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In This Episode You’ll Hear About:

• His journey from growing up in Vancouver struggling in school to ending up in finance for college 
• What he learned from his internship at Credit Suisse that helps him in what he does today
• How his time traveling the country while working in finance pushed him to create something he was passionate about, The Naked Market
• Why The Naked Market chose to create a collection of brands rather than create a single brand
• How they think about launching different brands and all the elements that go into it
• The advantage of having multiple brands under a conglomerate and how he leverages learnings from each brand for next one
• The challenges and lessons learned in starting The Naked Market and how he wishes he would’ve started sooner
• What's next for The Naked Market and some of the opportunities they see in the market

To Find Out More:

https://www.thenakedmarket.com/ 

Quotes:

“One of our aspirations is to build the next big food and beverage conglomerate and not build the next big brand.”

“If we see a brand that will integrate very well into the ecosystem that we have built, then we definitely will be opportunistic acquires.”

“We've been very fortunate where, you know, food and beverage historically had much lower e-com penetration than other retail channels. That's really changed in the last 12 to 18 months.”

“Rob’s Backstage Popcorn is our first ever celebrity joint venture. This is a brand that was created with the Jonas Brothers. They'd been eating this popcorn backstage since 2011. They came to us ahead of their tour and asked us to turn it into a brand and consumer product that all of their fans and others could enjoy.”

“We officially launched at the end of 2019, our initial approach, we were going to be much more omni-channel in nature. Because of the circumstances of 2020, it really forced our hand to be an e-com first company.”

“We've got a couple other big celebrity partnerships heading, one before the end of the year, and one in Q1, we've got an exciting line of candy products that are coming to market next year, and a really cool plant-based snack that we're really excited about.” 

“A big reason why we've chosen this portfolio approach to manage multiple brands is just the wide spread opportunity we see across the shelves of grocery stores and a lot of the non-sexy categories that people overlook.” 

“We thought we had such clear communication, and that we were clearly communicating exactly what we wanted the company to do, and where we wanted the company to go. But it very clearly wasn't felt throughout the organization and we weren't doing a good job at communicating.”

“Your day can start as the best day of your life at 8 in the morning, and at 11:00 AM you get an email with an unexpected twist and turn that that you just never saw, which put you at such a low, to only three hours later, have it get fixed and be back to normal. The emotional rollercoaster is unbelievable, it’s indescribable.”

“Expect the unexpected. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. And when things don't go your way, rather than harp on them, find a way to fix them.”

“It's really a rip the bandaid off moment. And my general view is if you've been thinking about it for a significant enough period of time, then you just gotta dive into it and make the leap of faith.”

“If you’re thinking about it, pull the ripcord, life is short and in the grand scheme of things, nothing even really matters. Optimize for impact happiness and, and stop making excuses.”