Let’s face it. Not everyone who has the passion to enter the consumer goods arena is doing this with a partner or co-founder. Daniel Lubetsky didn’t. And look how Kind bar turned out. I’ve detailed the common problems with lone wolf founders on my podcast. This is the most
Every year hundreds of new consumer brands ship their first cases to retailers or 3P online fulfillment centers. Most will never make it to even $500,000 in trailing annual sales (i.e., gross company sales). They will struggle in what I’ve called the Death Funnel. Fundamental issues of being a de-leveraged company take most players down
Last Thursday, I had my friend, Jacques Spitzer of Raindrop Marketing, on my PGS Live! Show. And it was quite the conversation. We discussed the history of critiquing advertising’s effectiveness as well as the kind of storytelling that works in the modern age. Traditional ad gurus often have an
One of the enduring challenges in premium CPG innovation is that the founder(s) are usually category geeks. This makes it very hard for these founders to accept that even their early fans may not be so geeky. Fans may routinely gravitate to a specific attribute embedded in your offering. Differing groups of fans may
It all comes down to where your category more or less. But, before I explain, we need to go through some math. This is math that many founders don't do before being sucked into a social media retainer. The formula for evaluating the benefit of paid social to an
Understanding why your fans love your brand is essential to creating a quality playbook for exponential growth. Understanding who they are is less important, but critical to key aspects of execution. Founders new to consumer-packaged goods often focus only on who loves them and assume they understand why they do. In CPG strategy, who is like the soil in your garden. Don’t think of who as a big mosh pit of disconnected individuals. In
Where should I go for additional funds after my family? I get asked this question routinely, so I’d like to share the answer I recently gave on my PGS Live show. And it includes a counter-intuitive response you’re probably not expecting. #1 – Seed - Virtually all consumer brand founders begin with some kind of seed capital, whether from their
The vast majority of CPG startups in what I call the Death Funnel (trailing annual revenues below $500,000 wholesale) operate as B2B businesses. Their founders don't interact with their consumers face-to-face. They manage distributor orders, distributor relationships, and case numbers. They drink words from their brokers' mouths. As long as case volumes grow, these founders are happy. As long as their wholesale price can float operations
I talk a lot about planning your experiment as you Ride the Ramp. And measuring. And iterating. I did not discuss what to do when you encounter historically disruptive events, like a global pandemic. And what I recommend you do is usually reserved for large, multinational
There is nothing worse for a high potential, emerging CPG brand than to enter the right retailer the wrong way and thereby to squander inventory (potentially lots of it) that could be moving faster elsewhere. It's essential to seek partnership with high-potential retail chains, i.e., a