Many Skate Ramp consumer brands have scaled with very little (or any) paid marketing activities out-of-store. Instead, they relied on other, labor-intensive field techniques I write about in my book. But, had they done advertising and done it well, would they have scaled faster? It's a
Here they come. 2021 Trend lists in food, beverage yadda, yadda. Nothing will stop them. Not a freight train. But curb your enthusiasm for these curations of the weird. Rare with potential to scale is what you want as a founder, not just any kind
Wait. What? TJ's doesn't do curbside pickup? Curbside bag dump? Won't let Instacart inside? Really? They must be bankrupt by now? Yeah, Yeah, this is where my mind went in summer when I discovered that Trader Joe's made no precisely no changes to its no
I know “barriers” is a downer word, but it’s not just a marketing concept. It’s one of the more sobering realities entrepreneurs must face as they pursue growth. Deny barriers to trying your brand at your peril. Some premium innovations have few obstacles to uptake
From Episode 35 of Startup Confidential: So many founders, early on, they get sucked into what I would call a distributor first mentality, all hail the distributor. And that is because it’s often the only way into many of the retailers that you have available to
Most CPG innovators and founders are geeks of some sort. It doesn't matter if the geekiness was professional or amateurish or a committee of both. The point is that you isolated a problem, a gap in your category, and you filled it. Or
Door-counting is easy to pick on as a completely common, yet non-strategic, 'metric.' Door counting is the easiest public way to suggest growth without divulging your actual trailing revenue to your competitors. The problem is two fold. 1- Not every door is created equal in retail.
In my book - Ramping Your Brand - there is a line that gets at the fundamental danger in CPG innovation, the fundamental threat to above-average memorability in a crowded, oversupplied marketplace. "Rarity in its purest form—rare ingredients, rare flavors, rare sensory textures,
America is entering the worst phase of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. Ironically, it may be our obsession with individual 'freedom' that empowers both the intrepid entrepreneur's willingness to take risks beyond the comfort zone of one's family and friends AND the virulent spread of the virus
Although I'm a social scientist, my advisory work doesn't focus narrowly on team organization and organization design for fast-growing startups. I'm honestly still learning and continue to read the research on this space (so you don't have to!). But one thing I can tell you