this.

Okay.

Uh, also computer science.

Got you.

So, uh, my, my theory on how I could justify spending the money for this was in Chrome on a computer, when you start to type in a name, if the person just sees the .com, they just enter it. So LOMI, I had a much higher likelihood of it never being an actual search where I had to buy the damn paid result. So we just did the backwards math and I'm like, if I can just get this many people who can type in a domain direct, I'm not having to pay my extortion tax to Larry and Sergey. And that was how we convinced the investors to write the check.

I'll tell you a funny story about Honeylove too, that we only realized after we had committed to the name. So this is not safe for work, So don't do this unless you're at home, but if you switch the words Honey Love to Love Honey—

Don't do it at work.

And so occasionally people come to us and they send the kind of things that they bought at lovehoney.com and they want their refunds and we just get like, you know, endless giggles from just looking at those things.

As you guys run the company, like now, I'm thinking of you specifically.

Mm-hmm.

Are you like day to day, are you more like, uh, creative or are you more like data, math, science? Like what, what comes up more often?

It's, I'm more creative.

Okay.

I think it's like, it's just been a choice. Like I try to like choose the areas where I think I'm harder to replace and I, I think I'm a lot more replaceable on the data side. There are people that are better at it than me. Yeah, that's a good point. Even though I have a math degree, it's not that I'm like the best in the world. The people that we have at the company are much, much better than me. I think I have a, a really high like BS meter. If something sounds wrong or feels wrong, I think some of my analytical nature does help me out there. Um, but yeah, I think the creative side is where I can add the most value and that's, that's where I try to spend most of my time.

Does that show up largely in product then?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Product, um, photo shoots.

Yep.

Brand things. I'm actually involved in growth creative.

Really?

Yeah.

Um, 'cause I was always there, like in the early days I was doing a little bit of everything. I didn't have Igor until about 2 years in. Mm-hmm. Um, and I'm still involved in Growth Creative. I think it's just like anything that's speaking to the customer psychology, winning them over.

Yep.

Speaking to kind of like what really drives them and drives their decision making. I feel like that's a, that's a skill.

It's also, you're the founder. It's also, you're the founder and just no one knows it better than you. Yeah. I, you, you always see that, right? Even yesterday, some of the folks at the mastermind, they, they have like a writer's room. They lock themselves into the room. I love that. I think the founders, just, they, they understand it at such a high level, at such a deep level that, yeah, that, that they should always be involved in the content. You see the, the businesses that, that ultimately go in the wrong direction is the, the key value of the founder is often gone, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I think, uh, the more people we talk to in consumer over the years, the more I realize like the very, very good companies, they have a weird obsession with creative, especially in consumer. Like, we're storytellers for a living. Yeah, we happen to sell things to monetize the storytelling, but like, really, we're storytellers. And the best ones are all like very deep and creative. Sometimes it's product, sometimes it's like just very ad-focused. We talked a lot about ads yesterday.

Yeah.

So how does the split then work today? So like, Igor, you join, I think, in 2020-ish.

2 years in.

Yeah, 2 years in. And Betsy, you're Very creative. You're clearly very science analytical. I mean, we were talking yesterday like you're in it. How do you guys divide up things and how do you guys work together, or is it pretty separated?

Yeah, I mean, I'm owning garment design, all aspects of product development. Like I said, I'm heavily involved in growth creative, which is probably the weirdest one for people on the outside. But to your point, it does, it does make sense. I think I really understand what drives the customer and I understand her pain points. And then brand. So, um, photo shoots, video shoots, the website, all of the messaging, the product marketing on the landing pages. Again, speaking to what the customer feels. Um, those are my strengths. Um, and then Igor, you can kind of share what you do. And then I would say beyond that, the two of us do overlap. So I have input on the areas that he's in and, you know, we figure out a way to kind of make decisions. Sure. Yeah. I think it's Um, we both respect each other and the value that we can add, but there is like a little bit of like, hey, how about this? And vice versa. Like he'll actually jump into the design room every once in a while and say, hey, here's what I'm seeing. People don't know that, that kind of like, it sounds strange, but I think having an outside perspective can be, can be really helpful in product development and design and visual things. Um, so yeah, but I don't know if you want to describe the parts that you do.

Well, my, my core domain is definitely scaling and optimization. So when I joined, I just want to give full credit to Betsy. And when I joined mid-2020, there was already, um, a Series A, about 10 people and a product that worked. So, you know, I had a pretty easy, uh, time joining. It was very obvious what Betsy wanted to do, what she envisioned for the company, where she was going. That was very clear. What was maybe not so clear is how do we go from, I'm going to make this up, maybe like $17 million that we made the year before. to like, you know, over 200, which is where we are today. So that, that was, that required a little bit of product expansion, which required, you know, hiring a lot of people.

That's a fundamentally different company, right?

Yeah.

It required hiring a lot of people and a heck of a lot like optimization on the cost side and optimization on the revenue from monetization to marketing on the more like analytical side of marketing, media buying, all that stuff. So those are the fundamental divisions. And I would say people is very, very clearly overlap. That's, you would definitely interview everybody who'd be hired. I would interview everybody that'd be hired. We're fanatical about people and we really believe that you can't invest enough in interviewing and sourcing and what have you. And then really interestingly, again, the most interesting analytical questions that I sometimes debate, like, you know, do we do this or do we do that? I think there's something to the instinct that people sometimes have.

Yeah.

And especially the founder of a company just has this like, unfair advantage in the world. And I don't have that. Like, I did not envision the product. It was not my idea. I'm trying to add 1 and 1 to equal 2, but she sees how 1 and 1 can equal 3. And that's like just like that unfair advantage that I think—

Yeah, founder math. Founder math is real. You know, like we invent things and sometimes they come true. It's like, that's why founders are founders and that's where the outcomes come from.

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So neither one of you has a background in fashion and apparel. You must have met some people along the way then that do, right?

That have like—

there's, there's a weird loop. I'll just mention it. Just my mom will be disappointed if I said no.

Okay.

She'd be deeply—

Oh dude, it's your mom. Yeah, let's not.

Let's celebrate mom. Yeah, gotta give credit to mom. Mom needs to be— Mom needs to feel the love. So mom is incredible in fashion.

Okay.

Designer. She is a pattern maker. Very cool. For decades built her own dresses, eventually started a tiny little boutique that survived, I think, over 30 years.

So, okay. So then the question I have to ask, given your background and, you know, Has there been something like a piece of advice when it comes to like fashion apparel as a category that has turned out to be like just useless and you've avoided it? Like you should just never do what these people tell you to do this in this space. You're nodding your head. You're nodding your head.

Yeah. I mean, you've got a good one for this, I think. Yeah.

I mean, the one thing that we always debate is the whole question of just like fast fashion. You know, and even, I mean, we just spent some time yesterday talking to a lot of amazing people, and I have so much respect for people who were at that meeting and also people that we meet outside of meetings like this. And newness, newness, newness, newness, newness is the formula. And there has to be something to it. I mean, and I understand it intellectually, but I also recognize that you really need to have a North Star. And if the North Star is speed of iteration and get as much as you can as fast as you can, you're not going to have the time and the space to put a lot of thought into engineering the products. You're just going to be optimizing for one North Star.

Yeah.

There can't be 2 North Stars.

Yes. Speed and quality.

Then you're left with nothing. You're left with nothing.

Yeah, totally.

And so either you're fast and maybe cheap, but just fast. Let's like focus on fast. Or you're like doing what Apple did with the iPhone. You're basically saying it's either going to be an iPhone or nothing. We're not coming out with something that looks like half of an iPhone. We're going to work on that glass for as long as it takes until it works. And maybe just because what Betsy, I mean, Betsy as an artist would never put out a track that's not fully perfectly mixed. You just don't do that as an artist. And I was, I mean, you know, I'm steeped in the, you know, school of Y Combinator, you know, just like the customer needs to love the product. They need to be able to tell to their friends about it. So of course you want to launch early and whatever, but at the end of the day, it needs to be a perfect product. And so we love to make our products best in class and that is our North Star. And if we can do it fast, then that's amazing. But if it takes a minute, then that's fine as well.

Yeah, I don't really think of us as a fashion company.

Well, what do you think? What are you guys?

It's more of like a technology type of thing. So Igor used the Apple analogy. I think it's in shoes a lot too. So they'll spend a long time figuring out the shoes.

Yep.

And then you take that idea and you do expansions on that, that shoe. So I think like On Running is a good example.

Oh yeah.

That's sort of how we think. We go very deep on the products that we make and then when we like have a hit, then we'll expand on that and create different versions of it. So it's not, it's not like fashion. And that's not to say that our stuff isn't beautiful and it isn't like very aesthetic. It's just that it's not the first thing. It's the function and the way that it works and is it effective that comes first and then the beauty and the aesthetics come second. Yeah.

I mean, this is HexClad, right? It's a great product. It's been iterated on over a long time. You can expand the product into a lot of different adjacent things.

Versions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say this is another one of those common things in great consumer companies is a weird obsession with the product. Yeah, some of my favorite actual apparel companies are the ones who go the other way of fast fashion where they say like, I'm just going to iterate forever on like these 10 things. They're just going to get better over time. And they show you every little iteration. And I'm a nerd that way. I like to see people who just kind of obsess over like the smallest, what would seem pedantic things, but yeah, they turn out to be really important in the experience.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, I've actually told Jason this. I had somebody steal one of my HexClad pants. Like, one of my friends just took the damn thing out of my house.

Nice.

He didn't tell me.

He just really liked it.

Yeah, he's just like, this is awesome. I had a few of them, so.

You don't need this one anymore.

Yeah, he just like took it home and I'm like, dude, I'll get you one. I know a guy. How did you guys— so right back to the beginning of like launching then. So you come off break. Um, you launched with a crowdfund?

Yeah.

Yeah. Kickstarter or Indiegogo?

Kickstarter.

Kickstarter. Yeah. We did an Indiegogo too, but it was just like kind of what you do. Like you, you do that.

This is what we share. We, we launched, uh, Lomi with, uh, Indiegogo though.

Oh, just Indiegogo. Okay.

Okay. Kickstarter wouldn't talk to us.

Yeah.

They're kind of snobby.

Well, I don't think they really like helped us out very much either until it was already going and it was doing well. Then they start to help a little bit. Um, but yeah.

So what made you want to do that? Like why the crowdfunding?

It seemed like a great way to start. I think you actually do raise money there. You find out if the consumer really wants the product. I do think a lot of other brands use Kickstarter differently than we did. For me, Kickstarter was very public. So I had a successful music career at the time and the idea of just using Kickstarter for testing, wouldn't really be true for me. I think it was like, if I'm gonna have a Kickstarter, it has to be successful because I'm exposing myself. Like all of, all of these fans that I have are gonna see me trying to do something totally different from what I've been doing. And that would be like a public failure. So to me it was like, I only wanna go on Kickstarter if I already strongly believe that I have product market fit. So.

Sure.

Um, I had that 2 years basically where I was on tour with Armin van Buuren, but When I was at home, I was like, every new woman that I met, I'm like, hey, I'm doing this thing. Will you try it out? So I was getting lots of feedback.

Oh, very cool.

Back to the iteration thing, it was like lots and lots of iterations trying to get the product exactly right because if I was going to launch on Kickstarter and have all of these people see it, it like had to be successful. So yeah.

Did you, were you like, we went really deep on what makes for a successful crowdfund.

Same.

Yeah.

Same.

Like literally pulled apart. Like we sat down with like all the best campaigns and pulled every video apart.

Yeah.

Like frame by frame, word by word. Like—

It's weird. I did the same thing. Yeah. I actually like transcribed the successful Kickstarter campaigns and this was before you had—

Yeah.

Before AI. You didn't have AI.

Yeah. I was handwriting these things.

Yep.

Totally.

But the good thing was, as you kind of went through that, you also were ingesting all of the patterns and like learning. So it was like the campaign pages, the order of everything, where are the call to actions? What are the different chapters in the video? And there are like serious commonalities between all of the campaigns that break $1 million. Um, I mean, mine did $300,000, which I was delighted with. Oh yeah, the goal was $30,000. We ended up hitting that on the first day.

That's pretty damn good.

Which was super exciting. And it was like most of what I needed to actually get the production order done.

That was— I was gonna ask like, how close was it to like what you actually needed to launch the campaign?

I needed like $60,000.

Oh, okay.

So I knew I was gonna get there 'cause on the first day I hit $30,000. So So yeah, no, Kickstarter is really fun. I feel like it's this microcosm for business. You have to figure so many things out. If you have a successful Kickstarter campaign, you, and you actually do it all right, you ship to the customers, like you do it on time, you really learn how to do a lot of what you need to know for the first couple of years of having a consumer business.

Yeah.

It's how to make the product, how to get it manufactured, how to ship it, how to do customer support, how to do marketing. Like you have to do all of those things right in order to have a successful Kickstarter.

Yeah.

The, the actual, it turns out the structure of a great Kickstarter cam— uh, video is, is like, uh, almost universally applicable in consumer brands.

Like you can—

Totally.

It, they will work all the time. You could even just use that structure and that script structure and to like apply it to anything.

We still do. Yeah. We still do. We've actually started it back up again where it was like, okay, we're gonna create Kickstarter videos for all of our new launches.

Mm-hmm.

And then we've started doing pre-orders, so it's really kind of a Kickstarter campaign. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we'll have these landing pages that have like something kind of like a Kickstarter video with some of the same chapters. This is why we did this. This is how it all came together. You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You, it, uh, even for the team, I think it helps really solidify like, why did we make this product?

Yeah.

Who is it for?

Totally.

You know, like, and, and like, yeah, it's just structure. It's great. The, so at what point did you figure out this thing was gonna be real? Like when did Honeylove become like, oh, we have a real company. This is gonna work.

Yeah. Um, there were a few places I think, I think hitting the goal on the first day of Kickstarter was actually one of them where it was like, that was surprising. Like I wasn't expecting to have that happen. Like I'm constantly flabbergasted by the achievement. Like I'm not, I think that there's a chance that we're gonna be successful, but the extent to which things take off sometimes is really surprising. So that was a moment, um, getting into Y Combinator was, a moment.

With Honeylove?

Yeah, with Honeylove.

Really?

Yeah.

That's very not Y Combinator.

This is a very common response that you have.

How'd you pull that off?

Well, it was 2018.

Okay.

We had traction. So most—

They like that.

Y Combinator companies don't have a lot of revenue. We had $300,000 in revenue, fairly good-sized market. And I think the potential to go into intimates, which is a much, much larger market, clear indications of some level of product market fit.

There's also innovation, right? You have an innovation story.

Totally. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, the whole we're a technology, that totally fits. Yeah, they just seem to have an allergic reaction to physical goods at Y Combinator.

They do, but they let a couple—

They're kind of adjusting now.

They let a couple in each year.

Okay.

And Honeylove's been in the top 50 YC companies a couple of years in a row.

Wow.

So it was a good decision on their part.

Yeah, yeah, good for them.

We had a woman in my interview, or it was just me, Um, Carolyn Levy, who's the lawyer for Y Combinator, interviewed me. She asked the right questions. I think she was able to see that this was a viable business.

Was it, uh, I mean, having like already had some success, was, I'm just thinking of like these early years, was there anything like personally, was this like a difficult journey for you guys? Like did it change your lifestyle having to start this company or was it sort of on the personal like relationship side pretty smooth? Just given both of you having like established careers and like having had some wins.

I mean, honestly, I feel like on the whole it's been, it's been pretty fun.

Mm-hmm.

Um, just like broadly, it's been surprisingly more successful than we would've thought. But you have to remember that we also launched in 2018. In 2020, you had the pandemic.

Yep.

Every single year there has been something that feels like a, I know, just, I'm so tired of being told it's like a 100-year event. I'm like, 5 years in a row, guys? Like, really?

Yeah. So there's definitely been a ton of headwinds. Um, and Igor and I have definitely had to navigate things as a couple, like, of course, um, working together. But it's really been an incredible opportunity, I think, to learn how to work together and to have that, just that exposure to some of these things. I feel like before we were working on Honeylove together, life was pretty easy. We would see each other at the end of each of our workdays, and it was like pretty chill. Now suddenly we have to make decisions together, and it wasn't always easy, but I think as a result of us like both trying and having our hearts in the right place, we've actually learned how to navigate these things, which has probably brought us closer in a weird way and given us a higher level of respect for each other than we would have just separately.

Yeah, yeah.

Somebody was bringing this up yesterday, you know, there's this idea like, I could never do this with my wife. And I just remember having this conversation with this same person just 2 minutes earlier about how they were, you know, like, you know, loving their kids and everything. And I was just like, well, you are raising children with your wife. And I think it's an analogy that's probably worth just kind of like, you know, wrapping your head around, you know, mom and dad, like mom's gonna have a certain style and dad's gonna have a certain style and sometimes they're gonna be identical, but sometimes they're gonna be a little different.

Mm-hmm.

And I Navigating those different styles and being consistent in raising your kid is kind of like an interesting proxy for what it, how it works when you're like, you know, husband and wife, you know, trying to get a company to take off. And one other aspect here that I think is really interesting is, so Betsy's career consisted at that time of traveling and working while traveling, but then coming home and not working while at home. I mean, like, you know, writing songs, but like not having a very fixed schedule.

Is this work?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But not having a fixed schedule, you know, like basically being able to like, you know, go and, you know, travel for 2 days and get in a car and drive somewhere.

Yeah.

My schedule couldn't have been opposite. Like, you know, I, at that time we ran a company with 100 people. I mean, I very much had to be here at that time doing those things. And oftentimes it also meant, I mean, just imagine, I'm sure everybody can empathize here. We're gonna go and see a movie or grab a dinner together and it's at a certain time and Of course, something blows up right before. Of course. Yeah. And I want to give Betsy full credit because she's so entrepreneurial and she gets it. But at the same time, there's still a little bit of this like, you know, oh man, I'm not living up to like what I really should be doing right now. I'm either tied to my phone or I'm like thinking about something. When you're doing this thing together, there's no such a thing as a missed dinner or showing up late for something or being absent-minded or whatever. Like you're in it together, you're navigating it together. So surely you increase the surface area of risk because you're now talking about hiring decisions or performance or what have you. But you're also reducing the surface area of risk because you're no longer sort of like, kind of like, gosh, this is going to sound horrible, almost selfish for your own career where you have to do trade-offs for the good of the family sometimes.

Yeah.

And so for us, I would say we are closer than ever, and obviously we navigated new lessons, but—

It's like an extension of life. Like work is an extension of life, and almost every spouse is somewhat intertwined with their other's work in some way. It's actually in some respects, I think maybe even just easier because you just know what each other is going through all the time.

Yeah.

You're just like in it. So it's just like your work is— everyone's work is their life in a lot of ways, right? Like your work really is your life because you've done it together. And I think it's a—

It's a lot of blend. Has that— has that sort of like the relationship dynamic, has that lent itself to how the company has expanded from like initial shapewear to other product categories? Like, does that stuff just come naturally to you because you spend so much time together? Do you just agree on things like that? Like, how did you decide go from where you started to where you are today?

It's all Betsy, you know, honestly, like I, I, I can't take any credit there.

Well, the playbook started, I think, before Igor joined, um, and he was always there on the sidelines. So I don't wanna say that all of these decisions were made 100% by me without your involvement. Um, I might run things by him, but yeah, I mean, I think it was just natural to do adjacent expansions. So we started out in shapewear and then we made a decision to do a top with a built-in wireless bra, but it still had a little bit of shaping in it. So it was like that logical adjacent jump that did really well. That actually got us through the pandemic because people stopped wearing shapewear.

Oh yeah.

But they loved the top with the built-in bra and it did— that did really well, thankfully. And then it was just natural, like, okay, the built-in wireless bra in this top is really good. We should just make the wireless bras. So I think I was just kind of logically expanding and really like looking for the next, the next big thing. Like, it's in my nature to always be looking for the next big thing. I think going from music into having my own business, it was like, okay, this is starting to feel kind of stagnant for me. I need something else. It's like Igor's doing all of these startups. It looks really fun. I'm really interested in it. I'm constantly probably meddling, so I should have my own company. And I think in the way that we run we run Honeylove product-wise, we don't like sit back on our laurels and like just like wait for the, the, the party to end. It's like constantly thinking about, okay, how else can we, you know, serve the customer? What's something that we can do better than anyone else?

And so product for you guys has been like customer pull first, as opposed to saying what markets and what categories do we think we should go into?

It's a little bit of customer pull and it's a little bit of like design team, I would say, where like you know, I'm, I'm kind of leading the design team. I'm thinking about where we should go based on my own intuition.

Okay.

And then we're running that by customers and asking them, hey, what do you think of this? Yeah. It's not always a request from a customer. Sometimes it's a hypothesis that we have, but we do run everything by the customers. We have like regular surveys of lots and lots of customers. We've started figuring out ways to survey people just outside of our immediate pool who we think we can expand into. So we don't do anything based purely on kind of gut and intuition, but a lot of things start there.

How many products have you had to— how many products never made it past the, we have an idea, here's design?

Oh my gosh.

How many don't get to, we're selling it?

I don't even know. A lot.

A lot?

Yeah.

What's the weirdest one? Or somebody's like, we're going to make this. I'm like, okay, let's try.

I'll let you think about it, but like the one, the one thing that while you're thinking, the one thing that I think is interesting is when we onboard people from other companies that are, you know, in adjacent spaces.

Yeah.

The hardest thing is always this idea of how much gets worked on and doesn't get released. And, uh, again, this goes back to the idea of newness. I think people are so trained in this career to be productive and productivity is measured in terms of how many, almost like as a programmer, the lines of code. I think that's an interesting proxy.

Yeah.

It's like this like useless metric that really doesn't in any shape or form reflect the quality of the product. Well, for a designer in our space, oftentimes they come and they get nervous if the thing that they designed in the first couple of weeks is not just quickly going through the approval process. And I don't know, I mean, I think I pride ourselves on— I think we pride ourselves on knowing that we really released roughly 30 styles. In the last 7 years and we've killed 3.

That launched.

That launched.

That launched. That's an incredible hit rate. So roughly a 90% hit rate in terms of these styles constantly being replanned is a result of having killed hundreds that never made it past the approval stage.

What typically makes a product not make it past? Is there some patterns just for people listening that want to get it, that are crazy enough to get into anything remotely close to apparel?

Um, yeah, I mean, one thing that'll happen is we'll survey it. So, um, we'll show things to customers and they don't like them as much as we thought they would have. So that could maybe ask us something.

So like actual style, like this is just not hitting the mark?

Sometimes, sometimes.

Yeah.

Um, at other times it's like, oh, we thought that this, that I, one example I could give kind of the weirdest one that, um, we didn't go forward with. And by the way, this is still something that I think we could do. But we were sort of like beating our heads against the wall with it and it just wasn't working. And that was a posture support bra and it just felt like—

That's actually really smart.

Totally. And they do exist. And we wear tested a lot of things that were on the market. It's like, but they don't, they don't work. And for us it's like, I don't want to sell something that we're saying is going to help you with your posture that isn't. So it was getting a little contraption-y. There were some really contraption-y things happening. In order to get it to work. And it just felt like this isn't a good trade-off. Like, you don't maybe need to have posture support in your bra. You can wear some kind of brace that isn't built into the bra. Um, again, I'm not going to say it's impossible, and I'm not going to say we're never going to do it, but it felt like we were just like beating our heads against the wall.

Have you seen the product, the posture things where they just like, they buzz you when you're slouching? So instead of trying to fix your posture, they're just reminding you that your posture I mean, honestly, that's probably— it's like zap effective, like a dog collar. Yeah, good posture.

No, but that works so much better than an actual—

I'll be getting one right now, probably.

Uh, so on the product thing a little more. Yeah, shapewear to bras.

Is that—

I went the— it went from shapewear to tops to bras. Yeah.

What is the, uh, what are your best-selling categories today, if you don't mind sharing?

Uh, bras by a landslide.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and why? Like, so people come back to work. Like, is shapewear just not as big of a category as you thought initially, or is bras just that much bigger?

Bras is a much bigger category. And then we were early in wire-free. So right now everyone is racing towards wire-free. We got into wire-free bras early and honestly, we got into shapewear early too. So yeah, we came out about a year before Skims. So kind of my like happy accident of hating shapewear on stage worked out really well for our shapewear timing.

Timing.

Yeah. And then the bras, it was, I think, similar. We got into the tops as an adjacency to shapewear, and then the tops had the bra built in. So we're like, oh, we should do these wireless bras also. And they, they were great. They were made differently. They still stand out in the market today. And yes, it's a huge market.

So can you— So can you— I got a question. This is random. Skims came into shapewear. Do you either of you have a strong opinion on competition being a good thing in consumer? So like, you know, big categories. Do you like having lots of competitors? Do you like someone like Kim coming in and saying like, let me show you what shapewear is? Is that a net positive?

I'll be honest, I was really scared.

Yeah.

When Skims first came in.

Kim freaking Kardashian.

Yeah. It was like she's got some reach. Like, what the hell? I mean, on one side I was like, this is kind of cool. I chose a category that like the most famous woman in the world then chose. Like, she had her pick of the litter and she picked something that I picked a year earlier. So I felt kind of good about that.

Yeah.

Um, but I was scared. I was like, yeah, they're gonna sweep in and just take over the whole business. Um, turns out it was totally positive for us. I think, uh, you know, the Kardashians have the ability to bring awareness to any category. In a way, they kind of made it cool, um, because people perceive her as cool. And I think it all just, uh, bled over. But then our products are so different. The way that they make shapewear and the way that we make shapewear is different enough that some people prefer ours and some people prefer theirs. Honestly, it's— I think it's been not positive.

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You know, it's, uh, we've, we have talked about this in many episodes ago on the pod. I don't understand the, the people in consumer who are like, I gotta stay in stealth mode. I can't let anybody know what I'm doing. Like they're worried about somebody competing with them. And I'm like, Okay, listen, kid, you realize that in consumer, all consumer goods, all categories, there is never, ever, ever been a single company who has a dominant market share in any consumer category. And the closest is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. And they invented freaking Santa Claus.

Didn't they also put cocaine in the first version of the product? Yes, man.

And that's the closest to like a A Silicon Valley-ish, I'm going to own 70% share, doesn't happen in consumer. And I'm just making this point because I am so tired of this, like, oh, but they're going to copy me and they're going to come at— I'm like, dude, you're not thinking big enough. If that's true, then you're not really doing a real— you're not building a real brand.

You're just—

Well, it's always going to happen anyway.

It's just— It's going to happen.

These are the laws of business. Even if you have a first mover advantage, that competitive advantage will become will get eroded. All competitive advantages get the only real competitive advantage is a monopoly, you know?

Yeah. So yeah, but in tech, like, and I asked that I'm bringing this up because like the whole Y Combinator thing, right? Like it is rare to be in consumer to get into YC, but then in YC, as some like I come out of tech, they teach a lot of. That doesn't apply to consumer.

No.

So I guess what are some of the things out of YC that really did, this was really valuable, this is stuff that we wanted to pull out of this program?

Make something people want.

Yep.

Talk to your customers.

Yeah, no shocker. That's not a bad idea.

I know, but a lot of people don't do it.

In consumer, we don't do it.

Yeah, in consumer, they don't do it. It's hard, but it absolutely works. Do things that don't scale. What else?

The, the, the number one thing that I just want to portray here is, you know, I went to an average school and, uh, I, I literally met the smartest guy out of like 5,000 students and then I hung out with him for the next 25 years. And that was like, that was my influence. That was like my benchmark. And that's who I measure myself against. And that's how we got better. But it took another So I was in YC in 2014 and I graduated in 2002. So it took me 12 years to be surrounded by, I think YC at the time had about 140 people in a batch.

Yeah. And that was a great generation of, of Y Combinators.

Slack support, Ryan Peterson.

Everybody knows Ryan. Yeah, we know Ryan. We love Ryan. He's been on the show.

He was our batchmate. Yeah. The mastermind yesterday when we had 30 people there, it's like a very, very tiny, like one day. Almost one-day version, I think is super valuable. I can't imagine you guys doing that.

Imagine doing that.

With an incredible group of people for an extended period of time.

And there's a leaderboard and, you know, it's very competitive. And like, you know, all the investors are going to invest in, you know, like the top maybe 10%, like all the best deals are going to be in the top 10%. And then, you know, other people get funded, but it increasingly starts looking like, you know, Second pick.

Can we go further into the customer thing? So you said like, talk to your customer.

Yeah.

And I do think this is a thing and somebody brought it up yesterday too, but like, this is a thing in consumer where I think we don't do this enough because the volume of consumers is really high.

Yeah.

You know, like you guys have millions of customers. We all have millions of actual customers, right? In quantity. And I think it's, it's easy to hear it in, in tech. Ryan probably had 12 customers that he had to talk to. Real easy to talk to 12 enterprise SaaS customers. Very hard to talk to a million people who buy bras from you. How do you guys do this now? Can you give us a, this is what we're, the current state of the company, here's how we listen to the customer?

There is a hack, I think.

Please.

And I actually learned it in Y Combinator. Brian Armstrong, Coinbase founder, spoke at one of the dinners and he's like, a lot of people don't do user testing because it's too hard. There's, you know, it's too much work. He's like, but if you just talk to 3 to 5 customers, chances are you're going to get 80 to 90% of what you would learn by talking to a much bigger group of customers. Um, so I think people should do that. If you talk to 3 to 5 people and they're all saying the same thing, it's true. Everyone else is going to say it too. If they're all saying different things, that's a different story.

You need to go— You don't need 1,000 of them.

Yeah. If they're all saying the same thing, like, because the main thing that's either wrong with that product, the customer's going to see it. Like right out of the gate. It's like there is kind of like some universal truths that I think you can get by talking to just a couple of people. So I think people shouldn't shy away from talking to small numbers of people as well.

I love this a lot. Uh, one of the things we did at Pela, like this is 6, 7, probably 6 years ago, um, and this was, uh, in the pandemic, right? Was we started, we had this thing where we're like, can we send a personal thank you video to every customer that buys from us? At the time it was like 400 or 500 a day. It sounded like a lot, but there's 30 people in the company. I'm like, okay, we did the math. Like, how many videos would each of us have to record to send out all the videos? And after a week, my, uh, my software guy, my, my developer was like, listen, I did the math. And if we just did like these 200 names, first names, we get 80% to 90% of our customer list. So then we all sat down and I recorded like 5, hey Jen, thanks for your order, like 5 versions of that video. And he built this little tool that customers would roll in and it would just pick their first video name. And listen, the lesson in all of this and the reason I bring it up is the law of averages is true in consumer.

Yeah.

Right? Most of us are actually not that different. There's a reason why you get a million people buy from the same brand. It's like, well, it's not like you made a million ads, although maybe today we probably have to, but It is true. You can talk to 5, talk to 10, be directionally correct, and then move. I think that's really great advice.

Yeah. We do still talk to bigger groups of customers too. We send out a ton of surveys, and sometimes you do need more for statistical significance for maybe choosing between designs or something like that. If it's close, it's like you have to keep going if they're tied. But yeah, most of the time you can get what you need with a small group. They'll call it out. They'll call out the main thing that really matters.

So as go from like YC, building and scaling the company, can you guys walk us through like how marketing has changed in the company in that time? Maybe channel mix, how you think about where to go now to find these customers that you're wanting to sell to?

I'll let you take this one.

I'll tell you, I remember a car ride with Betsy early, early on, and I'm embarrassed to have said this because it just reminds me of how incorrect I was. You know, we started with a very simple company. It was one channel. It was all very interconnected. You know, the Shopify side was basically like templates and, you know, like it was very, very simple. And I remember Betsy asking me like, what would happen if Meta just wasn't working anymore? And I remember telling her like, game's over, you know, like, you know, we all go into something else. I mean, like, I remember we don't think much about it. That was just like— Don't even think about it. Don't even go there. Like there are questions that we're not going to ask ourselves. And, you know, it still will be pretty painful, but I think that for a company, and let's look at some companies that we admire like Nike or, you know, what would happen to Nike if Meta wasn't there? So like you clearly can build a business without Meta. And, you know, this is not to say that you really should because Meta is just absolutely phenomenal. I really think it's underappreciated as a company for how many businesses have basically like, you know, become a thing that wouldn't have otherwise. But look, I mean, you know, it's possible and we try very hard every day not to have neither a key man risk nor a key channel risk nor a key product risk. What does our mix look like today? 40, 45% Meta. You're going to look at Google and YouTube together contributing to about 20%. TV, linear and CTV, about 15%. And those are kind of like, you know, the main channels. I mean, like we've had those channels for a long time and then the rest, you're gonna be looking at app login and you're gonna be looking at podcasting, Pinterest, you know, all those end up, you know, having 2.5% to 5% or so and then up to 100%.

Yeah, which is meaningful at scale, right? Like if you can put 5% of spend into something at your scale, that's still a lot of dollars. Like, so I think finding those channels ends up being pretty important.

So what would happen if Meta wasn't there anymore? I mean, you know, I think you would just have to fill a 40% hole, 45% hole down to like, you know, it'd be hard. It'd be hard. And I think the company will be much smaller. The company will be much, much, much smaller. But I think that's where this idea for brand marketing is really important. And how has marketing changed from early days to today? Well, early days it was all just conversion optimized campaigns and maybe like one or two of them and that's it. I mean, our Meta account alone is such a mess of full funnel from, you know, conversion optimized to, you know, view contents to everything and everything else, of course, as well. TV, driving, so much interest that then has to be scooped up on Amazon. Okay, now you have 2 shops, not to mention, don't get me started on TikTok shop. So like, you know, that's right. That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

You ever hear the saying like you You either die a hero, you live long enough to become the villain. The marketing equivalent to that is everybody starts off and either dies in purchase conversion optimization or eventually figures out that everything is just quality impressions, that we're going to get a lot of them. And that's ultimately where big brands come from. So you just got to, at some point, you got to get there.

That's right.

If you were to say over the last, okay, 5, 6 years, let's just focus on 2020 forward. Is there a year that you would go back to marketing again and give yourself a piece of advice in that year to either do something or don't do something? And what is that piece of advice?

Should I take it?

Yeah, you can take it.

We were so late to TikTok shops. We were so late to TikTok shops. We're always too late to TikTok shops.

And Amazon, actually.

I mean, we know some people who were early and I just, my head That's off. Look, the thesis, and you can't beat yourself too much about it. I mean, there was a thesis, but like there's a lesson learned though too. The thesis was that this is going to be a channel optimized for lower AOV and we're going to go after the channels that are optimized for higher AOV. I think where the channel turned out to be surprisingly important is first of all, the thesis, the original thesis was not correct. Like, so that out of the way, plenty of companies with an AOV well over 100 doing exceptionally well.

Yeah.

So like that thesis straight out of the door. should have been tested and not putting in the effort to test an important channel. That was a lesson learned right there. But the strategic importance of the channel for every other channel was also completely not understood.

Yeah.

And so for the first couple of years, I mean, listen, this is our first podcast. And the reason why it's happening today is because of this realization. These lessons, you can't just source them from internal 4 walls as hard as you think. And as much as you want to be thoughtful and working hard and like testing and learning and testing and learning. It takes a village. And I think Betsy and I just really had this, a little bit of this like YC mentality. YC is phenomenal and helped us like 99 out of 100 times. The one time where perhaps it didn't help us as much is this idea that they tell you don't go to conferences and don't like, you know, do it just like nose to the grindstone. It worked phenomenally well up until we missed TikTok Shop. And I think that would've been obvious sooner from talking to more people. Like we talked to our customers, but we didn't talk to enough founders. And that was a lesson learned. And we love to share and we discovered more recently as we started like, you know, talking to them and sharing that it's a really fun exercise.

I don't remember when I learned this, but it turns out that other people's mistakes are free for you.

Yeah. Well, this is actually where—

You know, go find them.

This is actually where this podcast comes from.

Right?

Yeah.

The Big Dog Chat was this incredible resource in 2021, 2022, 2023 amongst 12 big brands sharing everything. And it's still to this day, there is a few of these chats that we are in.

They're wildly valuable.

They're incredibly valuable. And people have questions about things like, is this really working? What are we doing here? And there's been just like a year and a half worth of talk about TikTok Shop and just trying to like, People are still trying to figure it out. And, you know, is it an AOV issue or is it just a type of product issue? Like, what really is the issue? You know, I would've thought you guys are perfect for TikTok Shop. And it's not because people spend $100, but because it's like, this is something that I'm gonna buy and buy quickly, right? It's— what is the consideration period for your average customer? I think that's like the question.

That's great.

Yeah. For TikTok Shops. And I think it's a question You know, and Igor, I have the data for that if you want me to take that one.

You can back it up with data. Go for it.

So as with every business, it's a curve. Yeah, sure. 30 days is so where the maximum is.

But what's the percentage that convert in 30 days from first touch?

I mean, that percentage I would have to think through now.

Yeah.

But we optimize for a 30-day conversion.

Yeah, we do too. But it's like, in, I'll give you like in Pela, my average order value is $65. So it's not very expensive, but it's still the average time from first touch to purchase. The average is 68 days.

Interesting.

And that is at $65. Now, the majority of my customers from a first touch will buy, the majority being like 55, 60% will buy in the first 30 days. But that curve turns out there's a lot of them that take like 2, 3 months.

The one thing that we definitely noticed is, uh, and, and a wonderful tool to test this is if you're using Northbeam, you can play with the lookback windows.

Yep. And you can see—

so useful— and you can see how your ROAS changes if you look at—

That's how we know that is Northbeam.

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of other people also ask the question in their post-purchase surveys. So not only how did you hear about us, but how long ago did you hear about us?

Yep.

Uh, first, but Northbeam is abnormal too. If you look how's your ROAS looking like if you expand the window to 30 days, 60 days, 180 days, whatever. And we definitely found that there are different consideration windows for Shapewear versus Bras. Shapewear has a much longer consideration window. And so if you're spending on 1-day click clicks only, your effective ROAS for Shapewear can be lower to achieve the same profitability as a higher ROAS threshold for Bras because it actually backseat to it over a period of time.

Yeah. I'm, listen, I'm happy you brought up the TikTok Shops thing too, because I actually think I'm like on record, like totally trashing the channel at some point in the last 2 years. Like I used to just think it was like discount central. Like this is the cesspool of commerce. I actually may have called it that. Uh, just thinking like the only people on TikTok Shops are like quality customers because TikTok was basically giving them 80% off. The Chinese government was funding it. And I'm like, I don't want to be there as a brand. Dude, we talked about this like 2 years ago. Like, why would any of us go here? And then it turns out everybody who figured it out was way smarter than us.

You know what was interesting about that analogy too is the, the savviest and heaviest user of TikTok in our company is our C-suite general counsel.

No way.

And I think she has a story about like, you know, using it together with her kids and whatever. But like, you know, the idea is that She comes to us and she's like, oh, I saw that new ad. I'm like, we just launched it last night. She's like, oh, I know, I love this. I've been singing it all day.

You're also learning a lot about her.

That's great.

Has there been a stage of growth that was more difficult than the rest?

That's an interesting question. You know, I'll tell you, I'll give you this. Difficult as in like complex versus difficult as in like results. So right now it's very complex. We have definitely come to a point where doing what we used to do in the first couple of years is no longer there. We are by far like, you know, already like in all the channels and full funnel marketing and really having to measure it, you know, in every single way from MMM to, you know, geo lift tests to everything else. So I would say that that actually has really been a learning curve and it's one where we originally started with fewer, better channels, really just focused on a few and It took us a little bit of time to like really start being the adopters of JioLift and incrementality testing because we just didn't have an Amazon store until a year ago and we didn't have so many other things until recently. So in terms of like the explosion of complexity, that was the steepest learning curve that we have navigated over the last 18 months. Amazon definitely complicated it because it grew very fast. It's about 20% of our revenue.

Oh, wow.

And it's run by a small team and we didn't really think about investing in it heavily. And we've been consistently out of stock from the day that we started. And obviously, you know what happens in that case.

Yeah, which is never great for Amazon.

Yeah.

And so like all the lessons learned from running out of stock on Amazon, we used to think of it as like, that's the last channel that gets attention because we have wholesale, we're in Dillard's and Walmart and, you know, in like all the big guys, Nordstrom and so forth. So you don't want to piss off Nordstrom. You really want to make sure that they get their, you know, slice of the inventory. But we're learning that you really don't want to mess with Amazon now though. You work so hard, you have 3 months of straight growth.

Did this happen to you this year? Because I think it's been like especially punishing in this year.

It happened to us in Q4. We launched in July, way exceeded our expectations, and then by October we were out. And we were then like quickly rushing to be back in stock. Out of inventory. Out of inventory, yeah. And we were quickly rushing to be back in stock for November and you could not find us on Amazon to save your life. I mean, like, he took an act of God.

It's like so many people with PTSD listening to this right now.

Look at him.

He's like, please. Arm hair standing up.

I just want to kill myself right now.

So suddenly, you know, we have, we have like, you know, our, you know, person who is running our wholesale asking for inventory. We're like, oh, that's important. Listen to that. And in the past, the person from Amazon asking for, oh, and now like when they ask, they get what they Very cool. So those are some of the lessons. Difficulty though, I mean, really 2020 was just like this, like, you know, staring into abyss and asking yourself, we were making $20,000, $30,000 something a day prior to March 17th, and then 2020, and then from one day to another, you know, like one or two or three Hero Shaper products went from like making good amount of money to, I think we would make like $100 a day.

Wow.

You know, like just like it really felt like something had disconnected.

It's crazy how COVID did that. It was like some things were just like this.

Yeah.

And then everything else was—

And just for context, it's shapewear. It's the garments you buy to go out and be active in some sort of social activities. And that was definitely like, gee, like, how's this gonna look? You know, in, in, and, and, you know, like the thinking is like, oh, well it's 2 weeks, you know, like, or it's 2 months or whatever.

Yeah.

Thank God for Betsy having started working on the tank a year earlier. I mean, this is just one of those things that you just can't—

So how long was it scary for?

When did you launch the tank?

Oh my God, I don't know if I remember exactly.

From memory.

Was it like October or something?

From memory.

Wow.

Oh man, you were in months of horror.

I think it was July and then the Brock came out in like October.

Is that right? I'm really bad with dates. Still.

That's scary, man.

But we were trying to decide if we should launch it because we were sitting at our board, our board is very small, and just saying, do we want to launch this amazing product into this messed up time? And then it actually ended up being the perfect time to launch it because it was a top that you didn't have to wear a bra with. And everyone was just trying to be comfortable on their Zoom calls. So like loungewear took off during that time. People who had a loungewear collection were just like sitting pretty. And yeah, that top saved us.

We talked to the guys from Shinesty earlier and their moment was COVID too because they could finally market to people. You could just work from home in your underwear. And then we had about, I think, a 2-week period with Pela when COVID hit where our sales dropped. I think I've said this before, like 40 to 60% or something, like in a day, because in phone case, it's very tied to movement of humans around the world. So it's like going to work, going to travel, going out with your friends, like doing something. And all of a sudden nobody was doing that. Things fell off. And then we figured out the wear one, wash one thing was like people who worked in healthcare, you were going to work and you wanted a different case for sanitary reasons, that then ripped us.

Okay.

And so COVID was this strange moment in time with how it shifted consumer preference. Then ultimately, if you actually look at things, I'm sure you've looked at the data, it was like we saw this weird spike up in e-com and it's basically normalized back down to exactly where it would've been over those 5 years anyway. It's like we all thought it was like, this is the time. Retail's dead, e-commerce is going to be a thing. Nah, we've just renormalized back to baseline.

It really did transform our space, but we had a very similar problem inflection point in that our largest channel at the time was Costco. And Costco basically shut down.

Yeah.

The roadshow. And, um, I was not a full-time employee yet.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but I, I was an advisor to the founder.

Mm-hmm.

One of the founders. And it was a very, it was a, it was a very scary moment And that the decision that you had to make whether to hold it or let it rip, yeah, was a— was such a key decision. They had the same decision to make and they made the right decision as well. Um, but yeah, just can you just think about it if you would make the wrong decision?

Like, oh yeah, there's no company.

It's wild, dude.

If you guys hadn't actually launched DTC, like, dot-com, yeah, like Costco Roadshow shut down, I guess I should sell some pans on the internet.

Yeah, well, we wouldn't be—

we were there already, but the The spend wasn't—

no.

Yeah, you weren't average. It wasn't a big channel.

You know, we guessed the spend because there was a lot of inventory and no channel. At HexClad, AppLovin has been our highest spending new channel since the start of last year, mid-7 figures and growing. It almost wasn't. My team was skeptical, so I stepped in to push them. First, I had them pull data on the overlap between Meta and AppLovin customers to find out if the platform was really just retargeting. Then we ran multiple holdout tests. The results? 90% new customers, 53% higher ROAS, 36% higher new customer ROAS, 27% lower new customer CAC. The numbers were just bang on. If you create an AppLovin account and launch on day 1, you're going to get $1,000 in free ad credit, plus another $5,000 when you spend $5,000. Audio on vertical videos, unskippable ad units, new reach for new customers. Check it out today. Go to applovin.com/9operators. You're going to get our guide to new channels, recordings of our live expansion events with us and 25 of our friends. applovin.com/9operators. Back to the show. Guess the spend, and it really worked.

Well, the problem at the time was that you just didn't know how long it was going to take. So I think the decision that Betsy was grappling with was it would be so much nicer if you launched it when the optimism and just the overall sentiment was a little better. And we just didn't realize that people were just making so much money at that time.

Let me add one more thing to this. So this is an adage, this is one of my mantras. You just never wait.

That's right.

You just don't wait.

That's right.

Everyone wants to wait for the perfect time to do something.

Nope.

You know, there's just like, very rarely is waiting the best decision.

Totally.

You just go.

Well, one of my favorite things from Y Combinator, one of our partners was Eric from Pebble, and he's like, if the launch doesn't go well, just launch again. And I kind of like that because it's like, it didn't go well, a lot of people probably didn't hear about it. You can go back to the drawing board, figure out your messaging, figure out your strategy, and then just launch.

That's internet wisdom. Aaron's always telling us, he's like, nobody remembers what you say on the internet. So he's like, just say whatever you want. They forgot the last time anyway. So on the YC thing, Did that also shape how you lead the company and how you hire and think about— so what's top of mind for me is YC is founder-led, founder mode. It's the Brian Cheskys, you got to keep in the weeds. Do you operate that way? Do you— let's just go there.

Yeah. I mean, I'll do it and then you can kind of give your version. I think it's all about stage of business. So it depends on where you're at, and you have to know when you can kind of get out of the weeds and when you need to stay in the weeds or be there alongside your leaders kind of contributing. For me, I think I'm at this middle point where in the beginning I was in everything, doing everything, working alongside everyone in all of the different functions. Now we have different people, we have more people. I think it's more of working alongside them. And sometimes, sometimes I'm still doing quite IC-looking work, but a lot less. And there's a lot more of just like working alongside them, um, and trying to get the most out of the people that we have. It's the only thing that you really can do at a certain point because we just can't stretch ourselves that thin. Like, and I have to say no to a lot of things now in the spirit of helping the greater good. Um, but curious how you would say.

I, I think it's just worth contextualizing though. Um, I think not being founder-led would mean that you're not in design room when the designs are happening. And so you're definitely in the design room and within the founder-led versus not founder-led, I would definitely classify you as founder-led. The only thing is that you're not the only person doing it now. And in fact, as you like look at the group of people doing it, you're trying to like let other people do more, but it's you're in the middle of it.

And we have more capable people now who I feel like I can step back more. There's more knowledge there, but I do think a time will come when I'm not not quite as in the weeds as I am now. It's really just a matter of sequencing and what your business needs and having an instinct for what your business needs. If it's fine to actually drift off into the bushes a little bit more, we're just not there yet. Like, we're still so actively like launching these new initiatives and like, I want to be there. Like, I not only want to be there because it's fun, but I think I'm actually needed.

Can I ask you like a follow-up on this product and in the design room? How far out are you looking with product? Like, do you kind of look out like a decade and just say like, this is the trend line?

Mm-hmm. No, I think I look more out like 3 to 5 years. Okay. I would say our product lifecycles are quite long for like a band and cup bra where we're starting a new pattern that can be 2 years. And that's really just like how long it takes. Like even with the best people, the best factories, that's how long it takes. it's complex. But yeah, with the grander vision of where I want to see us get to, that's really in the 3 to 5 years, I would say.

We can do a lot in that time. I ask because I spent a day with Chip Wilson once. He's the founder of Lulu. And it was like one of the things, it's the weirdest thing he was telling us about his long-term prediction of, I think at the time, technical apparel. He was like, I think at some point we're all just going to wear the exact same thing every day. way, like Star Trek style. And I remember thinking, I'm like, that's very bold. Also just shows you he's just way, way out in the future on where does he think things are going? And his world was technical apparel. But I like to ask every founder that. I'm like, how far out can you see where your category is going based on current product trends? Or are they just changing too damn much?

You have to think about pendulums swinging too. Because in the case of him talking about uniforms, I think there are times when the pendulum swings towards Simple wardrobe.

Totally.

But then people get bored and they actually want to express themselves and they want to like go vintage. So this pendulum is swinging. So it's kind of hard to look too far out in the future. That's such a great way to do it. But yeah, you can have your own instinct about what the world needs. For me, I often think about what would we be great at and where does that overlap with what the world needs?

Okay. So we like to finish these things with this segment called the Titan 10. Usually it takes 10 minutes, but we're gonna, sometimes it's like we just rip through it. Um, I'm gonna ask you the questions. I want you to answer them as like gut feel as possible.

Okay?

Okay.

Let's do it.

All right.

First one, I drop you both on a desert island. I'm gonna give you a piece of paper. On the piece of paper is 3 numbers. That's the only thing you know to run your business is just those 3 numbers. What are the numbers?

Um, I'll go first. Uh, Repurchase rate. What was the second one? Return rate and review sentiment.

Oh, how do you measure— what's review? Oh, like satisfaction scores?

Yeah, it's like the reviews that people leave us. I can describe that one first. That really is a proxy, I think, for word of mouth, that level of satisfaction where they write something down and that's where we get free marketing. Repurchase rate is the scorecard for how much they really liked the product and did we create a product that can be repurchased, which is actually part of the objective of all of this, is choosing subcategories that can be repurchased. That's something I think about now more that I've been doing this. And then return rate, that's super actionable for us. If the return rate is high in a certain size range, we can easily fix that. We have very granular feedback loops and they tell us exactly why, so we can go back in and fix it. So these are like the most actionable. valuable ones for me.

Very product-focused.

You have different 3 numbers? Yeah, yeah, we definitely focus on different parts of the business. So for me, I'll be Nordbeam all day, every day. So, you know, you guys know my answer. One-day click, ROAS, clicks only, attribution. Sorry, I'm boring everybody. The 2 that I really think where everybody else might be like, you know, going in different directions, contribution on an order level is really important to us, really making sure that between all these different countries and all these different stores that we have a really good grasp of that. And that the last one has to be, I mean, it's always inventory, right? At the end of the day, if you have too much of something, you want to shift more of your traffic and attention to those garments. You don't have enough of something, you want to preserve it for like, you know, the key moments. So, you know, weeks of inventory cash, you know, looking at 30 roughly as a benchmark is probably a pretty good idea and making sure that that's always healthy.

Very cool. I love it. Inventory-heavy businesses with long lead times. That's a good answer. You also get to take a book, a resource, something, entertainment. It just can't be about business.

What is it? I would take Autobiography of a Yogi.

Cool.

Yeah. Back when I was in my 20s, I started doing yoga and I was reading the yogic texts from India, and I just really love the way that it makes you think about the big picture. And I think a lot of this stuff can be reread, and every time that you Read it, you get something different. So if I only get to take one thing, I'm probably going to be rereading it. I want something that's got some depth to it.

Cool.

What would you bring?

So I had a chance to meet Naval Ravikant.

Yeah.

And he didn't write a book, but somebody else.

Yeah.

Almanack. That's right. Yeah. And what's interesting about it is like it's it's it's two parts. One part is business. So we said we're not going to read those pages.

No.

But there's a philosophical part.

I'm like cut them out.

That's right.

So imagine I get to only carry the second half of the book. It's literally first part is business. Second part is philosophy.

It's more a philosophy book, like it really is.

Yeah. And it's just, I mean, it just like, you know, really gets under your skin. It talks about health and family and happiness. And obviously, if he left it at that level, everyone's like, oh, okay, whatever, like same things, right? But the way he breaks it down, I deeply recommend everybody reads that. And for me, it's been my North Star for many years.

So you wouldn't bring her music to listen to?

That will be the close second. You know, uh, yeah, I'm not gonna—

Now you really get shot on here today.

I definitely, I definitely love listening to it when she was traveling a lot. It was like, you know, my—

I know. I come back and I see it was like the last thing listened to on Spotify. I'm like, oh.

Um, okay. Give me a contrarian belief about business. Hmm.

You want me to go first?

Yeah, you can go first.

Um, one really strange thing that we do is we believe that that screening calls are very important. Oftentimes the way it works is, you know, there is this like, I need a hire.

Mm-hmm.

And then I'm gonna brief a recruiter. They're gonna come back with like 10 or 15, maybe like, you know, sample profiles. We're gonna calibrate, then off you go and come back with people I need to pay attention to. And I'm sure there are amazing recruiters out there, but the one thing that they teach at YC is that, you know, do things that don't scale. And when it comes to recruiting, that's one of them.

Mm-hmm.

You, if you're gonna go and stretch, if you're gonna go and get the person that you only have a 5% chance of getting into your company, then that screening call is gonna be the last time you see them most of the time. And so if they, you know, if you're so lucky to get them on a call, anything other than like your 100% best day of your life, Yep. is just not gonna be enough. And so we, we are just fanatical about people. An, an absolutely unhealthy amount of my time is spent in recruiting and spending time in the weeds of recruiting. And I actually think it's a really good investment of our time.

Love it. Very cool. Do you have a different answer or do you want to go with his?

We already talked about the user testing thing. Yeah. That was actually—

That's a, I thought that was a really good one.

Yeah. Yeah.

You don't have to talk to a lot of people just to get a, to get directionally correct on that.

Exactly. Talk to a few people. If they all say the same thing, you know, you can probably trust that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like that a lot. Uh, okay, so then on the leadership, and people think, what's the most important word in leadership?

Let's go with you starting on these.

Um, I think, I think with leadership, um, I'm gonna have to think about this first.

Actually, I can go. Um, so I think it's commitment. Like, leadership, business, all of it is very difficult. There's lots of highs and lows. I think part of what has made us successful is that we've been committed and we've stuck with it. We've been okay with being very uncomfortable at certain times. So really just kind of doing the thing that you set out to do. For us, it's the way that we serve our customers and just being committed to that and being willing to endure a certain amount of pain in order to get there in the end.

Cool.

Yeah.

Honestly, it's inspiration now that I think about it.

Yeah.

Um, you know, at the end of the day, and I think that's really like why founder-led companies have just like a little bit of an advantage. you are basically going to have to see just a step further than a lot of other people see. And, you know, it's easy to lead when it's easy, right?

Yeah.

Like, you know, everybody can lead in the easiest days. That's not where the measurement comes from. The measurement is like on the darkest day, what's the truth and why are we gonna be successful? And why is it still important to pay attention to this company? Not only pay attention, but to be, for this company to be like your one company that that, you know, 100 other people are still going to find to be the most important thing in their lives. And I think it's really hard to get that from anyone else other than the founder who actually really saw the vision for the very first time and has the ability to continue to see it.

Yeah, I love that. So then what's the most important word in business?

Should I go?

Yeah, sure.

I think this is where like the discipline comes in. Like you as a founder, I think, and by the way, we should mention So Betsy was very generous and she basically gave me the title of a co-CEO and a co-founder. I take that very seriously. She always breaks the tie and it's her child and she sees further than I do.

She's still the tiebreaker. I love that.

Definitely, definitely. For the reasons that you mentioned before.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it makes sense.

I honestly think she feels it in her gut and I only see it in numbers, but this is where the inspiration from Betsy is really important when it really comes down to it. But I think as a founder, you have to do both things. You have to, on one hand, be inspirational and really give people like, you know, the extra motivation. On the other hand, you really have to be disciplined. And so what we have found is sticking to our values and principles is exceptionally, exceptionally important and to never deviate from them. So our 5 values are, I better remember them now, but best-in-class products. Fanatical about people. rapid iteration, truth in data, and lift each other up. And so each one of them give you a sense of like how we operate and what's important to us. And for example, fanatical about people, we'll never not pay attention to recruiting as more important than whatever we else could be doing with our time.

Yeah.

Or like, you know, first best-in-class products. If you could do 20 products that are 90% or 2 that are 100%, And it's not even a conversation.

Right.

And in business, you'll get a lot of people disagree with you every single day. And I think it's really important to be able to point to something that you shook hands on as a contract. This is before anyone joins the company, they see our values. We walk them through them. And every value has a counter value and why you should consider realizing that by sticking with this, you're going to miss out on all the other parts of the universe. The best-in-class counter value is that you are not gonna be as productive in with moving things through the funnel.

Sure.

Yeah.

And that might feel really frustrating. So if you're gonna easily get frustrated by just not getting a high hit rate, you shouldn't join Honeylove. And so I think it's very important that everybody who joins, we shake hands, we agree with each other, this is what we are doing. And then it just, the amount of disagreement that you can avoid by always sticking to those principles is phenomenal. Mm-hmm.

Do you have a different word then? Most important word in business?

I was thinking about it. I think it's product. Just like, yeah, that's what feels true for me. It's like we nail the product, everything else is so much easier.

It makes everything else easier.

Yeah.

Yep.

Okay, let's have some fun. Best meal of the day and why?

For me, it's breakfast because I have the most energy in the morning. Psychologically, I'm more optimistic in the morning. I'm usually excited about the day. Anything's possible. Also, I don't have as much time and energy to cook anymore, so dinner is often takeout and we're often tired at dinnertime. In the morning, I actually make barista, these really creative matcha drinks. I make mushroom coffees and it's kind of a fun bonding time just with Igor, me, the dog sitting out on the balcony. It's a few minutes of peace in the day.

Do you agree? 100%.

Yeah.

I love it. The day that she asked, what do you think of this? Was a day that life just got so much exponentially better. She just came up with this new thing and started experimenting. And just like for years and years now, we're like trying always a slightly changed little recipe. And cool, I'm like the first tester. And for me, it's just like an amazing moment every day.

Back to business, what do you think the most overrated growth tactic is right now in consumer?

I might regret saying this. It might be like, you know, when people talk trash about TikTok a few years ago.

I'm trying to go for max regrets here. Yeah.

So yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't think this is true for everyone, but I've seen a lot of intimates companies, a lot of intimate companies, intimates companies fail with brick-and-mortar retail.

Oh, so like owned retail?

Yeah. So I think people get really excited about it, especially consumer companies where it's fun to Put your product out in the world, get to express yourself through this like physical medium. But it feels like it fails a lot. And to me, I still want to do it at some point, but I think it's about sequencing and having a really clear plan. Maybe even focus grouping and testing out, you know, kind of mini versions just to get it right. Because the failure just feels like a bummer, like to open stores and have them close. Yeah.

Do you have a different answer? Overrated growth tactic?

Yeah, yeah. I would say that we are very much doubling down on AI and like an exponential amount of our time these days is spent on like both investing and benefiting from AI. One thing that we're not doing with AI is trying to focus on the SEO aspect of it.

Oh yeah, why?

Well, I mean, it's hard for me to tell you how many times it comes up in conversations, which is you should be using that vendor because you're going to surface better and higher in these types of prompts and whatnot. And look, again, I might come to regret it. And it's ironic because I started my career by getting a company to rank really well in Google. And so you should imagine that I would love to rank high for prompts on ChatGPT and whatever. And apparently people are putting a tremendous amount of effort into it these days. I just come from the school that you do have limited cycles to focus on. And we just made a decision to not focus on that right now.

Cool.

I also think you're working against the entire point of the machines.

That's right.

They're getting better at sorting this crap out. So like, it isn't SEO. It's not a perfect algorithm. It's deterministic. Like, it's like complete opposite of it. So yeah, totally with you.

Love it.

Uh, okay then underrated tactic. What is the most underrated thing in consumer right now?

Just talking to your customers.

Yeah.

They're gonna tell you exactly what they want. Um, I think people don't do it enough.

Yeah. So yeah, agreed.

Yeah.

I think there's always more money to be made in retention. There's always, always, always, no matter what your retention rate is, no matter what you're making there, A tactic that we recently discovered by pure coincidence. We asked every retention agency to just tell us about themselves and they said, no, we'll just do an audit for you. And we're like, oh. And so we asked 3 more and they all did an audit and we hired one that was best. But there is like, I would imagine that any agency that's really like interested in your business—

Yeah.

Can give you a free audit. And if there's one thing you want to do today, Go on Klaviyo, find the list of highest rated Klaviyo partners, go with whoever seems really reasonable or smart or what have you. They'll give you an audit in a week and you'll probably learn a lot and it will be a tremendous use of your time.

Yeah, it's usually free money.

And to be clear, only do that if you're really genuinely thinking about working with one and they did so clearly, but you can have a full-time retention team that's working really hard and working really well. And you'll still find ways for an agency to plug in and to like deliver on extra cycles that you just didn't have the cycles for.

Very cool. Betsy, Igor, thank you for coming.

That's the pod.

Thanks so much for having us.

Such a pleasure. Yeah, that was great.