michelle arnau is the co-founder and co-ceo of mimikai, the first plant-based insect repellent proven to match deet and picaridin without the toxic chemistry. she joins sean to trace an unlikely path to founder: wells fargo real estate workouts, a kellogg mba, twelve years at method scaling it from unprofitable startup to an sc johnson acquisition, then co-founding the clean pet care brand rowan before winding it down. mimikai found her next: a college friend connected her to stephanie watson, who had spent years fighting the epa to register undecanone, a compound from wild tomato plants and the first new repellent active in twenty-five years. it's a story about knowing a category cold, saying no to the wrong retailer, and building slow on purpose so the brand can last.
In this episode of Read Receipt, Sean sits down with Michelle Arnau, co-founder and co-CEO of Mimikai, the first plant-based insect repellent proven to match DEET and Picaridin without the toxic chemistry.
Michelle traces an unlikely path to founder: Wells Fargo commercial real estate workouts, a Kellogg MBA, twelve years at Method scaling it from unprofitable startup to an SC Johnson acquisition, then co-founding the clean pet care brand Rowan before winding it down. When a college friend introduced her to Stephanie Watson, who had spent years fighting the EPA to register undecanone, a compound from wild tomato plants and the first new repellent active in twenty-five years, she got on a plane to Australia the next week.
She gets into the launch strategy behind a category-first product: why they led with Credo and REI before chasing mass shelf space, how they used velocity and repeat over door count, why she turned down a major retailer this year, and what it looks like to build with investors who back the long game over short-term revenue.
Tune in for an honest look at building a regulatory moat, knowing a category cold before entering it, and what it takes to finally change an aisle your dad used as a kid!
Michelle: And as a two-time cancer survivor, I hope that my niece's children never use DEET. And if that's the legacy I can leave that finally changed a category that, you know, my dad used as a kid, that's, that's pretty cool.
Sean: I am super excited to have you back for another episode of Read Receipt. It's a deep dive into the how and why of the brands we love and the creatives behind them. From blueprints to launch day, customers as community, and the detours in between. Big lessons and easy listening. Read Receipt is hosted by Antidote, the email and SMS marketing agency by people who hate boring email.
Michelle: We built out the brand. It's called Mimikai, biomimicry and Boracay, but my dog's name is Kai. When people hear that there's finally an insect repellent that works just as well as the DEETs out there, but is natural, non-toxic, and safe to put on my kids and my dog, it's an unlock. And I was not planning to do another startup, especially not be a co-founder.
Sean: What did, what did you end up doing for work after, after college initially?
Michelle: I went into banking. So I was gonna go to law school. I was about a week away from going to Pepperdine. I was gonna become an attorney because I wanted to become an agent. I wanted to be a sports agent. I'm a big NFL girl, and I wanted to crack that and be the first. And I was gonna go to law school, but I noticed a lot of my friends who were graduating from law school who were not able to get jobs, and they were all getting jobs if they were in personal injury firms and things that just didn't sound great or a lot of paperwork, like doing documents. And so about a week away from that, I just decided I, I wasn't gonna do that, and I was a little bit kind of confused at that stage of, what do I do? And I, I just kinda fell into a job at Wells Fargo in-- it was commercial real estate workouts. So it was basically problem real estate that, you know, these large developments, so like The Lion Company and things that were doing these large developments, and they had gone kinda sideways. And so there was a team at Wells Fargo who would try to fix them. And so they would actually go in and look at the businesses themselves to figure out what was going on. And I kinda just fell into that, and I'm so grateful for it because banking wasn't my final path, but it-- the start gave me a lot of insight into how businesses work and how they don't work. And more importantly, one of our projects was in Compton, and it was this amazing real estate development with these beautiful new homes, and they weren't selling, and they couldn't understand why. And I remember going and looking at them and seeing their marketing. It's the first thing I understood at the time. I've never been exposed to marketing really in my career. And they were putting up these gigantic billboards like they would do in Orange County in Compton with white families, you know, in a, you know, in a very kind of domestic setting. And in Compton, that was seen as something that was not part of the community. It felt very outsider, and it felt wildly inappropriate. And so what I learned was their marketing was just completely off. They didn't understand the community. And so to fix that project, we actually went and worked with the community. We worked with the churches, we worked with the schools, and we learned more about how to market to that community and turned it around. And that was the first time I saw what marketing really was. It wasn't about advertising and pushing things on people. It was about learning what people really needed and matching things to that need, and that really put me on a course to marketing. So I left that to go back to school and become a marketer. I didn't really understand more about where that would take me, but I'm so glad I did, and I'm so grateful for those early moments at Wells Fargo and my drives from Orange County to Compton and getting to know that community. It also changed my understanding of that community greatly as someone who lived in Southern California, especially during the riots, and I still have friends from that community from that experience, and it was a really, really neat part of my career.
Sean: So cool. So that development Essentially, Wells Fargo had, like, risk with them not doing well, and you guys helped turn it around. How long did it-
Michelle: It took about 18 months to turn it, and part of it was first just kind of that understanding of why it was, was not selling. So Wells Fargo did have risk because if they didn't sell through, the loan wouldn't get paid back by the developer. And so instead of just saying, "Okay, let's write this off," our team was in charge of trying to figure out which ones you had to just write off and say it's never gonna work, and which ones could you actually build back. And some of them you'd refinance, you'd change the terms. It was a really interesting kind of way to look at business because business isn't always black and white. There's a lot of kind of gray in it. And so I learned from really smart people who would look at these business and think about kind of how do we change the structure. And a lot of times it was just the kind of the debt to equity structures. It wasn't something like this. This was really unique, and I think it required a lot more hands-on with the, the marketing team and understanding. And so it took about 18 months to kind of really change the developer's mindset and move through a new marketing plan and a new community outreach and to gain trust because that community was also, you know, was very like, "Hey, I, I don't know if I trust you now." "You have those big ridiculous billboards, and I feel like you're hiding something from me, and, um, I'm worried that it's too good to be true," which is a fair thing on any kind of real estate deal, right? And so it took about 18 months and we finally did turn it around, and I, I had a lot of, a lot of reward in that project because you got to see people move into homes for no money down and all kinds of government incentives for first time home buyers and for people who never thought they could buy a home. I know when I first bought my first home, the joy that that was, and to see people and families doing that was really, really special. And it taught me a lot about this idea of, you know, community centric marketing and understanding, and I was really intrigued by this idea of marketing things that are good and, and how do you find ways to do more of that. I walked away from those days, they were hard work and hard days, but I walked away feeling good about what we were doing, and that really set me on a course. And it's funny, I didn't think about that until recently. I have a friend who's retiring from my Wells Fargo days, and I don't feel old enough to retire, but he's retiring and he-- 'cause he stayed at Wells this whole time, right? So he's been there that whole time. And I thought back to those early days, and I'm so grateful for it. And got a great education in finance, and that's been really helpful as an entrepreneur. But it's also, it was really about this idea of connecting business for good, and that my whole career since then has really been about that. And I didn't always equate it to Wells Fargo, but I know it's because of that Compton project.
Sean: So did you, after going to school, you went into packaged goods? Is that what you studied in school?
Michelle: I studied marketing. So I, I think like a lot of 27, 28-year-olds, I knew that I didn't wanna do banking, and I knew that this marketing thing was interesting, but I didn't really know much about the options. And so I did what a lot of people did and said, "Okay, let's research graduate schools that are good at marketing." And I was fortunate enough to get into one of the best ones in the country at the time. I got into Northwestern and had to convince my parents why I needed to go back to school and incur $100,000 in debt at this stage of my life. Fortunately, they supported me, and so I moved to Chicago for two years. And so I studied business again. I was an undergraduate business major, so I studied business again, but I studied it in a very different format. In MBA programs, a lot of them are case studies, and they're done with, in teams. And about 30% of my classmates were international, and so I was in teams with people from all over the world, and so I learned business through their lens, and that was actually a very different way of learning for me, and it was great. I did concentrated marketing, but brand management was something that they didn't really teach. The concept evolved, and then a lot of the companies that specialize in brand management came to Northwestern to have internships, and I was fortunate enough to get an internship at SC Johnson in Racine, which is a funny story because it will come full circle when we sold Method to SC Johnson many years later. I had a great summer working there and really understood what brand management was, and it came back to this idea of running these small businesses and really understanding all the levers, not just marketing, that drive a business, and that's what I really liked about it. I had friends who were working in marketing from a communication side, so friends who had gone into tech companies and, and at, at that time it was like eBay and, and Yahoo. And marketing was just a, a, a basically a siloed function, and it would take something that the other groups would develop and then send it out into the world. I didn't love that. I liked the idea of being part of the, the molding of whatever we're sending into the world, back to this idea of creating good and not just talking about it. And when I was at SC Johnson, I got to work on one of their, I thought, coolest brands, which was they had shave gels at the time, so they were doing Edge and Skintimate shave gels for shaving. And so I got to work with the, and the NFL and did these really cool programs over the summer, which connected to something I was passionate about, which was sports, and I loved it. I thought it was really fun, really intriguing. But I, I was also 29 and single, and Racine was a tough place to, to be. So I decided that probably wasn't gonna be my long-term home, but it was a really great summer and I was so grateful for it. They were a really great place to work for that summer
Sean: And, uh, and I know you mentioned Method. How did you end up at Method? Did you start working more in the startup space after?
Michelle: Great question. So after I graduated from Northwestern, I wanted to come to San Francisco. My oldest brother was having his first child, and they lived in the Bay Area, and I really wanted to be there. And about half of my class was coming to the Bay Area. It was 2000, so the first tech boom. So everybody's going to San Francisco. So I took a job at Clorox. So I was at Clorox for a couple of years and really great brand and management house. But for me, the, the brands I was working on, I just, I wasn't connecting with. I was working on charcoal, then I worked on cat litter, and this kind of, you know, people love those brands and they need those brands, but it just wasn't working for me. And while I was there, it's something I talk about very openly, I got very sick. I ended up getting a blood cancer at, gosh, I was just about to turn 30, so 29. And while I was working at Clorox, I'm grateful I was there, had great health insurance. But I ended up needing to have a stem cell transplant. So I left Clorox for almost a year on medical leave to have this stem cell transplant and to battle cancer. And when I came back, this connection and need to work on products and businesses that were making a big difference became even greater for me. And so I left. It was not what I wanted to do. And fortunately, I then found a, a role at PowerBar, and this is back when PowerBar was still neck and neck with Clif Bar. It was a new category. Olympians were using it. And this love of sports and connection for me really happened. And so I went to PowerBar for a couple of years. They had-- They were owned by Nestle, so had been acquired. So you had the backing of the big company, so it wasn't super big risk for me yet. But it was a team of 50 and collegiate and fun and scrappy, and I loved every minute of that. And what started happening was Nestle started showing signs that they were gonna pull it into their corporate headquarters. And, and for me, that taste of startup-y culture, I knew it was, it was the perfect fit for me. And this deep brand love that I saw. I mean, we had Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps and these people using our products in these most critical moments of their careers, and I loved that. I loved that, you know, we had to make this better than ever for them or it would ruin something so special to them. And so I end up going to a beverage startup for a hot second out, out, out of PowerBar. I wish Michelle of now could go back to that beverage startup because we made a lot of bad decisions. I was, I was brought in to help marketing. I had a founder who was, you know, he's a founder. We're, we're a crazy breed, and I didn't know really how to help him as much as I could now, and we were burning cash crazy. An old boss of mine from PowerBar had gone to Method and called me and said, "Hey, you remember that culture we loved at PowerBar? I'm at Method. It's 10 times better." And for me, that was a, "Okay, I'll walk over to that office and do an interview," and I interviewed and left 12 years later. I could feel it the minute I walked in, and when I went to Method, it was 2008, and Method was still very startup-y. And I say that in we were very top-line centric. We had great growth. We were darlings of growth at that time. So Adam and Eric were on every publication. They were really seen as kind of this disruptor brand that was breaking through on both kind of the design world and sustainable business. We were wildly unprofitable. We were really, really struggling with the middle of the P&L, and we were in way too many categories, which is pretty normal for a startup. And when I was interviewing, it was clear that the company had tried to do an exit and couldn't. And so I was brought in as this next wave to really kind of think about how do we get into our adolescent years at Method and eventually grow up. And so I was fortunate enough to be part of, I call it three distinct chapters of Method, which is the early days, the, the adolescent days, and then eventually our kind of our, our adult days and, and then eventually an exit.
Sean: Yeah So, so you got brought into Method to essentially help them grow up?
Michelle: I came in to run the air care category. So they had people, you know, kind of brand managers running different business units, and so they brought me in to run the air care category. And within about 30 days of coming in, I decided we shouldn't be in that category. And I, I look back, I don't realize how bold it was, but I think it was pretty bold to go in and say, "I think we should exit this category."
Sean: Yeah.
Michelle: It just didn't make sense. "Hey, great
Sean: job. Great job you guys just gave me, but I'm actually not even interested in doing it anymore."
Michelle: And I remember saying it to Eric Ryan, the founder, and his face, 'cause he... You know, it was a beautiful category. It looked like Apple did air care. It was gorgeous. But it was so complicated. We weren't making any money, and it was taking us away from hand soap and cleaners and things that were starting to fail. And so for me, it was you have two choices: You either completely reinvent this category, which is gonna take all of our time and resources, or you exit it and get back into it later, but get these other categories right. And so I made that recommendation, and I was like, "Well, I'm either gonna lose my job or they're gonna find me another home." And this was happening right around the time that they had layoffs. So we had layoffs. It was a terrible day in Method's history, but it was actually a very powerful day because I saw how much the founders and leadership really cared about the people. That organization was handled very well, and I got a chance to stay and do other great things, and that said so much about who the leadership was and, and what I could do there. And so eventually, I ran the cleaning business, which was the bigger business, and turned that around, so dish soaps and all-purpose cleaners, and those became a foundation of the business. And then that kept growing, and eventually moved into running marketing, and then I ran North America. And so when I was running North America, those were the golden years. I, I thought I had hit my dream job and, and everything was just... We were building our own manufacturing facility. We were really changing the game. We were a founding B Corp member, you know, really doing stuff that was changing not just the category, but the industry. And then the family that had owned us at that stage decided to sell us, which was bittersweet. It was a wonderful moment for a lot of people to, especially the founders, to, you know, make some money out of, of the business, and it enabled us to create more jobs, especially in our manufacturing facility in the south side of Chicago. But I, I knew that I wasn't big company CPG gal anymore. In fact, we sold to SC Johnson, who I'd interned for, and I knew that that wasn't gonna be what I wanted to do. But I'm so proud of what we got to do, and for, you know, two and a half years, I ran North America Method, and I am so grateful for those... that time period and the team I got to lead and what we got to create. It was foundational industry, and I think it still is setting the course for a lot of brands and entrepreneurs. But I'm also really grateful that I had time at Method to understand that I'm an entrepreneur, and it really pushed me into what came next. And I had opportunities when I left Method to go run small companies, and I couldn't find one that I had my heart in. I tried. I looked at a bunch of different things, and I just, I had bled Method for 12 years, and I felt like I was one of the founders of that business, especially after the founders rolled off and gave me kind of the torch. I decided that the only way I was actually gonna probably resolve that was to start my own thing. And that's what I did.
Sean: Crazy. What a, what a ride.
Michelle: It's, uh, it's been a... It was a really great ride, and I am so... I look back upon it, and I think I'm, I'm someone who likes change. I grew up in a military family, and so we sh- we moved every two years. Like, I actually love change. I picked up and moved to Portland after 20 years in San Francisco just to try something different. I- that's who I am. And I stayed at Method for that long because it was constantly changing. So those first years were about disruptive innovation and, you know, putting dish soap in a pump and then a trigger spray and things people had never done before. And then, you know, thinking about body wash in whole new ways and seeing if Method could, you know, do Bathroom cleaners and then body washes. Like, can a brand do things like that, you know? And that was really fun to me. And then the middle years were really about how do you do all of that but make money out of it, and then have a triple bottom line business where you're reinvesting back in sustainable kind of past, present, and future. And that was really, really f- uh, one of the most challenging things I ever worked on. Like, how do you make something make money if you're trying to have, you know, less virgin plastic in it? And how do you do it if you're actually creating your own new supply chain that doesn't exist yet, or you're using ocean plastic for the first time ever? Those kinds of things are hard to make money at, but that was the fun challenge. And the third phase was really about selling it to a strategic and helping them take care of it. I stayed for two years after we sold it, and those were the hardest two years of my entire time at Method because I wanted to make sure the team was taken care of and the brand was taken care of, but I was also navigating a big company, and it was quite challenging. And we were integrating teams and other brands in the business and, and that was definitely not easy. I look back at those three chapters as very distinct chapters and almost like three different companies that I had worked at. I'm grateful for all of it, and almost the entire time I had some of the same people around me. So early days, the founders who con-continue to inspire me, we're still, we're still friends. And then I had a CEO who was a visionary who I got to learn from, and he was an amazing mentor, coach, and boss. And eventually, it was my leadership team who really pushed me, challenged me, made me better. I had some people who worked for me who've gone on to do insanely great things, and I'm so proud of all of them, and they just made me better. And so that then gave me clarity when I was leaving. I took six months off after I left Method, though, and I, I really thought about w- why I couldn't find anything that I wanted to do. And it was because I, I thought I wanted to create my own thing, and that was the right decision for me.
Sean: Did you have an idea when you left Method of what you wanted To create or no?
Michelle: When we were at Method, there was a category that I wanted us to get into that wasn't the right timing for us, especially through an exit. I had a French bulldog I mentioned who was the most high-maintenance thing in my life, person thing. And when I got her, she had all these skin allergies because she's a French bulldog and they have all kinds of health issues. And I remember looking at the category of, of dog shampoos and, and conditioners and things like that, and I realized that a lot of them were just glorified dish soap. I sold dish soaps. I knew what was dish soap and what kind of ingredients went into dish soap. And the pet category had evolved so much in food and, you know, I could give her raw lamb, organic, local small batch food, but I was putting dish soap on her skin. Yet for me, I was moving into clean ingredient and really thinking about what was going on my skin differently, yet there wasn't anything for her. So I started kind of thinking about, "Should I put my stuff on her? I don't really know." And that's where this idea came about, which was why has no one changed the personal care side of pet? And the big reason was because the category's small and a lot of people outsource their pet grooming to groomers. And so the category at the time was quite small, and so for Method, it just never really made sense. It's funny, now Mrs. Meyer's, who is also owned by SC Johnson, is doing pet. So it makes sense now. But at the time it was a little early. So I actually had been ideating this with a, a, a good friend and our global creative director at Method named Sally Clark, and we both had-- we were both big pet parents and really loved the space and thought, you know, someone needs to kind of merge this beauty and pet thing. And so we just started noodling on it on the side, and when I left, we started really, really doing it. She had already left and was doing a lot of consulting projects in the beauty space. And this was in, you know, 2019. We just started kind of developing a brand, and somehow we became the first clean beauty brand for dogs, and it was called Rowan. And it started as kind of just a side gig, and then it became a thing, and we launched it. We self-funded it in 2019. And in-- we were starting to have conversations with Credo and with Ulta, and then COVID hit. And all of the beauty stores shut down, but the pet stores were still open. So pet Became a big, big category, right? People got their COVID puppies, and there was a lot of stuff happening there, but supply chain headwinds and D2C CACs were insane, and so there was just a lot of headwinds. But we rode it out for about two and a half, almost three years, and we built a business mostly online. It was a beautiful brand. I'm still so proud of it. I think the thing I'm most proud of is that Sally and I went in as good friends. We came out the other side as even better friends, which is, as you know, very rare in the world Mm-hmm. Right ... of these early stage businesses, especially when they go south. Yeah. And for us, we-- this is in 2023, we had an opportunity to take it to all PetSmart stores, and to take it to PetSmart stores and be successful, we were going to have to completely change the brand. We were going to have to take costs out. We were going to have to change the formulas and make it more affordable because it was built for clean beauty. And she and I had a great moment where we just looked at each other and we're like, "Are we, are we, are we doing this just to do it?" And we decided it wasn't, and so we decided to push pause, and so we wound the business down. We-- it was just us and some fractional folks, and so we didn't have anyone we couldn't pay, and that helps. You're not having to make those hard decisions. And we both kind of said, "Let's go do some other projects, and if it-- we come back to it someday, we come back to it. If we don't, we don't." And I'm so proud of us because we both came to that same decision, and it was really hard. It's, it's still gut-wrenching to think about it at times because I'm so proud of what we built, and we had done a dry shampoo for dogs that I still use in my own hair. It's, it, it were really good products. And but the flip side is when I decided to kinda think about what was next, I had really developed some new skills I didn't have at Method. Method was not a great digital brand and to some extent really hadn't evolved in its marketing. Its marketing was very much about great product and great retail relationships and good PR. We really weren't doing a lot in the world of, you know, kind of affiliate and TikTok and Amazon and all the evolution of where brands are built these days, and with Rowan we had to. And so I learned a lot in that, in that world, but I also, I spent a lot of time in the clean beauty space, and I loved it, and so that really kind of pr- projected me into what, what I'm doing now, which is Mimikai. And I, I think so much of some of these chapters, even starting back all the way to Wells Fargo and the Compton project, have put me on this path to being at Mimikai now, and I'm so glad I, I found Mimikai now because if I found Mimikai five, 10 years ago, it may not have been the right time or I wouldn't have had the right experience to really bring to this, this brand when it needed it. And so I'm now, I, I think running faster than I would've been able to had I come, you know, back at that beverage startup I did years ago where I didn't even know how to manage cash in a startup or what VC versus private equity was. Now I know those things.
Sean: It's crazy that you left such a big company. I feel like the big company, I mean, it became massive while you were there. You-
Michelle: Yep ...
Sean: you grew it into that too. But- Mm-hmm ... leaving that and then going into the startup space again is a crazy change.
Michelle: It
Sean: is. Every- everything had probably changed about- Yes ... growing a brand at that point, so it's like all new. And then having a hard, challenging experience with the first go What made you decide to go straight back again?
Michelle: That's a great question.
Sean: Yeah. And did you have the idea from... And call me out if I don't pronounce it correctly, Mimikai. Correct. Did you have the idea for the product already at that point? Did you- I didn't ... just know that you wanted to start something again? That's a pretty crazy back-to-back decision.
Michelle: It's funny when you think about it. At the time, the way it came about was, so we had made the decision to wind Rowan down, and there's a lot of, um, there's, it- it's, there's a lot of emotion in that, right? There's a lot of s- it's almost like a breakup. I felt like I was having a breakup, and you go through all these kind of phases of grief. And I decided, I was like, "Okay, well, let's just do some consulting for a little bit. Let's just reach out to my network, and that will help me figure out what's next." And I was not planning to do another startup, especially not be a co-founder of another startup. I was really thinking, "Maybe I'll go and do something a little bigger. I'll replenish my savings account. I will have a 401again," and all the things. In that meantime, I had moved to Portland. I'd left my, my, I had a huge mortgage in San Francisco, so I moved to Portland. I was like, "Let's kind of right the ship here. Give myself a little bit of space." And so I had reached out to people that I really trusted, friends and people who knew me, but also who knew the industry. And so I had reached out to several of those folks and said, "Hey, I, we're gonna wind Rowan down. I have some capacity. I'd love to just kind of jump in and help some businesses. So if you see anybody who's doing something really innovative or disruptive, let me know." And I started doing a little bit of consulting for some nonprofits and, and some companies local in Portland. And I had a really good friend who also was a, a former colleague at Method early days, who went on into the beauty industry and had wild success, and is now an investor in a kind of sust- sustainable, sustainable VC, or a VC focused on sustainable business. And she had seen Mimikai. So Mimikai had started before me, so it's been in development for close to 10 years, and my co-founder, Stephanie Watson, had... Her, her history was she had done a lot of product innovation, created a company called Bobble, which is a water bottle with a colored filter on the top, a removable filter. Oh, yeah. S- really, really neat product, designed by Karen Rashid, who also did the Method early days bottles, so kind of fun, small world. She sold that business to Seventh Generation. And while I was at Method, so we're in kind of these parallel worlds, didn't know each other. Her brother-in-law was my head of Australia for Method, so these weird small worlds. But so she-- while she was kind of at Seventh Generation and eventually thinking about what was next, she was studying biomimicry. And so biomimicry is the study of nature's designs and systems to create better solves for ourselves. And so that's how we got Velcro and neoprene. And so she was studying that, and she met the head of entomology at North Carolina State, who had uncovered in his garden in one of the tomato plants, a natural compound that was just repelling pests. So he actually saw this tomato was repelling pests, dissected it, found this active. It's in a lot of tropical fruits and plants. We eat it all the time. And he had patented, patented it and was just kinda had it. And she met him, and the two of them were like, "Hey, this potentially could be something that we could use instead of some of the legacy products like DEET," because I think it works really well. He had a lab and, you know, one of those old labs with the, the arm and cage studies where you put your arm in and the mosquitoes are flying around. And so he had one of those labs, and they were able to test it. And so while I was still at Method, she and he were doing this early, early work. And by the time I had left Rowan, they had gone in and said, "Hey, we think we have something." They created a product. It was kind of a early days prototype, and they had named it. And Mimikai comes from biomimicry, and the Kai part comes from the island of Boracay. And so that-- they had named this, and they had started creating a formula. And they had been testing it, realized they were onto something, and decided to take the hard road, which is to take it for a full registration. So this category's regulated by the EPA, not the FDA. And I, I knew that because at Method, I had launched the first antibacterial products that say "Kill germs," and those are regulated by the EPA as well. So I had worked on those products while at Method. So when I left Rowan and said, "Hey, have you seen anybody doing something really interesting?" This good friend said, "I, I think this woman has this formula that I think can challenge DEET in the insect repellent category. I think you should meet her and see what she's doing because I've heard that she's now back in Australia and might need a partner in the US, and I think they just cleared registration after five years." And so the investor community had heard about what was going on that she was developing. She had raised some s- a couple small rounds. And so I ended up-- Before even talking to her, I called a friend who used to be one of my favorite chemists at Method, who was still at SC Johnson. And I said, "Hey, have you heard of this active called andecanone? And it's being used potentially in insect repellents." And he goes, "Oh yes, we've been watching that very closely at SC Johnson, who makes Off! And if it clears regulatory, it's gonna change the category." They hadn't heard it cleared regulatory just yet 'cause it just had happened. So I got on a plane the next week to Australia to meet her because I was so fascinated by this, what this was and what it could do. And back to this idea of Method, what I loved about Method wasn't just that it was a beautiful bottle that smelled great and had, you know, nice non-toxic ingredients inside. I loved that it changed a category. It was like shaking up this idea that we have to have toxic chemicals in our house. And as a two-time cancer survivor, for me, that connected me so deeply to Method and it, it made the hard days easy, right? It made me wanna go up that mountain with the founders and eventually, you know, take the rest of the team, you know, up higher mountains later on. And so when I heard about this, I was like, "W- wow, this is really interesting." And I flew to Sydney. We spent a, a week together, and we had the sessions on, you know, values and how you build teams and what's important to us, and I got to know her. She's a mom, and what I saw was someone who is super tenacious. The fact that she was fighting and battling the EPA for five years to get this thing through, and what she had gotten through was the first new active in 25 years. So you've got DEET, that was the 1940s. You've got Picaridin, which is a DEET alternative, but still not natural, in the 1980s, and now you had N-Decanone. So you had this amazing technology, and why that mattered was because it had the same hours of repellency that DEET and Picaridin have, but it's natural. It comes from wild tomato plants, and it's non-toxic, and you can put it on your pets and on your kids. And so for me, that was a moment of just... I didn't think about it as a startup. I didn't think about it as a co-founder. Again, I thought about it as like a disruptive, cool technology that had IP a mile deep. It was patented, had this new registration, and all I wanted to do was help her build it. And I, I laughed when I came back. I was like, "Am I really gonna jump into a pre-revenue..." Like we didn't even have a brand yet. We didn't, I mean, we didn't have anything yet. We had a name and a chemistry, but what I didn't have at Rowan that I had with this, and that's what pulled me in so quickly, was Rowan was a disruptive, cool idea in a space that needed it, but we didn't have anything other than the brand that was ours. Um, we didn't have any chemistries that were unique. We were being transparent and sharing every ingredient, because that's what you should do in beauty. And so you had to stay ahead all the time on innovation and branding, and all of that is expensive as a startup, right? It's really hard. It's almost easier just to have one product and stay with that one product as a startup, but we couldn't do that. And so with this one, I saw this opportunity to really, like, change this category. And so when I came back, I then met some of the, the current investors, and I spent about 12 months just on equity with the business. So I came in and said, "Hey, I'll, I'll help you get the supply chain built, get the brand built, you know, build the team out, whatever we need to do. And if we can get all of that and get to a place where we think we can launch..." And we also had to clear every state has regulatory. So we cleared federal. We had to go every single state. But I was like, "If we can do all of that, we'll then go raise some money and, and I'll come in full time and we'll, we'll do this." And that's exactly what we did. So we built out the brand. It's called Mimikai, and I mentioned it's, you know, biomimicry and Boracay, but my dog's name is Kai. So there's just so many fun little things on this brand that I, I just felt so connected to, and Stephanie's just an amazing, amazing partner and innovator, and we have very complementary skills, but distinct skills. And, you know, she sits in Australia, which is not easy. We're in different hemispheres, and it-- we're building a business together and launching it in the US. We've been able to really create some magic together. And so I jumped in full time, and then we were off to the races. And we launched after clearing California in June of last year. We cleared, I think, June 15th, and we launched a day later. This year has been a real season because last year we were launching a seasonal business in the middle of the season versus ahead of the season. Now we've actually been able to have a full season. So I don't look at that chapter as a choice to jump into starting another company. I think I just fortuitously stopped the company I'd started, and at that moment had an opportunity to really help someone who had started something Get it off the ground. And that was-- I was just so connected to the why and the what of what this product was. And when I was at Method and we had sold to SC Johnson, they had a brand called Babyganics, and they were bringing Babyganics and Mrs. Meyer's, another brand they owned, into the Method fold, and all of those brands were gonna be run together out of San Francisco. So they called it the lifestyle division, which was great 'cause it meant the people in San Francisco didn't lose their jobs and didn't have to move to Wisconsin. But they had me run Babyganics, so I had to-- it was-- which is out of Long Island. So I had to go and run Babyganics while running Method and shut that office down and try to get Long Island people to move to San Francisco and come aboard this new thing. Babyganics actually had an insect repellent, and so I worked on an insect repellent for a handful of months, and it was one of the natural ones that had essential oils in it, and it had great distribution, but not great repeat, and it was because the chemistry wasn't there yet. So for me, that moment when I heard what she was doing, I thought about Babyganics and going, "If Babyganics had had this chemistry, we could've done some really neat things with Babyganics repellent," but we were struggling, and there was either it's toxic and it works or it's natural and it doesn't work, and this chemistry bridges those two worlds finally.
Sean: How are you guys focused Mainly on retail distribution? Has it been online growth in the beginning?
Michelle: Great question. It's, it's been a little bit of everything. So for me, when we launched last year, since it was midsummer, we knew retail would be quite hard because the sell-in cycle-- I c- I had a couple of partners that were excited about what we were doing, but I couldn't tell them when because I, I couldn't launch until we cleared California. So what we always planned was Amazon and a little bit of D2C. We were like, "Okay, we'll have a D2C business, but we're not gonna spend a ton on Meta and anything else until we can just learn." Like, we wanted to get in the market and start learning. And we knew Amazon is a place that there's a lot of repellent sold. But we were able to launch last year in two flagships that were really critical to us, and these were partners who we had talked to about the brand before we knew when we could launch. Uh, one was Credo, so the kind of the, the cornerstone of clean beauty. Um, and someone-- I had met the founder of Credo while I was doing Rowan. And so I had kept in touch with her. Annie is a, a friend and a mentor now, and her dog Gus uses Rowan still. I've shipped her products through the years. And I met with her when I was doing Mimikai, and she asked, "Should we be launching this together?" And I honestly hadn't thought about clean beauty for this ca- this category because this category's not really sold in beauty, but it should be. It's a personal care product. It goes on our bodies, but it's mostly sold next to, you know, weed killers in mass channels and drug channels. And it really unlocked a moment for me of I, I think this should be in beauty, and maybe we won't sell as much in beauty 'cause the consumer's not there yet, but they will be over time. So we launched with Credo. We launched in all their stores and online with them. But then on the other side, I wanted to launch in a place where you buy DEET, you trust DEET, but maybe you're looking for something else in the natural world. And so a Former buyer at Target that I knew had gone and became the head merchant over at REI, and I was fortunate enough to reconnect and meet with her and her team at a trade show in June of last summer right as we're launching. And day two of the trade show, the buyer came over to me and said, "How quickly can you ship this?" And I was expecting-- we were talking about 27, you know, maybe 26, and he was like, "Can you ship it now?" And of course my answer was yes, 'cause we were ready to do that. And so we went from conversation to launch in under two months in 50 doors at REI, and it did so well that we're now in all doors of REI. And that's been doing so well that they just told us that they're putting us in secondary placement at all of the registers at REI. And so we're really like-- to me, that was the two places I really wanted to be. I wanted to be so clean, we're in Credo and we're considered a beauty product, but then we're also sitting side by side with DEET and saying, "Hey, there's finally an alternative to DEET." And that's really helped us then flank other channels. So in beauty, we're also now in Nordstrom, we're in Goop, we're on Revolve and a couple other kind of online places, and a lot of regional kind of smaller beauty stores like Lemon Lane down in Nashville, which is a big influencer. And then we're also now in the outdoor channel in a lot of like these regional stores, really big in kind of New York and Vermont and New Jersey and Connecticut. So any kind of store you walk into that sells camping, outdoor kind of lifestyle stores, we're in about 500 of those now. And then we're also in kind of a digital ecosystem, so we are in Amazon, and, and Amazon has been a really, really great channel for us. But we're also in like Grove Collaborative and some of these kind of online curators. And, and so it's, it's been really fun to see this season kind of continue to expand and build, and it's nice to see that beauty has actually been a home for this. I, I really didn't know where we would see that go because in places like Goop, we're the only repellent They don't sell repellents, so we're a new addition and a new story to tell for them. But when you think about where people already buy repellents, you know, we're sitting side by side with things that they trust, but are maybe looking for a slightly different alternative in the natural space that works. And so that's been really, really successful for us. And so we're gonna be expanding upon that quite significantly into next year. And, um, I've-- in my career, I've never had retail conversations like this, because with Method, you know, it was a brand people loved, and it was sexy, and it was fun to have retailers talk to you about it. And-- but a lot of times I was, you know, I was pushing to get a second SKU or a third SKU, and, like, the differentiator was, you know, you gotta build the rainbow, and like, it's a pretty bottle. Like, it was a little bit harder to go into a category where they have a consumer who wants natural products and is demanding natural products, and they're shelving natural products, but the consumer's coming back and saying they don't work. And they make more money as a retailer off of these natural products, and the consumer spends more in their stores. They love this consumer, but it's not working. And if you look at the natural penetration in this category, it's much lower than mo-most other channels especially-- or categories, especially if you think about personal care categories. So, you know, natural and clean is a big part of body care and sun care and-- but this category, it's still very, very conventional chemicals because it has to work. And with climate change and kind of the rise of vector-borne illness, the, the concern of it not working is even greater. It's not just a nuisance. It's, it's Lyme's disease. It's West Nile now in New York. Like, it's, it's scary.
Sean: And how-
Michelle: And so it-
Sean: Out here too ...
Michelle: it's, it's-- and, and it's, it's changed so much from when I was a child, and I'm a mosquito magnet too. So for me, this category has been a lifesaver. But it, it's now really concerning. I have friends with, like, chronic Lyme's disease and kids, people's kids I know that have Lyme's disease. It's, it's terrifying. And so I think that's really changed the category. And so I have retailers who are really just going, "Yes," and it's a matter of when. Like, when do they put it on the shelf? And I've actually said no to some large retailers because they wanted to come in this year, and it was too soon for us as a startup and as a business that needs to build the awareness and the trial, more importantly, before we go into some bigger places that when you walk into an REI, there's a person in a green vest who knows more about this category than anybody. That's who you want to trust your brand with. It's really hard to put your product in a store where a person may not even know where it is in the store, more or less know anything about it. So we made that choice very, very clear this year.
Sean: How, uh, how do you view, like, with a brand like this and your background and then the investor pool that you guys have, how do you view the need for revenue right now versus the long-term building that I assume you guys are looking at in changing the category. What's like the timeframe for doing something?
Michelle: Great question. It's a great question. Um, it's one of the reasons I really like the board we have because I went into this board along with my co-founder and shared that we were saying no to a very large retailer this year, about three months ago. And I have the right investors who understood why and said, "Hey, this is not about the short-term revenue gain, it's about the long-term category disruption and doing it right." And so we have raised modest money for what we're trying to do. In fact, we raised our seed round in 2024, and we haven't raised again yet. So we have stretched that really long because we wanted to get in and really learn and keep this, this kind of business where we only have two full-time people, myself and my co-founder. We bring things down in kind of in the months where repellent isn't sold as frequently, so we don't have a lot of fixed cost. And so to answer your question, I think what we said was last year was a soft launch. We're just gonna kinda get in and learn. So it was not a big revenue year. It was really about just kind of making sure we had our pricing right, our supply chain right, some of the retailers starting to learn, getting kind of the Amazon algorithm going. This year it's been a little bit more-- obviously we've had nice growth this year, but it's also about kind of the middle, like getting the margins right and kind of getting our supply chain optimized and thinking about how you scale and when you scale. So I think that's part of being an entrepreneur that's got some reps in me, is that the revenue's exciting, but keeping the revenue and the velocity is what's more exciting to me. So actually being able to say, "Hey, now we're the number one turning repellent at Erewhon. Um, we're the number one repellent at Credo and Nordstrom and all these places." It's about velocity and building a business we could scale. It's also about getting gross margin into a good place so we can scale it. And so I think what we've done is we've brought in the right investors who are not pushing us to go faster than we think we should so far. I've not had a conversation yet where my co-founder and I have had to say, "You know, we don't wanna do that," and we've been forced to do it because we have investors who are looking for a faster return. I think everybody sees how significant this could be and should be, but we gotta do it right. And the exit path for this is very clear. I mean, there are clear brands and companies who would want this product. It's a matter of really building a brand and changing a category, and whether we do that alone forever, whether we do that with somebody else, who knows? Our current investor network understands that this is about changing the category through our chemistry than about just quick revenue. We could have had the quick revenue this year, and we decided that that was not the right decision. But it's always gonna be a tension.
Sean: I'm gonna ask you two very specific questions. How much did you raise? What type of revenue are you guys doing right now
Michelle: So I'm gonna tell you the-- I'll tell you what we've raised. I'm not gonna share the revenue just yet- Okay ... because that's ju- more just because I can give you kind of loose ranges. But the, the, the, the raise that we did in the tail end of 2024 was $4 million. And really proud of us because that was a, a relatively short process. We brought in very strategic investors, but all of our existing investors came to the table as well, so we didn't have to bring in a lot of new investors. So our board composition didn't change much. We really had kind of the same people along for the ride. From a revenue perspective, we were teeny tiny last year, so, you know, under 250K. And I would say that we've exploded that this year. Since we're, you know, we, we have competitors who listen to all this, I probably will not share that just yet. But I will say that the revenue growth has been really nice to see because it's a cr- it's balanced. So it's not just Amazon or D2C. In fact, D2C has been a really small business for us up until the last month. So we were on Good Morning America about two weeks ago, and I guess people still watch television because our D2C-- because we don't spend a lot on meta advertising. Most of our spend is actually in sampling and, and getting it in people's hands. Because we know when people try it, they see that it works, and so we'd rather them try it themselves than see an ad from us telling us it works. But we were on Good Morning America, and so our, you know, our D2C orders exploded, and we had over 3,000 orders in one day, which is very, very s- very significant change for us. Fortunately, we were prepared for it, but it just said to us that there's such a need for this. When people hear that there's finally an insect repellent that works just as well as the DEETs out there but is natural, non-toxic, and safe to put on my kids and my dog, it's an unlock. It's not a-- I don't have to convince them of anything other than that. They just wanna try it, and if someone they trust tells them about it, they try it. The repeat's been really, really good. So I hope to see revenue continue to build the right way, which is around not just dis-distribution after distribution. It's about distribution velocity and repeat. And we're seeing that where we are right now. So as we go into new retailers and channels next year, we'll continue to make that our goal.
Sean: Wow. So awesome.
Michelle: Thank you.
Sean: What a fun ride on the, the newer path that you're on, and also it sounds like an incredible product and setup. Such a rare thing to have technology that's- Owned
Michelle: Mm-hmm
Sean: While-
Michelle: Very rare. I've never worked on it. I've never had it. Yeah. I had design patents at Method, so we were able to kind of thwart people who wanted to do teardrops. But in terms of the chemistries inside, and sometimes we're using the same chemistries that some Jen was using. It's just branding. And we did a great job at that branding. But it's been really nice to say, "Hey, we're the only ones who can use this active undecanone. And if anybody else uses it, they have to go through us." And that's really-- To me, that's been really fun. And one of the things I'm so proud of when I sit in a conversation with a, a consumer or a retailer is, you know, "This is, this is us. And if you see undecanone, it's Mimikai
Sean: So awesome. Well, congratulations on everything-
Michelle: Thank you ...
Sean: so far. I would love to stay in touch with you as you continue-
Michelle: For sure ...
Sean: the scaling.
Michelle: I will, and will you shoot me your address? I'll send you some product.
Sean: Love
Michelle: to, yes. It's my favorite thing I get to do as a CPG brand, is always to, like, give people product and, and let them experience for themselves how good it is, and the fact that you can put it on your kids, you can put it if you have pets. And it works on ticks and mosquitoes, which is fantastic. But thank you for the time. It's, it's really fun that people wanna hear the story, and I'm really proud of what we're doing, and you can probably see by my excitement around it, I'm just, I'm just... It's, it... For what I do and how much I put in, especially at the early stage. I was telling this to a friend recently, I was like, "You have to, like, just love what it is you're building because there's so many days where it is not sexy." Like, I'm doing, you know, PR kits and building up boxes in my home office for a whole day, and then I'm leaving that to go have a VC call. Like, you just, you have to be open to doing any and all things, and some days are really, really hard, and some days are really, really great. And to be able to ride that rollercoaster, the glue that keeps you on that ride is the belief you have in what you're building. And for me, like, I look at it as I hope that my niece's children never use DEET. But they had-- I had to use DEET because it worked, and I wanna give them something else. And if that's the legacy I can leave, is that we created a product that finally changed a category that, you know, my dad used as a kid, like, we... That's, that's pretty cool if we can do that.
Sean: I mean, now that you tell the story too, it makes total sense why you would jump back in. Mm-hmm. It's such a unique situation to even have-
Michelle: Mm ...
Sean: the chance to-
Michelle: Mm-hmm ...
Sean: find yourself in.
Michelle: Yep. That's exactly how it felt. It just felt like fate, and it felt a little bit like if I'm gonna do this, like... And, and I also got to come in with a little less risk for me. So, you know, she had already brought the formulation to a place where it had gotten through the hardest piece, which is this regulatory hurdle. There was a lot more risk still, but that to me, it showed the tenacity and also kind of what we had. So there's days that I go, it's a lot easier to have a fundraising conversation when you have IP and you have this belief, and you also now have traction in market. So it feels a little less risky to me.
Sean: So cool. Well, thank you again for
Michelle: taking the time. Of course.
Sean: And yeah.
Michelle: Thank you for the time. I'll be in touch.