Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the Brand Hunch podcast, where we explore ideas and hunches around how marketers are growing great brands. It's a look under the hood at how much is marketing science and how much is built on a hunch. In today's episode, I'm joined by Jamie Villela, Managing Director and Owner of Cookie Haircare and Eurowalls. Cookie Haircare is a foaming, solid shampoo conditioner bar that's plastic free. I purchased these a few months ago prior to the show. And why I love them is that Airbnb does not standardize offering shampoo and conditioner. And the number of times I've been caught out, it means I can pack these in my bag without taking up much room. She bought the business Cookie in 2023 when it was doing four sales a day. Today, she's grown it into a $3 million business, a 10x jump in 2024 alone, centered on just two channels, meta and email. She runs Cookie and Eurowalls, alongside her husband, Lucas. Eurowalls, if you didn't know, is a premium wallpaper business, home to over 20,000 designs. They acquired in September 2024. And to give you an idea, the business has since grown revenue by 50%. Before these two businesses, she spent 15 years on the other side of the brief as an editor and content marketer across retail, startups and publishing, including roles at Center Group, Floralee and York Street Brands. If there's one thing I know about marketers, it's how many of them want to start their own business. Probably brand and Jamie has actually done it and she's done it really well. Can't wait to get into how much of this has been built on data and how much has been built on a hunch. Welcome to the show, Jamie. Thank you for having me, Lance. Firstly, wallpaper and hair care, how, what and why you're a marketer turned now founder. How did you get here today? There's no link. So the tenuous link I have attempted to craft with my comms brain is pretty things at home. So whether it's interiors or beauty, I've, I guess my background is in magazines. And so anything in terms of lifestyle interiors, anything you can whack an influencer on was always my jam. And so, uh, the, if I'm being very honest, the beauty itch to scratch was mine. And then the wallpaper adventure was my husband, Lucas, who used to work for Eurowalls. And so he loved that business and loved the model. And when we had an opportunity to buy it, he talked me into that one. And I've since grown to love wallpaper very much. So Eurowalls is in, in the B2B space with trades, then the like, and then cookie is in the B2C space selling direct through your own channels and retailer channels. Does your brain switch modes or is there more crossover than most people would think? Yeah. Eurowalls is probably about 50% B2B and 50% B2C. So there's sort of a few different, really interesting customer personas happening there. There's a lot of interior architects and specs and briefings and plans coming through our inboxes and our DMs. But then there's a lot of people just doing one feature wall in a master bedroom asking for help with a mural. So I would say, yes, the B2B element has been a big, big shift because I've just not really worked in that space much. But at the end of the day, I think as a marketer, it's always safer to just imagine anyone B2B in their Saturday morning reading the newspaper outfit and just treat them in that way. And I've actually spoken to similar people in B2B space and areas like ours, and they've said they've actually never done B2B marketing. It's just been B2C marketing and you catch those people. So yeah, I think treating everyone as just their Saturday morning persona has served me quite well in that, I would say. Yeah, nice. Before Cookie, I mentioned before you spent 15 years on the other side, creating briefs and crafting stuff for brands. Is there anything that shifted for you now owning? Is there anything you appreciate more or less being on the other side? Honestly, not really, because I mean, obviously I love the fact that at the end of the day, I can call the shots in marketing and steering the ship. But I would say I've been a first head of marketing four times at a startup or a company. And so I'm kind of used to waltzing into chaos and figuring out something from scratch. And then plucking the revenue channels and going. And so it felt just like doing that again, except with a lot more latitude, which was really exciting. But I guess probably the dramatic difference for me now is that I'm working so much more on the product side with Cookie. So formulating new products, briefs to formulators, full decision making on which accessories we curate and what we just continue. And there's a lot when you sort of buy a business in terms of inheriting an existing suite of stuff that then you have to post-rationalize. And so, I've really enjoyed that element of it a lot more than I thought I would. Were Eurowalls and Cookie both just opportunities that sort of arose or did you sort of have an itch you wanted to scratch around running your own business and brand? Yeah. So how it actually happened was that I have, obviously I was working in marketing as a head of marketing for two really rapidly scaling beauty brands that were going into Coles and Priceline at the time. And I had purposefully taken a one day a week off. So I was working four days in that role because my husband had given me this challenge at the beginning of the year. And said, look, I'm ops and finance, you're marketing and product. We would be amazing at doing something together. Why don't we, instead of starting something from scratch, which you just don't have the headspace to do in your own time, why don't we just buy a tiny e-com, almost like a little business in a box that's got some basic parameters. And it's almost like you're just being handed the baton of something that you're not beginning from ground zero. Why don't we buy it and try and scale it as sort of an experiment and just see how it goes. And I was like, buy a business. What in like the 1980s car phones, Wall Street, buy, sell $250 million. Is that like, it just made no sense in my head. And I just didn't know that there was this thriving flipper.com industry of little businesses being bought and sold all the time. I had no idea of it. And I was also quite a purist. I was like, I would like to begin from scratch, but I heard where it was coming from. And I was like, that does sound convenient and compelling. And so it actually happened so organically with Cookie because I randomly had been editing the print edition of InStyle Australia, and they'd thrown me an article on. Shampoo bars, which I'd never heard of in my grown life. And it was about, you know, sustainable swaps and, you know, swapping this for that. And they were talking about swapping bottles for bars. And, you know, they were talking about how Loewe had launched Soap on a Rope and Glossier was doing face bars and bars are back. And I thought, oh, how interesting, filed that away. And then a few months later, as we were at the beginning of this journey of buying, a small shampoo bar business came up for sale. What are the odds? It was actually the first one we audited. And it was just a no-brainer. It happened so quickly. We just bought it. It was a beautiful business. It had been set up by an e-com consultant who just knew exactly what she was doing. And so, you know, the supplier relationships were there. The product was fantastic. She was doing four sales a day profitably, which is pretty rare and just on Meta at the time. And I just thought this is fun and it's an emerging category and I could play with this and I wouldn't have to completely start from scratch. In terms of the formulations, which enthused me. So that's how that one happened. And then for Eurowalls, as I said, Lucas had worked in that business. So when we went on our first date, he was like, I'm working for a wallpaper company while doing my MBA. I was like, okay. I just had no frame of reference. I was like, is it commercial vinyls at KFC? Is it pretty wallpaper? I didn't really understand it. And he just had a great time and loved that biz. And then they actually came to him in his sort of, he has a lot of M&A experience. And he was like, I'm going to do this a couple of years later, asking him to help value the business for sale. And so he looked under the hood, did a due diligence on it and was like, I want it. And now I just have to convince my wife that this is an amazing idea. And the timing of it was quite unfortunate because how that happened was that we had cookie in 2023. I only went full-time on it in Jan of 2024. So I've been running it full-time for two and a half years now. And we took over Eurowalls in September of 2024. And the week we took over Eurowalls was in September of 2024. And we took it over. Cookie decided to triple, which brought utter stock chaos. And I was trying to Google what a paste the wall adhesive was and reply to customer inquiries. And it was just this absolute cluster of pain operationally. And I was in New Zealand for a friend's wedding that exact week. So it was just, yeah, we'll always laugh at that. A week to remember. A week to remember. So to Cookie for a sec, you mentioned that the product was great. The sector was growing. You mentioned that the business from an e-commerce perspective was great. What did you think of the brand you were acquiring? What did you see in it that excited you? And what did you sort of instinctively know, we're going to need to retire that? A hundred percent. I think the point of it was that I wanted to find something that didn't have maybe a lot of brand polish on it because I find that bit so much fun. And so it was at the time when I inherited the brand, it had been done at home by the founder. And she was, as I said, an amazing e-com consultant, but she'd done the logo on Canva. I don't think she had, you know, an agency or a professional design team roll it out. It was very simple, and all of the cans, so they come in tins or boxes, the shampoo bars, and all of them were in the same green colored packaging, which is obviously great in terms of brand recognition and brand blocking on shelf and all these things that we know. Utter chaos operationally when you have 10 different scents and they're all green in the warehouse. And for the poor customer online trying to figure out different essential oils and how they might correspond to the same green box. So I was like, you know what? I don't believe the rainbow brand is dead. We're going to do it. I knew going in that we would need to rebrand it. But I think, you know, I always use this analogy that buying a business is like a house renovation. It's always best to go in and live in the existing structure for a time before you go in swinging with your hammer. Because firstly, you're respecting the base that's been built. You don't know the magic or the secret sauce behind how it's grown to where it is necessarily when you first waltz in there. And so I wanted to live with the existing brand. So I did that for quite a while, actually. And then in parallel, I was running focus groups with the customers. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And with people that had never used bars before and trying to get a sense of where's the gap and what would it take to convince a mainstream Kerastase audience. that a shampoo bar for travel could be a great idea. So that was really, you know, it was the excitement of not a lot's been done on the sort of brand packaging side. Channels have not been utilized yet that need to be. And there's just an incredible product at the core of it and very enthused customers that I know that I could build on. It's a great point about rebrands. We talk a lot, Achela, about learning the rules before you break them. And I think you can have a hypothesis or an external perspective based on you maybe as a customer or based on, you know, summation of all of your experience. But until you're living it and understanding what the customer perceives to be important or what's not working, you know, from the inside out, it's also a great and ripe sort of training ground for testing and experimenting with language or, you know, seeding ideas before you go all in. You mentioned the focus groups before. What kind of things were you exploring and did anything surprise you? Ah, they were amazing. I love doing them and I really should do more of them. It's such a, like, something that I preach about all the time and I haven't done one since, which is really bad. But I've done them for other brands in the past as part of rebrands and I just think they're incredible. A lot of people think you can achieve the same with a survey and I do not agree. I think what comes through in that room, people's faces, their reactions, their, you know, you just can't put a price on that. So. It's much more instinctive to, you know, you see an idea or you show something, you sort of get initial reactions. Whereas surveys, you can, sit and write something, may not be completely true. It's something you want to be true or you perceive differently. Oh my gosh, isn't that it? And I think people just want to bash out a perfect sounding answer and not their unvarnished thought. And so I, I got together focus groups of different ages and also people that either had used Shampoo Bar or hadn't. And I think because we are, you know, a low tox plastic free brand, there was so much to nail down in terms of how far are we going to veer on this sort of like chemicals, phthalates world and plastic. Free Captain Planet world versus just being a really excellent mass travel product. That was beautiful. And to this day, you know, we could still veer in those directions to different extents, but I felt strongly that in a sea of what I perhaps unfairly described as like the sad sage eco brands, no disrespect to sage as a color. I love it. I had a sage plant in my background, but I think no one had had enough fun here. No one had had enough fun with low tox with solid shampoo in general. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to remove the guilt and the plastic shaming and almost the toxin shaming from it and just let the products incidentally be those things and let them just be an excellent mass product. And that's what came through in those focus groups was that a lot of people, you know, there's obviously massive barriers to entry with using a bar. Our grandmothers used soap, you know, shampoo didn't come in bottles until the sixties actually. And so everyone was using solid bars before then. And so older demos are much more primed for that experience, but for our age group, it's just a bit like, Whoa, will it, what will it feel like in my head? And so I got to hear all those barriers coming through and I got to hear what my existing customers really loved about the product and experience. And then I got to hear where the gaps were in the existing, you know, set of accessories, like there was no draining tray and they were going mushy. And so we solved that. So yeah, I think it was very important. And I think finding white space in that category was much simpler than maybe I'd planned because people just hadn't nailed that down yet. And did you alienate any eco customers that the brand sort of came with or how did they journey? No, they're loving it because I think for them, the reason for them is still plastic free perhaps. And I think, you know, um, we've done surveys. We have a closed group of 3000 of our most loyal repeat customers and I pull them all the time on different things. There's sort of my IQ database of new product development and ideas and feedback, honestly. And I pulled them fairly recently and said, you know, how many of you were using bars before joining us? Um, and how many of you never used a bar? And I said, yeah, I've used a bar. And they said, yeah, I've used a bar. And I said, 76% of them had never tried a shampoo bar before switching to us. And they just switched to us based on the UGC, the ad, the hype, the 9,000 five-star reviews. And so we realized, oh, wow, we're not actually poaching off other bar brands. We're expanding a new category and taking it more mass. And that was really fascinating to us. And it kind of made us realize that's really cool because there's a lot of people that are, you know, firmly plastic free. And I am very low plastic as a person as well, but it's not something I preach about. And I think it's you can still use it for those reasons, but it's sort of all things to all people. Like there's a lot of naturopaths stocking our bars for the low tox element for people with endo fertility. That whole journey has been a huge part of my journey as well with stage four endo. So I loved that the product was extremely clean, but not preachy. And so I think people almost take what they need from this brand, but it's very neutral to the masses as well, which I think helps a lot. Yeah. A hundred percent. What would you say to a founder or a marketer that is clinging to eco-positioning because it's kind of a, you know, it's kind of a, you know, the right thing to do, even if it's not working from a conversion perspective. Say the time's over, babe. No one cares. And I, I say that, you know, really irreverently, but if you want to drill down really plastic free or, you know, using alternate forms of recycled plastic or BPA free plastic, all these things are sort of table stakes now. So if you're someone that wants to play in the masses, a lot more people are caring a lot more about that stuff because of, you know, the microplastics epidemic. And the BPA studies that are coming through. So people are a lot more scared about stuff and they're sort of naturally switching anyway. What I really enjoy is that in supermarkets now you're seeing a lot of products that similarly to cookie are doing the right thing around plastic, but they're just not preaching about it necessarily. So I've noticed this, this really cool trend that generally speaking, a lot of supermarket products are healthier or more low tox or more low plastic than they were five years ago, even, which I think is just healthy and cool and not something that's being preached about necessarily. But I think, I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. I care at all about plastic waste, which I do. I want millions of people just having a cookie bar in their bag for travel that they might use a few times a year. Cause how good that's so many bottles saved. But I think if you put your whole brand promise and platform around eco, you're just not going to reach the mass. And I think that's where change happens. I really do. Brand purpose has sort of been dragged through the mud the last, I don't know, five years where various industry heavyweights would say, it sort of doesn't matter. It's over, you know, purpose either as table stakes or be more interesting and find different ways to communicate. How do you see the role of brand purpose having changed? Where do you think it's heading? I think brand purpose is something you still need to heavily internalize as a business owner. And you have to have rock solid ethics and an approach for your team and yourself behind what you do every day. Because I know that that really sustains me as a person. I love knowing how many people have incidentally switched to a really low tox clean product. Now when distributors go and audit our ingredients, which is a really good thing. And I think that's a really good thing. We have, you know, some of the strictest health distributors in the country auditing us all the time. They're like, the formulas are so clean. And I'm like, I know because I have endo and I'm really passionate about it. But people are shocked by it because it's just so not something we're really top of funnel about necessarily. And so I think that makes me so fired up to come to work every day, knowing that just so many women's fertility is going to be improved. And so many people are just putting less stuff on their toddler's heads. How cool. And not again, not to demonize the rest of the industry, because that's not what I'm about. But I just think that keeps me humming. And then I think for our team, you know, the plastic free thing is really important to a lot of millennials and even Gen Z. We're seeing that coming through quite a lot. And so it keeps people humming. But again, I think there's a difference between what sustains you as a brand, a founder, a team, and what other people are going to connect with publicly and then buy through. And I think people love about us that we are, you know, zero waste and low tox. And so I know that that's something I connect to, but that is a nice brand, nice to have, and the product's got to work. So I think that noble activism streak that was extremely prominent, I would say in the 2010s has quietened down and it's been replaced by fun CPG. And so you've got to kind of move with the times, but I think a lot of it's going to be dictated to by your personality, like how much of a sort of activist streak you have as a person that comes through in your brand. We're a reflection of our brands at the end of the day and vice versa. So you landed on a brand platform, around good, clean fun. Did you set yourself KPIs? How did you know, obviously you got your ideally a commercial uplift or downtick, but how did you know it was working? What did you set out to achieve? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think when I inherited the biz, there wasn't a brand platform per se. Perhaps it was, it was extremely activism based, extremely zero waste, plastic free, leaning, very Captain Planet, I would say. And so we'd built a really lovely audience of people who were so excited about that. And then we're almost like, oh my gosh, yeah, sure. So again, in the effort of wanting to reach that 76% that we've now acquired who had never tried a bar before, a good, clean fun was sort of a tongue in cheek working reference for me in terms of cool. So the formulas are good for you. They're made of clean ingredients. They're good for the planet and they're fun to use. Like cookie is macaron adjacent visually. It's a dessert platform, which is very rare in health to this day, I would say. And so I thought this would be again, that more mass market approach versus a more noble or earnest approach to marketing a product like this, which hasn't been done. often here. And so people really latched onto the fun quite quickly when the rainbow branding came out. And I feel like the color of the bars themselves were always colorful and the packaging was just one color. And so when people started getting that reference, it was like, I'm using the pink one and I'm using the yellow one. It was very Pokemon, got to catch them all by the end. Like I have customers that will buy every single one and they'll try and get all of them in a year and then they'll be swapping them with friends and like our club will be blowing up. And so it's become this really gamified thing around the colors. I think people love the fun of it. And I think people enjoy not being plastic shamed. I do. Reminds me of Samantha Wills. Do you remember back in the, like, I don't know, ages ago, she had all the different rings with different resin and stones and everyone wanted to collect them all. And it became around like collector's items and kind of filling the gaps where you don't have certain products. That's it. To your point about KPIs, I think I didn't look at it in that way, like for the first one to three years. I mean, I've heard Alex or Mosey says this in a really interesting way. He says that revenue from one to three million, like getting from one to three, he calls it the swamp because you are drowning as a founder and you don't have enough cash money yet to hire people or like plug in amazing agencies or have KPIs or like, you know, research. You're just surviving, hoping that it takes off, proving product market fit and just trying to get out of the swamp. And we graduated from the swamp last year and mercifully have grown a lot more since then. I think we've grown a lot more since then, which has been incredible. So we've been able to expand the team and we've just hired two new full-time people in the last month. And so that's been incredible. But I think when I think about KPIs myself, my KPI was to survive and to have a very good news bite for Lucas on Sundays when he did the weekly P&L, you know, summary for me. Yeah. And to keep your marriage. And to remain married. And so, yeah, I mean, power to him. He's just let me run completely free and that's how we've stayed married because, you know, we've been doing it for a long time. Because we have very different skills and really different lanes that we run in. So we give each other a lot of freedom in that, which I think is quite rare. A lot of founders would have a bit more overlap in their skill set or like care a bit more about each other's domain. So I think that's naturally been really helpful. But yeah, I think, you know, I was just testing this brand platform and ads and being like, well, people respond to this if I don't go hardcore. And they did. And that was amazing to see. I've known you for, I don't know, over 10 years, probably more like 15 years. Something I know to be true about you is your love of the word. And I don't mean that in a. Religious way. I mean, the written word and the English language and what it's able to achieve. You've always been a great writer, a reader. You always sound so much smarter than anyone else when you talk. Much more polished language. Where does that love come from? And how much do you think has underpinned, say, testing and learning from an ad perspective or the copy that's driven the success of Cookies Growth? Thank you for saying that. My mum is English and I just have this firm belief that people from Britain have this obsession with the English language and they pass on this love for it. By osmosis. So she still will use words I've never heard. And I'm like, I just don't know how to write that down. Pause. Dictionary. She's cool. She communicates. And my brothers and I definitely got that incredible sort of skill from her, I would say, and just loving words and challenging ourselves around that. I was always like, you know, little miss 98% English, 42% maths. So I have an extreme brain. Probably explains your business split with Lucas, right? You both put your domains where you operate. Correct. I'm nothing without him. And so, you know, I think it's such a shame because I was sitting dormant for years just waiting to be activated by someone who could run a P&L. So he's come along and like, you know, we've grown disgustingly fast. And I say that intentionally, like, how cool, fast growth. We love it. Anyone that's been in it knows it's very hard, very painful, very cash scary to grow as swiftly as we did. And so, yeah, I'd say we went from, you know, 180k in 2020. 20, 23 to 3 mil by the end of last year and have kept growing at pace this year. And so you can only do that without loans in BC if you've got someone extremely disciplined in the wizardry that is cash. And a good risk appetite. 100%. And even just things I've learned from him, you know, he won't over invest in stock. He invests in just the right amount of stock. So the cash isn't all sitting in a warehouse. So yeah, he's been incredible. But I think in terms of me and language and how that comes through an e-com environment, I am so passionate. About how copy connects. And I think people have latched on to our business and to our ads because we are so very human and down to earth and unpolished. And that's everything for me in terms of the kinds of creators that I choose to work with and how they speak through to the opening line of the ad. It's not something I've plotted. It's just, again, I think so much of your brand is just an output of who you are as a person and your values. Right. And so I think the best brands designed by strategists and positioned, they come out of someone or out of a team's shared values. And it's just carried through really naturally through all those touch points. And so whether that's the way that my beautiful customer service manager replies to every single email, which is not like templated, shut it down, file it. It's have a conversation. Sound really human, sound really empathetic. Copy and the way we sound comes through everywhere. And I think an example I use a lot is even things like the way I'd reply to ad comments. I still reply to quite a few a week just because I think it's so important to keep connected to that stuff. And I often take the opportunity to banter with customers or to like say something unexpected because anytime it sounds like a template or a customer service reply, you're like, oh, and I think that, yeah, ads, I mean, ads is how we grew. And so you've got all these ads, you've got all these threads of ad comments. What an opportunity for someone to have like a really shocking interaction with a brand that you wouldn't get from the CEO of L'Oreal. So I've had a lot of fun with that. And I think, yes, like words have achieved so much more in our, you know, scrappy brand than, you know, a beautiful poised billboard could have because people feel heard and they feel connected to. I have a hunch that over subsequent years, we're going to see much more emphasis put on unexpected copy as a differentiator. And if you think about a brand being some of its parts and, you know, reputational or reputation generally, I think what you're talking about there around being unexpected and being human and being kind of like quirky. Is something that AI maybe will be able to achieve in the future. But I think people bring such a beautiful, almost like culturally relevant when to push enough, but not too far that it's kind of awkward. I think we'll see more and hopefully see more brands leaning into copy as a differentiator, building brands through words and humor and how they choose to turn up. So hopefully that's also part of your cookie journey. Agreed. Yes. I'm so passionate about that. You've deliberately scaled cookie on two channels, meta and email and said no to everything else until you could fund the cookie. Yeah. So I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think it's incredibly brave. What did you base the decision on? How'd you come to that point? Counted how many hands I had and that was that. So it was really, I think the thing to know about our biz is that, you know, once we got to the one mil or the two mil or three mil, we then, we didn't add a team then either. So it really was, I mean, my husband jumped in. So basically I, we bought the biz in 2023. I jumped in full time in that January of 2024 and was alone, alone. Alone. Um, without agencies, without budget, nothing. So it was just me staring at meta ads, having never bought them in my life, having overseen as head of marketing, these teams of ad buyers and worked with amazing agencies and attended Google HQ, uh, but had never actually punched things into the platform and realized that it was, I looked around and I was like, I guess I'm up. I guess my 42% maths has come into the fore. And so it was, I really didn't believe I could do it. And so if, anyone is hearing this and they're like, I could never, I'm like, no, no, no, no. I could never. And yet it is possible. And all I really needed from Lucas was a weekly CPA target of here's when we make money and here's where we lose money. And we started with 50 bucks a day in ad spend that, you know, we'd been handed over and I was too scared to touch it for months. I was just like shaking in the corner, but we just slowly started scaling up ads. I think what I brought was the what makes a good ad. And so having worked for these incredible previous DTC brands with big ad studios, you just know what works. And so I was able to commission stuff very cheaply gifting at first and dialed it up. But really we thought, you know what? A lot of brands have used organic as that positioning playground where you kind of like figure out what works, go a bit viral. That is an amazing strategy, but it's very resource heavy and it can be very low reward if it takes, and it takes a long time. Whereas I've seen a long time, a lot of work. And so I have seen brands, other brands do the same thing, but on paid ads, because you get the same feedback loop from a cold audience, but it's almost more like doing TikTok organic than doing Instagram organic where paid ads are serving to people that don't know you. So I thought if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Let's go. And so I focused on that. And then I think another thing I was really passionate about with that copy editorial background was EDMs. So email marketing and Klaviyo became our other string of our bow. And we just kept it so lean. So I just started scaling up ads and, you know, we went from four sales and then within five months, we were doing 40 sales. And then the New Zealand weekend, we scaled to 130 sales overnight. And then it just kind of kept growing. And so now we're doing about 300 sales a day on D2C. And then we have 300 retail stores. And so I'd say, you know, that retail channel has become our third one. And that was since last September going into those stores. But really the rest of our growth, getting to that three mil was Meta and Klaviyo. And I, still defend that strategy because I think the reality is if you can't find winning ads, Meta, which is a phenomenally powerful channel and is a lot faster to get swift growth with than TikTokers, unless you go, you know, get a lucky honeypot. Meta is actually a lot kinder in terms of CPAs to start with cold. If you can do that, you've sort of proven that your product market fit works, that your brand positioning is hitting and that your copy and creative match and are reaching the correct pockets of audience. I can't really think of anything else that does that for you that swiftly. And so I'm a big fan of it, but it was a big commitment, you know, commissioning the ads, cutting the ads myself, buying the ads, scaling the ads. And that's the one thing Lucas doesn't actually touch from sort of a financials perspective. He'll let me know how we go, but I'm in there personally still to this day, optimizing every ad. And so I think it's important and it's doable. How do you think about the split between future demand and current demand? When somebody is on Meta, are you treating them with some sort of intent to purchase or are you still doing high level brand work? Essentially, how are you splitting your budget for creative across brand and more into performance? It's such a cool question. And I think one thing I think I'm very unusual on is my view of brand versus performance in Meta. Oh, tell me more. People genuinely still believe that Meta equals performance and not brand, unless you run a traffic ad, which I ungenerously perhaps refer to as the Meta Donation Fund. So you will not catch this girl running a traffic ad? But except in like an extreme situation. So I think the reality is that all of your ads are brand ads on Meta because it's essentially cold billboarding to a group. So I think where we've gone wrong is that people, I think this is even sort of like eight years ago, people were using Meta as this sort of cha-ching, almost like pokies game where you were whacking out X percent off and like quite a voucher-led, gamified, lo-fi approach. Whereas I think with our creative. You can do like, you know, for our UGC, for example, we're plugging creators in, assuming no one's ever used solid bar of shampoo before, assuming people have no idea who we are. And so our ads are like, take X percent off today. They're long infomercials about what on earth is this and very explanatory and very top of funnel, almost like a friend at coffee is talking to you about this wacky thing she bought on the internet. Which also is sitting down with you for coffee. And I'm sure you'd be talking in the same way. It's very you. A hundred percent. And so our creators are very conversational. And so it's much less sort of sell, sell performance marketing. It's actually very top of funnel in the way that we do it. And so we have a lot of fun with the copy and the comms around that and even the offers. But then there's obviously the middle and bottom of funnel ads and they're doing what they're meant to do. But I don't subscribe to the idea that, you know, if you only run your business on there, you aren't doing brand. Because I guess. I guess how we've built brand is that we've done these really top of funnel ads that draw completely cold audiences in. Then we've built a lot of community in parallel and not in the traditional organic socials way. But we've got, you know, these closed groups of followers. We've got our email database who talk to us like we're friends. And then the proof was really in the pudding when they pulled us into retail instead of us pitching into retail, which is incredible itself. So I think, yeah, brand versus performance is a bit of a misnomer for me, because Meta is just a channel and it's on you, how you message that channel and what you use it for. And so I would love to stretch the marketing industry's thinking around what's possible on Meta because it's not a strategy. It's just a channel. And I think we talk about it like it's a strategy. What's been your highest performing ad of all time and why do you think it worked well? I think for us, it's still, there's a few, there's honestly like quite a few templates that work really well for us. Oh, there's a few because we just do really well. Well, no, but. As in, I'm quite surprised at the funny little templates that we've plucked out that do repeatedly work. You know, you get a shot in the dark ad and you're like, oh, this just went nuts. And we almost don't even know why, but I've now had a few of those and I've managed to replicate them. And I'm like, that's a template. And then you get another one, you're like, okay, that's a template. And so that stuff helps a lot. But honestly, for us, I've said this in the past, but it's been longer form than Facebook would assume or enjoy. Longer form UGC conversational to camera, talking about it like, you're a friend, not very salesy. Since I bought Cookie through your website, I now get pushed various ads, which I didn't get before. And quite a few of them have you in them. What's driven that? Did you sort of know that was probably going to happen when you bought a business or is that just based off the success of which ads are working? I'd say it probably took two years to put my face on the internet. That was a big thing. Really not Gen Z over here. And so I realized that, I mean, it was really Lucas trying to encourage me. He's like, the minute you talk about your brand and your style, you're going to get a lot of people. And I'm like, we're going to fly. And I was like, I know, but it's just, I don't know. Really compelling answer from me. It's probably verbatim what I said. And once I did it, it did work. So I think there is still that piece of founder led storytelling, really. People just want to buy into a story. And I think in the spirit of me, you know, talking a lot about setting up your business to be bought one day, you want to ensure that your founder brand isn't inextricably linked to your brand, because that's really hard for someone else to come in and take over. So you want to make sure that there's a really healthy balance of, you know, UGC creators speaking to your brand who get really known for it and the brand itself converting with ads about the brand. And then I think the founder can be a pillar, but it shouldn't be the whole thing. And so, yeah, we have leaned a lot more on me in the last year and that's worked really well. And I think it's that storytelling element of people seeing me react to a piece of news in the business or seeing, you know, hearing the story behind why I do what I do. And I think founder is not dead in terms of ad content, but I've found just as much success with UGC creators, to be honest, as me as well. From what I've heard, you're fully data-led on meta from your CPAs, creative testing that you sort of let the numbers decide, as you should with a marketing hat on. But everywhere else in the business, it sounds like you're sort of gut feel, founder, conversational, this just feels right for us as a business. You're running on a bit more of a hunch. Why split the business that way? And what does keeping most of it hunch-led protect? I think that's a great question. And you're speaking to someone who is hunch-led in personality. So I, again, I think that that extends to. Just who I am as a person. Lucas is incredibly data-led. Like his favorite quote is, if you're not God, show me data. And he would tell me that a lot. And my favorite quote is, strategy is what you say no to. Love it. And so those are two things that have kind of really led us. And so if strategy is what you say no to, that's why we have two channels and then eventually the third wholesale one. Because when you're scaling with a small team, that's what makes it possible. And then in terms of, if you're not God, show me data, you know, every single Sunday morning, I get an email from Lucas very early telling us profit and loss for the week. And that's been something we have tracked. I remember in 2024, I asked Lucas. What a fun relationship. You guys know how to party on a weekend. I know. He's such an early bird. It's insane. Not me. That's not me. So I think in 2024, I asked him if I could send 20 influencers a box of cookie bars. And he was like, okay. Oh, okay. All right. Because that's how hairline profit was back then. He's like, I've got a forecast. We've got. All right. And that was a big deal. And we just, we, we roll over laughing at that now because it's just, it's so quaint and we're so grateful to have exited the swamp. And I think in terms of Meta, the reality is, you know, we started this thing with 10K in working capital and we haven't taken loans. Like it, everything has scaled from the profit of the biz. And so Meta simply had to be profitable. We couldn't raise and burn and we couldn't burn our existing cash. And so I guess I, once I had those, fun parameters of CPA target, here's where we make money. Here's where we don't. Everything around the creative and the way that I taught myself to buy was a hunch. Like to this day, when people jump into my ad account, they're like, what is this? Like, it's so like a bouncy brain was here. And I, I love it because I find Meta so creative, like the backend of Meta. I'm like, are you saying I can just do whatever I want and there's no rules. So I've just really had a party of one with that. And I think, you know, the parameters around profit and loss are data led, but the hunch still comes into all the creative and everything behind what I do in there. So I don't think it's even necessarily treated super differently to the rest. I think it's just that I had parameters to follow. And then for the rest of the business, I think that, you know, when you are trying to exit the swamp, you're opportunistic. So you're trying to think through what's something that's going to surprise me this week about growth that I didn't know. And what's something we need to double down on. So it's not strategy and you're perpetually in flux, but I do think there's an element of needing to go where the gold is and needing to just like follow your nose a little bit. So I think the hunch stuff really comes in because you have to be prepared to be surprised when something amazing works and something you really wanted to work doesn't. And so there's a humility and an open-handedness around, I didn't know we would grow with this three minute ad. And that's what tripled us. And so that's what we do now. And so, yeah, it's, you know, I've had Meta pros be like, Jamie, your ads really should be 30 seconds. And I'm like, have you founded and grown a business? Yeah. We love Meta pros. They taught me to buy, but I think I'm such a cool free service that they offer, by the way. I'm just grateful. This podcast is not sponsored by Meta. It's not sponsored by Meta. And look, some are, I'll be honest, some are great and some have been not great, but the couple that were great really gave me those buying chops. So yeah, I think honestly, the whole thing is hunch led is my summary, but Lucas has been phenomenal since he joined the biz full-time last June at bringing in that structure, bringing in, that data-led piece. I have so much more data in the business now than. meant he was working full time. And so that's been amazing too. So you just mentioned no external investment. You sort of reinvested profit back into your growth. Have there been any great ideas you've had to kill because you just didn't have the budget? There's so many ideas churning around in my head. I think the hardest challenge for me coming in is when you've been a head of marketing at a well-funded series of startups in a row with a large team and fun creativity and agencies plugged in, you do get used to best practice, right? You know what good looks like. You know what healthy brand tracking looks like. You have all these amazing softwares and agencies and people. And so I've had to psych myself out of, oh, it would be so cool if we did a billboard that said this, or if we did an activation that was this. But to this day, we've never done a billboard or an activation. And that's been because of the way we've chosen to grow. And while I've never regretted the way we've chosen to grow because we own all of our business, it's so hard. It's like a frustrated previous brand marketer where you're stuck with your two channels. And so I think, yeah, every day, honestly, I'll get another idea and I have to calmly shelve it. But I've stored them all up so that one day we will be able to do those things. Running two business simultaneously can be a sign that neither is getting a founder's full attention. How do you split your time? How do you work most effectively with Lucas across both of the businesses? Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, Cookie is most of my job and Eurowalls is most of his to an extent. So he's much more hands on on Eurowalls weekly and I'm much more hands on on Cookie. But, you know, he runs the ops and finance for both. And then I run marketing for both. I think Eurowalls is a really different business because it's a lot more relational. So there's a lot more people on the phone in that business, our team with Euro building up sales, et cetera. It's a lot less reliant on Meta, for example. If Eurowalls required my headspace on Meta to the extent that Cookie does, that simply wouldn't be doable. But it's a very different sort of channel mix for Eurowalls in a way that it hums along. So, yeah, I mean, I think I've had to have great ideas for Euro in parallel and sort of shoot them over the fence and be like, this would be a great idea and hope someone catches it. I think what Eurowalls has done is really interesting because we had a lot more of a brand that we inherited. So, you know, Eurowalls is actually the first ever online wallpaper business in Australia. It was founded in 2008. It's been in every magazine. You know, it's been used by the top design houses and then it just lay dormant for a few years, essentially, over. So it hadn't been invested in at all. It didn't have email marketing. So I had to onboard Klaviyo. It didn't have Meta advertising. I had to start a cold Meta account. And so, you know, growing the Meta account from zero for Eurowalls was really tough. Warming a database on Klaviyo for the first time since Westfield was really tough. All these kind of new things. But where we've had fun, where I've had a lot of fun, is the brand partnerships. So we've partnered with, you know, Fenton and Fenton, Three Birds Renovations, Few and Far, a lot of these incredible design houses. And that's really put our brand on the map and built a lot of trust. So I think when people land on the website and know that we're, you know, a partner of Three Birds, that instantly signals something for people. But we've never had something like that for Cookie, for example. So I think, yeah, the role of PR and brand partnerships for Euro has been incredibly important. And then for Cookie, we've actually been able to grow based on sort of our own merit. So I think I would love to have more headspace and time for Eurowalls, but we have purposefully deprioritized marketing's role on that business because we had to go where the and we just had to double down. So that decision was made for us. If tomorrow you were set with the challenge of growing Eurowalls on Meta, do you think there are tactics that would work for that brand? Or do you think the tactics that you've been really successful in doing more of with Cookie are only applicable in that haircare context? No, I think they're definitely relevant. Same thing. Definitely. I think, you know, it's not necessarily a three-minute face-to-camera infomercial, but in terms of, the kinds of UGC that you would commission and the way you'd run them and just kind of the kind of brand that you would build, you could definitely do that on there. I think the reality is that, you know, Google works incredibly well for Eurowalls. It's more of a Google search and tent-led purchase than shampoo bars are. And so the channel split there is just very, very different. So we're more Google reliant for Eurowalls than Meta and then Cookie is the inverse. But I think there's a lot of fun to be had. You found that women over 40 embracing gray hair were a bit of a breakout audience for Cookie, but you didn't start there. How did that insight change, not just your targeting, but your audience? Maybe the way you thought about the Cookie brand. Well, we inherited an older demo. So I would say actually we inherited more like a 50 plus audience with Cookie when I first took it on. And again, I think it's that familiarity with the concept of bar products. It was just so baked in for them and just a no-brainer. There weren't as many barriers to entry. And then, yeah, we've definitely acquired a lot more of like the late thirties, forties since then, but I'd say it's still veers older because so many of the concerns that we're targeting like thinning and, you know, perimenopausal hair, changes just relate to that audience and are a shill in really. So I think there was a lot of UGC wins early that made me go, oh, wow, like the CPAs here and the return here versus trying to go younger. I think as marketers, particularly, we have this really unfair, you know, millennial catnip thing where we, we want to go for Gen Z and be cool. And it says something about us that we've been able to capture that young audience. I never once contemplated targeting Gen Z with this and I was like, well, unless I'm going to wake up Gen Z tomorrow, that's not appropriate. Know your limitations. I wonder if that will shift if you hire a younger team in the future. Totally could. Totally could. But I also, it didn't excite me because I think that 40 plus crowd is so underserved. The CPAs are so much lower. You're dealing with people that just aren't feeling represented. My 82 year old aunt, she said to me, it's the first time I've seen someone with gray hair market to me on Facebook about one of our ads when we had a gray hair wedding. And she was like, it was so lovely because we just never see ourselves. And I was like, wow, that's so, and she's on Facebook all day. And I just thought that was such an interesting insight. I think older demos are also on Facebook longer, right? Their dwell time's a lot longer. So much more. And like meta ads will serve evenly across Facebook and Instagram, obviously, but ours will be Instagram for those gray hair creators every time. And I think also when people try and market to older demos, it comes across either condescending or infantilizing. Like it's it's very naff often the way that people my age might attempt to speak to those people. And so I think nailing that tone has been really key where they just don't feel coddled. They just feel empowered. And that's been really key for us. But yeah, once I realized that like forties is where it's at, I just, I was not ashamed to double down on that. And I'm, you know, I'm about to turn 38. It's relevant. And I was excited about that challenge of speaking to an audience that isn't me because as a marketer, that takes a lot of empathy and a lot of listening. How much of your of a bar of shampoo do you spend a lot of time there? I do. I think it's just, it's such a shock to so many people. I had never seen or used one. So I know they exist in the supermarket because now I go into the supermarket and I'll see shampoo bars. You go into chemist's warehouse, you see shampoo bars, you go into Mecca, you see $42 shampoo bars. So they're out there. I think maybe my brain just always thought it was soap or I just didn't pause in that aisle. So yes, there's definitely a massive opportunity there for just education because people, most of the time, if I'm at a party and I say what we sell, they've never heard of it. So that's really fun. And it's also quite rare. Unlike for example, wallpaper where you must own a home in order to use permanent wallpaper like ours. Most people own hair. Yeah. Most people own hair and most people wash it. I'll have the occasional awkward chat with a bald guy who like just laughs at me. Who might have friends and family who need a cookie bar. Also they, they often still wash their scalps. So, there's that. But I, I think a lot of it is. That is so visual. I had a guy at GoVita conference come up to me and I was like, oh, would you like to try one? And he was like, I was like, well, I don't want to assume. In this day and age, you can assume nothing. Yeah. How dare you assume. So yeah, I think it's a lot of education, but the fact that so many people are willing to do it, I think it's because the travel angle gets them. So I'll often say if I'm in a restaurant, I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm in a wedding or something. Sometimes I won't even tell them the name of my brand. I'm like, I'm not going to tell you what my brand is, but here's what we do. Just go find any shampoo bar and travel with it. And then tell me how you go, because it's life-changing as long as it has a drainer tray and dries out properly, by the way. But I think, you know, I'm really passionate about the idea of just every Aussie having a shampoo bar for travel because shampoo leaking in your suitcase is so annoying. Plus really heavy. Yeah. It's really heavy. And also the little minis are so watered down because a bottle of shampoo is 80% water that they only last a few days into your pharmacy in Greece buying a new mini. My personal experience buying a cookie bar before that, I would use a little Aesop mini travel ones, but it would like, if I was on more than a two week trip, obviously you'd go through them. Then I'd end up buying local bottles of crap, supermarket shampoo, probably in a language I couldn't understand. And then carrying them all the way back to Australia. Whereas bought the bars, I have obviously very blonde hair. So I put the purple toner on. I do have a question though. Are you meant to be lathering in your hand with the bar to put on your hair? Are you meant to like rub the bar? That felt odd, rubbing essentially a bar head. What's the thinking there? It feels so wrong, doesn't it? It is that mental barrier of like, there's no soap in it. It's just shampoo. If you took the water out and made it a solid bar, there's no rules. If you rub it in your hands, you'll get less lather and you put the lather on your head. But if you have really like oily three day old hair, you put the bar straight on and you'll get heaps of foam. I've had quite a few customers say, I found it too foamy at first. And then I realized I had to lather it in my hands, not straight onto my head. Now it's lasting a lot longer. And similarly to the travel angle. And this is why you just can't predict what your customers are going to tell you. But a lot of them saying, well, I actually still find even the 65 gram bar too big. And so I've cut them in half. And so I've cut. the conditioner in half and I've cut the shampoo in half and I put them both in one tin. That is quite clever. If you're really on Jetstar with seven kilo carry on and that's all you're traveling with, I get the half half. Same. And so, you know, that's made me think, okay, so I'm going to have to make half size bars for shorter trips. So now you're doing a partnership with low cost airlines. Oh my goodness. So yeah, I think you can't predict how people will use this product and what they'll do with it. And, you know, I have some chaotic stuff that happens in my closed group community where they'll melt down the bars and pour them into new molds and make different shapes. And I'm like, okay, like the experimentation going on in there is just absolutely wild. I mean, that does make for like future, like partnership collaboration, kind of small batch runs where you've got to collect them all. I feel like you're going to become the Pokemon of hair care. Pokemon of hair care is the goal. That's our actual platform. Working with a spouse can get romanticized by some founders and then treated as a bit of a red flag by investors or advisors. What's your honest take? Give it to me real. Honest take really real is that Lucas and I work unusually well together. And I know that's a really irritating answer, but we are so different in our skills and what we own. Like he brings the pace and the structure and the energy in terms of like, we can do this by the end of the year. And so he's like the pace setter, I would say. And I'm a bit more of a dreamer naturally, but also work very fast. And so I think he's a bit of a dreamer. I think he's a bit of a dreamer. And so I think he and I just got really lucky that we are so complimentary that it's almost a joke and we don't irritate each other. Whereas what I've worked with even co-founders in the past, you have like a bit more of a desire for control of the other or the other's area or find that a bit interesting. It just, there's so much conflict. And so I think challenges in terms of, you know, the reality that you're married and then running a business. So trying to not make the business overtake everything else. And I think, you know, for every other couple, you have different work lives. And so if someone's having a really tough time at work, you'll try and empathize, but you're not both in it. Whereas if something goes down in the biz, we're both in it and neither can pull the other out. So that's just quite interesting to observe. But I think we are unusually fortunate in our very complimentary, distinct lanes. And that's how it's worked for us for sure. Where's Cookie going next? What's the thing you're building towards that maybe scares you a little bit? The US, because I've seen so many brands who have every right to play in terms of the size of organic following, the quality of brand assets, the love, the product quality tank. And I've spoken to these founders and they're like, we just thought we'd pop up in Silver Lake because Silver Lake's just like, you know, whatever it might be, Surry Hills. And it was a big old flop. And I've seen brands die and I've seen all these things. So I think, you know, the other thing is we had an amazing opportunity where we got to pitch to a big retailer in the US and we had to stare down the idea of goodness gracious, what would it look like to roll out cold on shelves? And luckily that hasn't like sped up in the pace of it. But I was like, you know what, I'm actually still really committed to creating awareness before showing up cold on shelf because I know how much harder it is to do that. Yeah, I think the US expansion piece is really interesting. And then for us, retail. So just continuing. So we're in 300 stores, but we, you know, there's so many more health food shops than even that in Australia and health's where we've positioned. So just continuing to expand into that. And then I think for me, the other mountain to climb would just be that Tupper Funnel brand awareness for us. So we've got incredible awareness in a niche now, that we've been able to track, but now that we've, you know, we've just brought on a head of marketing in the last month, which is super exciting. Congrats. Thank you. And that's incredible because we can carve out headspace and start doing the more Tupper Funnel awareness stuff. So that feels like a really big challenge and change of pace for me. Absolutely. Finally, what's your hunt? What's something you've believed about brand building that the data doesn't fully support yet? I think to the point around meta, something I believe about brand building is that it can be done on meta. And I guess the data and the industry doesn't necessarily support that idea that, you know, you have to do X, Y, Z. And I think brand has become quite formulaic. These are brand strategies or these are brand activations or these, this is how you do it. And I'm really passionate, like read how brands grow, worked in these roles, done head of brand roles even. And I just think my hunch is that a lot of these channels are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. And there is a far broader, broader view of how to grow brands in fewer channels rather than needing to spread yourself so thin all the time. What a great answer. Are there any brands you're loving? I went to Expo West in February, which for the uninitiated is seven stadiums of natural products. It's like the Coachella of healthy food. Sorry, where is this? In Anaheim, right next door to Disneyland in LA. And so you're literally like walking to this ginormous, you know, again, seven stadiums. You couldn't see it in the three days if you tried, just absolutely no way. But I got to meet the girls from Hot Girl Pickles there. Yes. And they accidentally shut down an aisle. So they just said like, we're taking over our friend's booth, come chat with us. And like security had to shut it down because so many people were trying to meet them and chat to them and eat the pickles. And I think Hot Girl Pickles have done a really interesting thing in terms of a similar approach to me with the two channels. So they were just organic and retail. And they've obviously had a bit of influencer in there, but they've done no paid basically. Which is fascinating. And I guess just the challenge of the way that they've just done that completely BTS build it. And then the brand buzz they've generated in store with Gen Z girls buying pickles is phenomenal to me. Similarly at Expo West, I got to meet the founder of Koala Eco, who's an incredible person. And that's a really amazing homegrown success story. And they've scaled into thousands of doors in the US and done it so well. So I was quite proud wandering into Errol Wayne and seeing who gives a crap and Koala Eco and all these Aussie brands just killing it in like a really tight edit of skews, arguably the best of CPG. And so I think Koala Eco has done a really beautiful job of being in that similar vein of low-tox, but not preachy and just having beautiful products that have just overtaken people's houses. And then I actually think, I guess, closer to home in terms of that DTC split, Merit, who I think have in that makeup world taken that glossier positioning. It's almost like grown-up glossier. And everyone's got the Merit limited edition bag and everyone's got the Lush. And so, you know, they're doing 200 mil in Rev now. And at last glance, I think about still over half of that was DTC and then the rest was Sephora. But what an incredible omni-template, I think. And it just, I think watching that evolution of like glossier Kosas Merit has been super fascinating. The biggest takeaway for me from this episode with Jamie is how intrinsically linked she is as a founder with the product, both from a positioning perspective, but also tone of mind into the founder brand as a way to scale, which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about brand building rather than founder first, it's product and positioning first and her market fit, and then adding to that with her founder brand.
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