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it is such a massive and complex and kind of diverse set of issues that touches almost everything that I think it can be really overwhelming to go and say I want to work on climate and sustainability and then try and figure out what the heck to do next we're going to be talking about sustainability today so that's exciting so office hours you guys are probably familiar since you've been here before but basically we just cover relevant topics for Founders within the Shopify ecosystem really

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focusing mainly on marketing so our goal is for everyone here to find Value in today's discussion and we've brought three I would say pretty impressive people not including myself actually just get just one impressive person right here on on screen but I like these guys a lot I run dark room and we invest in businesses and we grow Shopify Brands mainly uh across Amazon across DDC um across retail as well today we're focusing on sustain businesses brands that are really doing good for the environment and for the

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planet and we've got Daniel tus and Chad they each have three businesses in the space Daniel is on the VC side at gather tarus is running and the founder and lead designer of tarform and then Chad is uh the founder and CEO at Rosie um I'm going to have them each introduce themselves and guys just pass around the mic um Daniel if you could start and just tell us a little bit more about gather and the work that you guys de with sure yeah Daniel mafazi here I'm a principal at gather Ventures we are a

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sort of Boutique VC that invests in the health of humans and the planet we are operating out of our first fund mostly in the plant-based ecosystem um and working on our second fund that's going to be a little bit more expansive and focus on sort of three pillars of Wellness investing one being human sort of physical wellness the other being mental and then environmental yeah how let's gather Daniel gather is awesome tarus is uh the CEO and founder of tarform it's an EV motorcycle business

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I'm doing your intro for you but tell us more remake electric motorcycles also made out of plans which is uh not how we started but uh it kind of organically sprout in so we began about 7 years ago and um the idea was basically how do we make Electric Mobility sustainable and beautiful how do we get more people excited about maybe using less of their internal combustion engines but also ride motorcycles that is pretty cool experience in my opinion I would agree if you if anyone is in Brooklyn you got

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to check out their office in the needy yard you can see some of these beautiful machines Chad tell us about Rosie hey everybody I'm excited to be here my name is chav Sur I'm the founder and CEO of froy soil we create a sustainable heat-free pwning soil so it's for house plants cactin succulent and seedling and then we're working on some exciting new products as well um but I got really excited about it because we basically found a way to turn captured CO2 into a higher performance soil which means that

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every product that we make and sell actually pulls CO2 out of the air and does so in a way that doesn't ask consumers to compromise on the performance of the product which is I think key to really scaling and impact or Mission driven company so yeah excited to share more about that we're going to dive right into it so Chad let's just start with you what profited you to get a degree in your climate Focus startups yeah I mean there were kind of two paths to it so I uh I grew up in Chicago and I lived with my

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grandma and she was a big Gardener so I've been a gardener literally my entire life I actually asked for pting soil for Christmas when I was 3 years old and got a giant pile of dirt under the Christmas tree basically and so I've been a consumer in that space for a long time and you know was one of the kind of just kind of realize that most of the brands were not speaking to the things that I cared about despite you know gardening being America's number one Hobby and people that are gardeners obviously

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caring deeply about sustainability and and nature and sustainability all that good stuff and then the kind of other path that brought me into specifically climate focused startups is I built and sold a food delivery company when I was in college so I caught the entrepreneurship bu super early and um while the experience was amazing I got basically burnt out on lack of purpose or Mission um I just didn't care that much about delivering food to people and so I knew I wanted to start another company but I knew it needed to be kind

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of more meaningful more impactful felt more fulfilling for me to spend tons and tons of time building it and I got totally obsessed with the climate side of things and then carbon capture and sort of found a way to combine my love for gardening and my desire to work on something in Hest see tus that sounds really similar to your path too just in terms of your lunch for design can you take us through that yeah I spent most of my career in product design development technnology AG grub in Sweden uh which is I'm sure a lot of you

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know sustainability they sort of got it down where you if you don't toss your you know plastic bottle to the whole s crime what's going on you put it in the wrong bit so the Scandinavian culture you kind of grow up with this inherent sense of responsibility and I want to say slightly more awareness where are things come from from and what happens to them end of life United States has a little bit more to catch up on that front and I think most of it comes from education simply it's not a priority to

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teach people you know what is waste what is petroleum and all the stuff that ends up on the landfill so for me it wasn't like oh I need to be sustainable it was more like well yeah is there another option so when we started tar for and I spent a lot of time in the dusty shop in Brooklyn trying to sort of revive uh vintage motorbikes and when you work with toxic materials like uh toxic paints and primers and you get home and you know your skin is just not good and my ex is like dude what the hell you're

00:06:13 - 00:07:10

just stinking this oil and gas at that point the first question was like well why are we still making things with these outdated and toxic material surely has got to be a better way to to construct things so that becames more of an exploration less than a value that we have to be sustainable where we started saying well is there a way for us to displace petroleum based Plastics in our manufacturing process and then basically went through a long prototyping round and found this guy that was making surfboards out of flag

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seed in Australia that seemed to be a pretty good alternative to uh uh to Plastics and then we started making prototypes and then from then on it sort of sort evolving and you know one question led to another it's like well if we can replace this why can't we replace that and so it was less from you know having like this is our sustainability policy on the website but it was more driven from an intrisic uh intrinsic motivation to to make products that are a little bit healthier I guess it just made sense I guess for that

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product development cycle like for what you were doing and it sounds similar Chad where you know you mentioned the product really works and it's actually better but it also has this really beneficial component of it how long did that take for you to find I mean I mean like was it part of the the the purpose it was certainly part of the purpose it was I mean version one of the product was certainly not better it probably took a year of constant iteration to get to the point where we could compete with

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soil that's basically jacked up with chemical and synthetic fertilizers because those make plants grow really fast but are terrible for the actual Health the plants in the environment but yeah I mean we just we knew from the beginning that the product had to be better to get people to buy it and so focused diligently on iteration to get there Daniel I like you to answer this question too just for those of you don't know Daniel's background is in Venture and in VC and gather is obviously

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exclusively focused on products that are good for the environment so tell us a little bit about that Journey yeah sure so my background is entirely in sort of better for you venture capital particularly angled on sort of human health outcomes but what we've noticed over the years right is that doesn't really matter what you do for your own body or mind if the environment that you're living in is not livable right and so I think that's something that we've been really hyperfocused on the

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past couple of years of how we can kind of bridge that gap between what's healthy for humans and what's healthy for the environment um because there's certain products out there right now that are really good for the environment in spite of human health and vice versa um and so that's sort of what's Driven our focus on green and climate you know focused startups and sustainable startups um is sort of figuring out that intersection between things that are good for for the planet and good for you

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as well and in the plant-based World there is thankfully a lot of overlab there um and it's important to to kind of really support those businesses that are doing that so that's sort of the the Nexus that we operate within my personal story was that I was a Premed student athlete in college and sort of really fine-tuned my understanding of really knowing where things are coming from and the supply chains behind them and and how that can actually make a significant impact on you know your health and the

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health of everyone around you so um it's just a generally important thing for us to be cognizant of as we're moving through our lives awesome how do you we sustainability into your story in a way that consumers care about um what marketing initiatives have driven the most impact for you in the past two years so there's two parts to that question Chad if you want to go first yeah sure yeah I mean we've we've tested it extensively to to be honest like the the primary messaging for us and I think

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for a brain still has to be what's in it for the consumer like you still have to kind of win against all your competitors on the things that they're judging your competitors on but what we found is that when you then sort of layer on a secondary or a third level of messaging that connects what's in it for the consumer with either your own company values or showing that you care about something in the community or show that you care about sustainability that's I think what really sort of can push you

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over the Edge and the consumer mindset and especially I mean we think a lot about in a retail P most of our businesses is actually on shelf and Retail and you have like two seconds to win on shelf and so we've gone super deep on basically how do we connect yeah that primary messaging around for us its performance with some of the kind of deeper things that the company is thinking about and do it at a level that you know most people can sort of understand and access like for example we used to talk a lot about carbon cuz

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product sequesters carbon first of all sequester is a terrible word and most people have kind of a high level understanding of carbon but don't you know it's this very like ephemeral thing so we've moved sort of back from that and gone harder on our sourcing and our ingredients and the fact that it's a living soil and again it's like how do you connect the things that the consumers care about with kind of the deeper mission of the company and then marketing initiatives you know there's

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been a lot of different stuff I would say the early win is I because I actually know nothing about soil I've learned it all kind of since starting the company so I hired our first hire was someone who is way smarter than me and all of this stuff and he happened to be a Tik Tok influencer talking about basically soil health and so he had I think like 300,000 Tik Tok followers and that I think really helped Chum start getting him to start talking about all the things that he cared about and the

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research that he was doing connected to this company I think one gave us a lot of like trust in the gardening Community but also helped get the brand initially out there okay so your was that that was your first hire you said so was a marketing hire focused on no he's he's our lead soil researcher like he he runs our soil app and happens to be on the side a big Tik Tok influencer interesting does he have any hand in marketing yeah does he run brzy marketing no no yeah he's very busy like

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in our soil lab I was like two birds one Z in the early days he did but now he's got it's very funny because most of the brands we talk to they still haven't figured out organic Tik Tok or reals and they're usually missing that higher so he probably could double yeah and he knows how to communicate with creators too because he is a Creator uh really quick can you describe to us like biochar and the two the one minute scientific process of it for those who who don't necessarily know yeah so at a

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at a very high level in order to achieve Net Zero we have to do massive emissions reduction but there will be certain sectors of the economy that are really hard to get to zero via emissions reduction alone which means to basically make the equation work you have to start taking excess CO2 out of the environment that for a long time has been kind of the ugly stepchild of of the climate kind of conversation people put it in this weird category with like Geo forming and trying to change the planet and all this

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stuff but at the end of the day you know I the ipcc most scientists agree that to get to Net Zero we have to pull CO2 out of the air the bleading way to do that today is this really weird kind of ct-like soil amendment called biochar it has we've been using it in farming for 2,000 years because it does amazing things when you add it to soil and recently we discovered the process of making it is actually net carbon negative and the way that that works is basically plants in the process of doing

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photosynthesis pull CO2 out of the air plants are mostly carbon the problem is when they die or allowed to decompose or are burned they release most of that carbon as CO2 if you convert the plants into biochar you basically fix that carbon in the material and remove it from the carbon cycle so for every ton of biochar that you produce you pull about three tons of CO2 out of the carbon cycle and fix it for hundreds of years in that material and so you get again that win-win of better soil performance because it's an amazing

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agricultural input along with this really important kind of carbon story great explanation give us the type of impact that you think this business could have on on the envir you know at scale well we're tiny right now I mean I'm I know I know I'm just like give us an idea even if it's just a small Enda yeah so for context we're we're we actually turned two today on Earth Day we have sequestered 100 tons of CO2 in that time which is about as much as an average American emits in a year so it's

00:14:52 - 00:15:57

not that much but it's you know it's scaling quickly and the kind of larger impact that we hope to to have is by scaling awareness and demand for this input called biochar which will have serious serious impact on climate and is expected to be you know about 10% is of the total carbon capture kind of story which ends up being really big kind of crazy numers unbelievable Taurus let's go to you first one a second let's do both both I'll I'll be sure I'm sorry I didn't realize you alleries were hitting

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you today yeah uh how do you we sustainability I let's do the first one because marketing hasn't been an issue for Taurus and if you see the bike it like sells itself let's talk about first for now the way we look at sustainability no I think it's for I'll help you out a yeah no I get it uh so one of the things we believe in all these appal ads come to my we worked really hard to sorry um so what we're building is a highly technological product right and technology is inherently

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um it has shorter lifespan it's uh obsolescent right the reason you buy the iPhone every year is not because you have to it's because the way sell an engineer this product it's engineered to fail at a certain point and this term called land obsolescence came about 100 years ago it comes from the automotive industry where um the car manufacturers realized that they need to sell more cars and the cars they were building were lasting a little too long and and you don't want that right you don't want

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to sell one product and then for the customer to enjoy it so they started engineering things that were planned to fail at a certain point that does not sound like a story that we should keep you know designing and building new companies and products after if you want to take sustainability seriously so usually we look at sustainability as a technological solution and we talk about you know Carbon extraction Technologies and electric vehicles and so on which is great but the core of sustainability is

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you use a product for the longest amount possible because the amount of energy that is required to dig into the Earth extract the minerals to create a product anything like look at whatever you're wearing even the simplest thing took so much energy as so many people in a global supply chain to produce and uh you know plastic bottle we use it for 30 seconds so a product that has traveled all over the world has a lifespan of 30 seconds to end up and out anyway so uh what we try to do is how do we move away

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from technological obsolescence while building a highly technological product so building it on a modular platform makes sense which means that you only replace the parts that are failing and in terms of electronics so a lot of parts on our bike can last 50 60 years just like vintage bikes you know if you buy a motorcycle from the 50s if you take care of it it still works if you buy a car from the ' 50s if you take care of it it still works why because the mindset of The Way We Were building

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things back then the mindset was built to be repaired today we build things to be replaced and I think we need to go back and start thinking from a perspective of if I buy something if I choose that something enters my life is this a product I want to keep for the next 5 10 15 years and if it is then inherently it becomes the most sustainable thing because you going have to buy it over and over and over again so looking at through that filter we try to create a product that would last for 50 60 years just like a Triumph I worked

00:18:33 - 00:19:32

on that was built in mid-century and if you do that well the the future will tell if if that's if that's going to work but I think it starts with an intention and then from then on you can choose how to incorporate that into into your company yeah that was a a great answer so it's more just like making things to last in your particular case though it's an e motorcycle which is pretty rare give us an under give us a a reference point how large is how much market share does E Capture in the

00:19:03 - 00:20:06

motorcycle space for now non-existent I would say where the electric two wheel spaces today is where Tesla was about 10 years ago where people like yeah cool there's this electric car right today like it's no question that electric vehicles is the is the future the motorcycle space and in general the two wheel space is slightly lagging it's laggy in North America and Europe if you go to China 5070 million EV School TS were sold in Asia so over there it's like of course you know EES are here to

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stay uh because Asia owns the global Supply chains when it comes to electrical Vehicles us is just warming up and uh also the S of sort of the notion of lightweight Mobility is not very prevalent in America in Europe more so if you've been to like Milan or Barcelona you know scooters that's kind of how people get around so I think that there's a lot to be done on on that front as well Danel um I want to give you a chance to to on this point for maybe the portfolio companies yeah I think it's definitely a more founder

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Centric question so I want to give these guys the the time of day but uh I do think that one of the things that they both touched on um if you guys picked up on it is that ultimately the the product has to speak to Consumers sort of full stop right there you can have a mission you can have the sustainability Factor but if you're leaning on that alone to win consumers it's probably not going to be long lasting and in order to have that stopping power from a product perspective it needs to be a very good

00:20:37 - 00:21:35

product period regardless of the sustainability element that is a nice to have in the eyes of consumers right now hopefully one day we can all hope that eventually people will become wise to the fact that sustainability should be their primary focus when purchasing a product but at the end of the day it might get them to try it but what gets them to stick around and to have repat purchases and to be a lifelong consumer of your product and a and a supporter of your business is going to be the fact

00:21:06 - 00:22:00

that the product stands above all other products that are in that category that you're competing with right so that's just something to keep in mind especially for the founders here the mission the mission is important and it's very core to your business but if your product doesn't win next to all the other products in a lineup every single time it it's a valiant effort and you're going to save some trees but at the end of the day you're not going to be a you're not going to be a sustainable

00:21:33 - 00:22:28

sustainability focused business right you're going to be kind of a flash in the pan and that's not what we're trying to achieve right as Founders so that's I think it's a really good point I mean just to it seems like winning in a particular category is like a Confluence of product you need to have the best sort of product uh to win in the space I would say mission is a part of it and then marketing too to drive demand and to to win market share yeah for sure tus actually want to talk about that too

00:22:00 - 00:23:06

though because we mentioned how design has been such a focal point with your marketing strategy like you're talking about building a sustainable EV bike and people actually see it and they just want it regardless of knowing that it's sustainable or not can you talk a little bit more about you know how you managing your debt how many people ride motorcycles here SI yeah that's kind of yeah in usually it's about two people per 100 so it's a very small segment of uh of humans that uh want to sit on a

00:22:33 - 00:23:44

machine that goes 80 mph right in New York city so you need to belong to certain subset of of Risk Takers but nonetheless there's there seems to be some energy that this this machine uh has where as a product designer of all the products I've made like this thing is when I chose to dedicate the last six years of my life to because it had it it encapsulates so many different dimensions of um uh like the physical world it has state-of-the-art engineering you know because of a small footprint you need to figure out a way

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how to compress the stuff we've created which is everything from electrical batteries motor controls Motors into compact package right it needs to have a a form factor the exterior the Aesthetics the way you look at it you need to feel something because a motorcycle is not a rational decision it is purely emotional so if you don't make it appealing simply by looking at it you fail already there and there's a lot of I think you can all relate whether you like motorcycles or cars there's certain

00:23:37 - 00:24:39

cars you passed by and you wouldn't if I would ask you what was a car you just passed 99% of cars you wouldn't even reflect like k whatever right but then you pass by like a 1960s Porsche 911 or a Lamborghini or whatever sports car right you even if you're not its cars you look over your shoulder like huh that's cool and you can so what is that thing that made me look around right and we can dig into like the psychology of Aesthetics and what defines Beauty whether it's objective objective but

00:24:08 - 00:25:11

there seems to be a layer where we just viscerally react to things that they carry an element of of beauty and that was basically the pursuit is like how do we how do we identify that how do we create a shape that speaks for itself and if we spend more time and effort on that maybe the marketing will be easier and uh I don't remember who said it uh one of the marketing guys he's like marketing is an excuse for bad product and sales is excuse for bad marketing so if you're not focusing on the product if

00:24:40 - 00:25:34

you're not making sure the people like holy I want this thing right everything you build on top is probably going to be a little bit shaky unless you go back and in engineering Char say what's the boot cause right trying figure figure that out let's progress here Taurus I'm going to give you a break I'm going to give you a break Chad this is actually great for you so Chad previously before Rosie was head of growth at every table that's actually where we met we worked together um on

00:25:06 - 00:26:17

agency client side he knows a lot about marketing do you have any contrarian perspectives on the marketing ecosystem in 2024 he also I didn't give these guys the questions before yeah I was told I would get the questions before and I did not question um I mean I I think I could kind of tie it back to the Genesis of of Rosie and why I went the direction I went which is we are very much and purposefully D Toc second we wanted to build a retail first brand and part of that was a reaction to trying to build

00:25:41 - 00:26:43

an e-commerce brand through iOS 14 and basically banging my head against a wall for a year and burning hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and I did not want to do that again I didn't want to kind of rely on that as a channel I also just felt like retail was a really interest way to get basically free brand Impressions like you know today we're in over 800 doors across the us including targets and that means that you know hundreds of thousands of people are walking past our little kind of package

00:26:13 - 00:27:03

and billboard every single day basically for free I mean the stores are paying us to hold the product so I don't know if that's necessarily contrarian in 24 I feel like a lot of Brands who started to go that way but that was certainly the kind of impetus for why we crafted Rosie the way that we did yeah I think it's it's definitely important to think about I mean like even form factor when I think about your packaging for you know if retail is going to be the channel That makes the

00:26:38 - 00:27:34

most sense for you to think through that but um yeah I think there's a whole generation of direct consumer marketers where like a retail is is a big thing if you could give yourself one piece of advice is someone getting started in the sustainability space or in marketing uh what would it be a l you could Don it yeah so it took me five years to figure out what aspect of Cl climate change I wanted to work on which I don't know if it has to take someone that long but it it definitely is a

00:27:05 - 00:28:06

process it is such a massive and complex and kind of diverse set of issues that touches almost everything that I think it can be really overwhelming to go and say I want to work on climate and sustainability and then try and figure out what the heck to do next and so my first piece of advice would just be really patient with yourself to like figure it out but my second piece of advice would be to try to connect it as deeply as possible with something that you care about whether or not that be in

00:27:37 - 00:28:32

sustainability and just find a way to do something that you love even marginally more sustainable um cuz I think you'll have greater impact over the long term if if you're in it and you want to work super hard and you're not going to get really burnt out doing the 80 90 hour weeks it takes to try to build something and there's there's impact to be made literally everywhere and so find a place that that you want to work on and figure out how to make it impactful it's a great answer Taurus I think you could

00:28:04 - 00:29:16

relate to that yeah I go ahead 100% there's uh there's a lot of people a lot of Founders right we start with like let's save the world and U um the approach usually it's uh to be perceived in a certain way right you're doing it because uh you want to get the you know credibility points for being sustainable most most of that does not come from the space you actually wanted to come from and uh I'm a big believer that sustainability like it it needs to there needs to be a psychological shift within

00:28:40 - 00:29:43

each person to figure out why why do I care about this do I really care about sustainability or do I care about it because I'm supposed to because everyone is talking about sustainability right and that's for each person to ask yourself that question what do I actually care about what does sustainability mean to me uh is it to take care of our environment you know is it to protect the Earth for future Generations there could be tons of different answers but I would say yeah ask yourself the question why why why

00:29:12 - 00:30:16

does it matter to you and then work your way from out of there figure out what are you good at you know can you combine what you're good at with what the world needs and then maybe somewhere in the middle uh is worth exploring because if uh if uh there comes a time where you're like oh man I don't want to do this and sustainability doesn't really matter so 100% to what you said so Daniel I think from an investor perspective like you talk to how many brands do you talk to a month oh a month yeah dozens um but we

00:29:44 - 00:30:48

have I mean we have 13 portfolio companies right now that are all kind of in the on average probably sub 7 million in Revenue um so we're we're dealing with Founders who are firsttime founders who are a year into their Journey or veteran Founders who are three years into their fourth company because the other three failed miserably right so it's like there's u a lot of what these two guys are saying is is perfectly on point right you have to be you have to be super passionate about what you're

00:30:15 - 00:31:29

engaging with um and allow yourself the time and the space to learn about yourself and about the business and about the sector um and I think you know the in terms of the sustain ability element um I think as Tara said right like you need to know what it is that drives you within the sustainability question and how you want to operate within that ecosystem right um whether it is you know water treatment or EV or soil or carbon sequestering in other forms and Fashions right um or recyclable containers uh things like

00:30:53 - 00:31:58

that right there there are all sorts of avenues to go down um but ultimately if it's in an area or within a product set that you're not super passionate about already to begin with OR that you don't have some unique perspective on it's going to be very hard to be working those long hours um and really you know gritting and bearing it for the journey and so I think what they're saying is you know I would heed their advice um and we you know we stand on the VC side we're pretty operationally focused Fund

00:31:25 - 00:32:20

in general in terms of our strategy and so a a lot of these conversations are ones that we have with FS on a daily basis of like how are we thinking about this is the you know is the consumer resonating with your product right now in terms of how you're marketing it with respect to the sustainability angle or should we just be marketing it straight up as a consumer product and they realize after the fact that oh this this product is actually good for the environment and good for me I'm going to

00:31:53 - 00:32:47

come back for more now right so a lot of these questions kind of are pretty fluid conversation that you should always be checking in with yourself and or your co-founders and or anyone on your team and other advisers um and really leaning on that support system that you might have as well um but yeah that's that's sort of the advice I'd give I think it's really interesting that we have both the Venture side of things here and the entrepreneurs because both of these companies right that here are

00:32:19 - 00:33:31

venture-backed and I think you guys you know some of these businesses require a lot of funding to actually bring some of these products to Market and that process in it of itself is incredibly debilitating um and you need to be like committed to whatever your company is um i' like for you guys both to talk about that and then Daniel prud to respond being on the other side uh and kind of writing the check but you know I think most of the people in this crowd probably have thought about raising

00:32:55 - 00:34:05

venture or considering it or have done it since you guys are on the other side give us a a take of what that looked like yeah I mean it's it it kind of goes to what we were just saying which is it very much depends on who you are and what you want out of the business and ultimately like what you want your lifestyle to be running that business so the The Venture route is really purposefully designed to be super hard cuz they want you to grow as fast as humanly possible um with as little Capital as ly possible and you know we

00:33:30 - 00:34:36

made the choice to go that route because frankly I wanted the pressure to try to you know a th000 or 10,000x the impact of Rosie or or frankly fail trying I mean that's that's the Venture model um it does not make my nights and weekends super fun but that's what I kind of wanted to sign up for and feel like I'm in the Life Stage to to do that but it's it it it makes it really challenging to try to grow that that quickly um and I think it really is I think it's kind of no offense but kind of overrated

00:34:03 - 00:35:08

like I think I think more people should consider not doing it and building a business around the lifestyle that they want and then if you are ready to try to you know pour kerosene on it like go for it cuz is it's also super fun how long has it been two years yeah we've done two we did a preed and a seed nice Taurus reply to that um yeah I agree with all of that and we've been pretty much raising Capital since day one that's a other halftime job right and the Venture model is amazing because it

00:34:35 - 00:35:35

has allowed so many people with just a napkin sketch to get funded and bring amazing things I I don't think there's other a venue to get funded but then somewhere in somewhere there the whole Venture model kind of got caught in its own tail and it became sort of an accelerating spiral where in order to hold the model you just need to write bigger and bigger checks on very little evidence that this is actually going to be a company that's going to succeed and I think if anyone's been raising funding

00:35:05 - 00:36:04

in the last two years uh it hasn't been flowing like Rivers right because a lot of VCH Capital realize like oh the Investments we've made are not into companies that are actually creating value they haven't figured out their fundamentals and their business model and neither have we you know so the one big thing we've been doing in the last year is like okay if we can't get this your funding let's go back to 101 building a company you know how do we make profit on the thing that we

00:35:34 - 00:36:43

actually sell and just you know tenaciously starting looking at what would this look like if we were not relying on external funding and I think it's a exercise that very few entrepreneurs do mainly because Capital has been uh accessible fairly easily and whether you can get bench capital or you can get a grant or you can get a check from anyone one my biggest recommendation would be like go and understand the basics of your business numbers and a lot of Founders like yeah later I'll figure out later how I'm

00:36:09 - 00:37:17

going to make money out start with a napkin sketch I didn't do that I relied on like oh $100 million you know EVS are left and right and now we got to sort of go back and do the H work we should have done a couple of years ago um yeah just you know the one1 of trading building compan I wanted uh I mean this is a a conversation for another time but uh Daniel I want to talk about like how you actually built a motorcycle but we we'll get to that later well yeah no I'm going to I'm going to leave before Chad beats me up

00:36:44 - 00:37:52

because he's he's a little bit bigger than me but um no I think everything everything that they' said sorry I'm Italian I talk with my hands so my mic control is very poor but um I I I think everything that they said is first and foremost entirely true our you know any Investor's model that's not sort of an angel investor or a high net worth individual that's you know supporting a company out of passion is going to come with a lot of weight and gravity and new found structure and sort of you know as

00:37:18 - 00:38:21

soon as a Vestor a venture investor comes into play the stakes just got raised substantially right because you're they're managing other people's money and now you're using their money to grow your business and so everyone has a really really high level intensity around succeeding um failure is a huge part of startups it's a huge part of my job as an investor um we don't get decisions right all the time no one does and so I think the key if you are looking for Venture funding

00:37:49 - 00:38:49

is to find the right partner that you actually get along with and you want to work with day in and day out um because at the end of the day the goal should be if you're go if your business needs that Capital to grow substantially to a place that you want to get it to right you want to get it there not them don't listen to an investor listen to yourself there's nothing wrong with starting a business with the intent of growing it to a place where you're making 10 15% eiton margins and paying yourself and

00:38:19 - 00:39:23

your family and and your co-founders off of that and you have a nice sustainable business and and that's your story right that is that is incredible commendable I think we should all just sort of like establish that as a as our grounding right and then if you do want to take it to a place where we're talking you know nine fig exits super high growth High Velocity really high impact or die trying as Chad mentioned right like that's when the discussion for bringing outside institutional Capital comes into

00:38:51 - 00:39:51

play and you just have to be aware of the risks and potential you know sort of outcomes there um but it's really the key is finding the right partner right every investor every VC fund has different style of approach has a different strategy that they're trying to employ has a different check size or deal structure that they usually are most comfortable operating within and so finding that fit is all part of your job as a Founder um and and you don't want to you don't want to be in a position

00:39:21 - 00:40:13

where you're making a decision based on something that you think you should be doing and it's not something that you actually want to be doing as a Founder right and that's something that's very important that level of mindfulness and occasionally I mean I see it dayto day in you know in my seat where we'll have Founders that are coming in they've got you know a $2 million business they're trying to raise 3 million dollar to grow and to tz's point they're losing money

00:39:47 - 00:40:37

on every piece of product that they sell and they're like oh well eventually we'll get economies of scale and our business will start making money and and it's that's just not that's not the position you want to be and is you're going to constantly be having to return back to the well and you're going to start to feel like you're doing something that you you're ring you're too heavily relying on other sources of in of funding and the business isn't structured properly to be able to

00:40:12 - 00:41:02

succeed as a standalone unit right um and that's where you get caught in that spiral of venture capitalists coming in and you start you know you have a Down Round so you can raise more money so you can work on product Innovation and then eventually you need to raise a debt structure because you know something goes wrong in the supply chain and now you have $2 million of debt that can take over your entire business if you don't succeed and you're stuck in a in a blender right and we you know that's

00:40:37 - 00:41:35

just not a fun place to be in for people um even for investors it's not fun CU we want you all to succeed as Founders and we get put in a position where now we have to make the right call for our investors and if push comes to shove and I have a you know a $2 million convertible debt that's coming due and the business isn't where it needs to be we have to we have to make the best deal for our fund to manage our investors money we have a like a legal responsibility to do that and eventually

00:41:06 - 00:42:05

the the division between the team as us as your investment partner it starts to become more and more you know us versus you and that's never a fun place to be in for anyone um and so that's I think the advice that I would give Founders particularly on the early stage side is just make sure that you're approaching it you've built buil a business that's sustainable with or without outside Capital because that means you have good unit economics youve good margins you've built a sustainable business and then

00:41:36 - 00:42:38

decide what it is that you want to do and how you want the business to grow and and at what rate and to where and then move from there yeah there's so many so many critical I think foundational business pieces in there basically you want to set the business up for scale you know and be good whether or you have Venture dollars or or or not tell us and Daniel we actually stay with you here so some of the different companies that you're you've invested in they're trying to take market share from incumbents that you

00:42:07 - 00:43:03

know have totally different value propositions from a climate or sustainability perspective what are some of the conversations you have with those founding teams and some of the tactics that they use to uh win market share yeah that's a good question um I think again I'm going to sound like a broker record but it comes down to the product um especially if we're if we're talking mostly consumer product companies here you know I think a good example and a bad like a a bad example would honestly

00:42:35 - 00:43:33

be probably beyond meat is a pretty interesting case study in this um again this is goes back to my point about focused on sustainability first in spite of human health or in spite of product quality they've they've taken that on the chin lately um in terms of creating a product that's environmentally friendly with a mission to take animals out of the supply chain for ethical and environmental purposes sustainab sustainability Focus but the product wasn't good enough to compete against

00:43:04 - 00:44:15

real meat and a product also probably wasn't healthy enough to compete against the health aspects of ground beef um and what happened was was that consumers would have a lot of one-time trial and they they' try the product out of curiosity or out of sustainability and it wasn't good enough right a good example of this is oop I don't know if any of you are familiar with that product um they've they created a product that tastes at a like uncanny similarity to Coke Sprite whatever you

00:43:39 - 00:44:36

want to call it um to the point at which now now they can win on the actual mission of the brand and the actual benefits of the product right because you have people who are Coke drinkers who are like oh this is interesting let me try this oh wow this tastes just like a a really good Cola and then now they're hooked and they're like what what is this oh it's got nine grams of Prebiotic fiber okay cool and now you're in right you've got the consumer hooked and again the the sort of

00:44:08 - 00:45:13

differentiation and the thing that's going to pull market share away was after the consumer had actually tried the product and so the quality there really matters when you're going up against massive incumbents you have to catch their eye and then win them in a head-to-head battle with whatever the the product or service might be right um I think it's probably similar both of your cases right with the with soil you you have to be as good or better than Scots in from a performance perspective

00:44:40 - 00:45:29

if gardeners are going to use Rosie soil and they plant their they plant their you know tulip bulbs and then it doesn't grow as well as if they use Scots they're not going to give a crap if it's sustainable right because they want their flowers to look good that's most people operate in that way there's going to be a small portion that will use it regardless right but you're not trying to win them because you've already got them um and so I think that's that's the

00:45:04 - 00:46:05

key like sort of calculus that you have to do when you're dealing with these kind of product sets um and with large sort of bow incumbents in particular yeah that's a really good point I think from a marketing perspective uh it's so much easier to Market a really good product you end up like taking the perspective of I'm generating demand I'm introducing like Easter egg something that people really should know about um and that's predicated on just having a great product we did a a commercial

00:45:35 - 00:46:39

campaign for ollipop and the whole campaign was about you know this new better for you soda that is something everyone should know about because it's just such a functional benefit such a better choice for the consumer and it also tastes really good yeah exactly if it if if people saw that marketing went and tried the product and it tasted like crap it would the marketing wouldn't have worked right cuz it's this weird kind of chicken and egg situation but it all comes down to what's in the can at

00:46:06 - 00:47:15

the end of the day so um Chad what do you think about this one yeah I mean just one kind of funny aside for our weird industry which is pretty much all potting soil is made from this input called Pete Moss which is made by mining peep BS which hold more carbon than the Earth's forests it's like 3% % of land mass and 20% of the stored carbon and it contributes the like extraction of pee bogs contributes to about 5% of total Global emissions like it's twice as bad as the airline industry and the entire

00:46:41 - 00:47:43

gardening industry is totally reliant on this terrible input most people don't know about that so we've been very like loud and proud Pete free and that's gotten us into some kind of fun trouble I suppose um we got like a c and assist letter from the Canadian Pete Association telling us to I mean basically like shut the f up um we go to trade shows with all of these people and I've had many come up to me and kind of just like laugh or swear in my face because of us telling people what's in

00:47:12 - 00:48:09

traditional ping soil so um I don't know I kind of think it's like fun and a little bit like uh I don't know makes for some healthy competition and you know clearly this is something we should be talking about if people are this emotional about it so just one question on that before we go to tus how do you weave like are you educating your consumers about that and how are you doing that yeah definitely um we are trying the paraben free route I don't even actually know what parabens are but

00:47:40 - 00:48:49

I don't want them in my shampoo so and we're kind of going the same route like just loud and proud ped free just to kind of trigger curiosity and say well if they're putting it on their packaging it must this must be something I don't want my nice Taurus thank you I've been reflecting what industry are we competing with the petroleum the I mean the oil industry no let's let's let's consider narrow it down yeah let's narrow down motorcycle IND yeah let's try that okay um Harley David is

00:48:15 - 00:49:14

specific for yeah I think that's fair um I guess initially it's just maybe there's two phases to it like during the creative phase when you work on something I think it's useful not to pay attention to your competitors because it distracts you and if you start playing this game of like the positioning Char where do I fit into Market landscape you kind of it's so easy to get lost in because the very origin why you're doing it begins to fade away at least for me like the first two years I had no idea

00:48:45 - 00:49:45

what other electric motorcycles existed and people asked me like don't you know your competitors I'm like nope I don't care because if I allow myself to start mapping out maybe I'm not going to honor the the real thing that I want to build here now luckily after we built it and we kind of showed the world Tada we've made this um it was strong enough to stand on its own and then I begin looking like okay what moves the needle and then you begin developing a feedback loop with what you're doing and how the

00:49:15 - 00:50:09

world responds and I think just like any natural process as biof feedback loop right um same thing in the startup the more the faster you can create the feedback loop meaning you do something how does the world respond reflect over it incorporate it iterate it and do and then you begin to have a conversation or a relationship between your product and the people you're building it with and your competitors because your competitors are going to be doing the exactly same thing and the funny thing

00:49:43 - 00:50:44

we when we started doing plant-based materials a couple of years ago uh New York Times wrote an article a motorcycle made out of Pineapples uh most people probably never heard of a motorcycle made out of pineapples right but that was attention worthy head for in their persp perspective right um it is the bike made out of pineapple this we tried the we're treding pineapple at the on the seat oh cuz um it's a fast thing we would write a pineapple 100 miles hour I guess for for like so motorcycles and I

00:50:14 - 00:51:12

think biking in general is just really interesting because you have this consumer that is obsessed or like idolizes Harley-Davidson it's like a really specific image yes um how has that been difficult to kind of reshade people's well that's the thing we're not trying to reshape it and that's the the whole point of it is like how do we create something that is uniquely ours and just let people come to us and that's been working so far you know and all of that comes within branding what's

00:50:42 - 00:51:43

your voice are you staying true to your voice are you doing what you believe in you know how authentic is it and the more you H that in the less you have to real on going out there and convincing people cuz if if you're you if you find yourself in a position where you have to convince someone either you're not talking to the right person or something's wrong on you around um what I've noticed and I've had a couple of companies prior to this and I work with branding and a lot of times a company

00:51:13 - 00:52:07

comes it's like I need a new brand something's not working you know and then the agency goes and does the whole visual identity positioning right and then they present it and then they're like I tried it it still doesn't work it's about the same thing as I come to you and I ask tell tell me who I am can you help me tell me who I am and you come back and you are this I'm like thanks right so every company to go back to its roots and like who are we what are we doing and make sure that's

00:51:39 - 00:52:38

crystal clear you know if it's not it doesn't matter nobody's going to be able to help you maybe short term maybe you're going to be able to get some sales but in the long term if you want to build a long-term business like back to patience why you doing this have you had converts from you know Harley guys oh we've had we started doing test rides so if anyone want to uh ride an electric motorcycle in Brooklyn um let us know Saturdays um you need a license but we had a bunch of hary guys you know

00:52:09 - 00:53:07

goatees and leather jackets and the whole thing show up and superp skeptical they look at the bike like what is this thing and initially I try to convince them I'm like it's electric it's faster it's zero Mission you know and now I'm like you want to go for ride and they go for ride almost every person comes back is like oh what the you know and they start looking around and they look at their Harley and they look at our bike like all right right and so that was enough you know I'm not trying

00:52:38 - 00:53:41

to go to create a marketing campaign you know like instead of a Harley buy at tphone so Chad for you the consumer are they usually just unaware um and then you're educating them and they're like oh this makes perfect set yeah uh we think maybe one in four gardeners knows about be and I think once many once many of them when many of them learn about the issues with Pete it's really hard to go back and buy Miracle Grow so it kind of helps with the loyalty and retention to also tell that story on the back of

00:53:09 - 00:54:12

the back um what do you guys can you just opine on like next big opportunity since you're in the space and um I'm sure you know other Founders in the space yeah um I so I got totally obsessed with biochar but I also got pretty obsessed with kelp and so if I hadn't have started a biochar startup I would have probably started a kelp startup and what's nice about kelp um you can Farm it with almost no inputs and you can grow it in certain ways that actually sequesters carbon as well

00:53:41 - 00:54:49

basically it like sinks Plankton and Plankton are made of carbon um but yeah it's a super nutritious um you know high quality crop that needs all snow input you can just grow it out in the middle Rosy we actually are putting some kelp in the soil just cuz I'm D in the kelp uh Daniel what do you think Well Chad stole my idea so uh yeah now I did I need another answer um no I think anything kelp is hot right now kelp is pretty hot kelp also uh it sequesters carbon but it also helps filter like sea

00:54:14 - 00:55:31

water um and so I think anything in the kind of water treatment clean water drinkable water potable water kind of space is going to be a big hot button topic over the next probably decade or so you know and I think anything that any business or service or technology that operates within that realm um and in in addition on the kind of microplastics and um seafood supply chain side of things um is is what we see a lot of right now um whether that be people who are making tuna in kind of Petri dishes and or people who are

00:54:53 - 00:55:59

trying to more sustainably farm and source kind of commonly consumed seafood and things of that nature um cuz I do think even though we are a plant-based heavy fund um Seafood seems to be the kind of like final frontier of when people draw the line from a dietary perspective um and so I I don't know whether it's because people can't really seem to anthropomorphize fish as much or shellfish as much um but it was also one of the least sustainable Supply chains for a lot of different species of fish

00:55:26 - 00:56:38

and SE Seafood um and so I think that's something that we see particularly cuz it spans both sides there's the there's the for lack food better word Upstream stuff of the supply chain and then there's the downstream stuff from a consumer perspective um so yeah Taurus plans for sure uh bio design Biol bioengineering anything bio finding a way for the cold Tech world to get closer to Nature and find that oral LA and uh just harnessing you know the intelligence that's been here for quite

00:56:02 - 00:57:13

a while if we just look a little closer right I think it it has a lot of answers that uh we have chosen not to uh pay attention to but now we have the tools so we can at least understand what I'm talking about is nature how nature operates and try to unlock its secrets and wisdom and then incorporate it into our iPhones and electric cars and yeah I agree with that I think like there are a lot of uh overlooked categories where there's really big opportunity um Daniel this is back to back to you and I sort

00:56:38 - 00:57:35

you sort of kind of answered this with the last one if there's anything else you want to add yeah um and I think yeah what's your investment criteria when you look at a startup so we operate mainly on the seed to early growth side of things um in which case generally speaking the first and foremost Focus that we have is on the job cocky not the horse so to speak um so we're very fou or focused particularly also in our case because we get heavily involved in the operations day-to-day with these

00:57:06 - 00:58:13

businesses it's really important to us that the founder kind of checks the boxes um usually that's you know some sense of kind of coachability stubbornness a little you know one or two screws loose in a good way um we want that energy we want that Focus that fire that drive right um but we also want people who know what they don't know and want to learn and want mentorship um and are seeking out those moments uh throughout their Journey as an entrepreneur um and then yeah I touched on it a little bit but there's

00:57:40 - 00:58:40

got to be product Market fit typically we only get involved if there's already existing Revenue um and proof of concept and traction from a sales perspective um occasionally we'll be lenient with that if there's a heavy techn technological advantage or IP component um and then from business perspective yeah there's you know how big is the market you're playing in is the business sustainably built already even if subscale how much would scale affect that sort of build of the business from a p&l perspective um

00:58:10 - 00:59:07

what are the UN economics who's your consumer um and just getting a full understanding of sort of what makes this company tick and what where the where are the places that we can help it succeed and help it be better um and ultimately where do we see it heading over the next 3 five seven years cuz as Venture investors we're holding you know we're investing in a company and then we're along for the ride for 7 to 10 years on average right um and so it's a journey for us as well and and it's just

00:58:38 - 00:59:35

about being confident right now that that there are the underpinnings of something that can be very successful um later on right so for the two Founders in the room if you could relaunch your own business what would you do differently I so I'm a solo founder um and I wanted to have a co-founder but just never kind of met that person um and I think there's pros and cons with being a solo founder or having a co-founder but it definitely I think in the early days before you start to really build a team is just like lonely

00:59:07 - 01:00:24

and you feel like you're crazy half the time so um I think I would probably I would have loved to have found someone to deal with but just didn't yeah maybe Rosie kelp Co yeah you and Daniel uh tus said you're a solo founder as well right uh no I have a co-founder but we went we're separated um H tough question there probably too many things just to be honest hav't done a honest self assessment of what that would be main thing you could you could do one thing over one thing yeah I would say uh Focus

00:59:45 - 01:00:39

kind of balance creativity with just basic business practices more you know which I think is a very normal thing for most creatives like we're typically like ah business that's kind of gross that's that's not from me right until it becomes the thing that you need to understand and if if you got MBA that's a different scenario maybe you should adjust your creativity Nom a little bit but if you come from the creative industry maybe find a better balance between sort of you know knowing

01:00:12 - 01:01:26

how to make pnl and what uh profit margins and the basics of you know selling stuff is okay cool great great stuff lot of Fun open Q&A for who whoever wants to go first how far into his business did he make his first ire we I started selling soil on a Shopify site like well before incorporating the business um just to see if people would buy it so I probably spent 6 months just kind of tinkering in my kitchen trying to yeah see if there was a market foring then Incorporated and then raised our

01:00:50 - 01:01:52

first round of capital and then hired someone so it was it was probably it was about 6 months after incorporation but probably a year into driving revenue and that was the soil person cuz I was way out of my element trying to create great soil I remember you actually um okay I remember that actually you were running ads and you were like I have an 8X row ass on the on the soil products yeah yeah I basically put I think maybe three grand of my own money into it and sold like probably 60 Grand of soil and said

01:01:20 - 01:02:28

okay it's time to go my job and really do this thing nice other questions go ahead I'm gonna pass by mik to you hi I'm Tiana um I'm kind of just wondering how do you navigate you know having a sustainable brand and com with pricing for consumers you know when you look at a store and kind of choose BP of price for a lot of the a high hand na F should have um yeah I I don't believe that consumers will pay a green premium at least at scale like maybe you know 5% of your like super Whole Food Shoppers

01:01:54 - 01:02:52

Mone but if you want to have real impacts you need to kind of get out of that super early adapter so we are a more premium so but I believe it's a performance premium and that allows us to invest more deeply into higher quality inputs that are better for the plants and better for the planet so I think it's coupled but um yeah I'm not I'm not convinced that a green premium is a scal thing to do I yeah I would just add that the um when you're thinking about pricing you shouldn't be

01:02:24 - 01:03:22

you shouldn't you should be pricing something such that you can make sure that you're making appropriate margin for your business to operate sustainably and so to his point if there's another reason to charge someone a premium whether it's performance-based whether the the whole set is a more premium set um I would focus on that but ultimately you know if if you if you think your pricing is going to be too outside of that competitive range then it might be time to go back to the drawing board on

01:02:52 - 01:03:50

the on the cost side of things and see if you can bring down one or two components so that you can make sure you're competitively priced while without sacrificing too much on the quality or the function or anything of that nature um but at the end of the day you don't want to get into a position where you're priced too far out of range and you're trying to say that it's a green premium and consumers are just kind of walking by it right are questions go ahead I'm going to pass

01:03:21 - 01:04:42

this over to you hi there man Jonathan so I would like to know more about how do you like motorcycles on Shopify like know yeah like how does it work do you P of sale uh in your um you know store or how do you call it that's yeah we do sell them online but not through Shopify I I told tamis about this I tried to I tried to get you on Shopify yeah it's like an Ikea so $30,000 Ikea no I'm kidding we build them in brpl um but um we yeah we do direct consumer so from Lo one someone finds out about us until we

01:04:01 - 01:05:10

give them the keys we do it all in house uh maybe in the future we're going to rely on a dealership uh model of some sorts but for now pretty much how you would find any EC consum a product you know find on Instagram Google features whatnot go to website and uh do the rest I'm going to giveing a better answer than tars search uh tar for on Instagram they' he's done a fantastic job of just like generating demand showing the product and then he gets pre-orders because people want bike right if it

01:04:36 - 01:05:39

would be that simple just build something as solid that's pretty that's how you other questions well thanks I had a question for tarus I was curious um how do you go through the design process of um deciding on your handlebar Grim for free of motorcycle if you did if you didn't study any of your comp editors and I I was looking at your um Instagram looks like you decided on like a um diamond pattern is that correct the diamond patter for what sorry your your handlebar grip the grip for your

01:05:07 - 01:06:12

motorcycle oh handlebar interesting detail what do you do sir why I designed a a push-up handle so it's called the ab Shield boss so I have it's like a you know it's kind of similar like a you know so it's got it okay well do you have 14 hours um I can run you through the whole yeah know workflow how this operates that' be great be Curious Thing no seriously if you're interested you can stop by our shop at the Navy Ard everything from prototyping to like the final product um I guess you need to

01:05:39 - 01:06:42

know what you're doing before right so you need to understand design engineering uh for sure there was an inspiration board like this is kind of the uh you know the aesthetic Universe we went into but there were no motorcycles on that vision board um they were more like product design influences that we wanted to draw upon from a different dimension which I think for any designer is interesting because usually we like if you're going to design a car you look at other cars your product ends up looking like other cars

01:06:11 - 01:07:06

if you're design a chair you know most people have other chance so I think it's useful to look outside of your industry completely and draw inspiration from that and that's going to create something unique something people like oh I've never seen that line or I've never seen that texture material whatever in that specific setting and our handle bars is a example of that the the way we designed the handle bars uh no other motorcycle handb looks like this uh it this one looks more like I

01:06:38 - 01:07:58

don't know Art Deco Space Age sort of sci-fi uh kind of thing which now became kind of one of the signature looks on the book uh so thanks for noticing thanks uh this question for you um you opened uh 800 stores in two years quite a bit so I wanted to just understand from your perspective the challenges going from d2c testing it out and then managing the velocity of each of those stores because while retail is a free visual yeah you still have to show velocity otherwise they shut you down yeah it's a great question um so we

01:07:18 - 01:08:23

kind of went with the traditional cpg route which was try to prove it in a bunch of small natural kind of high high-end stores before trying to scale up and so for us that was all the trendy kind of plant shops in Brooklyn and Chicago and Denver and I basically was just flying around the country hanging out in plant chops which was awesome and what that allowed us to do is basically launch hundreds of times and get better and better and better about what it took to get the velocity to stay on shelf

01:07:52 - 01:08:50

it's actually it's your right it's much easier to get on shelf than it is to stay on shelf because you're competing basically for the dollars of that real estate and that that retail business needs to prove that you deserve that spot and so for us it meant a bunch of iterations on price point a bunch of iterations on packaging trying to get better about staff education and placement and making sure they were telling the story correctly um and also trying to figure out you know which

01:08:19 - 01:09:28

stores we did best in and why um we also got super lucky in that about half of our doors have been inbound like have just ordered sight unseen because there's just that much like this in the category and then we got really really lucky cuz our the target buyer cold emailed us like just filled out our website form two months and our launch and we got to launch Target because of that so um I don't there's a little bit of hard work and a lot of lug I think hi my name is Ashley um I have question I think just across

01:08:55 - 01:10:02

the board though for uh to be a sustainable business uh sometimes you have you know byproduct left bler um and then you also have packaging that goes into play with that in mind what challenges or systs that you put in place for the consumer on the other end and as well as for yourself for it being manufacturer yeah great question um so I accidentally printed 10,000 bags of our house plant mix with our Cactus illustration on it and I don't know what to do with those bags so if anyone has any ideas please but yes you're right

01:09:28 - 01:10:30

like happens basically um from the consumer perspective we try to make it as easy as possible to know what to do when you're done with the product to reuse the packaging how you can we set up refill stations at our retailers um and then to try to make it easy to recycle when you have to um you get get rid of the packaging and the rest of the product um and that actually factored into we've done a full life cycle assessment of the product which basically says here's the net emissions

01:10:00 - 01:10:59

from Cradle to grave of this product and part of that math is what our consumers do at the end so we're actually incentivized from that measurement to try to help people do the right thing with the product and it'll you know be continuously iterated to try to get there yeah I think um I think yeah what he's doing at Rosie is typical for what you would see from the cpg that's trying to be sustainable from a packaging and consumer kind of interaction perspective um you know we have a company in the

01:10:29 - 01:11:34

portfolio called Holier which is a in the vitamin minerals and supplements Arena um and they have a multivitamin that's sort of curated to be specialized for people who live a plant forward sort of Lifestyle from a diet perspective and um instead of shipping in kind of a plastic typical like vitamin container that you'd see it's a glass container so it's a little bit more expensive to ship um but then you get refill pouches that are compostable to refill the glass jar um and consumers seem to really love

01:11:02 - 01:12:04

that added kind of thoughtfulness uh that comes with the product um and from a you know from a cost perspective it's it's a little bit more expensive than a plastic tub but at the end of the day it creates a much longer lifetime value from a consumer um that it's worth every penny to do things like that um so similar to his refill refill stations and um other sorts of any way that you can create a unique touch point with the consumer that seems very well thought out and and well designed and kind of

01:11:33 - 01:11:49

curated for their wants and needs um you're going to have them there for a long time so that's that's how I would think about it