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[email protected]. And tell us how we can help you. I will never forget the image of my mom sitting there. I walk into this kind of dark conference room and she's sitting at the table with like hundreds of nuts that she's bitten in half and just pale look on her face. And she just said, "There's nothing we can do." They're rancid. Welcome to How I Built This. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Ross and on the show today, how a mother and daughter joined forces to make a new kind of chocolate almond and grew skinny dipped into a multi-million dollar brand. There's something crazy about American snack foods compared to similar products in Europe. There is more sugar in ours. Part of that is regulatory. EU law has different rules. But another part is what's known in the snack food industry as the sweetness profile. Basically, how sweet people like things to taste. And when it comes to American taste buds, our sweetness profile is apparently really high. Or at least, that's what snack food brands have thought for decades. But it turns out we may not actually like things so sweet. And it helps explain the recent boom in products that are still sweet but with a far lower amount of sugar. Products like Oli Pop and Smart Sweets and Simple Mills Cookies. This was the trend that Val and Breezy Griffith saw back in 2013 when they came up with their idea for chocolate covered almond snacks. That was a long time local TV producer in Seattle. Her daughter Breezy was a few years out of college and trying her hand at different business ideas. Both of them loved chocolate covered almonds but they realized that in most cases, you get like twice as much chocolate than almond. And they wondered, could you put an ultra thin layer of chocolate on the almond? Enough to make it taste good but with a fraction of the sugar. And turning that idea into a real product, one that could be made consistently, sold at scale, and survive in one of the most competitive categories in retail, that turned out to be much harder than it sounded. Along the way, they had to figure out manufacturing, distribution, branding, and eventually had to make a fast growing business actually work financially. Like so many previous guests we've had on the show, the founders here were so focused on making a quality product and on growing the company that they lost sight of the most basic goal of a business, making money. And for a while, the brand was in a perilous financial position, which we'll get to. But before all of that, and before Breezy and her mom teamed up to start skinny dipped, Breezy was living in Miami where she was trying to come up with different business ideas. I shared a one room apartment with four other girls that didn't have a kitchen. We slept on beach towels, I'll forever remember that. So I just, I decided, and this was probably my first foray into food. I decided I was going to start making these organic sorbays and selling them at the farmers market. I found a commercial kitchen that would only rent to me between the hours of like 11 p.m. and four a.m. in a pretty sketchy part of town. I would go there with my two pint ice cream maker and I would make these just pure organic sorbays. And then I would pack them up, put them on dry ice and take them to the farmers market and sell them all the next day. Like frozen in cups or like scoop, scoop, yes. Frozen individually frozen in cups. And did you, I mean, had that been a thing that you did like cooking and baking and like was that something you were interested in? I didn't realize that was something I was interested in but my mom was this incredible self-taught cook. Everyone always wants to come to dinner at our house. They always have my entire life. And so I had learned by osmosis without even realizing it. But I knew zero, absolutely zero about finance any of that. I mean, I guarantee you I was just, I was doing all of this work and losing money. So what, I mean, what happened to that idea? Did you, at some point did you just sort of, you know, be the kind of just naturally fizz allowed? Yeah, I mean, it just wasn't sustainable. So I was, you know, going making these teeny tiny batches of ice cream through the night, you know, trying to stuff it all into my freezer. They said, definitely losing money. I had, there was no thought into, you know, how would you scale this or make more. So I started making sandwiches and I would go and buy all of my ingredients at publics and I would make these sandwiches. And again, quickly realized that I was definitely losing money and that's when I went, maybe I should be going to a restaurant depot and finding these ingredients. And I think what I didn't realize at the time was happening is I was building these micro businesses, these teeny tiny businesses. Really what I was doing was cultivating a skill set by failing. So all right, so you go to sandwiches and then I guess at a certain point you leave Miami and move to New York. Tell me about what was going on in your life. Why did you, why did you do that? Yeah, I think I had friends at the time who lived in New York and who loved it. I was, I was excited for more to be going on. There was somebody that was dating in New York at the time. So I thought I'm going to make the big move and I will never forget going from Miami to New York. I pretty much didn't eat for the first couple of weeks because I didn't even know how to get in line at one of the bodegas in an order of sandwich because New York was this, you know, it was chaotic and bustling and I realized pretty quickly that it had an energy I had never experienced before that I really resonated with. So in New York, tell me a little bit about what you were doing there. I didn't want to go and look for a job. I wanted to continue to try to build a business and so I opened a very, very small business out of this teeny tiny apartment called Sweet City Bites and I would make cupcakes. I would make birthday cakes. I mean, I would roll fondant out. I'll never forget. I would have to put like cover my floor and my apartment with paper and then roll fondant out because it was the only place I had enough space to cover these little birthday cakes. And then I would get on the subway and I would deliver them all over the city again, definitely still losing money at the time. Yeah. So, all right. So you're, you're living in New York. Obviously, your family, your parents are in Seattle and you're going to visit them now. Again, I guess from what I understand around 2012, you're in New York, a very close family friend who a guy named Josh Dickerson, who was a young guy, he passed away. He died. He had a very rare form of cancer and he was just 18. And this really like, you guys were really close with this kid, right? I think he was even, he had dated your sister. Tell me a little bit about this because this was going to actually affect the change in your life. Yeah, it was horrible. And, you know, and he'd gone into remission. And we didn't know him at the time. My younger sister, Emma, she met him, you know, right after he'd gone into remission. And when we found out that the cancer was back, I started coming flying from New York back to Seattle to support my sister and I would go back and forth between the two places. And as we started to get more information about
about Josh's diagnosis and it became clear that it was terminal. Those trips became longer back home and I had been living this kind of fast-paced, exciting life and this started to become a reminder as to what really mattered the most and what was most important and I really started to feel that urge to spend more time with my family and my sister and my mom and my dad so then that was eventually kind of what prompted part of my move back to Seattle along with launching Skinny Dipped. Val, I want to bring you into the conversation at this point because this is I think around 2013 you were living in Seattle where you had a career as a freelance TV producer. Yeah. So you had some flexibility, right? But also maybe I don't know, tell me a bit about how you start to talk to Breezy about this because I mean at this point you were maybe in your late 40s or early 50s and I think I don't only say that because people who know this show well know how much I love first time founders who are in their late 40s or 50s or even beyond because I think a lot of people think that you have to found a business when you're 22 and that's not actually true at all. So tell me a little bit about just this idea of like starting something with your daughter like starting a business. Yes. At the time that Josh passed away in 2013 at that time I'd been working as a producer on this travels to the edge with our wealth which was a super exciting job for me. So I was a little bit at loose ends as well because it looked like we weren't going to have another season and as you well know in the freelance world you're always looking for the next gig. And I wasn't sure what the next gig was and coupled with that we had really I had really pulled myself in some ways out of the workforce for the year that Josh was sick because it's really an extraordinary thing when you walk a family and you walk a child through an illness like that. And we happened to be one of the families that that they were that Josh's mom and dad were very close to and there was sort of this village that closed in around him. So I had literally kind of taken a year off of my life to be sure that I was shepherding our younger daughter through this journey because I wanted to make sure she was okay. She was only she was 15 and then 16 at the time. Yeah. I read an article about Josh. There was a profile on him in a Seattle Times from that from when he passed away and obviously he was I mean can imagine how traumatic that was for his family. He even he was a baseball player and even played while he was in you know undergoing treatment and I mean it's and so as a parent myself I can understand that response of saying you know we just saw this just tragedy happened to friends of ours and let's just you know not forget what's important. And so for you it was like let's just spend time together. And breezy you are clearly coming back to Seattle you were you were going to come back and live near your parents. Yeah those stretches that I started coming back from New York to Seattle were getting longer and longer and as the idea developed and got real I made the choice to fully move back to Seattle and move back home and into the you know the house I grew up with with my parents. So it was a big it was a big life change I'd gone from you know I remember at the time you know I was going from New York it was busy and fun and very social in Seattle especially at that time was quieter and so for me if I'm a you know being in my 20s it was a big change to go back home. I think two guy for me I was facing kind of empty nesting was looming large so I think the timing it was that played into the timing because I'm not sure that that I was looking forward to I don't know what I was looking at as an empty nester. Yeah I mean you're going from teenagers and running in out of the house and friends and cooking and to and this is something that you know many people face in their late 40s early 50s and you know beyond the kitchen gone and then it's like okay this is the next chapter and what what does that mean right so so here is a potential opportunity to do a project with your child which is amazing tell me a little bit about what you start your your a great home cook your kids obviously had absorbed some of that talent and you guys start talking about let's maybe do some kind of food think taught tell me a little about some of the ideas you start to bat around. I think we had a bunch of them including we talked about doing thin cookies. I don't it's in cookies yeah yeah we were constantly looking for like girl snacks yeah and you know snacks that would give you a little bit of energy and and we couldn't find them we couldn't find these delicious better for you kinds of snacks and so I can remember that we would go into Starbucks and we would look at the count you know at the at the pastry case and most everything in there that was some type of carbohydrate. Yeah hasn't changed by the way right so I think that that's that was the driver was sort of girl snacks that were both like really delicious but also had some redeeming value to them and we've never been a huge sugar family my mother when I was growing up it was not allowed to have soda pop as we used to call it we never had candy in the house the only time we ever a candy was at Halloween you know so I grew up in one of those households so I think I carried I carried that with me as well. Yeah it sounds like you were you were already moving the threat this this direction of like things that that you liked but like a smaller version of smaller portions is that fair to say yes. I was just say I think the other things that we were considering were that it was really kind of my mom's part of my mom's cooking philosophy was whole foods right things that we were very early to this trend that we're really starting to see now right like minimally processed real foods I grew up in you know what has been coined an ingredient house you wouldn't open the cupboard and find a bunch of you know snacks and processed foods you had to make something if you wanted to have a snack I grew up with you know my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches where homemade jam and peanut butter that came out of the grinder and so I think we also started talking about it was portion control it was also something that you could grab and take with you that you felt good about eating and there wasn't a lot of that that existed then. Yeah all right so you guys are are are sort of batting ideas back and forth and and in your mind Val was this here was it's like a really serious like were you sort of thinking we're really going to do something here or in the first year so is it still just like this is fun. I was I was going forward with great trepidation is the truth because I know my daughter well and I know when she sets her mind to something that it's very likely it's it's a go I was excited but in truth I was pretty exhausted by the year with Josh and my previous gig it was very stressful at times the production was stressful and so what I didn't want was to hop into a situation that was going to be highly stressful again so I think when I went into it there was a sort of a little bit of naivete on my side as well I thought we were going to the farmers market you know we were going to put something in a jar and we were going to tie it we were going to sell it we were going to sort of build from there so I think that I was committed to moving forward I didn't really know what I was getting into. Yeah all right Breezy what do you remember about I mean what I I read that you guys took like a road trip a certain point was this like a what where did you go I was it just for fun tell me a little bit about it. Yeah so we were taking my younger sister Emma up to her first day of college at University British Columbia where I went and it really it came out of this you know we were just having conversation we were snacking like you do on a road trip my mom had you know good roasted almonds with her because she was very healthy either and I had brought you know a quote naughty snack I think I had you know I had a peanut butter cup with me and I knew that that wasn't you know healthy or something that you would eat regularly but it was delicious and it really kind of just got us thinking maybe there's this intersection between whole foods and deliciousness that we can strike and we really started talking about how chocolate almonds in particular had been this they were this dated boring product that were sitting in bulk bins and could we reinvent it to become a snack and kind of like we thought about it a little bit like a deconstructed nut and fruit bar but in a more snackable fun way to eat it in pieces and so when we got back from that
road trip, that's really where we started experimenting in the home kitchen. So you guys were talking about fruit and nut bars. I'm thinking like the Cadbury's Fruit and Nut bar, right? That chocolate fruit and nut bar? I think more almost like what kind was doing it the time you know? What kind bars were doing it? Yeah. These kind bars were unusual. It was like just nuts stuck together in a bar. Exactly. With like some chocolate, you know, a little bit of chocolate on there. Mm-hmm. And I think we felt like especially how we wanted to snack, like a lot of women's snack. You eat a little bit, you know, you eat a few pieces, you close up the bag, you eat a few more pieces. And so if it was this idea of can we get something that is good for your body but tastes, you know, as good or as close to as good as a chocolate chip cookie and then put it in a fun format. Yeah. All right. So tell me how, because I maybe it was on this road trip, maybe that's apocryphal, maybe it didn't really happen that way. And it doesn't, well, I'd be curious to get your sense of how you remember you landing on this idea of chocolate covered almonds because chocolate covered almonds are delicious, right? Like you could go to the bulk section of like Safeway and you can, if they have them, but you and you can find them. And they're usually like these giant sort of, you know, like oval shaped chocolate knobs with an almond in there and they're shiny and they're delicious, but there's a lot, gotta be a lot of sugar in those. Tell me how you start to think about chocolate almonds. You just told part of our story there, I think, because I would go to the grocery store. I love chocolate. I would go to those bulk bins. And I would buy some of those, those nuts, those big as I call them chubby nuts, bowling balls of chocolate, you know, and somewhere inside of that great big ball glob of chocolate, there would be something that resembled a nut. And I remember different from you, for me, they were not delicious. They were like woefully disappointing because there was no balance between the nut and the chocolate. And I also didn't think that chocolate was very good chocolate. There was also a chocolate tier in town, fabulous Seattle chocolate tier called France. And France had a chocolate coated almond that was in my mind perfection. It was expensive. And I didn't have the kind of budget where I could buy those very often. But from time to time, I would. And there was, I mean, such a huge difference between what this chocolate tier was producing, which was a thinner-coded almond that was treated thoughtfully. And I just thought, why can't we do something like that? Yeah. To me, it sounds easy, right? You just, you just take almonds and you just roll them in, in some melted chocolate. And then you just put them on parchment paper and there you go, you got your chocolate, right? Yes and no. Is that what you started to do? That's what we started to do. That was the sort of the starting point. True confession, we might have taken those France almonds and very, very, very carefully deconstructed them with a knife. Because I knew, because of my palate, I knew something else was going on there. It wasn't just an almond, a raw almond that had been dipped. There was something, there was some other little piece of magic in there. And I think again, because I had taught myself to cook, this is kind of how I approached food was like, ooh, I'm going to sluth this and see what it is that makes this delicious. Okay, let's just talk about the science of this for a moment, because I, again, like I think most people think, okay, an almond, it has an almond skin on it. And if you dip it in chocolate, that just stays on there and then if you let it drip, like it's a thinner coating of chocolate, that's not what happens, right? What does it, chocolate just slip off an almond? No, you can make that happen as long as you temper your chocolate. Like you could do that. You can, like you could, you could do that tonight. And you could have a, a thin dip dipped almond, but it wouldn't taste like ours. And it would also probably be hard to do like a lot of them. Yes. Yes, we dipped them on forks for a long time and quickly realized that was not a viable option. And if you were considering selling those that you had made on your kitchen table, you had the same problem that the bulk bins were, the bulk bin almonds were trying to solve. You had to finish them somehow so that they could be kind of protected. The chocolate could be protected. Right. Otherwise they'd melt up, they just melt together. Yeah. You would have problems. Yeah. So, okay. So this is actually a much more complex problem than now that that you guys probably even anticipated. And before I, I, I, I, I, so want to really want to dive into this process. But you know, we've, we've done a lot of confections, food on this show over 10 years. And I know that around this time, even before this time, people were really starting to get interested in alternative sugars, coconut sugars, maple sugars. But then even stevia, because stevia and, and you got lilies, they were using stevia. People were, you know, there were, there were some entrepreneurs and brands that were like, let's move away from sugar. You guys took a different, a different approach, which was, let's not do that. Let's use just a lot less of it. Tell me, tell me about the thinking that went into that. I think moderation was always a part of our formula. You know, that less is more. I mean, again, I think all of this goes back to the way we ate. And we ate in moderation. We didn't eat a lot of sugar. And, and if we just could reduce the sugar, like kind of the way we eat, just do less. But, but still make the product sing. So, okay. Let's, let's go back to the process of getting a thin coating on chocolate. Because, but even if you get a thin coating, you still have to protect it if it's in a bag, because you can't sell individual almonds, because that's just, doesn't make sense. And who's going to pay, you know, a dollar for an almond, right? And, and just the labor costs of like dipping each almond. I'm thinking like, you need tiny fingers to do that. You need like a tiny elf, like a whole army of tiny elves dipping them one by one. And that just doesn't make sense, because the elves are expensive. You're paying minimum wage to thousands of elves. Impossible to do. So, what other ways were you trying to get a thin coating on an almond? So, we spent a lot of time in the kitchen trying to just make, make this taste good. And we did try a lot of different sugars. We tried, um, molasses, a whole variety of sugars to, to kind of get this little added tiny, tiny hint of sweetness that we felt we needed above and beyond the chocolate. And again, I think we were, we were looking at artisan and culinary techniques when we were thinking about how to make this thing. The roast on our almond was really important. When you roast an almond to a certain place, you get added sweetness and caramelization. We knew that could contribute to the sweetness. And then we put this thin coat of chocolate on. We were super thoughtful about what kind of chocolate. But as you said, um, we had to figure out a way to protect it. And so, we used an old culinary technique called truffling. And truffling is where you can take a chocolate product and you can, um, you essentially sort of dust it with something, usually cocoa powder. So, with our original dark chocolate coated almond, that's what we did. So, that way you, it's basically creates a layer that protects the almonds. And people have had cocoa dust at alms with people listening. Yes. And then that led to our subsequent two almonds that were part of our, you know, kind of suite of products. Initially, one was a raspberry almond. So, chocolate coated, we dusted it in real raspberry powder. Just like dehydrated raspberry. Freeze dried raspberry powder. And then we did an espresso iteration. So, you know, grow, espresso. Yeah. Yeah. Where we had, yes, espresso does. So, we were getting real flavors from the get go. Yeah. I mean, literally, when we were making these first iterations, we were making in the home kitchen, we were dipping them one by one on a fork, we were setting them on parchment paper. And so, part of the next step was, how do we make more of them? And so, we brought my dad into the conversation because he has an engineering kind of mind. And one of the ideas was, well, maybe we should spray them. So, we went to Home Depot. We bought a paint sprayer. We filled the paint sprayer with chocolate. And the chocolate would start too hard. And so, you couldn't actually get it to work. So, we had to maghiver some heat guns next to the paint sprayer to try to keep the chocolate warm while we sprayed these sheet pans of almonds. And let me just tell you, it was a complete failure. We just had like, it just chocolate just atomized into the air. There was none on the almonds. It didn't work at all. It did not. And we definitely returned the paint gun to Home Depot. It's kind of an ingenious, right? It's kind of an ingenious idea. You would think that that would work. So, what did you, I mean, I read it took you like a year or like around many months of experimenting before you landed on what actually worked. Tell me. I'm
maybe you've got trade secrets here, I don't know, but tell me what you can tell me about what eventually worked. - So there's one more step before we got to what worked, which was that we thought maybe it could go through a process called enrobing where the nuts lay down and they go through a waterfall of chocolate. We found someone in Oregon, a family operation, we called them up and asked them if we could essentially come in trial making our product in their facility. And they were really kind and they said, "Yes, sure, come down." So we went down there and we spent, we'd brought like 10, maybe 15 pounds of almonds and we spent four days on this line, individually placing nuts on a conveyor belt, letting them go through this waterfall of chocolate and then hand sprinkling them with things like espresso powder, sea salt, taking them off and bagging them up. - It's like, it's like Luciol Ball, like the chocolate factory. - Exactly what it was. - It was that scene. - Yep, we had breezy on one end of the line, feeding the nuts in, me on the other, desperately sprinkling them with emily and sea salt. - There's a photo of us, passed out, sleeping in the sun on this loading dock after fortic. We were so exhausted and we had one cooler full of chocolate almonds. So that was also not the answer and we knew that. - When we come back in just a moment, the founder set up shop in a converted chicken coop and breezy walks into a bar and meets someone who changes the course of the business forever. Stay with us, I'm Guy Ryes and you're listening to How I Built This. (gentle music) Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Ryes. So it's around 2013 and breezy and Vail are in Seattle searching for someone to help make their thinly coated chocolate almonds. - I started to get on blogs, like Reddit blogs and they started to dig deep looking to see if anyone was putting this thin coat of chocolate on, on fruit, on anything, any sort of center. And I eventually found, I was on this kind of like, esoteric chocolate blog and I eventually found this chocolateeer who was writing these commenting about how he was thinly coating, I think maybe the time was freeze dried fruits. And so I figured out a screen name, found his name from his screen name, reverse looked his name up to find his phone number and then called him at his house. And I essentially just asked him, can you make this for us? And he said, yeah, I think I can. And that was really kind of the first step. We formed a relationship with him and it was there, it was in that relationship that we commercialized our recipe. - He was in Seattle? - Just outside of Seattle, so it was just, yeah. - Yeah. - Good fortune. - And you guys probably didn't have a whole lot of cash to, you know, I'm assuming you're working with some cash but not hundreds of thousands of dollars. - Definitely not. - We were working with a stash of about, you know, I think it was our, pretty much our life savings of about 25,000. - All right, so this is a challenge, right? 'Cause you can't find a co-manufacturer's to do this for you. But you do have this guy outside of Seattle who says, yeah, I can do it for you but can he do it at, I guess at this point, you don't really need scale. You just need to make it enough where you can start to sell it. - Exactly. - So how much could he do for you? - Well, it was a longer journey than that. So we started making very small batches with him, you know, 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30 pounds. And then, you know, we would sit at coffee shop with him and we would kind of brainstorm about, you know, how could we get to 100 pounds, 200 pounds? And I think at the time we were trying to make a roadmap, a plan that got us to about a thousand pounds, maybe 2000 pounds of product. And originally when we met him, he was working out of his, you know, he was making this in his garage essentially. And then he leased a very small facility to essentially start producing for us. And when I say small, this was a converted chicken coop. We bought an oven off of eBay, one single oven that sat on the floor. We washed all of our dishes outside on the loading dock on the hood of our car with hose, with hose water. So this was like a serious, like, you know, kind of makeshift first facility where we partnered, you know, with this person to start to create a, quote, commercial version of our recipe. He had the one essential piece of equipment and the skills to do what we needed. The piece of equipment is called a pan. Looks a bit like a cement mixer. And when you put a certain number of nuts in there, they rotate around and you add the chocolate and then gradually gradually, whatever layer you want builds up on the nuts or the centers. But yeah, this facility had no heat, had no hot water, had one pan and one semi-functioning oven in the middle of the facility seems like such a big word for, you know, which we, the place we fondly refer to as the coop. Yeah. All right, let's talk about your, and your, you mentioned your co-founders. You, you bring in, I think, your two childhood best friends to join you to help you with this project. Yes. This is Lizzie and Chrissy. Lizzie, Resta and Chrissy Holler. Yep. So kind of right after my mom and I come up with this idea and these kind of first samples, Lizzie joined us. Lizzie is my oldest, dearest childhood friend. We met in preschool. We grew up together. She's the one that I would, you know, build tree houses with when we were young. And so Lizzie was just really excited about the idea. So she jumped on board and then shortly after, Chrissy, who had become kind of my soul sister when I was living in New York. Chrissy's fiery, she's like a kind of a brace horse. She was really excited about it and she wanted to do sales and she joined us. So Chrissy moved from New York to Seattle, moved into the house with the parents, myself, her dog, and Lizzie lived about two blocks away. Okay, let's go back to the process of making them. So you've got this guy who is making small-ish quantities for you and you've got something that tastes good and it's thinly coated almonds. And then how are you gonna sell them? Or they're gonna be like individual snack size or was it gonna be like a big bag of almonds? Like how did you think about packaging them up at first? - Yeah, so we wanted to put them in essentially kind of like a single serving, right? Because part of the idea was this grab and go on the go. So I eventually reached out to someone in Spokane, Washington who was a co-packer. And I think we convinced him to give us a chance. So I mean, he was bringing truckloads of nuts in. He was a pretty decent scale. And here we were with, we wanted to show up with 250 pounds of almonds and pack them out or 500 pounds. And we convinced him to let us drive a truck to Spokane, work on the line and pack them into packages through the night when he was the quietest. So it was the night shift. And he employed a lot of ex-cons and people that had had a really hard time in life. And it was a pretty eye-opening experience because we would go and we would work through the night on the line with all these different kinds of people. And we would hear their stories. And we would see what that manufacturing is hard work. - I think that was such a lesson in sort of what goes on the line, but also just kind of diving into the world of manufacturing that not a lot of people ever get to see when, you know, how is our food made? Who are the people that are putting their hands on our food? How many times are they doing that? How long do they have to stand on their feet without a break? - Yeah. All right, here's, I'm curious what the chicken and egg question which is, did you, even before you had packaged these, did you start to reach out to potential retailers and shops or did you, was the plan? Let's just make, you know, we've got 25 grand of work with whatever. Let's just make as much of this as we can and then try and sell them. What was the approach? - I mean, originally when we were making them on the dining room table, we would pack them into little clear baggies and put a label on them that at the time said skinny nuts with a Z. And it was those that we handed out to friends, family, and like honestly, anyone that we would meet to just get like feedback, right? And it was very positive. At that time, I don't think we took those to retailers. This was like, during this time, it was kind of the beginning of disruptive brands and challenge or brand. So I had spent a lot of time with you.
about Lara Bar's story, pop chips, some of these, you know, challenge your brands. And so we knew a piece of it, obviously, a very important piece was the product, but we were also aware that the brand was equally important. And so we wanted to put them in a package, we wanted to have a look and feel. - Yeah. And so now you're manufacturing them or you're packaging them and Spokane. Did you already have commitments from people where you're gonna just collect all the bags and then start to figure that out? - Yeah, I mean, when we started going to Spokane, we were going with, you know, a regular car size, you know, a few cases of nuts in the back. And we would take those, we would pack them all up, bring them back to Seattle. And we would essentially sell door to door. We would pack them into, you know, these were grab and go single servings that we would put in a box of 10. We would go march into a mom and pop corner grocery store and wait for the manager and give them a sample, have them try it and hopefully sell them in to sit near the cash register. And I mean, when I tell you, like we would only take cash or check, we had no other way to take payment. And then we would go and we would demo them. We would ask this manager, can we just, you know, can we come demo them? And we would come demo for four hours, five hours, six hours, however long they would let us demo for. And then we'd sell through them. And then the next time we went to Spokane, you know, we would rent a sprinter van and we'd fill it and eventually we were driving 25 foot box trucks there and back. - Where were you keeping all the inventory, like it's your house? - Yeah, oh my house. - In the garage's box. - Like in the basement. - In very flimsy boxes that, you know, came from China. - Yeah, but you probably had to keep it cool. - Yes, but this was Seattle. So it was. - Yeah. Okay, you've got the packages you're going into, mom and pop stores and how are they doing? I mean, you're sampling them. Are they, are you getting reorders? Are they selling? - Oh yeah, I mean, first of all, we believed that demoing was really important because it's food. We wanted people to try the food. So, you know, we would go in, it would either be four of us or two of us. And we would demo five or six, sometimes seven nights, so you know, nights a week, sometimes double demos. And in a single demo, we could easily sell, you know, 40 bags, 50 bags. So you were seeing these store managers go, wow, like, you know, you sold through, you know, four or five boxes in a few hours. And then we would start to get, you know, slightly bigger purchase orders, you know, instead of buying two boxes, they would want 10 and we eventually put our, you know, our small flimsy boxes into quote, master cases and we started delivering bigger cases to the store. So it was very organic in that way. - All right, so you guys are doing mainly mom and pop stores, but I think you also get into the local Whole Foods in Seattle at some point. - Yeah. At this point, Chrissy was, our co-founder was leading the charge there every morning she would take off pretty much the crack of dawn with a backpack full of samples and she would go sit in the Whole Foods, you know, where oftentimes they would tell you a manager's not available and she would just wait. I mean, we're talking, you know, one Whole Foods at a time, one mom and a hop at a time, you know, actually Google, the Google campus in Seattle was probably one of our first big accounts and Chrissy snuck into their cafeteria, found the chef and convinced him to bring the product in an offer to their employees. - And sort of reading between the lines, it sounds like this is when at least the two of you, maybe the four of you start to talk about, we gotta raise money if we're gonna do something, if we're gonna make this bigger. Is that more or less what happened? - I think that's true because I think it was reaching an unsustainable place in terms of, you know, obviously no one was being paid. Everyone was living at my home at the time. You know, I think we had to look for an alternative then. And so yes, it was clear that we needed to raise some money. - Okay, so you guys decide to raise some, to raise a round of seed money. I think originally looking for a million, a little bit over a million. And one of the people, this is just, I'd love to hear the story, who invests in the seed round, is this guy, Rohan Oza, who's been on Shark Tank and he helped like the vitamin water poppy. I mean, this guy is kind of legendary in beverage and other products. How did you encounter him? - Yeah, this was a complete chance moment. Right after I'd moved to Seattle to do this full time, I would still go back to New York every once in a while. I had friends there, it still where a lot of my social life was. And so one night, it was just out at a bar and I got to talking to this guy. He was asking, you know, what I was interested in and everything and I said, oh, I've started. I'm starting this business. We're gonna be the next pop chips. Oh, by the way, do you want me, do you want to try my nuts? And he was like, absolutely. So I give him this, you know, probably half melted bag of, you know, our dip dolmens and he said, wow, this is a really good product. This is a really amazing product development. What's your plan? You know, and I was like, so, you know, I had so much confidence. I was like, we're gonna build a big brand. We're gonna disrupt the industry. I had no idea who this was. I just thought this was like a random person who I could get feedback from 'cause we were passing these out to anyone we really could. And he was like, you know, what are you doing about money? I was like, oh, we're gonna raise a friends and family round. We're gonna raise $100,000. And he said, I think you're gonna need a lot more money than that. And so he ended up giving me his contact. I still had no idea who he was. I went back and, you know, and researched it. And at the time, you know, he was a huge part of vitamin water, pop chips. And so that led to a kind of early, a very early mentorship with Rohan. And at that time, we were raising, you know, we were gonna set out to raise this friends and family round. We had brought a little bit of money in. And actually one of our very first investors was Bill Nye. Thank you, Bill Nye. You gave us some seed money despite his financial advisor. I think at the time telling him it was a terrible idea. And so we'd raised, I don't know, I wanna say maybe $65,000. And it was big for us, you know. It meant that we could continue to make product and sell product. And Rohan came in on that very first seed round. I, you know, if memory serves, I think he put $150,000, $160,000 into the business. And that really kind of like started to make things feel real. One of the earliest things he said to us is he said, what makes a brand successful is, comes down to three things. Product, people, and package. And he's like, you have the product, you have the people, and this is a real founder-led brand. Let's work on the package. Yeah, I mean, the name Skinny Dipped also is interesting. I mean, there was Skinny Girl vodka or a cocktail thing is still around him. And I wonder if it's also a way, which I think is smart to appeal to, you know, maybe, again, originally you were thinking about, what do we like to you? What are snacks we like? Was there thinking like this could also appeal to women being called Skinny Dipped? I think we were really careful about that. We didn't want to look at Skinny in any sort of pejorative way. We want women to feel great about their bodies. And we were never, ever intending to imply, you know, I had two daughters. I raised two daughters. I wanted my daughters to feel good about themselves because they were strong and resilient and intelligent and not because they were skinny. So I have to say for me, there was a little bit of trepidation. - Using that term. - Correct, that name. Because I knew it could be maybe misunderstood. It's a double-edged sword. It's, there's an attraction to it that you're sort of pointing out. I mean, I love the name because of what I love about the name Skinny Dipped Olmons is it is the product, you know, that's, and we still to this day and our products are always aiming for this balance, this thin coating. So it's very, it's a very literal name. I also love the idea of Skinny Dipping. I do it myself. Yeah. There's a double meaning there, right? It's naked baby, basically. But it's wild and free and like, you know, it's got some cheekiness to it. Okay, so now you've got some money that you've raised and clearly and in three products, still it's basically the chocolate dipped almonds that are rolled in raspberry and in salt or in espresso powder, is that right? Correct. We were very focused on those three for the first few years. And, you know, after we'd spent, call it a year, year and a half, maybe selling in kind of all these regional stores and smaller places, we caught the attention of target and-- Yeah, how did that happen? Yeah. Was it a trade show?
Did you guys go to a trade show? - Nope, we actually got introduced to a broker who was from one of our kind of early mentors. We got this introduction to a broker who specialized in Target. So even though it felt early in many ways, this broker at the time loved our product and he felt like we should present it to the Target buyer to see what they thought. So we did, we flew out, you know, this was in the day of where you got to go sit with your buyers in person, right? So we flew out to Minneapolis and we sat with this buyer and we sampled our product and we talked about our brand, charred our story. And then we went away, we went back home and the broker who was helping us at the time said, "Listen, I think I feel good about this. "I think we might get 100 store tests, "a 200 store test." And so he gave us a call, he said, "Okay, you know, she wants to have another meeting." So we flew back to Minneapolis, we sat in front of this buyer and her name was Tanya and she gave us, thank you Tanya 'cause she really gave us a chance and she looked at us and she said, "I absolutely love your product." And she said, "Do you have any supply chain issues?" And I just looked at dead in the eye and said, "Nope." And meanwhile, we were still in the coop producing very, very small batches and she said, "Okay then, well, I'm gonna bring "all of your flavors in chain wide in three months." So 18. - And chain wide is how many stores? - 1800 stores. - Wow. - Yeah, and some pretty sure I was like, you know, immediately clammy sweating. It was a mix of, you know, fear and excitement, all at once. And we really couldn't believe it, right? Because in my mind, we'd set the high bar at 100 stores or 150 test stores. And we didn't even have a distributor. - We didn't have a co-packer. We did not have a co-manufacturer. We were packaging and spoke hand. We were producing nuts in the coop and we had three months and it was the holiday season. - We didn't even know how we would get this to target, let alone make it. - So you three months to get enough product. And I mean, I can't imagine how many pounds of this stuff you have to make. So what do you, I mean, you've got some cash. You've raised about five or a little or five million dollars. So you've got some cash, which is great 'cause you're not, you're gonna need the cash to finance this. Where, what do you do? Where do you go? - We made a lot of tracks really quickly. We reached out to a co-man in Seattle that was actually a confectioner, co-man. - Doing big quantities of things. - Doing big enough quantities of things. And we, and so we, yeah, we started working with them and they had the capacity to do the thin coating. They had those giant like cement mixture machines. - I did and we had to essentially convince them and teach them how to do that, but they were amenable to that. But it all didn't go quite as planned. The guy who was sort of their head guy who was sort of my contact, I'd been out on the floor coming back into their little office and he brought some finished nuts out to me and he said, I don't think they taste quite right. And I said, okay, and I started tasting them and he was absolutely accurate. Something was wrong and something was really wrong. And I was able to identify what the problem was which that was that our nuts were rancid. And you cannot make a rancid nut taste good. So there we were. We were sitting there with 40,000 pounds of rancid nuts and three days to produce package ship. But we had one mission, target was our opportunity to have a selling story. So that we could then go to Kroger, we could then go to whomever and say, hey, we've done this in target. So this was gonna be our selling story. This was our big opportunity and Rohan had been hell bent on making sure, forgive me, but he kept repeating Rohan mantra which is, don't fuck this up. When we come back in just a moment, how breezy and val overcome the crisis of the rancid nuts, but soon face something even worse, they're spending much more than they're ringing in. Stay with us, I'm Guy Ross and you're listening to How I Built This. (soft music) Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, I'm Guy Ross. So it's 2017 and breezy and val are racing to fulfill their first big order from target when they hit a snag, 40,000 pounds of rancid almonds. All I could think was, I literally was paralyzed. So I called breezy who was on a plane to Denver and I guess you were just off the plane, you had just stepped off the plane. And I was, I sat in paralysis not knowing what to do. We landed and mom just kept calling my phone over and over again and I pick up and I was like, what's going on? And she's like, we have a crisis, an absolute crisis. And she explained what was going on. I got off the plane, went to the same podium, you know, when you step off boarding and duplaning and I just said, is this plane going back to Seattle? And they said, yep, they said, how do I get on it? I don't care where I have to sit, I'll sit in the bathroom. I just need to go back. And they were very nice. I got loaded back onto the plane, flew back, went straight to our manufacturer which actually kind of close to the airport. I will, I will never forget the image of my mom sitting there. I walk into this kind of dark conference room and she's sitting at the table with like hundreds of nuts that she's bitten in half and just pale look on her face and she just said, there's nothing we can do. They're rancid. Immediately I started calling the supplier. I was like, we need a new shipment. They're like the earliest we can get it to you is, you know, whatever it was, 10 days a week and a half. We would have missed our window. I called everyone I could think of to say, you know, what other suppliers are there, you know, I begged anything we could do. And honestly, we just kept hitting roadblock after roadblock. We got to the point where we started to do the math on going, we're just going to have to go buy these from the grocery store. We're going to have to create an army of friends and family who all go to the grocery store and just essentially deplete the bulk bins and how many can we get? How many can we get from Costco? Whatever we had to do. And it was, and so eventually I reached out to somebody where I got connected to somebody who had been kind of in the nut world and he's like, I think I may be able to pull in, get a favor here and get you a truckload. And he came through, we got a truckload and we were in fact able to produce for target. But just barely, honestly, just barely. Wow. So think about target also is that it sounds amazing, right? From, I think most people are saying like, wow, amazing, you're set. But it's a huge risk because if you do this and then your stuff doesn't sell, you're done. You're kind of out and you're not going to get another chance, right? I mean, so that's a risk. Like you could put this product in target as good as it is. And it might not sell, right? Because what either what tends to sell like end caps and things with massive promotional dollars behind them. And so what were you able to do to make sure that they would sell? We were aware that it was a big risk. So we had been told by so many people, you should just say no to them. Like you're exactly your saying you're going to, you're going to feel you have exactly 0% brand awareness. And there's no way you can be successful at this. And obviously, the usual way of entering a retailer like Target, right? Is that you have these segment of test stores where you go to see if the product will turn and sell. And we were going from 0 to 60. And so we had someone say to us like, you should at least try to get an end cap. That way you'll get more visibility when you launch. So we went back to Tanya and we essentially said, is there any way, anything that we can do to get an end cap, you know? And she said, do you have any other flavors that could be exclusive to Target? And we said, we literally just developed a peanut butter almond peanut butter. It's like a double coated, double coated in dark chocolate coated peanut butter. We can give you that if you will give us an end cap and she agreed. And I think that the end cap really helped us initially. So you made it exclusive to Target? We did initially because an end cap usually have to pay a lot for. To be honest, I'm sure we did pay for it, but because we had no idea what was going on
financially in our business, we weren't tracking deductions at the time or all of this. We were just surviving. It was super messy. It was so messy. We were just like, this is an opportunity. How do we make sure that we just absolutely, we do everything we can to be successful in target? And that worked. Clearly it worked. So that's a major test that you then, you, you not just survive, but it, it works. I mean, they're selling there. Yeah. It was really a springboard for us in so many ways. It had forced us to kind of, this accelerated, you know, not just growth, but like growing up period. And we had proven that we could, you know, that the mass market loved our product. Yes. You know, clearly we were, we were beginning to accelerate and there was, you know, kind of an amplification of the brand. So in addition to the co-man, we worked with right around the time that target came into our lives. This guy's name is Jeremy. Jeremy was also building out his facility. We really birthed the product with Jeremy. So we were, you know, we were in the facility all the time. It is a very different kind of relationship than I think a lot of folks have with their co-mands. And today, do you work with multiple co-manufacturers? Or do you only work with one? Multiple. Multiple. Not the margins on, on a product like this. I mean, are they pretty good? I mean, people, I think, are more willing to spend more on all-ments because they're used to spending more on all-ments. Um, so we have quite a colorful, gross margin history, which is that our brand was, you know, born in this time when everything was about growth, right? Like growth at all cost. Growth at all. Don't worry about profit. Just grow. No one had even asked about our margins or, you know, profitability, forget about it, no one was considering that. And then, you know, you have to remember that we didn't even have a finance background. I mean, originally we were doing our finance on, like, you know, sticky notes. And, you know, I didn't have no idea what cogs were. I didn't even know what gross margin was. So at a certain point, you know, we, the business had seen a tremendous amount of growth, right? We were available and probably at the time, 20,000 plus retail, retail doors, right? We were losing money. We were still, because- Were you underpricing? No, we weren't underpricing. We just, we were focused on growth. We were focused on brand. And we really had not put our focus on, you know, what are our gross margins? Are they sustainable? Are they healthy? And we had gross margins in the teens. We hadn't focused on it. We didn't have the expertise or the know-how. And it wasn't until the end of 2022 when essentially the funding dried up, right? Like, we were going to raise another round of funding. It wasn't available. And everyone told us, you are never going to be able to take a business that has gross margins in the teens and make it profitable. This is really critical, right? Because you, 2022, you couldn't raise money. And this is the thing I think a lot of businesses don't realize is that, you know, you might be doing extremely, I think in 2019, you guys were already on the Forbes, like, or Inc. 5,000, unless your number 32 on this list for the fastest growing business in America. I mean, 6,000 percent growth, you know, revenues grow. So on paper, it looks like you guys are, everything, you got everything figured out, right? And, but, in 2022, you have a hard time raising money, which is, which is a lot of businesses did. And some of the jeopardy is that you go so fast. And if you are founders who are not grounded, say, in finance, you may not understand that it's really critical to know something about cogs. It's really, really important that you find another source for your caramel powder other than Brittany in France. And I don't think, I think we were so fixated on, certainly speaking for myself, on developing a quality product that, you know, kind of blew it out of the water in terms of flavor, that we just didn't have the discipline or the know how to kind of hold ourselves to some of the limitations. And that was a big challenge because we did not want to impact the flavor of our products. I mean, it reminds me a little bit breezy of your time selling sorbet, right? Because you were just going to publics or whatever and buying the best stuff you could because you wanted to taste great. But, you know, naturally, this is what we all want to do. But we don't always think about, well, am I actually with the labor costs paying for everything? Is it all, is it, is a retail price paying for all this stuff? Well, and I mean, listen, we had, we didn't have a leaky bucket. We had a bucket with big holes in it. And we had to figure out, you know, the ship was going down. And we had to figure out what to do and we had to do it quickly. And it came from, you know, the supply chain and finding domestic sources for things that were coming internationally, that were just as delicious. It came from picking up every single one of our, you know, warehouses, like essentially where we are warehousing product, finding more efficient places in the country to put it. It was working with all our retailers and moving them from delivered to FOB. It was, there was a time when, I mean, when I tell you, we did not have money in 2022. We, I asked our entire, like, leadership team to put their salaries on hold just so that we could try to make payroll for the rest of the company. Wait, so, so that's amazing, right? Because again, on the, from the outside, you're just crushing it. You're all these stores, you're in Costco. I mean, you're trying Costco. And Costco was eventually, you guys figured it out. But I mean, you've got celebrities coming at you wanting to invest like, this is a hot brand. And was any part of you worried like, we might not make it? Like we might have to sell this business for like pennies in the dollar. There was a moment where we hit absolute rock bottom. It was in November of 2022. I think it was the first time in the history of the brand when I remember I was in New York trying to raise money and I just absolutely lost it. Just sobbing in my teeny tiny shoebox hotel room. My husband got on the plane and flew out to come support me. And I just thought, I don't know what to do now. Like this is, we are in a hard place. It was the first time I had ever had that feeling. And then somebody said to me, she said, she said, I have never met an entrepreneur who was ultimately successful that did not hit rock bottom. And this is your rock bottom. And you're right, we had a brand, a lot of things were working for us. You know, we had retailers picking us up. We knew that we had our consumers loved us. We had all of these things from the outside that looked great. But we had a sinking ship behind the scenes with our financial situation. And so we had two options. It was either, like when people say, a soft landing. It's like the worst words. It was either find a soft landing or get your finances to match what you have built from the outside looking in. And that is what we decided to do. How did you do it? Because again, I'm sure people are like, breezy, foul. You guys, it's amazing. And what you've built and this goes, wow, and people are assuming you as a rolling in cash and you're freaking out. How did you and you can't raise money? Because I know you would eventually raise money, but it would be not until September of 2023. And again, this is a tough time, 2022. Tough year to raise money. Very hard. And I just mentioned here too that we had a grown up in the room. We had hired and he had been with us for several years by this time, Mark Mortimer, who is our president. And I do think that, you know, arm and arm with breezy and our CFO. There was a concerted effort to address every aspect of the business, to be ruthless and to figure out how to get out of the pickle that we were in. And not only that, Mark came in with some added capital at a time, you know, just to at least make payroll. He made a personal investment to help to support the brand. But like, when I tell you ruthless cutting, we cut every single thing that we cut to bone essentially is the way I think about it. Everything. I mean, we, starting at the top to bottom, even in our trade spending, we cut every bit of trade that we feel like wouldn't put us in jeopardy of losing an account. We cut every single bit of marketing that was costing us anything. I mean, we had no money, zero money. We reformulated our chocolates. We reformulated our peanut buttercup feelings. We reformulated. We reformulated anything we could put hand, you know, our hands on. We found new chocolate suppliers. I mean, we just dug deep. The one thing that we tried to protect was the team. So we knew that we had worked really hard to build an amazing team. And I think we felt like there's one thing we are going to protect. Let's try to keep our team intact so that we can go do the work that needs to be done to get our gross margins where they need to be. We did that. And we did that over the next year and a half. How much money do you think you estimate you saved? Or you cut like millions? Yes. And at that time, I was also working to raise money. But when I tell you working to raise money,
I mean, I talked to hundreds of people. No one was deploying capital, you know? And so I had to find a solution. And we ended up finding an amazing partnership and it was a really important piece of like, the next chapter of our story. And we partnered with David Grutman, who had been a friend of mine from my Miami days, who had gone off. And while we were building skinny dipped, he had built a really well-known and successful hospitality business in Miami. And we raised around from all of these celebrity investors that like genuinely loved the brand. I think I just had this like feeling deep down that this was it. If we could overcome this obstacle, then we would be there. And or we would be on the other side. And I have to say like when I raised that money, that was not a syndicated fund. That was individually from each celebrity investor. 65 individual celebrity investors, wanted a time, multiple calls with each. I mean, you know, and-- That's a lot of time. Yeah, but they had been great advocates for the brand. And David for us was, as I said, he has been a believer because he believed in us in a time when he could see. He could see that we had built this brand that people loved and we had products that people loved. And I convinced him that all we needed was a little time to get our finances to match the brand. Yeah. And I know I read that in 2024, you become profitable for the first time, which is-- I mean, right, it often takes 10 years for businesses. But now I imagine, as you describe Reesy, that became like an absolute obsession for you. Oh, it's a game changer for us. That being said, I do think that there's a balance between growth and profitability. And I think the pendulum used to be too far one way, right? Which was grow at all cost. But then it swung the other way. And then what happens is, it's too hard for a challenger brand to break through because it is expensive to go into CPG, have to fund inventory, you're doing something different. And you pay slotting fees, all kinds of things. So I'm a believer that I think it would be very difficult to be profitable from the start. I think you just, at a certain point, it is important to know that you can get there. And for us, it was a game changer. It means that now we have the funds to be able to invest more heavily in marketing. It means that we can invest in our philanthropic program, which has been something that my mom and I had wanted to start from the very beginning. And it took us 10 years to get there. So it's certainly-- it's definitely a little more relaxing to be profitable. Yeah, I bet. I mean, now you are in, I think, over the 25,000 stores. Breezy, you're the CEO. Yes. Still. And Val, what's your official title? I had up our innovation. And you're very much involved in this business. Do you consider 10 years old or 11 years old? What do you guys think when you think about how long you've been doing this? Yeah, I think of it as a decade. Yeah. And people say to us all the time, oh my gosh, it's an overnight success. And I always will remember this interview that I saw with Daniel, the founder of Kind. And he said exactly the same thing. People would go to him and be like, overnight success. And he was like, it took a decade to get here. It took a decade. This didn't come overnight. It's been-- we have had our fair share of up and downs. But yeah, so I think of it as a healthy decade. And look, Val, I mean, you were-- I think I said late 40s, and it doesn't matter. But I think you were in your early 50s when it started, right? You're my age. And here you are. A very youthful 60 something. But that's awesome. Like when you were 50 years old, you would not have known that by the time you're in your mid 60s, you're going to be running a business that's doing 100 million plus a year. Yeah, totally. I mean, I had none of that vision. And when I was 40 years old, I would have fallen over backwards if I'd looked into my crystal ball and seen myself standing in a hair net next to my daughter who was also in a hair net with a tray of nuts. I mean, really, people will ask us sometimes what kind of-- or will ask me what kind of advice would you give an entrepreneur? And part of it is holding the course. It doesn't mean that you don't make some compass shifts or you don't tack from time to time, but holding the course and to do it with my daughter has been the great honor of my life. And not only with her, but with our two other co-founders who are also like daughters to me. So-- Well-- And your other daughter's also in the-- And my other daughter. And here I am at the ripe old age of 66, shocking. And I used to think, wow, there's so many father and son businesses. But you so rarely hear about a mother daughter business. And I think part of me wanted to set out to change that. To be a part of a successful mother daughter business. Yeah. I mean, it is so cool that-- I mean, I just-- I could keep coming back to you as a parent, because I just think it's so cool that you trusted your child's vision and instincts. And you-- to me, it sounds like you really let breezy lead this thing. That you were not sort of making assumptions about your experience and your wisdom or-- there's like, OK, let her lead it. And I'm there for the ride. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, that was a leap of faith. Wasn't-- I mean, at the time that the business started effectively or at least conceptually-- I mean, we were paying her cell phone bill. And this was not like-- at that time, a kid, a young woman who had an incredible amount of financial sadness. So it was a leap of faith, but it became clear very, very quickly that she was absolutely the one destined to lead the company. That is not my skill set. But I was just saying, yes, I think that part of what I bring to the business is just kind of unlimited jet fuel. Sometimes there's a cost to that. And my mom's an amazing counter to that too. But what my mom has brought is she's a visionary of the business and has been from the beginning. She has an ability to see long-term consumer trends coming before they're here. And so I really think it's been that combination of jet fuel meets visionary that has been part of why we've been successful. Yeah. When you think about where you got to now, 10 years on more, and you've got a great product and brand and people know it. And it's visible to Starbucks. And here you are over $100 million in sales. How much of this do you attribute to the work in the grind? You put in how much do you think it had to do? It's just luck that people wanted skinny almonds and chocolate cover almonds. They wanted these products now. And it was just the right time and place. I would tell you, 98% hard work and 2% luck. I mean, seriously, and you use the word grind, which is what it is. It is a grind. It is relentless amount of hard work. And not to say it's not fun and all of that, but it is a lot of hard work. That grind that we were talking about was not just about us. That grind was our co-founders, Lizzy and Chrissy. So much of this is when one was down or two were down, there was somebody else to stand up and be a cheerleader. And that's been, I think, incredibly important. And I'm a very peaceful person by nature, but when people say to me, wow, you guys have been so lucky, I can feel my, by the violent side of my personality wanting to emerge. We've absolutely had some serendipitous moments and some important breaks along the way. But yeah, it has been a harder in 10 years. But it's a labor of love, right? You keep doing it because you love the people you're working with. Again, then that circle extends to this little mighty team that we've been lucky enough to have surrounding us for the past number of years. That's Val and Breezy Griffith, co-founders of Skinny Dipped. By the way, their website has some pretty good advice in case the chocolate almonds melt on their way to you. You just take the bag, you smash it, put it in the freezer, and wait for about a half hour and boom! Instant chocolate nut bark. Hey, thanks for listening to The Show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at gyros.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Carrie Thompson with Music composed by Remtine Arablui. It was edited by Niva Grant with research help from Chris Messini. Our engineers for Robert Rodriguez and Quacy Lee, our production staff also.
includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Catherine Cipher, Ramell Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raaz and you've been listening to How I Built This and don't stop the podcast just yet! Because right now you're about to hear an amazing small business story that you don't want to miss. This segment is presented by American Express with a business platinum membership the best just got even better. This week's story starts in 2009 when artist Ryan Burkhard left his job at a non-profit screen printing press to try and start his own printing business. I was kind of adrift for a few years trying to figure out how I was going to rebuild something from scratch. Ryan felt like an imposter because he didn't have a traditional background in business. I had no plan B my expectation was that I would be an academic. And he kept having the same thought. If he was going to start a company in his adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, he needed to start building relationships with other entrepreneurs. So he joined a local co-op meant for screen printers where he met Bruce Braden. One of us took a job printing something we didn't know how to print and went to the other one and said hey I got this job and it's due very soon and I don't know how to do it. Would you help me? The two of them took on a few gigs together and found that their skill sets complemented each other pretty well. It was just like so obvious that we were going in the same direction. We thought well let's let's go together. So Ryan became a co-owner of a company that Bruce had recently launched Kong screen printing and design and in the beginning it was a pretty bare bones operation. We were printing everything on a manual press meaning no mechanics. You loaded the screen onto the press, you pulled the squeegee by hand, you did everything by hand. For the first couple of years they weren't making much money but then in 2013, right before South by Southwest, Kong screen printing got a special t-shirt order. There's kind of a trope in our city that everybody comes to South by Southwest for a week or two and then they move here the following week and there is with some resentment within the community and we were approached to design a shirt that basically is as welcome to Austin. Please don't move here. The shirt they wound up printing became a huge hit locally and nationally. GQ picked up the shirt and published it in an article about how to look like a local when you're going to South by Southwest. And it was so much demand that Kong screen printing could hardly keep up. Well we learned an awful lot about fulfillment and mailing and shipping really fast. It went crazy and we were totally unprepared for it. So they hired some help and bought an automatic printing press with more colors. Buying this press was really a marker for us at Kong because it allowed us to do a lot more for our customers and it also allowed us to gain a lot of efficiency and production. Today about 15 years into their business, Ryan and Bruce have printed designs for local restaurants, businesses and nonprofits but also for big brands like Coca-Cola and Topo Chico. Their business is now bringing in roughly $3 million annually but unlike bigger printing facilities which might have multiple shifts and run all day they've made a more intentional choice. We keep it 830 to 530 Monday through Friday we both have families and we really want to have a rich quality of life. As for that shirt that put them on the map all those years ago, I still see it out around Austin from time to time. People still ask us about it and I find that kind of amazing. That's Ryan Burkhart, co-owner of Kong screen printing and design. His small business story is presented by American Express. To build a business like no other you need a card like no other. There's nothing like business platinum.
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