Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / The Ugly Side of TikTok (Misogyny) with Behave Candy’s Founder, Mayssa Chehata (Part 1)

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The Ugly Side of TikTok (Misogyny) with Behave Candy’s Founder, Mayssa Chehata (Part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Mesa for Female Startup Club.
• 0:12
  Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and Hype Girl. I've been so happy to see so many new faces joining us in the Facebook group and asking all of the questions. Josephine and I are going to be digging into these topics every Friday for our Hype Girl chats. So come and join us by clicking the link in the show notes below and drop your questions and challenges into the group so we can explore them too.
• 0:42
  Today on the show, we've got Maysa Chihara. She's coming back for a second episode. She originally joined us back in May 2021, I believe it was, to talk about her business, Behave Candy. And since then, Behave has gone through a massive relaunch. Okay.
• 1:01
  Mesa made the call to pause the brand for what ended up being like 12 months while they worked through new packaging, new pricing, and new formulations. So it's really interesting to hear about this approach and the journey, and of course, the impact that it's had on the business. Let's get straight into it. This is Mesa for Female Startup Club. Mesa, welcome back to Female Startup Club. How are you?
• 1:29
  Good. Thank you. It's so good to be back. It's so good to be back. You were on the show in May 2021, which is like circa two years ago. And kind of crazy what can happen in kind of two years. How's your week going? What's been going on? Oh, yeah.
• 1:47
  My week is good. You know, New York's getting cold. So I got I caught like that early winter bug that goes around. I had no voice yesterday. So I'm very glad my voice came back just in time for this. But apologies in advance for the scratchy voice.
• 2:04
  You know what? I feel like since I started the show, it's gotten a bit better, but there was, I reckon, a good year where I was just constantly sounding croaky and I was having to, because I wasn't used to talking so much and talking like nonstop for long periods of time daily. And I had to start taking these like certain throat lozenges and they give them to like people on a much more extreme level, people who sing and things like that to try and, I don't know, get their throat sounding a bit better. But it was a really long time. And I actually feel like
• 2:34
  Even though now, you know, as we're talking, I feel like my voice doesn't sound scratchy or anything like that. But compared to what it used to be, I feel like it is. It just changed a little bit. It's different. Yeah. So interesting. I think even just being a founder, like I was thinking when my voice went completely silent yesterday morning, I was like,
• 2:54
  we've, I've just been in a period of so many back-to-back meetings and I've been, you know, talking to retailers and investors and just talking nonstop. I was like, I feel like the universe is just telling me to take a day off. And yeah, I just feel like talking so much as a, you know, as a founder, obviously hosting a podcast, just like not a normal amount to be talking. And I don't think our bodies are really built to be on calls from like,
• 3:18
  I don't start my calls early, but you know, 11 or noon until 7pm, just straight through. It's pretty brutal. I hear you. I seriously hear you. Gosh, crazy. Really crazy. Yeah. Well, we're here. We made it. We're here. I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful that we were able to make it happen, even though that you, you know, you should have had a day off, but here we are. Thanks. No, I haven't. Yesterday I was off, so I'm back in action. Okay, right, right, right. You're back in action. Okay.
• 3:48
  Before we jump into kind of like where things were in 2021, like what I usually like to do is paint the picture of 2021 and then kind of like talk about, you know, what's happened since then. But before we jump into that, I want to talk straight away about this bloody TikTok video and what the hell went down. Because there's a side of me that's gobsmacked, just like, huh? And then there's the other side of me that's like, oh God, I'm not even surprised or like I'm not even shocked because...
• 4:14
  people are so strange. Can you give everyone the overview and the context of what the video was that you posted on your TikTok that we posted on our Instagram and what unfolded? Wait, remind me which video this was because there have been a few that have generated a little bit of controversy and I'm trying to remember which one it was. Oh my God. Oh, I remember. Yes. So I've had a few videos that ended up on the wrong side of
• 4:43
  kind of Andrew Tate, you know, misogynist TikTok. So for fun, from time to time, I post a little TikTok videos. I love scrolling TikTok. I get little ideas and I post them. And I posted this TikTok that said it was using some trending sound. Basically the caption was something like,
• 5:01
  when you and your COO have... This was the one, right? It was like when me and my COO have a collective, you know, 20 years of experience, an Ivy League MBA, and, you know, have sold companies and raised millions of dollars of funding, but partners that you work with, the male partners that you work with still call you guys girls. And it was a... It generated a really interesting backlash. I mean, I kind of knew...
• 5:27
  I think whenever you question something that is sort of part of the patriarchal agenda, I'm talking about the right video, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Whenever you start questioning something...
• 5:38
  people get mad without even knowing why they're mad, right? This was pretty, this one felt pretty straightforward. It wasn't like abortion or, you know, something that should really get the people fired up. It was like, hey, maybe don't call us a girl in a work setting. And we got all these responses that was like, people, you know, well, people use the word boys. And I'm like, no, they don't, unless they're talking down on you. And then there were responses like,
• 6:04
  My bio on TikTok is getting girlies. We're manifesting our dreams and getting rich. And people are like, well, you are referring to women as girls in your bio. And I'm like, it's not the same. I'm not sitting across a boardroom. Just so out of context. It's not the same.
• 6:21
  Yeah, yeah. It was really interesting. I mean, and it actually got to the point of like violent comments, like threatening comments. I ended up shutting down the comment section. But people were really, really upset. And then you guys reposted it. And then I think you started getting that same backlash. And I think I commented and I was like, oh man, I could have warned you that this was coming. I think it's so strange. And it's top of mind for me because there's been this like...
• 6:50
  story unfolding in Australia that happened on the weekend just gone. So I spoke about it in my last episode briefly, but there's been an update. So this guy, he's known as a serial repeat offender on LinkedIn. He kind of just writes these vile comments to women founders. And so this woman, she's a woman in VC. She's amazing. She's high profile. And she posted this article. And literally,
• 7:16
  Thank you to the journalist Bronwyn for having this great conversation and including my comments in this post about the landscape of women in V.C.
• 7:24
  And that was it, kind of like exclamation mark, like go check out the article. You know, nothing that you could basically assume you were going to get like vile comments on. And then this guy chimes in, Sam, and he starts being like, diversity is the dumbest shit of the century. This isn't true. Women are like at the top of every vertical and you still complain. It's classic. Just like word vomit ranted. And then he starts going into these comments like,
• 7:55
  to other women in the comments being like, would bang you, then abortion. Like it starts becoming really odd, like weird. Anyway, so this basically then spirals because everyone's kind of like, nah.
• 8:07
  We're not having this. So it spirals. Then these journalists get involved. Then he, it goes on the AFR, which is the Australian Financial Review. It's a very big publication here. It's very well respected. And then it goes across these other, you know, Startup Daily websites. This guy has now resigned as a founder. So many people have come forward being like, he has harassed me on this professional website, leaped in for all places. Like, what the hell?
• 8:34
  He was actually found out that he was removed from the startup hub that he worked from last year because, again, he had multiple complaints of harassment and bullying in the workplace. And when he had came out with an apology, the company said something like, he has this ongoing pattern of bad behavior that needs to stop immediately and then followed by his apology. And...
• 8:59
  Basically recognizing like that he has very strange misogynistic and sexist thoughts and is now going to take the time to go through therapy and change because he sees he had these really enlightening conversations with the women that he was harassing. And basically, yeah, has now come out and been like, yeah, I like need to go to therapy. Like I need to like I'm not doing the right thing here, basically.
• 9:22
  So it's all unfolded. Wow, yeah. And it's just so crazy because when you see things like that, I'm like, if there's one, there's many. And then you see these, what happens on this TikTok video where, or multiple videos that you've posted and you get this weird side of the internet and you're like, who are these people?
• 9:42
  I know, but what a twist ending that he like in the end acknowledged and saw his wrong because I have seen content from people who are like, I, men who are like, I used to think these things. I used to think women are sluts and women are just out here to, I don't know, like they're these terrible creatures and they just rejected me my whole life. And so I just hated them for no reason.
• 10:06
  And then I went to therapy. Like that's usually the common denominator. I've seen this content from men who now are like really enlightened and trying to like show other men the path. And I think I used to be this person that's like, this is so disgusting. You know, like the stuff you're talking about, like the, I mean, threatening rape, threatening. I was getting death threats on that video. I literally said, Hey, don't call me and my COO girls at work. Death threats.
• 10:35
  you know, whatever. And I, like, I used to be in the camp of like, if people are this kind of violent and vile, like I have no space for them and I have no, there's no redemption and you're just this like awful person. And I think now I'm coming, especially with some of this like misogynistic stuff.
• 10:57
  I feel really sad for these men. Like I think you can see, and now there's research coming out too, like the isolation that these men are experiencing. You just have to think like, what a dark place would I have to be in to go on a person's video? Already to comment. I see shit I don't like on TikTok all day long. I don't have any, I don't need to say anything. Already to comment. And even just to share your negative opinion, I already find kind of weird.
• 11:23
  to be going hate, vitriol, death threats, rape threats. What kind of place do you need to be in? What kind of isolation from society and community do you need to be experiencing to get to this point? To your point of this guy, he's on LinkedIn. People can see what you're doing. It's almost this cry for help. Very public. I know. Not to psychoanalyze anyone, which is my favorite thing to do these days. But
• 11:50
  it's like a tantrum from a, your inner child is throwing a tantrum. I don't know, looking for love, looking for attention to push the buttons of these women that maybe he didn't get attention from when he was in high school and the prom queen rejected him. And now he's gonna call female founders bitches. And that's his way of getting his leg up. I don't know. I don't know this specific story, but I think I'm finally just seeing this. I'm finally just looking at, I think the whole dynamic and the whole situation with a little bit more,
• 12:19
  empathy and trying to be more understanding towards men. And not to say that everyone needs to do that. Like some of the stuff is vile. And if you are not there, this is very recent for me of just trying to see the other side. And I think also I'm obsessed with the book All About Love by bell hooks. And it's kind of all about this is like, you can't fight hate with hate, right? You need to fight hate with love. And so I'm just trying to like,
• 12:48
  figure out how I can embody that more. And I see it to your point of how disappointing it can be. I have posts, I've talked a lot in my TikTok videos about,
• 12:57
  being women in the workplace, being a female founder, also dating and the dynamics that patriarchy brings into dating as a heterosexual woman. Some of them make it to the wrong side of TikTok and it's pretty upsetting. But then I feel hopeful because some men will literally comment and be like, I don't understand, but can you explain? And I've had some really nice, enlightened conversations with men walking away being like, wow, I didn't see this perspective.
• 13:27
  hitting children and about how it was actually an excerpt from the book, all about love by bell hooks, about how society really has accepted that we hit that a lot of,
• 13:39
  parts of society have accepted that we will hit children and that it's really this act of violence from, you know, children see adults as their only source of love and survival when you hit them. It's very confusing and it's extremely damaging. And I had people commenting like, yes, but I don't know how else I would discipline them or teach them. Or I only learned things because my parents hit me. And then it's like, you can have the conversation. You can see people change their mind. Mm-hmm.
• 14:07
  And I just feel like you have to believe that people can change their mind. The story you just told me, I previously would have gotten really stuck on the disgusting stuff he did and been like, this guy is a monster. But now you tell me the story and I really heard the end of it. And I'm really trying to find hope in the fact that people are changing and want to do better. I don't think the men who act like this, they don't want to be like this. There's no way.
• 14:38
  dimension to feel so hateful. I agree. But I also think, though, if he hadn't have resigned, I would have been still in that former camp of just being like, no. No, no, for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because it's one thing to say, I'm going to therapy, and then we just never hear again, and who knows? And for someone who's obviously a repeat offender, and there's more to the story, because he resigned, I'm like, yeah. Yeah.
• 15:05
  Well, and honestly, not only resigning, there's a lot of men who resigned and then they get hired two weeks later and they do the same shit. Only because from how you told, I'm hearing this story through you, but I think you're a very credible source for something like this. It sounds like from how you told it that he really came, I don't know, the way his,
• 15:23
  statement sounded or the way the events unfolded, it sounds like he actually took this turn. That is the only green flag for me. Anything up until like true apology and retribution and not the fake apology and not the PR apology and even the resignation. Like in this day and age, you don't have a choice but to resign. You do dumb shit on the internet. You're gonna have to resign. Yeah. Let's make that a public statement for everyone. Yeah.
• 15:51
  I think like his apology like wasn't wasn't actually good. And that came first and it caused more backlash. And then he resigned. But I think where the story changed, A, the resignation because he took an action that was very like public. But B, having the conversation with these women that he they took the time to also discuss with him. And like they had a deeper conversation. I don't know the details of it. I just saw it in the article.
• 16:15
  But through that and like being kind of like, yeah, I don't want to be like this. I don't want to be that person. Like I need to step away and like reevaluate. I'm like, yeah, fair. Yeah. And you can also say it's annoying that women have to do the emotional labor. Like these are women who were abused by him emotionally or in some capacity verbally. Yeah.
• 16:37
  And they now need to go and teach him. It's the same concept with how like Black Americans have to teach, you know, white people and non-Black people in this country about racism. And it's a huge emotional labor and it's not fair. But I also think in any movement, the group that is seeing may have to like meet somewhere in the middle. So I think I don't want to speak for, you know, the racial side of the issue. But just in terms of women and men, I think I used to be in this camp of
• 17:05
  Well, we're the ones being oppressed. So now we need to teach you hell no. And now I'm kind of like, well, I don't like how this feels. I don't like how dating misogynistic men feels. I don't like how working with misogynistic men feels. So we need to open and create a space and create a dialogue for us to talk to each other, not just to hate each other. But that's a really interesting story. I'm fascinated. I'm going to have to read more about it.
• 17:36
  I'll send you the link. How do you think like now, like, you know, you're posting these videos that do go on the wrong side of TikTok. And I'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of anyone who's posting content online who gets on the wrong side of the people that you don't necessarily know exist or something like that. Yeah.
• 17:52
  What are your coping mechanisms and like how do you keep yourself feeling like safe and secure and that you're going to keep showing up on that platform? Because obviously like part of the problem is obviously these kind of comments aren't blocked, which is strange. Same with LinkedIn. LinkedIn didn't have any of the blocking measures switched on for those comments. What are your coping mechanisms and yeah, how do you decide to kind of like keep showing up? Yeah, I mean...
• 18:18
  I have boundaries for myself with the TikTok stuff. Actually, the video we just talked about was one of my first videos that went pretty viral. And I remember when the really hateful comments started, it kind of escalates too. At first, it's like some people just being annoyed. And maybe it probably feeds itself because then when someone sees that a man already said, oh, I don't agree with this, then it's like they take it one step further, one step further until it gets to this really dark place.
• 18:47
  And I remember talking to my therapist and being like, okay, at first this was fine. I was kind of just like laughing along, but now it's getting to me. Like I see all the comments, you know, and some of these are pretty dark. And I was already like anything that crossed the line, I was just like blocking the, when you block the person also deletes the comment.
• 19:05
  And she was like, just turn off the comments. You don't need this. So I was like, oh yeah, duh. So the boundaries that I have is if a comment section has gone out of control, it's only happened once or twice. On the wrong side of TikTok, I turn off the comments. I block anyone who says anything hateful on my page. I just want my page to be a safe space. And it actually goes both ways. I recently had an experience. I posted a video about
• 19:29
  women having high standards in dating and just like upholding your standards and, you know, waiting out until you meet someone who meets those standards. And a man had commented on the video, it's crazy how many average women these days have crazy high standards.
• 19:45
  And I didn't think his comment was hateful. I didn't block him. I actually ended up making a video to respond to him. And I sort of spoke to why it feeds the patriarchy to tell women that their standards are too high and to call women average. What's an average woman who gets to decide like we shouldn't be rating each other on a scale. But then a lot of women jumped in the comments
• 20:04
  replying to him, calling him bald and ugly, and you're disgusting, and you're only saying this because no woman would get with you. And I actually had to start blocking the women who are normally, I know they're trying to back me up, but I just say this to say, I've had to stand on my value, which is no hateful thing.
• 20:23
  commentary in my page and I will block people on both sides of that conversation. And that's just, I think been really important to me and, you know, one and however many videos ends up on the wrong side and it's something you just accept and then you can decide what to do. You can take the video down, you can block the comments. Like it's really up to me and, but it took me a second, I think, to even feel like I have that right, you know, but I'm glad that I got there pretty quickly. My therapist sort of like gave me that permission to,
• 20:50
  but most of it is so positive. Like most of my page...
• 20:55
  not to make it a women versus men thing, but I think my audience is 80 plus percent women. You probably feel this with your platform as well. It's just like women who are here to learn and grow. And it's like the most, like I get so much from making these silly little videos on TikTok. They're not even all related to my business, but actually mostly not. It's actually more like just stuff I like to talk about day to day, almost stuff I would talk about with my girlfriends.
• 21:22
  I love it. I love talk. I have conversations with people in the comments. It's a lot of younger women too. Like I've been through a lot. I've got divorced. I started a business. I had a career where I went, worked at a lot of different companies. I talk a lot about career and salary and growing your salary and manifestation, which I'm still working on, but I'm, you know, I've definitely manifested a couple of things and I just love sharing that. And it's a, it's a really beautiful thing. And I think the little negative is
• 21:48
  is worth it. And just having boundaries. You don't like something, block them. I used to be one of those people where I was like, you can't block people. It's so mean. It's so definitive. And you're like making this judgment on their character. And then I was like, no, it's, I'm just going to block people. Like what, they came into my space with this energy. I'm not even going to engage. That's another, I think that's what gets a lot of people in trouble too, is getting into back and forth with people in the comments. I don't respond to anyone who
• 22:18
  If you cross a certain line, you're getting blocked. There's like a middle ground, right? Of just, you don't agree with me. That's fine. I'm a block for that. But I don't respond to people who don't agree with me. That's fine. I respect their opinion. Yeah. Gosh, it's an interesting world. It's an interesting world. And it really makes me like...
• 22:34
  I mean, I don't know how old you are, but I'm in my 30s. And I feel like we grew up when there was a time with no internet. So we've gotten used to it. But then when I think about kids who are 11 and trying to figure this out at a much younger age. And the world is very different for someone who's on social media from such a young age. And I'm like, shit, this is like full on. It's full on. We're older. We're able to put up those coping mechanisms. We have more life experience. And we have more lived experience. And...
• 23:03
  Oh, yeah, that's a whole other, that's a whole other train of thought that I have. Right. And even for me at my big age, I needed my therapist to tell me like, hey, just turn on, you know, even me, it's like, I don't always know what to do. But I really believe, you know, TikTok, I do think is such a powerful platform and all these things. You know, they can be used for good and they can be used for destruction. And I just think that
• 23:28
  there's so much information being shared. I mean, we've just seen revolutions in the Middle East started on Twitter. Like we're seeing now with, you know, even what's happening in the Middle East now, there's just so much more information being shared. There's so much more ability, I think, to understand what's happening around the world. Even just with some of the silly stuff that I talk about, like dating, I just feel like there's,
• 23:50
  I'm just feel like I'm watching women in real time raise their standards because they go on TikTok and they see the woman whose husband is so loving, so supportive, supporting her dreams, like backing her, feminist, progressive, like helping take care of the kids, helping take care of the house.
• 24:07
  And then the woman who's at home begging her husband for an ounce of attention and to figure out how the hell to put the dishes in the dishwasher and she has to ask him 10 times, she is watching this and being like, oh, I took this because this is what I saw every woman around me growing up. And I just thought this is how marriage had to be. But when you get exposed to
• 24:29
  other ways that life can look. It is extremely expansive. I mean, I think about, I am pretty into a lot of manifestation stuff and you have to see things to believe that they're possible for you. And I do think a lot of content on TikTok is helping expand people's mind. I mean, my most viral video, it wasn't even the most views, but it was the most engaged video I ever had. I talked about how at 26, I doubled my salary.
• 24:52
  Oh, I loved that video. Yeah. And just- I sent it to my girlfriends who are in the corporate careers. Yes. It went so viral because I think everyone was sharing it within their social circles. And I love to hear you say that because, and I think I shared the number. I said, I doubled my salary to over $200,000.
• 25:12
  when I was 26, I was able to get to that number because a girlfriend had told me what she was making. And that became my reference point. I would have never in my life asked for $200,000. I would have thought I was being greedy, spoiled, crazy that they're going to hang up the phone and never call me again. But because my friend told me, hey, this is what I'm making in the same size of company that I was interviewing at,
• 25:38
  and same type of role. She was actually making a little more than me. She was further along in her career. But so I threw out the number 200 and I got it. And I had so many people on that video. The comment section was like, it was just so beautiful. Even like women being like, hey, I'm a nurse and this is what I'm making. And then nurses commenting and being like,
• 25:56
  wow, that's okay. And what city is that? Okay. So if you're making that in that city, then maybe in my city will be a little less, but I, I'm way too low, you know, and just that information sharing is so powerful, especially among women, especially among minorities, these groups that have historically been told to like, don't talk, don't tell anyone what you're making. Don't tell anyone what you're doing. Just shut your mouth, accept the oppression that has been handed you be grateful for whatever the hell you can even scratch off the bottom of
• 26:25
  You know, information is truly power and the powers that be will surely have an interest in, you know, keeping information from us. That's not to say that some of the concerns around TikTok are not valid. I'm not making a political statement as far as TikTok goes, but I have gotten a lot from it and I have really loved building a community there.
• 26:47
  Yeah, I agree. It's a really, it's a cool platform and it's true. It is very expansive. And even like, I mean, you just can learn so much from like every layer of like depth as well, like silly little hacks in the kitchen through to deeply life-changing high layer. Yeah. Spiritual. I've picked up a lot of like spiritual stuff, book recommendations, business advice. Yeah. There's,
• 27:13
  There's really something for everyone, right? There is something for everyone. They did a good job. Including misogynists. Including them. Okay. Oh, my gosh. I feel like I got so sidetracked there. I was loving that chat. No, it was great. Loved that career video. Everyone should go check that out because, yeah, I literally forwarded it straight to multiple girlfriends in the corporate career situation and was like, listen, there's no asking for a 5% pay rise or a $5,000 pay rise. Yeah. Yeah.
• 27:43
  Okay. I want to talk about what's happened since 2021. I've kind of, you know, I've been on the sidelines. I've been hype girling you from afar. It's been a couple of years. What are the kind of big moments since then? How's it all going? Yeah, absolutely. And is it helpful for me to just give like a one or two sentences on the business? Yeah. Paint the picture.
• 28:04
  Yeah, absolutely. So my company is called Behave. We make low sugar candy, clean label, no artificial ingredients, no artificial sweeteners. We use all natural plant-based fibers, allulose and monk fruit to sweeten our candy. It tastes delicious. It tastes as good as real candy, I would argue. And we have less than three grams of sugar per bag.
• 28:27
  all gummy products right now. You guys call gummies something else in Australia? Lollies? Yeah, we call them lollies, but I feel like everyone knows what gummies are. Yes. No, but I was just fascinated when someone said lollies because I thought lollipops.
• 28:41
  You call them candy and sweets, whereas like we call lollies like what you make, candy. Lollies is just like any sweet candy. Okay, yeah. Like in a packet kind of thing. And then anything that's like an ice block or an ice cream is like what you would call a lolly. Because you call ice creams lollies, don't you? I think.
• 29:00
  No, we call them sundaes or ice cream cones. Lollipops for us are the candy on a stick. Right, yeah. Lollipops for us are the little suckers. Yeah, they're also, yeah, suckers. Yeah. Yes. Okay.
• 29:13
  Anyway, sorry, just to get the lingo. So we make gummies, gummy candy right now. We have big visions for a whole world of healthy Willy Wonka, of all different types of candy. And we actually have an in-house Willy Wonka. We work with an incredible female celebrity chef named Elizabeth Faulkner. She is our in-house Willy Wonka. She's always cooking up new products, new flavors, new types of products.
• 29:38
  And then we also in hand in hand work with a PhD confectionary food scientist, which means is a fancy way of saying candy scientist. So we sort of hit like the culinary side and the flavor and really perfecting the product from like a taste and just the experience. And then we have the food science aspect, which is how do we keep our product completely clean label, not use anything artificial, right?
• 30:04
  still keep our nutrition label the way we want it, which is low in sugar, low in net carb. And another thing that's really important for us that we don't spike blood sugar. So we're diabetic friendly, keto friendly, PCOS friendly. So we hit on a lot of groups with our products that even some of the other low sugar candies actually are not really a good fit for because they're low in sugar, but they'll still spike blood sugar. So
• 30:27
  This is the product. We brought it to market in August of 2020. So when I spoke with you, we were probably early days still in the first year. We were still completely direct to consumer. We spent the entire first year of the business entirely direct to consumer. And then in June of 2021, we opened up some retail. We were very intentional. We only opened a small handful of
• 30:50
  excuse me, with the plan to test and learn with those retailers. We didn't want to go too big, too fast. We had been approached by some of the biggest retailers in the US. We actually declined and said, we're not ready for a retailer this big. We want to learn more about our customer. We want to learn more about the product.
• 31:06
  And I think we always felt that we wanted to make an update to our formula as well before we really started scaling the business. But we spent the second year of business, like I said, nurturing a small handful of retail accounts. We were in Erewhon and Foxtrot here in the US. And then a couple hotel mini bars, a couple coffee shops. And we kept really close communication with those retailers that we were in, understanding what our customers are saying about the product.
• 31:34
  How is it moving? What could we improve? And then we were simultaneously having the same conversation with our customers through direct-to-consumer, and we did a little bit of testing on Amazon as well.
• 31:45
  What we heard, there were a few overwhelming pieces of feedback that came through across both sides, retail and consumer. And on the customer side, we did surveys. I did one-on-one phone calls with a lot of our customers, our subscribers. And then we did over 100 in-store demos where we were also talking to people and getting their feedback on the product.
• 32:06
  What we heard was one, the price was too high. We were $5 a bag and people were saying they really liked the product. They would have bought it again, but they were just kind of not willing to pay that much a second time around. They were sort of curious to try it, but too expensive to kind of repurchase and integrate it into their day-to-day life. So we knew we wanted to bring the price down. The second piece of feedback we got, which was interesting because it really kind of varied across different channels.
• 32:35
  But we started hearing from people that they felt like the taste could improve. And it was interesting because we did not hear that feedback when we were really focused on the natural grocery stores, the really health conscious retailers. And I think a lot of our early customers are like super health conscious or they are diabetic or they have these health issues where they don't eat any sugar. I think this was a really interesting insight because...
• 33:00
  what I think we realized is that customers who don't eat sugar, they're already kind of accustomed to like some of the sweeteners that we're using. They are not sort of expecting that like high dose sugar hit that you get when you have like a Sour Patch Kid or a Haribo. And,
• 33:15
  As we started expanding past that, when we went on Amazon in a test period, when we opened a few retailers that were not just ultra health conscious stores, we started hearing from customers, more mass. We started hearing from customers like, hey, I love this product. I love this concept, but it just doesn't taste as good as my regular candy. And I probably wouldn't choose it over regular candy.
• 33:37
  And that for us was the key insight because we, for us, we see ourselves as a true replacement for candy. I mean, we really want to take over this category. We feel that that's the opportunity. We feel that that's the direction that people are moving in terms of how they eat and in terms of how they feed their kids. And a lot of candy that's purchased is fed to children.
• 33:56
  And frankly, I don't think the way that we feed candy to children is kind of healthful or responsible right now. I mean, the childhood diabetes epidemic is insane in the US, childhood obesity, and just diabetes as a whole in this country, and sort of all the health repercussions that come from just poor metabolic health, which is what happens when you're kind of having overconsumption of sugar and
• 34:20
  You're overworking your pancreas and sort of that insulin production. And so as we were getting into the more mass space that we were hearing from people, there's a little bit of an aftertaste. Some of these flavors, like we were using really out of the box flavors, our first product, we had like passion fruit. People were like, eh, it's a little tart. It's a little bitter. And we also heard from people like love the out of the box flavors, but what about my favorite candy classic flavors? And we didn't have as many of those. Like raspberry and grape and things like that.
• 34:48
  Exactly. Apple, watermelon, things like that. And the final piece of feedback, which really only came from retailers, but was a really key insight is our original packaging was just plain text. And we did that intentionally. We really wanted to almost have this feeling that we're almost like this fashion product in the candy aisle, right? Really stand out. Everything in the candy aisle, it's like full of animations and characters and like a lot going on. We wanted to go pure minimalist text only with our logo. Right.
• 35:16
  And, you know, I think it worked really well. We generated a lot of buzz when we launched because of the packaging. But the retailers really came back with the resounding feedback. You need to show the gummies on the front of the package. People need to know what's in the bag. People who are walking by the aisle, they don't, you know, you need to catch them in a split second. So we did, for people who are on video, we did add images of the gummies to the front of the pack. Looks good. Looks so good. Thanks.
• 35:44
  And retailers have been really happy with that update. And I think it's gone a long way for us. So with all this feedback, what we did was about a year ago, we said we need to shift the direction of the business and we need to almost go in a little bit of a hibernation, pivot, correct all these points of feedback that we've received in an overwhelming amount.
• 36:07
  And so what we did was we moved to a new co-packer, which reduced our cost and allowed us to bring our price down from $5 to $3.50. Wow, that's a big difference. I know. We passed every cent that we saved on the product, we passed on to the customer. So we kept our same margin. So sorry, how did the price go down? What do you mean you changed co-packers? And why was it suddenly cheaper?
• 36:32
  Because our new co-packer is just a much larger scale facility. So they have economies of scale. Right. So they can offer you just better. Yeah. They can offer better pricing. Exactly. Got it.
• 36:44
  And so our cost per unit came down significantly. We passed everything that we saved on our cost. We passed it on to the customer and we reformulated. We worked again with our kind of tag team of our celebrity chef and our food science partner. And we reformulated the product. And I think we just landed on something that tastes good.
• 37:06
  incredible. The feedback we're getting is like this, I can't, I would never have thought this is a low sugar product if you had given it to me blind. And I think that is exactly what we wanted. We wanted to really feel like we taste close to conventional candy, if not as good as, and I think we really got there. And this is what we felt like we needed to do to be able to scale and reach as many customers as, as we hope to over the lifetime of the business.
• 37:34
  Before we get into kind of like that relaunch moment, because I know for you it happened kind of just a couple months ago back in September. So that was probably, how long are we talking that you are in this hibernation phase of, you know, a lot of changes and a lot of iteration? Are we talking a year or are we talking six months? Yeah, about a year. No, about a year. Yeah. And so for you, because...
• 37:56
  correct me if I'm wrong, you've raised, right? Like you've done some fundraising, like you've got investors, you've got lots of different partners, like you've got bills to pay. Like how was that kind of time of being like, cool, we're basically going to kind of pause, which means our revenue is not going to be the same. It's going to drop. What happened? How does that work?
• 38:18
  Yeah, I mean, first off, we just have an incredible group of investors who really stand behind me. They understood this decision that was made and this pivot that we wanted to go after. And they understood that it was going to mean, you know, not pursuing revenue growth for about a year, focusing on kind of rebuilding the business behind the scenes and then putting ourselves in a better position to grow and scale financially.
• 38:40
  from here forward. But to be honest, we thought the reset period was going to take six months, and it ended up taking a year. It's a lot of just managing those relationships. And again, I'm just so fortunate that I have an incredibly supportive investor base. I don't think I have a single investor who ever questioned me or tried to pressure me to do anything different than what I saw as the right choice for the company. Add to that that I have a
• 39:06
  incredible ride or die COO and business partner. She stood behind me and the business in this pivot as well, which I don't think a lot of people would have done, but she is just so fully committed to our vision. This is fully me and her company together. This is
• 39:25
  everything we're putting out there, everything we're building, it's us together. And so that I think also gave me so much just peace and frankly, love. Like, I don't know how else to put it because I don't think you can get through a period like that
• 39:40
  Without that, without that support and from someone who's in it with you, you know, in the past year, we did basically take the business all the way down to the bare bones. It's been just me and my COO in terms of team and then obviously our R&D partners, but they kind of work as more as consultants into the business.
• 40:00
  And, you know, bills to pay. Yes, we we just did what we needed to do. I put I mean, I'll just speak very transparently, because I think it's helpful. I put a lot on credit cards this year, I moved to Mexico for the first kind of couple months of the year. I live in Mexico City.
• 40:20
  And so, you know, that allowed me to reduce my costs significantly. And Mexico City is a beautiful place. I mean, cost of living aside, just a great place to live and to spend some time. And I was working remote and we were sort of in this rebuilding mode. So it's a great place also just to have a lot of focus, a lot of creative energy. It's a really creative place.
• 40:40
  So that worked out really well. And then it was a lot of trust and faith and manifestation and reminding myself that I can trust the universe and that, you know, the other side of this, that we were building towards something and what everything, all the work we were putting in, we were sort of like planting the seeds of the garden and we were going to get to spring where the garden would bloom, but we just had to trust it.
• 41:03
  And that's not easier. That is so much easier said than done. I cried a lot in the last year. I had a lot of days where I was like, is this going to work? I don't know. But getting through the relaunch, seeing the response that we've had to the product, the new packaging, the new price point from customers and from retailers, it's truly been overwhelming. And I think I really felt like
• 41:26
  we're going to relaunch and I'm going to know. Like I think in business, you don't... Sometimes you do have to give things like a year, a couple years, and you have to like really let it simmer. But we've already given it a couple years. And I felt really sure that we're going to relaunch. And in 30 days, I'm going to know just based on the energy. And if it's not meant to be, I'll accept it. You know, if the product is not resonating with the right people, if retailers are still kind of, you know, not coming through and picking up the product, but...
• 41:54
  I mean, the first 30 days have been insane. And the amount of just like interest that has flooded in the excitement from our retailers and some of our new partnerships that we're launching has been, it's just been that validation that I was looking for just to say, okay, we did what was right. And it's paying off now.
• 42:13
  Hell yes. Love that for you. Oh my gosh. Sounds so exciting. So does this mean that, you know, for next year, now you're able to be like, cool, we are like so happy with where we're at. Obviously, we've crushed this first kind of period of launch and now we move into scaling and revenue growth. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
• 42:34
  You've done the retail partnership testing. The growth plan is, is it new products? Is it more retailers? Is it all of the above and more? Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, it's nurturing the existing retail partnerships. We have all those partners that we were really working with in that pilot. I would call it the pilot phase of the business those first two years.
• 42:56
  we have really incredible relationships with all of them. And as much as there were, there was all this opportunity to improve, like we were still, we still sell very, very well. And all the retailers were in, were in, in some of our retailers were the best selling product in the store. We're the best seller in our category in a lot of spaces. We're,
• 43:13
  It wasn't like we were this floundering business. We had a good business. We could see the ceiling. And the ceiling was really like, we can hit a certain amount of growth in the natural space. But can we really scale past that? We felt like we were going to hit that ceiling pretty soon.
• 43:31
  you know, we will nurture the existing accounts, existing retail partnerships, and then what's next will be opening up more retail. And we've been very lucky. We've been approached by, you know, a bunch of distributors and companies that can kind of help hold our hand and pull us through in this next phase of growth. And we're just trying to be strategic about what are the markets we want to focus on? What are the channels we want to focus on?
• 43:54
  And also, you know, there's a lot of great partnerships that we're exploring now, which are maybe not just hitting grocery store shelves, but, you know, how do we get into every hotel room in the country? How do we get onto corporate campuses? How do we get into the coffee shops that we want to be in? Because
• 44:11
  I think that type of retail is so exciting to me because it's like this double punch of revenue. It's wholesale revenue and marketing. You're just reaching such a huge new audience when you're in these spaces. We have so many customers that we hear from. They're ordering online, but they found us at...
• 44:27
  you know, the Elk Coffee Shop in New York, which is one of our great partners or Ace Hotel mini bar or, you know, founded at the Edition Hotel where we're also in the mini bar. And so it really becomes this kind of that type of business works for you double time. So we're really excited to keep growing that.
• 44:44
  Absolutely. I think discovery is so key and discovery in those kind of places, like at a hotel, a boutique hotel or, you know, your local coffee shop, you're willing to try. And that is how you discover new brands and fall in love with new things. Yeah.
• 44:59
  kind of thinking about all the things that you've learned in the past couple of years. I mean, you've raised, you've done the pilot version of the business, you've relaunched, you've reformulated, you've learned a lot. If you had to start kind of an entirely new CPG business tomorrow and you needed to kind of bootstrap to your first thousand customers, how would you be starting again? What would you be telling people to do first? So...
• 45:26
  What I would tell people to do first, and I just, I have a lot of grace for myself because it's not, it's not so much that I would go back and change this. The reality of my category, which is gummy is that the minimum orders are huge. So we had to place a first order for tens of thousands of units. So we sort of had to like go big or go home. And there's only so hand, I know a lot of CPG and food businesses, they'll start off hand making.
• 45:52
  hand-making gummies. I mean, think about if you've ever bought a little gummy bear tray from Amazon, they're this big. They make 25 gummies, I think, and it will take you. You are literally making gummies one gummy at a time. You need so much refrigerator space just to let them set. It's very hard to do the hand-making process. So we basically had to make this leap from doing just a little bit of R&D ourselves and our kitchens. At one point, we borrowed
• 46:19
  commercial kitchen space from a friend's company. And we were able to do like, I think at one point we did a couple hundred bags. We sold them in a store in New York and we got friends to test them and give us feedback and complete a survey. We probably did like two or 300 bags between those, the surveying and putting our product on the shelf just to see how it sold. Then we had to jump to, I think it was 40 or 50,000 units. Wow. Wow.
• 46:43
  What I would tell someone who doesn't have that, those constraints is test the hell out of your product and iterate your product a thousand times before you go into scaled production, before you go and also before you go and build out your brand.
• 46:58
  Because again, for us, since our first production run was going to be, I think it was 50,000 units, we wanted to have the brand already locked in. Beautiful branding, beautiful packaging. We worked with an incredible branding agency that knows our category, that knows how to design packaging. But we were guessing. We had to guess everything about who's our customer, what do they care about on the package.
• 47:21
  That's why doing this relaunch was so rewarding because now we have so much information. So we also like in redesigning the packaging, we changed almost all the call outs that we make on the back of the package. We changed what we call out on the front of the package. We used to call out sugar and calories. No one cares about calories as we learned.
• 47:40
  So I think what I would say to someone starting out and bootstrapping is make a hundred, have a hundred people and not your friends if you can, like friends of friends, like people who don't know you, test the product. A really great practical piece of advice is get a sticker of a QR code that links to a Google form. Put that sticker on every little prototype of a hundred bags, get those in, go on the street and hand them to people. Get a hundred strangers to give you feedback on the product, people who don't care about hurting your feelings.
• 48:09
  I think what I'll say is in the beginning, I was so afraid of people hurting my feelings about the product. I would give people the product and I would be sitting there like, do you like it? Do you like it? So obviously everyone liked it, but I think I wish I had been asking people to hurt my feelings. I should have been like, tell me the worst of it. I don't, if you like it, great. But like, tell me every single thing you would change. I would make a hundred. Then I would implement those changes. Then I'd make another hundred. Then I'd implement those changes. Then I'd make another hundred.
• 48:38
  Then I would, then you, I would be feeling good about it. Then I would make 400 and I would find two stores to get, don't even like, if you can financially, like even just give it away and like, see, and have them pay you back on consignment. Like you'll get the money back later, but you know, take the risk off the store. Just be like, I'll put these on your shelf. Just pay me back, you know, the 60% of what you sell or whatever afterwards.
• 49:02
  And then I'd like stand at the door of that store and be like, what'd you think? What'd you think? Try it in front of me. Tell me what you think. This is all to say, collect an insane amount of feedback in the beginning. Learn who is gravitating to your product, who's not. Don't worry about the people who aren't. Just focus on the people who are. This is a big learning for us also in this refresh was we were trying to talk to everyone. We were like, we're healthy candy. Anyone who likes candy is going to want our product.
• 49:27
  But what we learned when we really sat and talked to like our subscribers and our most avid customers, they have diabetes. They are women with PCOS. They are families with children who have diabetes. This is who is like obsessed with behave. And we needed to be doing more to speak to them and to market to them and to make them feel seen in our marketing.
• 49:57
  you know, and that a lot of our customers is like mom whose son just got diagnosed with diabetes and is trying to figure out like what to put in his lunchbox or what to let him have at his birthday. Like we needed to show up for that side of our community as well. Phenomenal advice. Absolutely phenomenal advice. I feel like people miss the customer's feedback moment. People go really deep and really far and then they haven't got that
• 50:25
  data. They don't have that true perspective. You're in an echo chamber surrounded by friends and family and your close network. You need to get out of there. And I get it. Yeah. You work with other people for feedback. And on a spiritual level, it's scary. You are birthing a child when you start a product, especially a food product or anything CPG. I see people making these
• 50:49
  tinctures and these herbal products like a lot of them it's like they put so much love into it and it's so scary to be really open to feedback because it can feel so personal if someone doesn't like it and that's where I was at and I definitely did not gather enough like
• 51:06
  unbiased feedback in the early days. And I wish I'd collected more and I wish I had been less scared of the feedback. And I'm here to say, like, don't be scared of it. It's not a reflection on you. People don't hate you. Like if someone doesn't like your product, they don't hate you. They still love you. You're still a great person. You're still a good founder. And actually as a good founder, you'll want people to be really honest with you about your product and you'll want to incorporate the feedback. Yeah. And I think it really speaks to as well, like you are not your brand. Yeah.
• 51:34
  you are not defined by this business that you bring into the world you are a human and you have a brand or you have a business and it's two very different things oh man yeah
• 51:47
  That's a hard one. At least I think on your first business, that's really hard. I feel very fortunate. I almost feel like I'm getting to be a second time founder in my first company with the relaunch on a spiritual level. I've been thinking a lot about that. People say your second one is always so much easier. Most people are successful on their second or third business or even they have to give it a couple of goes. And I'm like,
• 52:10
  What you just said, that's what I feel now. But on your first business, it's so hard. You leave your corporate life. You leave your safety net. A lot of times you defy your family and friends. You tell them to fuck off and you're doing this anyways. And then you need it to work and it becomes your identity.
• 52:29
  And if it fails, then you fail. Then if it succeeds, you succeed. And it's just so not true. It is so important to do that, whatever it is, inner work, hypnosis, ayahuasca, I don't know, to separate yourself from the business. Absolutely.
• 52:51
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 53:15
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• 53:38
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.