Ep. 16: Sean Lee on founding the Zevo Insect Brand
In Episode 16, James and Sean flip the script and James interviews Sean about founding the Zevo brand and his time in the P&G Ventures studio.
Sean is the co-founder and President of Cincy Brands (a CPG operating company), Co-host of BrandBusters, and Co-Founder of the Zevo Brand. Sean spent a decade at Procter & Gamble in Brand Management - leading brands like Iams pet food and Old Spice deodorant. He was the former CMO of Amify (sold to Cart.com). Sean has worked as an executive for private equity and venture capital-backed CPG and eCommerce businesses.
In this episode, we discuss:
1. The leap from leading established brands like Old Spice at Procter & Gamble to founding the Zevo brand within P&G Ventures.
2. How Sean identified the insect control category as ripe for disruption and the challenges of launching a brand within a large, risk-averse corporation.
3. The importance of consumer education and feedback, and how early product hurdles were overcome to build a successful brand.
4. Zevo’s strategic retail launch, starting with an exclusive partnership with Home Depot, and expanding to Target and Walmart by aligning distribution with brand awareness.
5. Key lessons on the entrepreneurial mindset needed to succeed in a big company, the value of mentorship, and staying curious in the face of challenges.
Sean shares invaluable insights on navigating corporate innovation, offering practical advice for anyone looking to launch a new brand, especially within a large organization.
Show Transcript:
Welcome to Brand Busters with your hosts, James Schwyn and Sean Lee. Together, we bust open the latest in CPG, retail media, and life, or whatever the we want. And for today's episode, we got something special cooked up for you. Extra spicy. Take it away, Sean.
Awesome. Welcome back, everybody. Episode 16 of Brandbusters. Today we're gonna whoop whoop. Keep it going.
We're gonna do, something a little bit different today. We've got a lot of really great founder interviews, lined up that we can't quite reveal yet, but that will be dropping throughout the rest of the year. But, we were talking and wanted to just do something a little bit different today and, have James actually interview me on my time, founding the Xevo insect brand out of P&G Ventures. So I'm not gonna talk about myself. I'm not gonna do an introduction.
I will turn it over to James, and hopefully, you guys can get some value out of what I learned innovating inside a big company and, you know, fighting the antibodies of a big company and and doing all that to try keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive to launch a brand that's now, doing about 200,000,000 in annual revenue. So we'll jump into it. I'll share, some of the the stories and lessons from the early days. And hopefully, for anybody working at a a big CPG company, this can give you some inspiration. If you're working as as a founder or at a smaller company, I think the lessons are still really applicable because I tried to throw a lot of the big company playbook out of the window.
So I'll turn it over to James, and we will dive in. And, hopefully, I can give some entertaining and educational stories. Man, I'm so excited to put Sean on the hot seat here. Fun fact. This is actually gonna be a roast, not, an interview.
So let's see what happens. Fine. Yeah. I I make it make it easy. I make it easy.
That's for sure. My my wife So I I'm really I'm really looking forward to this. Sean is someone I've known for for probably 14 or 15 years, and kind of always admired from afar. We did get to work together, for a little bit, and now we're obviously doing this. But for those of you that don't know Sean, he's a cofounder and president of Cinci Brands, a CPG operating company, cohost of the Brandbusters, obviously, and cofounder of Xevo brand, which we'll be spending a lot of time today talking about.
Sean spent a decade at Procter and Gamble in brand management, leading brands like I'm Pet Food and Old Spice deodorant. He was the former CMO of Amify, which sold to cart.com earlier this year. Sean has worked as an executive for private equity and venture capital backed CPG and ecommerce businesses. Is. He is a proud dad of 3 and active guy, and has been married.
Are you 10 years yet? Are you you're knocking on it. Right? Oh, man. Next year next year will be 10 years.
Yeah. Next year. Yeah. Wow. So as an amazing wife and family, so shout out Robin and kids.
But today, we're gonna we're really gonna focus on, this kind of your founder's journey, which I think is a unique one. Right? I think a lot of our guests that have previously, been on Brand Busters, which has some phenomenal experience, they really kind of started, kind of their own companies in the last maybe incubate, like, within one of these more conglomerates, larger, organizations. And there's you know, you talk about entrepreneur and entrepreneur, and I think you had a really unique experience, being able to do that at P&G. So, you know, before diving into how you founded Xevo, maybe share with me, share with our guests, like, what is p and v P and G Ventures?
Like, how how did you get involved in that, you know, leaving brand management, of Old Spice and Ime's? Yeah. I think that's a great question. And every company is a little bit different, but I'll I'll kinda walk through the evolution of of P&G Ventures. And I think there's Kellogg Ventures, AB InBev has one.
There's a lot of these venture groups within within big companies, and they've been around for a very long time. So if you think of a big company, most of them are organized in business units and regionally. Right? So you might be the, you know, the brand manager of North America Old Spice. And there may be a global Old Spice brand that helps create stuff that gets pushed out to all the markets.
But that's how a lot of these big companies big CPG companies are organized. So, you know, those brands have their own p and l. They're making their own investment choices. They're bringing in real profit dollars. They're innovating for their own brands.
But a lot of these companies are like, great. We still need to find new business somewhere. And that can be through acquisitions or that can be through using their own internal r and d teams and consumer research teams to try find opportunities that the P and Gs, the Kelloggs, the Unilevers of the world can then go and launch into. So P and G had had a group in different iterations. It was called new business creation that had been around for quite some time.
I think probably about a decade, there hadn't really been anything like a new brand that had been launched out of it. Maybe some interesting technology, but not a a a full scale new brand like a Febreze or a Tide or something that you would think of as a a true, like, household name. So I had been on the the Old Spice brand, and I was in my mid twenties. We were doing really well. Like, for big CPG, if you grow 10 or 11% a year, like, that's considered fantastic.
Most of these brands grow 1 or 2% a year, and a lot of it's through pricing and other kinda distribution mechanisms. So I was kinda dubbed as the guy that knew the Internet and ecommerce because Old Spice was geared towards a younger audience. We did a lot with Reddit and YouTube and Facebook advertising in the early days of that. So I had been promoted into a role where I was our doing global ecommerce for all of p and g. So I was helping a lot of brands around the the globe think about how to go to market on Amazon when Amazon was still, you know, not as big as it is today, and how to think about d to c or direct to consumer websites.
So I did that and kinda traveled the globe and and consulted with all of our brands and created some best practices and was looking for my next opportunity. And I wanted to take all this stuff I had done on Old Spice, all this ecommerce playbook work I'd created for for all of our brands and put it into practice. So this role in the newly formed P&G Ventures, which was the rebranded new business creation unit, which, like I had said, hadn't really had anything in probably a decade that that turned into anything. It it it had popped up and, you know, it probably was a risky career move because going somewhere that hadn't had a hit, like, is usually a career dead end, but I was kinda getting bored. I didn't wanna go back to, like, a normal a normal role.
So I liked the guy, kind of guy by the name of Patrick Kraus who was leading the the group. Met with him. He pitched me his vision on come here. We'll we'll find an area that we can go disrupt just like Dollar Shave Club and Harry's Razors and Casper Mattresses, all these other guys were doing. And I'll pretty much give you air cover and free rein to actually go create something and launch something and that you'll feel proud of.
So that was kind of P and G Ventures and how I got there. But P and G Ventures as a whole was set up interestingly, which was, like, let's go identify spaces that we wanna go disrupt, not have a solution, but be open to where the market could take us. And the space that I was working on was we were calling it the safe and effective space. So finding old sleepy categories that maybe had more chemical chassis formulas or products that we could launch a newer or better for you or safer version of. And that's that's how kind of P and G bet ventures was making different bets.
And we were doing a lot of external benchmarking, studying startups. I think we did a really good job of kind of looking externally to see how people were doing it. And, yeah, that's that's the Ventures Group. So I'll kinda stop there. That's that's that's P and G Ventures in the nutshell.
And I think they're still kinda operating that way today. And the Xevo brand still operates within P and G Ventures. It hasn't been moved back to its own business unit yet, which would probably be the home care division of of P and G. In in ratio of organic versus inorganic, I know, you know, P and G was guilty of a couple, like, concepts that maybe didn't hit that they you know, everything's not gonna turn out to be a Febreze or Swiffer, and same thing with the other big CPG codes out there. So Yep.
Do they find more success? I see native was, I think, a pretty a pretty big win. I know that didn't come through through ventures, but Yep. How did you see that kind of evolve versus, hey. Let's just go out and identify acquisition targets versus, like, hey.
Let's build something like Xevo. Yeah. I mean, I think big big consumer goods companies are notoriously bad about launching new brands. It happens. Xevo was an example of it.
But it's incredibly hard. Right? If you think about how big CPG companies hire, they hire really smart, talented and intelligent people, oftentimes with MBAs. And they're brought in to basically, you know, come into a publicly traded company that's going to grow a few percentage points a year and probably pays a dividend. So a lot of it's kind of a, you know, project management, financial managements, marketing exercise to make sure that you're not taking too many risks.
You're continuing to grow the business, and you're always paying that dividend. The profile of that that does really well in that role is a completely different profile of somebody that's gonna be an early stage founder and launch a business. Like, they could not be more polar opposite. Right? Like and that's not a knock on anybody.
Like, those roles exist and they're great roles. And there's a reason P and G is worth 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars because it's got great people being a steward of those big brands and 1,000,000,000 of dollars. But the that that profile tends to be more risk averse, tends to be more process driven. And then when you're launching a startup, you can't you cannot be that way. You have to be, you know, pivot quickly, like, make decisions, take on risk.
Things are gonna fail, and you gotta be okay with that. So a lot of these, like, ventures groups across every company, I don't care who you are, really struggle. Right? Because they they manage them the same way that they would manage the launch of Tide pods. Right?
Which is not the same because you already have an established brand that's launching a new form. If you're launching a brand new brand that nobody's ever heard of and introducing that, it's a completely different skill set. So I think that's that's probably the most challenging thing in in in launching in a big company. And big companies just aren't really set up well-to-do that. So with that being said, I think what was really unique about what we did, and I would say, like, the magic of Xevo at the time was I knew by the time I had taken this role that I wasn't gonna be a lifer at P&G.
You know, being a lifer at P&G is a great a great thing. You can make a lot of money, have a very fulfilling career. I knew I wanted to go smaller company. I knew I wanted to kinda do my own thing at some point and stay local in Cincinnati. So I was already willing to go take a risk and say, I'm gonna try to launch something.
And if it doesn't work, who cares? Like, if I hit a career dead end at P and G, I'm gonna leave anyway because I was already kinda planning in my my road map that I wanted to do something with a smaller company. The guy that I was working for, Patrick Kraus, he was on the tail end of his career. His kids were about to go to college. His wife was actually the head of purchasing of all all of P&G.
He probably had about 5 years left in him before retirement. And he basically said, I wanna make a big impact, and I want a legacy. So we're gonna do anything we can to, like so I can go out and retire on top. So I feel like that mindset of both of us being like, f it. We're just gonna we're gonna throw everything out the window and just try do do what we feel is right to launch something and make it work was like a like a dangerous, like, 1 plus 1 equals 3 combo between the 2 of us that, you know, had he not been my manager or he he was a career driven manager that wanted to go back and be the brand manager of Swiffer, the director of Swiffer, the VP of Swiffer, he probably would have played it a lot safer.
And for me, if I wanted to go do that too, I probably would have played it a lot safer. So that was what I thought was really interesting is we were like, okay. You've got this safe and effective space. We had just seen what happened with Harry's and Dollar Shave Club, basically disrupting P&G that had, like, a 70% market share in razors. P and G raised the prices.
You know, razors are super expensive. These guys came in and basically flipped that model on its head and started stealing market share. So we looked at a couple of things in safe and effective. And insect control always came to the top. It was a globally growing category.
Outside the US, it's a bigger problem. And, like, Brazil, China, India, it's it's rapidly growing. And all the players had the same hallmarks. They were like, you know, brands from the fifties sixties, really harsh chemicals. It's really hard to launch a new insect product because of all the the in the US, the EPA regulations.
Every state has its own regulatory bottle body for different insect products. So we're kinda looking at it and, like, everybody's got this in the insight was everybody has that, like, rusty can of raid or hotshot in their garage that's probably been, like, burning a rust ring on their, their concrete floor or the shelf that it's on. And you get it out and you spray it and you're like, gosh. I don't wanna breathe this stuff in. Like, I don't want my kids breathing it in.
I certainly am not gonna use it in my house. Or you feel like you gotta you gotta leave. So we kinda looked at it and we're like, there's been no real innovation for a very long time. It's a hard market to get into. So a startup probably isn't gonna go there because of the amount of heavy lifting to get things approved with the EPA and all the different states.
And, if we can bring something that kind of is the Method home care version, you know, better ingredients, safer for you, something that you'd be comfortable using around kids, puppies, your family with packaging that looked more inviting and friendly. So maybe aluminum instead of steel, maybe a clear teardrop bottle spray bottle than, you know, something that's in all white that looks like it's a a spray bottle for bleach. So that was kinda how we we identified the inside category to go into, and then we had to try convince the company that it that it made sense to do so. So I know I just went on a long rambling rant and tried to things together. But You you did, but that's okay.
It was all there was a lot of good, I think, nuggets in there. I think one theme that you hit on is and this is coming up in a couple of the episodes. It's kind of the power of, like, good mentors. And it sounds like Patrick Krauss was one. I see you had, I think, Kemi and Parton were other guys that, you know, and Andy.
So I think, your career has really echoed that, spent a lot really during your decade at P&G. So that's amazing that you had someone like Patrick to kind of be kind of clear the path for you to kind of put your stamp on it there. On that, I imagine resource allocation is a tricky thing. Right? Venture sounds buzzy and I gets well funded by the same at the end of day.
Like, again, P and G is a publicly traded company. Like, they have to, satisfy the shareholders. So they're you're not going to get the same war chest as tied. Right? So how did how did, you know, resource allocation go?
It's probably not like raising funding per se, but, like, how did you guys go? Or and how could other listeners that are at big CPG companies, like, think about securing additional budget to, you know, go out there and, after launching a new brand or concept? Yeah. I think that's a great question. And for us, it it happened to be the right time, right place.
Like, the context of when I joined P&G Ventures is AG Lafley, who had been our prior CEO, had just come back as an inter interim CEO role, and he was very hot on we need new innovation, we need new brands. So he kind of got behind this idea of the New Ventures Group, And it had a pretty healthy budget. Right? Like, nothing like a tide or anything else, but, like, you know, tens of 1,000,000 of dollars of budget to to get headcount and go spend money and go run some experience. So or experiments.
So that's a pretty healthy budget for for something like this. So at least we had the budget. Then within P&G Ventures, there were different groups similar to ours. Right? Like, we were trying to play in a a variety of different spaces, skin care, men's grooming, this insect control market that we wanted to go after.
That's where it was really we we took the what I would call, like there's a book called lean innovation by Eric Reese that we tried to follow, which would be great. We wanna go into insect control. What are the experiments we could run to see, you know, if we should actually do that? So we would try to, like, create some concepts. Great.
We got good feedback on the concepts. Can we create prototypes and go we we went to, like, trade shows and and tried to pitch in person to see if somebody would get out their wallet and buy it and be like, actually, it's not a real product, but we'll put you on the wait list, and here's a Starbucks gift card for for talking to us. So we tried to do all these things to prove it out. We would run Facebook ads to a website that had, like, a, you know, a preregistration or sign up and try measure the interest that way. So, honestly, it was like me and Patrick at the early days fighting for this, you know, pretty small in the grand scheme of thing budget in in a big company, like, you know, 1,000,000 of dollars, maybe $10,000,000, like, or less.
And it was trying to run these experiments and come back and say, our data is better than all these other people that are running similar experiments, and we think that there's consumer heat here. Here's how much money we're asking for. Here's the next bigger experiment we wanna go run to prove it out. Right? So it's almost like software engineering.
It's like, what's the version 1, version 2, version 3, or, like, what's your crawl, walk, run plan? So that's how I would kind of if you can frame it out of if you can get data and and improve that there's a need there and then go use that to justify your budget against all the other people that are asking for money, like it's like anything. Just like pitching to a VC if you're a private company. Like, they hear hundreds of pitches. Like, why are they gonna choose yours?
You gotta frame your internal pitch up just the same to go go lock up that money. Obviously, I benefited from the fact that we were tasked to do that in ventures. So the money was there. I just had to say, like, why should you give it to me versus all these other people? Right.
And I I think something to make clear to the listeners here. While sure there's a clear budget and substantial funding provided, there were multiple concepts running concurrently. It wasn't like Yep. Ventures went all in. Hey.
You know, Zevo is our golden child. We're gonna actually set them against multiple other concepts. So you have to kinda prove it out. And as certain benchmarks are hit, additional funding can be allocated. So, again, I think for those of you just getting into innovation or the idea of, like, launching something, it's not just gonna be, hey.
Here's we're just gonna open up the purse strings. Like, make sure you're taking the path to really prove out what's that MVP, and what what's gonna help catalyze growth at the necessary velocity to really, you know, drive that confidence from your 1 up to up 3 up bosses, to continue to kind of make bets on your concept versus someone else's. Yeah. And I think you gotta be honest too. Right?
Like, at a big company, you're basically you're trained to always show the rosy picture. Right? Like you do annual reviews and the only things that end up in your review are all these great things that you did. And across the country, the company, there may be 50,000 employees and everybody's annual review has all the great things they did, but the company grew 1 or 2%. So you're kind of like everybody can't be doing all these great things.
So when you're you're you're trained to never talk about failures in big companies, like, it just how it is what it is. Right? Like, whether that's right or wrong. When you're launching something, you have to quickly raise your hand and be like, shit. This did not work.
Like, we should probably pivot or shut it down. And I think if you're in a big company and you're doing that, like, anytime I would do that, nobody ever faulted me, especially in the early days of Xevo. I'd be like, I don't think this is working or this we need to change our approach or, like, this data isn't very good. Like, let's be honest with ourselves. That almost always unlocked us to pivot to something that that worked better.
But I saw so many innovation teams fall on their sword of, like, they didn't wanna look like they failed to their management or their leadership team, and that was more important than actually succeeding. So they would keep we call them zombie project projects. They would just keep these things alive and keep asking for funding, and you knew it was never gonna work and it was a bad idea. Again, I had a different perspective because I was like, I wanna hit. Patrick wanted to hit.
We both probably weren't gonna be at the company for that long because of him retiring and me knowing I wanted to go, you know, the private equity or or founder route at some point. So we were just like, hey. This isn't working. Like, let's go do something different, and we did that a ton of times in the early days. Yeah.
It sounds like it's easier said than done, but to not enmeshed your identity with, like, the project or concept. So no one wants to be themselves called a failure. So if the project or component of it fails, you all said in, like, lace that with your identity, which is not gonna to be the road to nowhere. Very dangerous territory. But I think in this, you know, you're talking about what to measure.
Right? I think in sales and marketing, there's a lot of vanity metrics out there to just kind of portray that things are going well. But at the end of the day, they don't really mean shit. So what were the metrics that you were really keen on in the early days of Xevo to say, hey, yes, this is working. We're seeing the success that we we need and want.
Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you a a couple a couple stories of of what we did early on. I said, one, that trade show story. So we had different pitches of how are we gonna pitch this product. And every day at the trade show, we'd we'd try a different pitch, and we would visually measure like, we talked to a 100 people with this pitch, and 20 of them got out their credit card and said, yeah.
I'm interested. Like, that's good. You know, it's a it's a pretty good success rate. The next pitch might have been 5 people, and you're like, oh, this is a pretty bad one. We kinda triangulate to, like, what's the best pitch just from, like, reading body language and being intuitive about it and getting that that data, which for me, it was always, will somebody actually pull out their credit card and vote with their dollars in the early days?
That's all I cared about. And, like, what's the highest conversion rate? Whether you're live pitching, whether you're doing other things. So we we came up with this page that we thought was really good, and then I ended up hooking up with this guy, who made as seen on TV commercials. So those, like, late night 2 minute commercials.
The the inventory is super cheap. We would buy, like, TV 2 minute TV spots for, like, $5. Right? And you're running, like, late night on Fox Business, overnight on, like, crazy channels. So we turned our in our our trade show pitch into a script for an as seen on TV commercial that we produce, you know, on a very low budget.
And then our measurement was how many people will actually go to the website or call in and and order, and how does that compare against every other as seen on TV commercial that we had data on. And for us, we were performing within the range. We're like, like, there are a lot of as seen on TV products that if they perform in this range based on the number of people that go online or call the phone number and buy the product, they tend to do end up doing well at, like, a Walmart, a CVS, a Walgreens. And, again, it was a a pretty easy test for us to run. It didn't cost that much money in the grand scheme of things.
So we did that, and it was always about conversions again for me. Like, how are we doing versus other people who have done well? Are we in that range of conversion rate? So we did that. And then the next step was launching a Shopify website, which I think everybody does right now.
Like, that's the first thing you would probably do in this day and age. And we took that everything we learned from pitching in person, everything we learned from the as seen on TV stuff, and we turned it into a a Shopify website. Use Facebook and Instagram ads, video ads, static ads, motion graphic ads with a ton of different copy to try drive everybody there. And again, my whole thing was, like, how do I make the website convert the highest it can be? And then how do I get my cost per acquisition down as low as it can be?
At the time, Facebook was a lot easier. There wasn't as much competition. Things weren't as high that the iOS update hadn't happened. So I think when we when we launched Xevo, we were probably at, like, a $50 cost per conversion, which wasn't gonna be great. Right?
Because we had these, like, lower dollar value ring products. We were building basket size, but not a not a great conversion. By the end of it, just through running a ton of iterations of Facebook ads and videos and and optimizing the copy on the website, we got it down to about a 9 to $11 cost per conversion, which in today's world, anybody would be thrilled with that. Like, that's almost unheard of for for Shopify websites. So we were like, wow.
Like, even when I was talking to, like, other people who are VC funded outside of P&G, like, this is a really good cost for acquisition. So, again, my my core metric was always, will consumers buy us, and we'll we'll can we be efficient in the way that they buy us? And that was where I was like, alright. I think we're ready for retail. Again, a lot of iteration along the way, but it wasn't an overnight thing.
It was probably a year and a half, 2 years of, like, prototyping, fixing things, listening to reviews, tweaking copy until I finally felt I was ready to go, you know, pitch something to a retailer and try to put it on shelf. On the note with retailers, so probably no surprise that P and G has, you know, access to some of the biggest retailers, in the world, especially here in the US. But I can imagine that even if you have great relationships with the buyers there, that they're just gonna roll out the red carpet for a a new concept and give you shelf space. So Correct. Talk to talk to us about which retailers did you start with, what was the receptiveness.
Yes. You have the affiliation with P&G, so probably a little bit of a leg up, but also a new concept. Right? So how did you how did you pick? How did you advocate for more shelf space and kinda navigate, like, where in the planogram, like, what's gonna position Cboe the best?
Yeah. I mean, I kinda wanna circle back to a comment you made earlier that I didn't really address, which was, you know, how much innovation fails at big companies? It's the exact same as, like, the number of venture capital companies that fail. Right? Like, I think our hit rate of new initiatives, even if they were tied to a brand, like, if Tide launched something or if Febreze launched something, you know, 7 out of 10, 8 out of 10 would fail, even with big budgets behind them, everything else.
It was the same thing with, like, new brands. It's what the same hit rate with, you know, venture capital funded companies. So that was always a challenge. Right? It's like, we could use the weight of P&G, and we could go get distribution everywhere.
But I always felt like the reason some of these things failed is we tried to we tried to run before we walked. Right? So is and I fought a ton of battles within p and g because they're like, Xevo seems to be doing well on Shopify. I was like, great. We've sold, like, $2,000,000 a year on Shopify with good conversion rates.
I'm not ready to go into a 100% of all stores across America. Like, we're just not there yet, and America doesn't even know about us. So how are we gonna get moving off the shelf? Because we probably could have gotten, you know, 80 to 90% distribution using the weight of p and g. I didn't wanna do that.
Other people were not doing that. If you look at, I think Harry's razors at the time was probably the best model. Build a really good d to c business, build a good Amazon business, and then go to Target exclusively for 12 months. And, like, you know, you're at you have 10% distribution because that's about what Target was at the time. And probably about 10% of America is aware of you, so your distribution is matched to your awareness.
So it's a very manageable thing. You can drive people to Target. You can hit your metrics at Target so that you don't get delisted. It's a very manageable thing to chunk off. Then I think Harry's in year 2, Walmart came to them because they're like, hey.
This is doing well at Target. We want you. Like, Walmart was pulling them versus them pushing themselves into Walmart. So they go there. And then year 3, Kroger comes to you and says, hey.
You're in Walmart and Target. We want you. And then you start to build this, like, pent up demand. And all the while, you can reasonably manage success metrics at those retailers that you probably couldn't do if you were in 50 different retailers trying to, you know, fight 50 different battles and and and allocate a small budget across 50 retailers. It's just never gonna work.
So for us, I took an even more conservative approach. I said, this is an insect control product. Home Depot and Lowe's besides Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe's are the 2 the next 2 largest, by dollars and units move places where people buy insect control. So we went to Home Depot, which P and G sells some stuff to there. There's a guy named by the name of Dan Trauig, who was the the only person that serviced the Home Depot account for all of P and G.
And I called him. I was like, hey. I wanna try pitch this to Home Depot. Like, would you help me? And he's like, they'll probably be thrilled because we've never come to them as P&G and said we wanna give you new innovation exclusively.
He's like, sure. I'll help. It wasn't really, like the company wasn't really sanctioned, but he kinda skunk works, like, was like, yeah. Come fly down and meet with me. Well, I'll set up something with the buyer.
It won't be official P and G business, but I'll help you, like, get your foot in the door. So we we took that approach. He did that. We went to the buyer. Like we like he said, the buyer was thrilled that we were offering him exclusive innovation that would normally go to, like, a Target or a Walmart, and it was a pretty easy sell.
Like, he was like, sure. I'll run a test in about half of our stores for a year. If you hit your metrics, we'll go to all stores, but just give it to me for 12 months exclusive while we run this test, which was a no brainer for me. So that's kind of how we initially thought about it, which again is much different than, like, the typical P and G model, which is, like, go as fast as you can as quickly as you can. Like, my vision was always, we're gonna build this brand over 3 to 10 3 to 10 year time horizon.
It doesn't need to be an overnight success, which at a big company that's publicly traded, they want it to be an overnight success. Yep. There there's nothing wrong with singles and doubles. Everyone wants a home run. Just getting on base, especially in the early days is good and proving it out versus crippling your supply chain or taking a a huge whiff.
Going off that, I I mean, you were I guess your your biggest ahas in terms of transitioning from, okay, I'm brand brand manager to now founding. Like, are there 2 to 3 that are just very salient to you that stand out? Yeah. I think the first one is whether you're in, like, brand management at a big company, finance at a big company, whether you're in consulting at, like, Bain or McKinsey, it's like, you learn a really good base of business of how to look at a business and diagnose problems. So that's what you do all day in brand management.
Where you lack is the execution side most likely. Like, you're you wanna have too many meetings and talk talk about it to death and you don't actually take action. You're so you get really good at diagnosing problems, but then you're slow to move. When I moved in the Ventures Group, I realized, like, I had to use that skills the skill set to quickly diagnose problems, but knew it didn't have to be perfect and biased towards action where it was more important for me to move and run and, like, you know, fail quickly, pivot, learn, then try to get it perfect. And I think in big companies, everyone wants to get it perfect, but you really should, like, use everything you've learned, make the best educated guess that you can, have a good hypothesis, and then quickly just go execute.
And if you fall on your face, get back up and reformulate your hypothesis, and then go execute again until you until you get it right. So that would be, like, the the first insight. I think the second insight is, try to unlearn everything you learned about how to go to market in a traditional big company role. So when I took the ventures role, I specifically used the Power P&G to reach out to people on LinkedIn. Like, I talked to a founder of Casper Mattress.
I talked to a guy who started a company called Tipsy Elves, which is they make kind of novelty, party apparel, a bunch of these d to c businesses that had popped up. And I just kinda like we're doing right now. I just interviewed them on, like, what's working about it? Like, how do you run your business? Like, what metrics do you measure?
Like, what advertising platforms are you using? And I just made a log of all the things that these guy these people are doing across the 10 founders of these, like, web companies or ecommerce companies, what they were doing, and identified patterns and commonalities. And basically said, I'm gonna run this playbook and throw all the advice of the internal people at P&G out the window, and I'm just gonna stay laser focused on doing what these guys who are currently having success doing what I wanna do or actually doing in the market. So those are probably, like, the 2 biggest things, which is 1, you know, bias towards execution and trust your gut. And then 2, study the people that are doing what you wanna do, and don't take the advice from the big company that hasn't been able to do it well for years years years.
Yeah. I I think both are great points. And your your second one specifically, you know, I'm in sales, and I had my entire career has been in sales. And so I'm accustomed to having to reach out to people blindly and try to connect and network. I think if, you know, anyone that's listening is at a big hill, like, you have, I think, a leg up when it comes to proactively networking.
So if you have any hesitation of reaching out to the founder of this kind of buzzy startup brand, I think they would be more receptive and willing to hear from you all because there's some things that you might have in in place from an infrastructure standpoint, that could help support that. Or connections. Right? Because they all wanna get acquired. So if you can make an intro to somebody who can acquire them, like, they'd be thrilled.
So if any, I just really wanna encourage, go out there, actively network, identify as you said, Sean, I think identify the people that are are are doing what you want to be doing or running, growing in a way that you want to for your business. But if you're in a big co, probably have a massive leg up and can do a lot more networking, which is gonna benefit your business either short term, long term, and also you can kinda pay it back, to them. So definitely take advantage and and get your neck out there either. LinkedIn or sending out coffees in town, especially if you're in a hot market like New York or Chicago, Cincinnati where Sean and I are. But, absolutely take advantage.
Sean, is there any moment you know, we talked about not hiding from the failures. Is there any point where you thought Xevo's gonna crater? Just like, oh, shit. This isn't working. Like, I've gotta I gotta figure something out here.
Yeah, man. I think a a ton of times. There was there was one point, like so just for context for the audience, when we initially launched the Zevo brand, there was a plug in trap, which is like a a blue light trap with some citric acid that would attract fruit flies and bugs that would be in your room, so in your kitchen, you know, other places. And they would get stuck on this little sticky pad that was kinda hidden from the consumer, and you'd throw this cartridge away and put a new one on. So that was kind of the first product.
I didn't think that that was gonna be the only thing that could carry the brand. I think we need I thought we needed a lineup. So there are kind of 22 oh shit moments in in this. One was when we first started selling the trap on, on on Shopify, we had a New York Times, article through somebody in our PR department had a connection there. They wrote wrote up about this product, which we didn't pay for.
It was, like, very we kinda got lucky. Right? From the moment that that went live on, like, the Sunday New York Times lifestyle page, like, we sold out of all of our inventory that we had planned for, like, the next 6 months within, like, 5 days. The problem with that is we hadn't done enough marketing and education yet. So everybody that was buying it from this New York Times article didn't know where to put this thing.
So they'd put it, like, in their bedroom where there were no bugs, or they'd put it, like, you know, on the other 30 feet away in their kitchen from where fruit flies were, or they wouldn't put it near an entryway, or they wouldn't put it in their garage or in their basement. So we were getting flooded with all these, like, you know, bad reviews and emails saying this thing's crap. It doesn't work. So I was, like, panning. I'm like, may maybe this thing really is bad.
Maybe it doesn't work. Like, maybe it's time to just, like, move on and hang it up. But we had a a really good, I had a couple people on our consumer research and r and d team who are awesome. We just started picking up the phone and calling all these people and started interviewing them and be like, well, where are you using it? And they would send us we get them to send us pictures.
They talk to us, and we we realized pretty quickly, like, people are putting it in the wrong spot. They're putting it where they don't have the problem and thinking that, like, you know, if you put it in one your bedroom, but your bug problem is 3 rooms over, that the bugs are magically gonna navigate through your house and end up on this thing. So once we would educate them where to put put it, immediately, we'd flip it to, like, 4 and a half or 5 star reviews. They'd be like, oh, it's working. This is great.
We love it. So quickly, what we did was we sent out an email to everybody that bought it with, like, a video instruction. I think I was the one, like, talking and demoing how to use the product. We sent, like, a PDF instruction sheet out to everyone over email. And then going forward, we we had an email series that anytime anybody bought, they got a series of how to use it, where to use it, what rooms to use it in.
Every, thing that went out from our 3PL had a pamphlet on, like, getting started and, like, where to common areas to place it and tips and tricks if they if it's not working. And immediately, we stopped getting these bad reviews, and we went up to, like, 4 and a half or 5 stars. But without calling, like, probably 50 people, we would have never figured that out, and we probably just would have shut down the project. So that was kind of, oh, shit. Number 1.
I think the the second piece there was I knew that we need, like, some additional, products. So we found some sprays, some insect sprays that were like raid, but were really good and, you know, would work just as well. Like, you could side by side, it would kill a roach just as quickly as raid, but it was made from, like, essential oils. And and you could essentially, like, spray it in your mouth, and you wouldn't die. You'd be completely fine.
So we did this license deal with a company that had the technology. We rushed a bunch of it to market. We didn't do enough on, like, the scent profile, and we realized, like, there was too much of one ingredient that just smelled absolutely atrocious. So we'd probably run, like, 10,000 units of this thing on the production line, got it in the market, and we're like, holy crap. Everybody hates the smell of this thing.
Like, this is gonna tank it. Like, nobody's gonna wanna reuse this if it smells if it makes your rooms smell weird for, like, 8 hours after using it. So, again, we called a bunch of people, tried to identify what it was, did a bunch of, like, scent profile work, worked with the people we licensed the technology from to dampen down that scent. But I I thought it was the end. I was like, the company's gonna wanna cancel this.
We're gonna get terrible reviews. But uncovering that up front and just being honest with everybody, it'd be like, hey. We messed this up. People hate the scent. We know what they hate about it.
We can go reformulate, and we think that we're gonna get better reviews because people like the idea of it, and they're spending their money on it. But if it's just not delivering in that that usage moment or that at home moment there, which we call the second moment of truth. If we can solve that, I think we've got a winner product that people want to buy because they love the concept. And then if it doesn't make the room stink for 8 hours, like weird essential oils, like you just got went to, like, yoga and some lady rubbed, like, essential oils on your forehead, like, that's that's the win. But I thought I thought, surely, both of those times, we're gonna sink the brand because we were getting, you know, 1 and a half, 2 star reviews.
But it was always just a minor thing, either missed expectations or one tiny thing that you could tweak that would solve the entire problem for them. Since you brought up your first point, I think there's a Voltaire quote that's been floating around in my head that, common sense isn't so common. So I I think for, if you have it if you're going to assume that the consumer is gonna use your product without any type of, like, precise instruction, it's not gonna happen. Like, especially now, you're talking about this theme of, like, education and entertainment or edutainment. Like Yep.
Everyone every brand is doubling down on video. Look at Amazon listings and how explicit some of the directions are in the images and the bullets and the a plus content. Like, they're telling you it, they're telling you it again, and they're telling you one more time. So just make sure you, oh, you you figure that out. If you take nothing else away from this, definitely focus on number 1, with with, what Sean brought up.
Make sure you're equipping your customer to have a a positive experience with their product. Because if you don't, it's gonna be you're you're you're coming from behind there. So Yeah. I think the other piece, James, like, one one point that I would make too is kind of along this theme of, like, building awareness with your distribution and and kind of getting retailers to pull you instead of pushing yourselves in there. Like, we we had a pretty good year the 1st year we went to Home Depot.
I think it was manageable because at the time I don't know if this tactic would still work. Like, you always have to evaluate tactics based on the the time and the brand and the place. But we're in, like, 5 100, 600 Home Depot stores. And I, at the time, would geofence them in Instagram and Facebook. And I would basically run ads within, like, 2 miles of those stores with a call to action to, like, go buy the product in store.
And I, like, a b I split test that for when I ran ads to the store versus didn't. I would drive, like, an extra, like, you know, 2, 2 and a half units a week where I was running ads versus where I wasn't. So I quickly figured out I could kinda game the success metrics of Home Depot by running these geo targeted Facebook ads because I think my metric was like, hey. If you move, like, 0.8 units per store per week, we'll be happy. And by geofencing all their stores and running these Facebook and Instagram ads, if I was running moving, like, 2 to 3 units per store per week, it looked like we blew this test out of the water.
So it was, like, a very efficient way to kind of use advertising that was manageable. Right? Because it was 500 stores. I knew that I could drive traffic through 500 stores, and I had a tactic that worked to do that. But then that data got us full distribution in Home Depot.
And then because they took us full distribution, we had this great unit per store per week metric target. When we went to Target, they were already interested because of how well we're doing on on Shopify, and then it was doing well at Home Depot. So it made the sales pitch for, like, the exclusive to Target in the next year way, way, way, way easier. And I had left around the time we we got distribution and sold into Target, to go work for a private equity backed company. But from people that I was friends with the brand, it went to Target.
It did well there. They kinda ran that same playbook, and then Walmart called them and said, we want it. Like, what can we do? Like, year 3, like, we want it in every store. So they didn't even really have to pitch Walmart.
It was kinda like a Target has it. Home Depot has it. You're like the jealous stepsister, and, you know, they would do anything they they could, to get it. So I think that's the lesson here is, like, most success stories aren't built overnight. And if you try to force it overnight, they turn into failures.
And this is true of almost every consumer brand that I've seen built over the past decade. There's usually years in a methodical slow plan that builds awareness and distribution together. And then all of a sudden 7, 8 years in, you're like, who's this new brand and how do they become an overnight success? But it was really, you know, a smart methodical rollout over a very long period of time with a lot of effort and work that went into it. So, I mean, this has been, great.
I think there's a lot of actionable takeaways, and excited this one appeals to maybe those in bigger organizations as well. So I think, thank you for sharing your background on that. There's there's 2 things I wanna close on. 1 is a a softball question. How did you land on Xevo?
Like, the like, talk to me about the name. Like, why Xevo Insect? Dude, man. Anybody that's named anything in in a private company or a big CPG company knows that, like, you basically have to start back from, like, what URLs are available and what things have not been trademarked yet. So, like, we basically had we we hired a naming agency, which maybe it's good, maybe it's bad.
Like, you probably don't need to do that. You could probably just use chat gpt and have it crank out, like, a 100 names and do a knockout list. But, you know, we paid an agency a lot of money to come up with, like, a list of all these names. A lot of ones we love, but then you'd immediately go search URLs or search trademarks and knock out, like, all of them. So we had about, like, ten left.
I think we there's Xevo. There was Fend. There was a, I think, Orb. There was a few in them. Then we were like, you know what?
Like, it doesn't really matter because the consumer like, some of these things are just nonsensical. So you can, like, tide. Like, what did that mean? Why did that why was that associated with laundry? They just came up with a word and said rising rising, tides of suds was their, like, tagline early on.
But, like, tide has nothing to do with laundry. So our approach is, like, let's pick a word that has no meaning assigned to it, and let's create the meaning for it. So we like Xevo. We wanted something that were, like, was 2 syllables, 3, 4 letters that easily rolled off off the tongue, could be written well. We liked that the v could be turned into a bug for the logo.
We just thought that was kinda like a little flying insect. I thought that was cool. And, my idea at the time, which got I got beat over the head and almost thrown out of the company for by all the lawyers was Xevo means 0 bugs, 0 worries, or something like that. Like, 0 0 bugs, 0 chemicals, 0 worries, and they're like, no. Like, you can't say 0.
Like like, get the hell out. You can't make that claim because there's there's no way you can support that. But that was my plan. It was Zevo means, like, 0 bugs, 0 chemicals, 0 worries. Like, that was gonna be the tagline, but legal had other ideas.
Oh, man. That's I always love the kinda naming origin story. I think that's something we need to ask future guests on as well, because it's it. You you never know. I think I think I think my advice to anybody working in consumer goods that's trying to name something is, like, you can do a lot a ton of consumer tests and a ton of, like, do you like this?
Do you not like this? But, like, if it's something they've never heard before or if it's a made up word, they have no notions of what it is. So you have a blank sheet of paper to go make them feel a certain way about a word. So I kinda took a lot of the research as a, you know, a grain of salt. Like, if I'm putting 5 made up words in front of somebody and they don't like the way this this thing made them feel, I'm like, yeah.
But once I put a a jingle to it or assign a meaning to it, like, I'll get to to dictate how they feel about it or, like, help dictate how they feel about it. So use your gut. Find something that you like that sounds catchy, if it's easy to say, and then ascribe your own meaning to it and help the consumer figure out what you want it to mean. Well, you, you're very active on, I think, paying it forward, meeting with people, sharing your knowledge and experience. What's something people might not be able to glean from, you know, your social media accounts?
What's something that you might wanna share with everyone just about your background, that's not, you know, something that you actively promote or or discuss? Oh gosh, man. Set us a hot seat, you know, not the lukewarm seat. That's great. I honestly, I'm I'm not that I'm not that interesting, to be completely honest.
I mean, I live a pretty boring life, but I try to be helpful where I can. I think I've certainly failed a lot of things. I've certainly not done well at a lot of things, but I try to, at least professionally, just be curious, sometimes to my detriment. So I've I've taken a nontraditional path many times, like a p and g, like, you know, going to the ventures group. Most people probably wouldn't do that.
They wanna take a safer role. I just thought if if I found something intellectually curious or something could be fun, I would just go pursue it because I feel like what's the point of life if you're trying to, you know, follow a path that you think is right or that somebody else wants for you? It's led me to good places. It's led me to bad places. I think I've collected a lot of experiences through that.
But I think as long as you're intellectually curious, which is probably why we're doing this podcast because we love talking to people, and learning about their journey, That would be my biggest advice. I think you can you can find yourself into really interesting spots and then just be really open to, like, where it takes you. Like, try not to go in with a preconceived notion of, like, what your life has to be or what your career has to be 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 years. Like, have a road map, and, like, that's great, but let that be pretty flex loose and flexible. Like, our current company, Scentsy Brands, like, I'm doing a lot of third party logistics services for ecommerce brands and for Amazon FBA.
Never thought I would be in that business, but I actually enjoy it. And there's a need that we can serve. And I've been open enough to find opportunities or find areas where you can go into and and not feel like I only have to do one thing in this bucket for the rest of my career. So, again, it served me well. I've I've probably, like, taken detours before or done things that haven't panned out as as well as I thought they would in my head, but I always learn something.
I always, stay curious and, you know, don't feel like you get boxed in. It's probably I also probably have severe ADD, so that's probably why I do it that way. But keeps things fresh. For sure. Well well, thank you so much.
This was incredible. You know, I've known you as long as I have and still learn learn new things every time we talk. So, great to present your founder's journey, to the audience. So for those of you listening, you can follow and find Sean on LinkedIn, on x. Make sure to follow, Brandbusters, where you get your podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and we'll be back with some another great batch of founders here soon.
And we just launched a new website, refresh website, the brandbusters.com. We've got everything archived there so you can watch YouTube videos on the site. You can stream Apple Podcasts on the site for each of the episodes, and then you can link out to Spotify anywhere else that you get your podcast. So we don't monetize this. James and I do this out of our own desire to learn, to add value, and and to hope others in our situation that are in the CPG and ecommerce space, can learn and and find value.
So as of right now, no advertisements. We don't monetize it. So it's purely out of our passion and our passion to help others learn the same things that we're learning through these conversations. So if you find value in this, the best thing that you can do for us is share it with a colleague, send it on a Slack group that you have at work, send it an episode that you like is an email to somebody that that might find it helpful. Again, we're not making any money.
We do this to be helpful. And the biggest success metric for us is how many people can listen to it and and find some piece of value out of it. Although you guys probably find no value in anything that I said because I ramble and my wife would tell me, why would anybody wanna listen to you talk for for 30 or 40 minutes? But but here we are. Hey.
We got we we have a red light. It's flashing right now. We've gotta go. So See you guys. See you