hey everyone today we're going to be speaking to aie zahar from burlap and Barrel a single Origins spice company

today we're going to talk about his journey basically building the company bootstrapping it over the last eight

years I hope you enjoy if you like these podcasts Please Subscribe after the [Music]

episode Ry what's up man it's good to meet you this is the first time we're meeting yeah yeah it's great to be here

but yeah so some of the things I I want to talk about today I want to talk about your journey this isn't your first

um I also just want to talk about like you know discovering um different sort of uh looking at at traditional business

models in different ways to actually bring something new to the market that um you can speak about and has efficacy

in the marketing obviously that's what a lot of you guys do at at burlap burlap and Barrel um so let's start with just

the basics of like what is the business and um and and really kind of where that

where that angle was yeah totally so we're now uh uh about seven years old

we're turning eight in October so about 7 a half years old right now but burlap and barel is a single origin spice

company we a social Enterprise and so we work directly with small holder Farmers now uh around the world we pay them more

we set them up to be direct exporters and because of that we get way higher quality spices so it's a little bit like

what happened in coffee and tea and chocolate why we go to farmers markets why we go to our butcher for high higher

quality stuff instead of the spice farmer selling spices into the commodity Market where good and bad and mediocre

gets mixed together years past all kinds of stuff just kind of happens along the way that we don't know much about talk

about all the cinnamon scares and turmeric scares and all that stuff we work with the farmers who grow the spices who are excellent farmers in

their own right and instead of selling to the commodity Market they're cleaning drying grinding blending in some cases

preparing for export and then we pick it right back up from their farm right after the Harvest and bring into the US

and pack it up to send out to home cooks and chefs all across the US is it a Marketplace model in that sense or

you're just using them as as basically like uh raw materials and selling it

under the burlap and bar yeah it's all under our brand but what we do is we talk about where they came from on our

site we have more information than I think exists on the internet for this whole lineup of spices we tried to make

the the first kind of comprehensive single origin spice business and so we talk about the farmers but but they're

represented in the products they made but it all comes under burlap and Barrel so you don't have to travel around the world you don't have to go to a company

that's specialize in Vietnam or Indian foods or or Greek Foods or whatever you can kind of come all through us and get

the kind of best spices in the world all in one place yeah that's great I love the I love the value proposition there

and it sounds like you're doing something great for for some of these different farmers are they able to uh

you know live off of Bap and Barrel as you know a a major part of their income

yeah yeah and it can give you like an example so we we what we believe is we believe in kind of farmer-led pricing

with the idea that we talk to the farmers we tell them the quality that we want often many say that's too expensive

because they're used for years and years of the commodity Market just pushing them down and just saying do whatever you can cut Corners we don't care we

don't want to pay more than x dollars and so we're paying Farmers five to 20 times the commodity price um I mean we

we see that even fair trade organic uh turmeric in India usually goes around a

dollar a kilogram and we pay north of $5 a kilogram but it's not the same thing it's instead of the farmer selling into

this whole supply chain the farmer gets to internalize all the stuff that often other people are marking up they're

providing a service like grinding but they're marking it up we're asking the farmers to handle more of that process we guide them we we we teach them how to

be their own exporters and so they're able to make a lot more money and that's the idea is that we work right now with

like 25 27 countries with Farmers all over the world and the crazy thing is that we we don't these like legal

contracts legal agreements what we're really trying to do is to be the farmer's best customer we do massive

down payments during the Harvest in some cases even before they plant the seeds to grow the spices and so we're trying

to create this win-win where the farmers are able to grow better spices and we're their best customer pay that's kind of

guaranteed on the other end of that to to pick up their spices and to pick up their product so it's really meant to be this thing where where we like we both

succeed together and then we have to our job is then to convince customers in the US to kind of catch their attention tell

them that the stuff that they're getting is probably mostly sawdust you know in the grocery store and that they they

actually they care about where their food comes from and the flavors that we we really have an incredible source for

it and if they give us a chance they're not going to go back and we see that in our reorder rate we see that people just keep coming back after they've had their

first taste of our spices interesting so there's a couple things that you hit on there that I want to just focus on one is like you're actually adopting I would

call like the AL altruistic part of the direct consumer model where you're truly

like looking at an Antiquated industry and being able to pay suppliers a higher wage and offer it directly to the

consumer um a lot of other DTC Brands like spoke about that but that wasn't

actually the case they were just like cutting out one layer of retail yeah totally and and I think the dirty Seeker

with a lot of especially food products is that most people go with their recipe and their like package design to some

kind of co-packer or co-manufacturer that just takes existing ingredients and just combines them in a slightly novel

way usually it's pretty trendy or hypey so like what do we want we want prebiotics we want mushrooms we want CBD

like it's just offthe shelf commodity ingredients being being kind of combined in a different way and really at our

core we're we're a supply chain company um and that really means that that we're

working hard to to build all the way like we work with Farmers we're not just buying from a local manufacturer here

domestically we're building This Global Supply Chain from all around the world and and and then we get to present that

product so I think then comes the other half of what other cpg or whatever companies do where they'll do something

slightly different in the look or the feel or the combination but we actually have this strong supply chain behind it

so by the time you get it in your home you smell it and you taste and you're like oh this is a fundamentally different product it's not just a

repackaged rebranded version of something that's been already available on it's not just like marketing it's not

like marketing fluff it's it's these are the best sorts of uh you know relationships when you actually have

competitive Advantage via Visa the supply chain or the product you can actually tell the story the story is

directly aligned with that sort of competitive advantage and people respond and resonate with the marketing totally

and I think you know this from the marketing perspective too is you spend so much time bringing in a new customer no company can live off of new customers

and one-off orders companies live or die based off of the reorder rate and so when that product then arrives to your

customer's home they're either like oh my God this is as amazing as you promised it would be and and now I love

it and I'm going to be a returning customer or they see and say huh that was pretty expensive and it doesn't do the things that I expected it to and it

just kind of like it sold to me well but it didn't live up to that that kind of expectation that that was built in me

and then they just piece out and so I think it's it's it's companies live or die by how well they're able to take a customer from like you've convinced me

I'm gonna give it a try and how you can then turn them into a recurring and repeating customer from there and we do

that really really well because the product quality stands for itself we still have a big job to do to reach out

to people and to show them that that a new thing exists we do this even with chefs at Major restaurants that still

they they know about their cattle rancher and they know about their produce farmer but spices are just spices and they don't think about it

twice so there's a lot of Education that happens along the process yeah I definitely want to dig into education

and how you guys are able to do that because I think it really determines how quickly you're able to convert someone

which is really important in cpg the best marketing is like super simple so you just need to just condense and

truncate the message so people can understand it and then they're like I'm I'm going to try that that actually that actually sounds good but going back I

think there's like so many important parts of the customer Journey that you know we know the obvious ones awareness

conversion but for me where a product can really you know carry its weight in

gold is during the unboxing I think that's an in really important moment which we talk about a lot on this

podcast and then um in loyalty and retention and that's a question of like

how the person has reflected and is enjoying the product and if they're going to really come back um yeah and we

put a lot of work into designing that unboxing process I think most e-commerce companies you get a shipment and it's

full of trash I don't know like it just full like papers and like other stuff like that and then like it traveled safe

I think that's the lowest level that your packaging can do we literally designed custom three packs and six

packs that were able to hold our jars tightly together and give a really beautiful unboxing experience the actual

boxes you can rip the back off of it that are spices ship in and use them as a tray for your spices in your spice

cabinet too so it really tried to be really thoughtful how can we make it small and Compact and efficient how do

we make everything work how can we make it all recycleable and how can we like it's one of those win-wins where if we

do it right we can save costs on shipping and we can design it to do that but then you open it and it feels like a

gift and that's what we really want and we see that about 10% of our customers or so send our spices as gifts and so

that's a huge form of customer acquisition too is if you get gifted a beautiful set of spices you get to try

them hopefully that's a way that you find out about us and that you keep coming back I love it I love the spice

trade how didd you get into this business so so this is the second business for me and my business partner

Ethan um we had an ice cream business back in 2010 and that was we were like

Ethan was cooking at restaurants in New York I was eating at those restaurants through some mutual friends we met and that was that was how we started

spending time together um and he was actually making ice cream working as a Pacer chef at one of those great restaurants and when he thought

about what to do next he kind of came and shared with all his friends saying I want to make some kind of ice cream business and I said absolutely I'm in

let's figure it out and so we started testing out ice cream sandwiches and all that we decided to call it gorilla ice

cream like kind of insurgent we had a little ice cream cart we pushed and we had flavors why political movements and

revolutions from around the world and we donated all of our prophets of Charity it was like uh our social Enterprise

training wheels just to kind of see what we could do and put together and it went really well and after that business was

one summer Ethan moved to London to get his Masters in International Development and Afghanistan as an aid worker um and

then actually came back to the US with all kinds of cool ingredients that he had bought from the markets there but in

particular this wild cumin that grows in the northern mountains of Afghanistan all the chef buddies were like oh my God

tell tell me more I will buy this from you right now and so my journey I left

the ice cream business after that summer my dentist was like what have you done I got a lot of fillings in and that's just

a a risk that happens when you run an ice cream business and then I went to I moved to California and I wanted to do

the next entrepreneurial thing Ethan's business is culinary mine is really in sorry Ethan's background is in culinary

my background is in business and so I ended up running a venture back mortgage company we started it I met some

investors there was a great opportunity and over four years we raised $32 million um grew to over a 100 employees

got licensed in 12 States but but we were running a loss every single month and so it was really this high stress

grow quickly even at a loss and ultimately we had assigned term sheet for a $40 million series C and it all

fell apart we had to cut the team all the way back we ended up selling it to one of our investors and I just came out

there with my head spinning saying I really don't want to do this again and that was right when Ethan was that when

was that when like the um I we just I know mortgage a bit uh is that when

mortgage Market just started to fall apart in uh 2122 or 22 rather that was

that was we were from 2013 to 2017 and that marked U mortgage

uh refi rates going way up so all of a sudden there was this big refi bubble that had really pushed a ton of mortgage

companies and then all of a sudden there was no refi because rates went up and all those buyers disappeared and we

hadn't got the business totally so so we were so we were and you

know shame on us for also not figuring out a profitable model but that's what all of our investors they didn't care

about that and all of a sudden they cared about it I think a lot of startup Founders people service will know better

mortgage you know totally totally so we got out of it Ethan right then landed in

San Francisco he we sat at nopa a great restaurant he pulled out this wild cumin from Afghanistan he met a vertically

integrated cardamom farmer in Guatemala he'd met an organic co-op in Zanzibar

growing cinnamon and black pepper and Nutmeg and vanilla and I just watched these Chef's eyes like just pop out of

their heads as they were trying this and that was at least my first kind of light bulb moment to say oh my God if we can

do this for restaurants and and then then we can really start to do this also

for for home Cooks they'll love it too yeah totally so is that so the business started supplying restaurants in the

city is is yeah it really started Ethan early on was just bringing stuff in his suitcase you know into his apartment in

Queens and and literally at some point he had over a th000 kilograms of spices

in his apartment and it was just unsustainable but we started selling to chefs and the reason was that chefs

really could tell quality just by tasting and smelling he could walk around to restaurants in New York City

and I did the same in San Francisco uh eventually um and we were able to they were just able shf are used to buying

from all kinds of strange suppliers there's a story of how Galis started selling truffles out of like the this

dude's like trunk literally running around some restaurants and so chefs are a really good first audience because

they could tell quality they were willing to buy unconventionally from a guy you know walking with a backpack

full of spices um and three is they gave us a lot of kind of like Authority they gave us a lot of legitimacy because then

when we were ready to start selling to home Cooks we could be like look at all these chefs right the same way that like Nike sponsors athletes but we were just

doing this naturally with our business we just had all the that really loved our spices and we could be like look the

restaurant 11 Madison Park three Michin Stars buys our spices don't you think you would love them to Deer home cook

and that really helped us open the door in the early days it's really interesting I was just having this conversation with uh someone I'm

thinking about working with who has a seafood business um they Supply you know half of the Michelin restaurants in New

York City with with fresh seafood and he has this just really integrated supply chain where he could offer Seafood

Marketplace for you know anyone who wants to buy it across the United States e-commerce is just such a different

motion um and you really need to be thoughtful about it how uh and and I

want to take that into your experience you know going from chefs obviously you had the social proof component it helped

out um what were some of the challenges getting the direct consumer business live and then today is the business how

does it split between retail Amazon direct consumer yeah totally so so today

I I'll I'll kind of you through because we were we always had our website going but we we were bootstrapped and so that

was one of the big decisions that we made is we wanted to have control over our own business and path it meant that

we weren't able to pay ourselves salaries for the first two years which we were able to kind of get by off of savings I did a little Consulting at the

beginning but early on we were really in 2019 we were 50% e-commerce which we had

done through PR a little bit through some affiliate promotion which is really like chir cutter like publication

affiliate was really helping us starting to pick up things um but we were about 50% Food Service to restaurants and 50%

e-commerce and then 2020 the pandemic hit and in March we were both in India on a sourcing trip we came back it turns

out we both had covid we had two founders of a of a spice company with no sense of smell so we were a little bit

worried luckily it came back but really our our restaurant business went to zero

um and so we we thought we're going to run out of business and you know what ended up happening is by May home cooks

and more more than made up for what we had lost in restaurants and we ended up growing 5x through 2020 the whole

business so e-commerce grew 10x you know so that the hob buiness could grow 5x and so we really tried to people we

noticed that people weren't weren't going to grocery stores there was a meaningful Behavior change where people

were starting to look online and typing in best spices and because we had so much PR and because if you type that in

we can't SEO for the search for like best spices but food and wine writes about the best spices and we were there

and seor about the best spices and all these other food Publications had written about it and we were there on

all their lists we'd made friends with them a lot of them were based in New York which helped us but our site was converting really well so even for us

doing a little bit of Revenue share with them through all those like wire cutter style listings we were there too and so

all of a sudden people started discovering us and giving our business a try because their grocery stores were just trying to keep like toilet paper

you know and and like beans and whatever in stock and so all of a sudden people were cooking it home and going online

for it so that really blew up our business and by the end of 2020 we were 85% e-commerce and in 2021 everybody's

Supply chains broke down we're a supply chain company we built all of our own Supply chains across all these countries

so we were in stock so we then almost doubled again in 2021 and now that we've

been growing uh our big kind of accelerator in 2023 was we went on Shark Tank which was very fun and ridiculous

and wonderful um but we did our song and dance four million people watch Shark Tank and

that was the real gift of Shark Tank Deal or No Deal you know we were just really happy to be exposed to such a big

Prime Time us audience and so our our sales again grew and so today Shark Tank

really built up our Amazon so we're about 70ish 75% e-commerce about 8% on

Amazon um and then the rest of it is split through grocery food service and bulk but really we're focusing in the

last year have been really focusing on grocery too because what we really learned was that we can be on e-commerce

all day long and people like it it's an area with headwinds meaning that more and more people are getting used to

buying their spices online and so it's just over time it's going to keep growing but today still out of all the

people it's about 95% are buying their spices at the grocery store and so then it became a mission of ours to say hey

if you're already shopping in the grocery store we're not going to have our full lineup there this is the gift of e-commerce like you said is we can do

store relling online we can tell you about the farmer we can show you photos of the farm and of the seedlings of black pepper corns and we give you

tasting notes and recipes on our site we can have limited run things we can do all that stuff on our site which is

really phenomenal but in grocery we can't tell that full story our jars and our packaging have to do a lot more

heavy lifting but can we get our top 10 12 20 spices in some of the special

grocery stores where people go to buy higher quality things then hopefully that's reveal their first taste with us

they can still get one jar without having they shipping for it but they'll still come to our site when they're

ready for The Full Experience so I mean you bring up a couple interesting points one being when messaging and advertising

are so important to the reason why it's someone actually buys your product over

the existing you know spice players on shelf I'm talking about at retail like at retail it's probably really tough for

a customer to discern what burlap and Barrel is versus you know the competitors with screw Supply chains

right so I'm just curious how you're thinking about if 95% of consumers are buying at grocery they're buying in the

store where they get their spices um that's obviously the next Frontier for you um how are you thinking about

getting into the mind of minds of those consumers have you explored retail media is it a function yeah we're trying to

think about it in general we've been a company where like traditional advertising like if we're going head-to-head with like PepsiCo or

Unilever sponsor company we're we're going to lose and I think that a lot of companies burn through a lot of VC cash

trying to kind of make it happen and and many of them are running it a loss their entire lives with the goal of not

necessarily being profitable but being Acquired and then somebody else that the acquirer making that profitability we've

done something a little different where what we did is we said okay not all groceries the same so we started with

small independent specialty and we start there where there isn't a whole wall of spices and there isn't like 50 different

brands and they're not selling mccormic get like $2 a jar or whatever they're doing there and so they're already kind

of curated and people come in there to find out about new products and new brands and people that love certain

categories they come in there to be like what what do they carry what's a new thing that I can kind of keep in now

we've been expanding into specialty retail grocery but that are Regional so maybe they're they're five stores to

like 50 stores you know and we're trying to kind of get into areas that are still known for higher quality but I think a

lot of people are like I need to go into the Whole Foods or and I really think that Whole Foods has put more small businesses out of

business than it has like built them up because it's so expensive and I think that companies go way too early into

retail because when you're still small you're paying more for packaging you're paying more for packing you're paying

more for everything in your business so if you can grow and this is why we're now in our eighth year we've now grown

enough that we're able to like Source our glass jars directly from the factory in Asia and we're able to do all these

things so now we've built margin then can get reallocated to a distributor to a broker to a merchandiser and so we're

able to actually do it profitably where if we if you ask three four years ago we wouldn't have been at the right scale

for it and to answer your question on how we're having people kind of find out about us honestly our e-commerce has

been the engine of it and hopefully people have know about us or heard about us either because they're customers or their friend is a customer or they tried

it in a restaurant that they love or they read about us online and then they see us at the grocery store shelf we

think of that taking a stranger to customer all in grocery is a really expensive proposition and so how can we

that how can you get to know us outside of grocery so that eventually when you do come into your grocery store and see

12 spices from Bap and Barrel on the Shelf then all of a sudden you can kind of like you get to know us and and like

you're like oh my god I've heard about them I've wanted to try them here's my chance the one other thing that's been

kind of fun is that we've now we're now working with a handful of grocery stores that carry a lot of our spices so like

if you live in Seattle you might have gone into a metropolitan market they carry uh 63 of our spices if you are in

Texas you may go how many spices do you guys have we have almost 100 now so but

a lot of them are like limited edition a lot of them are collaborations which I know I know we can kind of touch on because that's been a good Commerce

acquisition strategy but the idea is like how do we if we can kind of create this like visual Block in the grocery

store and most places won't trust us for that because like we have to like work our way up to that but stores that love

quality and know our spices know that we're going to really sell a lot better than than the commodity spices in their

stores yeah it's uh it's really interesting I think I talked to Founders and they have totally different

perspectives regarding you know how e-commerce fits into the business how retail is it it's really so dependent on

the category that you're launching in um and you know what marketing tactics also

just inform that for me that's part of the fun of Entrepreneurship it's like kind of figuring out how all the pieces

really fit fit together um but I love the way that you guys are building your company you're not rushing um which it's

so funny you probably felt this at your Venture back company when like being

profitable every month is it's like a breath of fresh air you have unlimited time you know and when you look at in

that perspective it's just you're able to think on a longer time Horizon think when you have the pressure of either

you're losing money or you have investors that you need to you know answer to just creates a totally

different Dynamic uh psycholog totally and we've had to solve it creates also a discipline of having to

solve things profitably I think at my last company we would be like I don't know we have to grow 10x so like let's

hire a bunch of Executives let's do this let's we did a lot of inefficient things and here we're like okay we have to grow

profitably so let's find ways like we did we redesigned our packaging so we would shift better and faster we wanted

to gift packaging so instead we did these drawstring gift bags you know we couldn't afford to hire full-time people

and specialist for everything so instead our team is a fully remote team everyone's a customer um and a bunch of

our customer support team we just hired our customers to do customer support and so you know like just a fun little fact

I listeners if you want to think about this too uh like our audience if you think about it think in your head are

they mostly male or mostly female and this is for e-commerce on our site think about that think about if they're uh

over 40 or under 40 and then think about out if they're in cities or outside of cities and when you answer those three

questions you'll have some something in mind most people think of themselves when they do this just because of cognitive bias but what we learned is

that 10 what was it 10% of our customers have AOL Yahoo or hot mail email

addresses um and so we have middle-aged ladies they're our customers and we love them and so we we found out that it was

good because they had 20 30 years of experience cooking in their home so they're actually quite experienced Cooks

they were cooking because they loved it and and they were willing to spend a little more disposable income on on the

spices themselves and then three is they lived outside of major cities and so what that meant to us is that they

couldn't drive to a specialty store like if you're in New York City like we are you have 20 specialty stores of great

products all around us and so they were the ones that were more likely to order incredible ingredients online because if

they wanted to get it themselves that would mean that they would have to really drive all around the city or go for hours and all that stuff and so as

we're trying to think about this we're like how do we make our site more friendly to people who are maybe

middle-aged and those aren't all of our customers but those who are earliest customers and our most fervent customers

we saw that we had a 70% reorder rate we saw that 5% of our customers had spent more than $500 or less lifetime so like

we started getting this real picture of our customers and we were able to really serve them well through e-commerce um

and then kind of build this really warm thing that we're able to do profitably for them and so now we're trying to say

what is the gross version of that and you mentioned categories like yeah in spices if you move 8 of of of product

per week per store then you're doing amazing in spices but if you were in chocolate or chips they would cut you

the next day and so we're trying to find out how do we stand out in this area so we're trying to make our labels a little

bit better we're seeing that like Blends sell a little more than single spices so we're starting to push more Blends in

the grocery store we're trying to wrap our heads around all this stuff on how do we make it kind of an experience because we don't the budget to do

samplings and 20% off and buy one get one free like we don't have the budgets for that so it's forced us being

bootstrapped to just be more clever and to take our time with it it's being disciplined I think it's just one of the

most valuable skills to have no matter what you're doing personal in business

you know it's it's really important um let's talk about some of those Partnerships that you mentioned how has

that so obviously like creating different sorts of conversations and a good product experience being being in

the right mix of of of restaurants and chefs like and Publications that's been

a huge part of your of your growth it's kind of just common sense it's like let's make a good product that works for

a specific subset of people and let's get the right people to talk about it what other sorts of Partnerships have

really stood out as being important parts of your growth so the Publications for sure and I think getting food

journalists and know us and like our product but it has to be good right that that's the same thing is you can't just

slap a logo and a thing that you know and then people that are Professionals in this industry chefs food writers

they're going to look at and be like this is this is nothing you know it's not legit so we were able to do something we put it in front of them in

the open and they said oh this is this is great and I need to tell people about this the other thing that's been really

helpful is we've been doing what we call collaboration Blends and so we'll work with a collaborator who's somebody who's

an expert in a particular area food maybe it's a Cuisine maybe it's a type a

type of of specific food that they make themselves maybe they have a specific opinion on food um and how and how it

should be presented and so what we've been trying to do is bring in some of these and one of our superpowers as a

business is that specifically for e-commerce we like to have lots of new things we're always introducing new

products whether it's a new kind of spice a new spice blend a new this and that so we were able to really make it

easy most cpg companies are introducing four products a year we introduce four

products a month and we get to learn a lot and if it sells well we keep making it if it doesn't sell well we say thank

you that was really fun and we discontinue it we we sold kelp soap that our friend made nobody wanted to buy it

but it's an excellent soap but we learned that we can't sell stuff like that and so we started working with collaborators uh that that have big

audiences that have a strong message and a point of view about food and that we wanted to represent and so we would find

folks like like Sol El wiy and her husband ham who came from the bonti test kitchen and now is just a food star in

in her own right and what they did is they they wanted to do three kind of a fun nostalgic spice blend and so we're

like okay great we'll take your lead we have all these spices and all these ingredients let's do a blend together

and so we did a a nothing Hidden Ranch to kind of poke a little bit fun at Hidden Valley um we did a yo- KIRO Taco

blend and a pizza kind of party seasoning and so these were kind of fun these were less intimidating these were

a little more approachable um and then Sol and H will have millions of people following them were able to be like look

at what I made go check this out and we did a healthy Revenue share with them but it more so I think is tied for our

collaborators about them taking themselves and making a really unique and special product and we're here to

like Source new ingredients bring new spices do all kinds of cool stuff to make it feel really special and so that

you wouldn't have otherwise like kind of come across so we're trying to do this kind of win-win where we get something

really cool and new for our audience that they're going to love that they're probably not finding anywhere else and their collaborators get to kind of put

themselves into a product and we do this Revenue share we run these in Bach is and and we just try to every month have

one or two new cool unexpected spice blends to both Delight our existing audience and to have the collaborator

push their audience over to us and then hopefully through that they get to know us and start getting to know our whole lineup of spices and do that so again a

little bit of a win-win one other fun and unexpected partnership is we try to find other complimentary food producers

so one of my absolute favorites and a mentor of ours is the folks at ranchel Gordon heirloom beans check them out

they'll change your life but what do people that buy beans need they need spices to go with it and so they have

been also carrying and selling our spices and so then instead of paying for acquisition they're paying our wholesale

margin to kind of pick up our products and cases and then they're introducing us to their Bean loving audience and if

people that are buying beans online are the same people that would buy spices online so that's been a really really

nice kind of overlap where we both get to win where they get in higher average card size they get to sell their

customers a little more and we get to be introduced to this really really relevant customer base yeah I think

those sorts of win-wins are just so critical when you're smaller and you know you need to tap into other ways of

acquiring customers yeah and we can SC I I think we can scale it up I don't know

but this is the hypothesis we're trying to to test but like we just started working with a company called Sitka Seafood that does incredible Frozen

seafood and we made three Custom Blends for them to sell to their customers and to give for free for customers to sign

up and so we're trying to say like how can we get to bigger and bigger Partnerships over time with both bigger

influencers and then food personalities and also with bigger producers so King

Arthur Flower for example also carries our spices and that's been really huge but that took us years to get to the

point where they knew us and they trusted us and they got to try our spice and we were able to get into their lineup so I I don't know yet but one of

our hypotheses that we're trying to test now is how far can we push this so we can do this without having to do paid

acquisition for customers yes we have less control over it like we can't just like quadruple our ad budget because

it's partnership based but we're hoping to keep a really healthy pipeline of these that keep introducing us to new audiences you you can scale that I think

the the really interesting thing about e-commerce and and brand building today brand building today is the the org

structure is changing in terms of what makes sense and the decisions that brands are are choosing to prioritize so

I'll give you an example I was just talking to um Caleb wers from Haven athletic instead of hiring like aead of

growth or aead of paid he hired a head of Partnerships who just negotiates these sorts of deals if we spoke five

years ago there would have been a head of growth hired in the dead of that person and budget would have been allocated towards paid so the tides are

just shifting and I think people get attracted to paid because it's scalable

uh because it's super efficient it's obviously an ad auction and there's unlimited sort of gos and demand and and

ways to serve and AD but uh sometimes it's the things that are take a little bit more time and are a little bit more

manual that end up paying dividends long term totally and those we find are really sticky really loyal customers

that come through Partnerships and collaborations because they love food and we're not kind of interrupting them in the middle of doing something else we

also don't do discounting or sales like we really are trying to say like if we can bring you in and convince you that

this incredible draw of cumin is worth $10 then then then we got then you're going to love the rest of our lineup but

if we come buy everything 50% off and one time only and this and that and there's some companies that are able to

really just do orderly sales or are kind of doing this discount Mill and and they're able to bring in happy customers

like bless them but we we are trying to kind of keep our value up and say if you're willing to pay for this at full

price and we're trying to keep our price as low as possible almost everything on our site is under $10 and that's

incredible for for what we have to do for sourcing and packing and and doing huge down payments and all that and so

we're trying to do everyday low pricing but if if you come in and buy that value proposition then then you're going to

love everything else that we do that that's the job of the founder to figure out what is the The Sweet Spot between

what a customer is going to pay and you know what your minimum margin is

basically uh to run the business in the way that you want it to I do the same thing at at my business at dark room

it's like I used to charge I used to try and just continuously increase our price ing as our brand would get better and

better and our services we become more sophisticated certain point it's like we just want to provide the best possible

product and in ours case of service at you know a reasonable price that that is

going to you know promote longevity for the customer and I think it's the same thing on the product side the interesting thing is though the last 12

years marketers got so used to discounting and all of these interesting

Ecom tactics that really just erode brand loyalty in many ways and also ER

road profitability that just weren't exercised before yeah and and we've had to get really creative about it so just

like one thing that we do is we have a spice club which is a quarterly subscription almost copying a wine club

you know it's a mystery box I love it we were like you don't you don't know what's in it you're going to get spices we had to get at a high enough price

points enough products so we could cover shipping and so we're like okay it's going to be four fullsize jars of spices

plus an extra collaboration of a of a non-s spice product that we make with a partner that we really love

um and we have now thousands of sub subscribers to that so that was a clever solution to try to create a subscription

product that wasn't discounted but it's still a really good deal because you get new spices before anyone else you get a

bunch of exclusive spices and it's a fun curated box yeah it's exciting it's fun you have to you have to add those

moments into the marketing um let me ask a a personal question what do you what's

your favorite spice oh my God I have to tell you right now my favorite spice that we do is uh we have a sundried

tomato powder and we bring this in from turkey and it's just Tomatoes they slice them they extra dry them and then they

grind them into a powder and it's just like Savory Umami salty kind of bomb I

even put them on tomatoes I don't know but it's been really fun you can make tomato paste out of it you can put it on top of eggs or kebabs or chicken or fish

rubs it's been so fun I always love that kind of savory Savory thing and so I've been putting that on everything and I

haven't seen it much in a spice and the other one that I just always love is is our black lime whole limes are dried in

the sun they oxidize and turn black and then we grind them into a powder there's black lime used in Persian Cuisine

they're called Omani limes also or Persian limes um but typically they were just whole lives of like ping pong ball

size and that's great if you're going to like stew it which is how it's traditionally used but grinding it into

a powder lets you sprinkle it on like guacamole or like you know your Margarita or whatever and so I always

want a little bit of sourness anywhere I want to squeeze a lemon or lime I using this black line powder and it's just it

just like levels up the flavor wow you're converting me to a customer I'm getting some spices after this ory

thanks so much for joining us I really appreciate it appreciate all of your perspective congrats on burlap and Barrel sounds like you guys uh have a

spicy future I'm thank you so much for having me and and anyone that's listening feel free to reach out I'm ory

bapen barrel.com happy to chat and and I hope there's also other entrepreneurs on their Journey listening to this too so

thank you for having me thanks wor [Music]

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