Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Fave hits: From 0 to multi-millions in 1 year, how do you do it? Learning from Three Wishes founder Margaret Wishingrad
Transcript
- 0:00Hey, it's Dune here. This is just a quick message to let you know that for the next two weeks, we're bringing you a roundup of our favorite episodes that you might've missed the first time around. Episodes from women like Leslie Carls, the founder of Midday Squares, Ju Ru, the founder of Hero Cosmetics, and Michelle Grant, the founder of Lively. I hope you enjoy these episodes as much as I did recording them. And if you learned something, please do shout about it by posting it to your Instagram stories.
- 0:30This is Margaret Wishingrad for Female Startup Club.
- 0:42Hey everyone, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. On the show today, I'm joined by Margaret Wishingrad, founder of Three Wishes Cereal. In the 12 months since launching, Margaret and her husband slash business partner, Ian, have built a multi-million dollar business through thoughtful retail expansion, unique guerrilla marketing moments, and a tasty, better for you product that people want to keep buying over and over again.
- 1:07We're going through the blueprint to launch and why it's important to keep your customer's behavior front of mind. Let me tell you a little bit about Three Wishes. Three Wishes is healthy cereal that tastes like childhood indulgence, led by the Cereal Aisles' first female founder, Margaret.
- 1:23While other cereals on the shelf force customers to choose between flavor and nutrition, there is no compromise with three wishes. It's high protein, it's low sugar, gluten and grain free, and made from ingredients like chickpeas, pea protein and tapioca, whilst tasting totally amazing.
- 1:42And by the way, we're just a few weeks away from launching our private network to founding members. If you're a woman in e-commerce and you're looking to build your network, get access to women on the show for mentorship and experts to help you build your brand, join the wait list today. We have a limited number of founding member spots available, and you can pop your name on the list at femalestartupclub.com forward slash waitlist to be the first to know.
- 2:07As always, share this with a woman in your life who needs to hear this. Share it on social. Chat about it with your friends. Chat to us in the DMs. Do any or all of the above. You know how much I love you guys. You are the absolute best. And I'm so grateful that you guys keep tuning in to listen to me three times a week. Let's jump into this episode. This is Margaret for Female Startup Club.
- 2:30Margaret, hi, hello, and welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to dig in. Like I was saying before, I feel like the business that I'm building with my husband is in that food industry, the CPG space, and I'm excited to understand the blueprint and everything that you've been doing so far in this last 12 months, especially. But I always love to start by getting you to introduce yourself and tell us what your business is.
- 2:58Sure. So I am Margaret Wishingrad and CEO and co-founder of Three Wishes Cereal, which I also built with my husband. And the brand for us is around a few things. So it's a better for you breakfast cereal. So it's high protein, low sugar, gluten and grain free. And those were our three wishes or other three wishes was the three wishing grads.
- 3:16And then it was just the three of us. Now there's four of us. But we basically created this product after I realized as a mom that there was nothing in market for my own family, my own child. And here we are now selling cereal. So it's crazy. Oh my gosh. I love it. What year are we talking about when you have this moment of, I can't find a cereal. I might think about making one myself.
- 3:40Yeah, so it is late 2017. And my son at that age was about six months old. And one of the things everyone recommends is for pincer skills is cereal. And I'm like, God, I haven't had cereal in the longest time. And I don't really see anything for my kid. Like, am I the only one feeling this way? This is a real problem. And yeah, it was totally a real problem.
- 4:03Oh my gosh. And so at that point, had you already thought of yourself as becoming an entrepreneur? Had you done it? Had you dabbled in entrepreneurship already? Or was this kind of like out of the blue? Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this now.
- 4:17Yeah, that's a great question. So Ian and I have an ad agency in New York. And so we've been building, we're entrepreneurs naturally. And so we've been building brands for other people. And it felt so right for us to be able to build our own brand and take all the same earnings we had from all of our clients and now go and apply it to our own business. But completely opposite side of the spectrum, right? One is service and one is product. So totally different, but both
- 4:42interesting in their own ways. It's so funny that you say this because my husband also has a performance marketing agency and we've reached that point where we're like, we need to take these learnings that A, we're getting from the show. B, we're learning from what he's doing, scaling brands and put this into our own thing. We've got so many similarities. Love that. I've watched a few of Ian's videos in the past. Actually, I followed him on Adweek with the, I'm with the brand stuff. So funny. Yeah.
- 5:08I love those. Okay. So you have this aha moment. What are the actual next steps? And like in that moment, how long does it take you to actually be like, yeah, I'm going to do this. Serial it is.
- 5:22I mean, that was instant. I think Ian and I, he's an idea person. I'm an executor. And so once I came to him and I was like, Ian, cereal. And he's like, oh my God, yes, let's do it. Let's start now, like figuring out how this physically gets done. And I always say like, I wish cereal was a KitchenAid attachment that I could just like crank, try and play with. It is so highly technical, so difficult to actually create. Um...
- 5:45And so the barrier to entry there is pretty high. So Ian is one of the most beautifully networked people I've ever met in my life. And I was like, I'm like, we're going to dig into your phone book. So it was a lot of let's reach out to our friends in CPG, find the right formulator for the product and start to just narrow down what are the things that are important to us from an ingredient standpoint, from a product experience standpoint, where do we want this to live? Who do we want to deliver this to? What are the price points? We started to
- 6:11At the same time as we're trying to develop the product, build out the strategy of what it looks like for us. And so every minute of those two years that it took us to launch the actual finished good was whether it was R&D or strategy or packaging, we were working on all of those things at the same time. When you say, you know, you were working on that strategy in the background when it comes to price point, how did you come up with the price point that you wanted to go with? How did you come up with the things that were important to you or what were the things that were important to you?
- 6:41Yeah, so we definitely, we looked at cereal as a category, spoke to a ton of people to understand what's missing for you. Why do you no longer consume it? If we changed X, why would you consume it again? And it was interesting. A lot of parents of boys were like, okay, there's not enough protein for like, I can't get my son to eat, you know, eggs in the morning or really be fueled with real protein, especially for breakfast. And so like, okay, protein is one of those things we need to tackle.
- 7:05A lot of mothers of girls and daughters said, oh, there's too much sugar. I can't feed it to my girls in the morning. Like there's too much sugar. So we're like, all right, so sugar needs to be lowered. And then we just looked at cereal as a whole and what it's made from any ingredient panel you turn around, you look at, it's just nutrient deficient grains. And we're like, okay, we as a generation know so much about the effects of gluten, the effects of grain on brain health, on body health and all these things. And we're like...
- 7:31This is a great opportunity to create a grain-free alternative that has that same experience. And then once we kind of narrowed down what the parameters were of like, okay, we don't want to be more than, you know, X grams of sugar or fewer than X grams of protein, that kind of set us, these are the ingredients we would need to kind of utilize to achieve that. And it was just a lot of tinkering and a lot of, you know, changing certain ingredients for other ingredients to get to what we needed to get to on the product side. And that's what took the longest.
- 7:57Wow. And so two years, was that like from you finding the formulator right through to finished product? Like what actually takes two years? All right. So we nail down those parameters. We give that same way in advertising. We give a brief to creatives. We give a brief to the formulator of like, okay, these are the parameters. This is what we need to achieve.
- 8:15It's getting line time because it's not like, it's not a laboratory thing. You need to be on the physical machines that make this product. And so you're not running, you know, five pounds at a time. It's, you're running thousands of pounds and you're going through a lot of ingredient to just see if it performs and expands properly and coats properly. And, you know, it tastes the same in milk like you would want it to. So it was tasting the product and we could have probably launched a year into development and I'm a stickler for product. And I'm like, I can't go to market unless this is something that I'm like,
- 8:45is so in love with. And the other thing for us was we have now a four-year-old, but then when he was, you know, one, two, he is the pickiest eater you can ever find. And the best thing it's like, yes, our marketing background's a beautiful thing. And the fact that I can, you know, like paint a beautiful picture for a consumer. But for me, it came down to is my son so obsessed with this, whether it's in no box, a box, a big box, a huge box, like it needs to work as a product.
- 9:11Um, and when he finally was like, mom, I want more of this. I was like, okay, my job here is done. Um, and that happened to be two years. So it was a blend of, you know, getting the ingredients, getting the line time, um, being set up to now run this full scale. And so it, it was all of those things that kind of led to the two year timeline. I wish it was shorter. That is so interesting. Did you keep like tally of how many samples you had to do?
- 9:35Oh my God. If I kept, I would have run out of notebook space. A lot of stuff. Like hundreds? I mean, if we counted like every flavor and every variation of the puff could have, yeah, easily, but it was, yeah. It's just like every little tweak changed the product so much, right? And every little ingredient and proportion, like it's so, so scientific. So it was a lot of cereal before we got to the cereal we love. Gotta love cereal a lot.
- 10:04I always love to ask about the money side of things. How much money did you need to invest to get started? And how were you financing it in the beginning? I mean, it sounds like, you know, lots of samplings, two years of R&D, formulators, sounds like it requires a lot of upfront capital. And then I also imagine serial requires huge MOQs.
- 10:23That's exactly correct. So to get just for us, we weren't comfortable in going to the investor community or even our friends and family until we had a really like a great minimum viable product. So everything until the actual like time we had that thing in a bag and we're like, try it. Up until then, we bootstrapped it. And so that was probably $250,000 of investment to get there. And then from that point on, then when we had our product, you know, as close to $100,000
- 10:53what the finished product in market was, that's when we started to bring it to our friends and family and started to look for investment because it is a product that requires these massive MOQs, like truckloads of finished product. And so that's, you know, why we have to go out and raise as well. And for you guys, I read that you launched into retail kind of from the beginning. Was that originally the plan or was the plan to go D2C, go e-commerce, or was the plan to do both?
- 11:21Oh, yeah. So I thought about myself. Okay. So I take a step back with the strategy side of what we did for two years. And for that, we were thinking about who's the consumer. It's a consumer like myself or my husband or, you know, any of our friends and family. We think about the behavior of cereal.
- 11:37And cereal is still predominantly children and predominantly in retail. And unless you're a specialized product that adheres to specific diets or super niche, that's where I feel like online is a very interesting thing. But if we think about cereal as a category, it's the biggest aisle in the grocery store, right? It's the longest one with the most SKUs that you can think of with every flavor, color, character you can think of. And so it is definitely a retail-heavy product. And so when we thought about that behavior, we knew we were changing what it's made of.
- 12:07The macros, we kept the similar behavior things where it was what we expect taste to look like, what we expect shape to look like, where we want price point to float. And so we didn't need to change the behavior of purchase. So for us, we're like, okay, let's keep it in retail. Let's keep it attainable at an attainable price point in retail. So when that mom like Margaret wants to go and...
- 12:29buy her child breakfast. She doesn't have to go order it online and wait two weeks. If she wants to do it, she can. It's available there. But, you know, I wanted someone to be able to go, okay, I'm going to Whole Foods. I'm going to pick up some chicken, broccoli, and three wishes. And so that's kind of how we thought about it.
- 12:46And so obviously the pandemic kind of hit as you launched. You launched end of 2019, right? Or beginning of 2020? Late October 2019. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So you're launching right in the lead up to the pandemic. You don't know what's about to come. What was that early kind of time like when you were launching and what was the launch strategy, I guess?
- 13:10Yeah, so we launched, when we launched, it was, there's a local store here in Westchester called Stu Leonard's. And we just like, we know the family, we decided to sample our product there. And we're like, all right, let's see how many boxes we sell. On a day that we would sample, we would sell 200 plus units. And we're like, okay, there's real love for this and demand here. And it was really fun. And then from that, a producer from Good Day New York approached us and was like, hey, do you want...
- 13:37there's going to be this morning segment. Do you guys want to be a part of it? And we're like, uh, yep, we absolutely do. And I guess when's the segment they're like, oh, it's Friday, October 25th or whatever it was. Do you want to launch? Like, and we're like, okay guys, it looks like launch days, October 25th. And so that's kind of how we decided to launch. And it was great. And, and for us, because we spent that time figuring out very in like a very detailed manner of like,
- 14:01Where are we? What retailers are we approaching? When are we doing it? What are the reset cycles? Because the thing about retail is not like you can go have an appointment with a buyer and then think it's going to be on shelves in two weeks, right? Everything's on a reset cycle. Your meeting is months, months, months in advance of you possibly even hitting yourself. You have to work with distributors. There's so many levels to getting into retail. And so we had authorizations because we started doing the work before launch. We had authorization by the time we did launch. Within two weeks, we had Whole Foods
- 14:30So Cal, we had Wegmans, we had Sprouts a couple weeks after that, then Whole Foods Northeast, and it started to just pick up. And this was kind of pre-pandemic. So by the time it was really peak pandemic, we were, we had our approvals and authorization. So we were kind of sliding in right in time.
- 14:49When you think about looking back, how long in advance did you need to start reaching out to the buyer of X, Y, and Z to get a meeting to open those doors? Are we talking like six months, nine months, a year? It varies with every single retailer and buyer. I think the thing for us is we knew we were creating a real solution for a declining category where there was no innovation. So there was such excitement. Buyers were so excited to find something new. It wasn't like, oh, here's another solution.
- 15:17you know, XYZ product, it was, here's something our consumers have been looking for. We are giving the consumer permission to shop in a category that has been so taboo for so long, where it's like, oh, it's just sugar for breakfast. And here it's, we're bringing real nutrition. We're allowing you to have that great taste. And that's kind of, I think there was real genuine excitement there. And so...
- 15:38It was a mix of luck and having the right product at the right time. And there's no like too early. Once you have a product that you're comfortable and ready to get into retail, start finding a way to those buyers and start having those meetings and having those conversations. It could be months before you see a shelf. Wow. That's so interesting and something that's so key in keeping in mind if that's the way you're going to go down, you know, for launch.
- 16:01What actually happened when the pandemic hit? Like in terms of, did you have to pivot more away, obviously more into e-commerce, but away from e-commerce in some ways, because you already had these retail stores. I'm wondering what actually shifted and how you had to approach it. Yeah. So it was twofold. So something that was super important for our product is to
- 16:20Right. And so no one was really going into grocery stores anymore and like walking the aisles, having a great time, looking around, sampling things. It was like and no sampling, no sampling. And a lot of it was like, OK, you're going into grocery. You need bread, water and you got to go home. And so I think that makes it difficult to create some kind of brand awareness when you're just like running past these shelves. The other part of it is.
- 16:42I remember it's like so clear. So I remember like some store shelves had, oh, you can only buy a limit of two boxes of any cereal. Like the store was only allowing you two boxes of cereal. So where other brands started to run out of inventory and because we were new, we're like, oh, we have inventory. You want to give a shelf space? Like we'll bring it in immediately. And so we were able to be a reliable partner for our retailers. And that was super important. It was, we were both helping each other. And that was interesting around that time.
- 17:09And then the other part is relaunched our website to make it a real because people were now shopping at home. And so within eight weeks, we like relaunched our entire website and made that experience really seamless for people. So if they wanted to buy it online, they could do that as well. And what it really forced us to do was be creative and nimble, which is
- 17:27our life before cereal. And we started thinking of really interesting ways to create some interest and buzz and what can we do in our local community. So our driveway in our house is a U-shaped driveway.
- 17:39And so Ian was like, what if we do a drive-through sample? You'll be the mask gloves, you'll have tongs. And we just give like sealed samples to anyone that drives by. So they could try it. They could order it and create some awareness. And so we did that. It was, it created some fun traffic in town, which is really fun. And then it also got some pickup in the news because people were so,
- 17:59I think it was such a difficult and sad news cycle that any stories about businesses trying to figure out a way to thrive in a really weird situation were so interesting. Oh, I love that. And I actually saw something else on your Instagram that I thought was just the cutest thing. I think it was your youngest son or maybe it was your oldest son. I'm not sure.
- 18:21Your oldest son with the box of three wishes outside the studio asking for, I forget the name of the guy. John Oliver. John Oliver. Yeah. That is so cool. Who came up with that idea? So it was, we saw the John Oliver piece. He had like this whole thing.
- 18:37this whole little thing on cereal. And we're like, what can we do to like let John Oliver know that there's a new cereal out there in town? And so Ian and I were sitting that evening and we're like, all right, what do we do? And so we were like, all right, let's just take Ellis in the morning to the studio and find a way to deliver the products to John Oliver. And we just like, we decided to capture the experience. It was just so fun. And I think the beauty of being a family business is...
- 19:00And I feel like we don't do it enough. We actually don't share our family enough and we should. But the beauty is we are real humans behind a product. We have stories to tell. And so we try to involve our kids as much as we can. So it was really fun to put that together.
- 19:14Did you already have the truck with the billboard on it? Or was that like, hey, let's get it printed today or however that works? No, no, no. We have a truck in the New York area, one of our local distributors and merchandisers. We printed a truck with him like a year ago. And so when we were sitting thinking about it, we're like, oh, my God, we should get the truck. And so we had the truck show up the next morning and we were able to pull it off. So it was just really fun.
- 19:38Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I love those kind of ideas that are really like surprise and delight moments that are fun. You can capture the personality of a brand in a really cool way that, you know, maybe it leverages the brand on the show. Maybe it doesn't, whatever, but you still did it. And it's still that piece that you're able to tell the story and show it on your own channels and things like that. Ah, that's so cool.
- 19:59So after you've gone through that phase of like relaunching your website, you guys are obviously coming from a marketing background. What were the kind of paid channels that you found were really working for you at that time in, you know, when we're considering that it's food, it's CPG, it's, it's a different space to, you know, fashion, for example, where maybe Instagram ads are working really, really well, or TikTok ads are working really, really well. What worked for you guys? Yeah.
- 20:23So it's interesting. So we're also sold on Amazon. We're on some other retailers as well. And I know a lot of people preach like, okay, you want the email list. You want to push it to your own website. And we do that and we have that. But again, thinking back to those consumer behaviors,
- 20:39Serial is one of those things, especially on Amazon, knowing that 45% of searches begin on Amazon and that it's a search engine in its own. That's also a channel we focused on. And so I really spent resources and time and tried to build out Amazon versus, okay, let's do a little here, a little there. It was, yes, are we running Facebook and Instagram? Sure. But Amazon, I think, was so interesting because also during the pandemic, it was,
- 21:04I don't know if you remember, like if you wanted to order streamers for a party, you'd have to wait 30 days because there's only essential items that would get delivered immediately. So it was a really good time for us to be able to capture that. OK, you can get this. This is probably the only item you get in two days right now. And so being there for consumers that are looking for food on the platform was also a great time for us to push the brand out.
- 21:27When you say building it out on Amazon, what does that actually mean? It was just, you know, PPC campaigns or whether it's, you know, ads on any other Amazon properties that then lead back to Amazon. Whether you're capturing some of your Google search and directing it to Amazon, because that path to purchase is usually a little bit easier than it is if you're directing them to a website they may not have seen before.
- 21:57And so we played around with a lot of things. And how has that evolved to now sort of 12 months down the track? You've obviously got, you know, amazing traction. You've been all over the internet in the press. You've had these really cool guerrilla style activations. What's working for you that's driving growth now?
- 22:15And what's kind of like keeping that momentum going? Being that we're a brand that really cares about retail so much, I'm the biggest advocate for end caps, incremental placement, displays, those things when you're, and especially now, I think there's excitement for people to get back into a grocery store and get back into the norm of what their life used to be. TBD on sample still, but just being an entire end cap.
- 22:40You can't miss it. You're walking. You're like, oh, what's this brand? Let me look. Let me try it out. And, you know, whether it's. So I always I rather if I had that dollar to spend in digital advertising or the dollar to spend in couponing or end cap placement, a thousand percent the couponing or end cap placement.
- 23:00I heard that ads on Instacart, like when it's coming up to checkout as an kind of added product, or even was it sampling on Instacart, is a really effective way for brands in the food and CPG space. Are you doing that as well? We are. And so Instacart's another interesting one. And I think we think about it, you know, if you were advertising on Facebook or Instagram early days...
- 23:20you probably had some great data. And similarly to Instacart, it was really a platform in its infancy on the paid ad side, at least. So being able to play around there and figure it out as the platform evolves has been really interesting. And we've had really, really terrific return on ad spend. So very pleased with Instacart as a platform. But it did require us to be in retail, right? You can't be on Instacart if you're not sold in retail.
- 23:45Yeah, totally. Right. We don't have it here in the UK, but I've heard a lot of women talk about it on the show. And I'm sure something like that is probably here or coming or something, but it sounds really cool.
- 23:57You've had great success in the last year. You've done multi-millions in revenue. You're in retail. You've got your e-commerce going on. When you look back at this first year in business, is there anything that you would do differently or anything that you were like, in hindsight, this is the most important thing or those kind of key lessons and insights in hindsight?
- 24:16I mean, it's so hard to say because no one predicted a pandemic and it's hard. It's just it's a bizarre, bizarre time to say, like, what would I have done differently? I think the thing that has always been in our favor, and this might be because it's not our first business, is that we're able instead of like freaking out and not knowing what to do in a weird situation, we're very quick to be like, OK, this isn't working pivot quick.
- 24:38stop earning cash, turn it off, turn, keep going. And that's just always worked well for us in any business. And I think having the flexibility and understanding how to just quickly turn things around and be resourceful has been our saving grace. Yeah, that's so true. So true. And where are you guys now in terms of how big is the team? What's going on? What fun things can you shout about that are coming up over the coming months?
- 25:04Yeah, it feels like there's always something fun. I can't even think of anything in mind. We're always working on new flavors and innovation behind the scenes. So that's something that I have a lot of passion for where the brand is going. I think for me, we really, our strategy was natural channel because that's where we know our consumer is. The same way it was...
- 25:22back to that setting the strategy thing, it was who's our consumer, where are they, and how do we build a real relationship with them and become a brand that they love and trust? And I think of brands like Kind and Annie's that have, you know, whether they're selling you a bar, granola, snacks, mac and cheese, whatever it is, you have such heart for the brand and you really, you're willing to buy anything and everything they make. And I think that's a goal we have with
- 25:45three wishes is to be a platform brand like that, that you really trust and love. And I think that requires that you kind of, you figure out who your consumer is and you double down in that space. So we're not necessarily thinking about like, oh, let's go spray our product all over the country and be in every door you can think of. It's let's focus on the retailers we're with, continue to open doors with like natural type retailers and just go deep there and make someone just love you and lean in with that retailer and lean in with the consumer. And that's been really...
- 26:14Wonderful for us. And that's kind of the strategy as well going forward. Love it. What advice do you have for women who are on the entrepreneurial journey, but a few steps behind where you are?
- 26:25I would just, it's like, for me, it's like yank the bandaid, just go for it. Whatever's holding you back, just like look it in the eye and go for it. There are going to be a thousand fire drills. There are going to be a million no's, whether it's from a co-packer or an investor or a retailer, there are a million of them. And it just, you have to get really comfortable with the unknown. You have to get really comfortable with rejection. You have to get really comfortable with problem solving. So it's a lot, but you just have to dive in.
- 26:55So true. So true. Got to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Love it.
- 27:04Hey, 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.
- 27:29And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
- 27:51As 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.
- 28:07Hey, 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.
- 28:31And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
- 28:54As 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. Thank you.