stephanie farsht spent 16 years at target and eight years teaching entrepreneurship at northwestern's kellogg before she ever pictured herself as a founder. she joins sean to talk about small wonder, the waterless hair care brand behind the powder-to-lather wonder bottle, and why potent ingredients work better freshly activated than sitting in water for months. she gets honest about failing fast: the pre-dosed pod experiment that flopped with 100 testers, the bottle that clogged after two weeks, and the customer-service emails she still sends herself. it's a real look at product obsession, raising on your own timeline, and building a mission-driven brand in a category most investors are walking away from.
We're creating space for the brains behind the brands we love, and asking good questions along the way. The result is a deep dive into the how and why of brand-building, from blueprints to launch day, customers as community and the detours in between. big lessons, easy listening.
In this episode of Read Receipt, Sean sits down with Stephanie Farsht, CEO and co-founder of Small Wonder, the luxury waterless hair care brand built on a powder-to-lather format that activates fresh in the shower.
Stephanie's path to founder wasn't conventional. She spent 16 years at Target in innovation and strategy, then eight years teaching entrepreneurship at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, before teaming up with two co-founders to reinvent hair care around a simple idea: potent ingredients work best freshly activated, not sitting in water for months.
She gets honest about the messy middle, the pre-dosed pod experiment that flopped with 100 testers, the bottle that clogged after two weeks, and why she still emails customers herself when they cancel. Along the way she shares hard-won lessons on product obsession, failing fast, raising on your own timeline, and building a mission-driven brand in a category most investors are walking away from.
Tune in for an inside look at building a category-defining brand through relentless iteration, customer intimacy, and a refusal to ship anything less than the best product possible!
Chapters:
00:00 - Cold open
01:38 - Target, then teaching at Kellogg
08:40 - The powder-to-lather idea
11:01 - Becoming a CEO she never planned to be
13:00 - Two years of R&D through COVID
16:43 - Self-funding, no fixed timeline
18:01 - The pod experiment that flopped
23:09 - Designing the patented Wonder Bottle
25:24 - Doubt, failure, and identity
31:57 - Why the founder still does customer service
39:46 - Revenue, raising, and the road to retail
46:45 - Time is what kills companies
48:05 - All or nothing: a billion-dollar mission
Stephanie: If we create a billion-dollar business, I feel like I've really made a pretty big dent on our, on our overall mission. So for us, it's, it's all or nothing, which I would assume VCs are gonna love to hear.
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 emails
Stephanie: I'd never thought about being a CEO or a founder, but I, I'm in. This is our passion. This is our mission. The, the background of Small Wonder is why are we, why are we not tackling these large bottles of shampoo and conditioner that are 80% water that we're shipping into our shower? That's where the premise of this whole business started.
Sean: Um, are you from Chicago?
Stephanie: Not originally, but this is home. And we actually spent some time out in Southern California in January and February now that it's... Now that we're empty nesters, so it's pretty fun.
Sean: How, how long, how long have you been in Chicago?
Stephanie: Um, we have been-- We brought our kids up here, so we've been here 16 years. I grew up in South Africa, and then we- Wow ... immigrated to Chicago, and then I left, and we lived in Europe and lived in Minneapolis, and now we're back. So kind of a long, circuitous path back to Chicago.
Sean: And what, what, what's your background before launching the brand?
Stephanie: I, I have a pretty non-traditional beauty entrepreneurship background. I spent about 16 years at Target doing innovation and strategy, and was never a merchant, but would always work on what we would define as more disruptive businesses, businesses that didn't fit into the mainstream. And then I actually evolved into being a professor at Northwestern's MBA program in Chicago, Kellogg. And the class that I taught was basically helping entrepreneurs launch their businesses in business school. So I would watch eight businesses launch and get hatched every quarter, which kinda pushed me into entrepreneurship. I'd never planned to be an entrepreneur, so- So- ... it was kind of a non- non-traditional background for sure.
Sean: What, what types of businesses were you working on for Target? Were they Target-owned brands and concepts that you were launching for Target?
Stephanie: Sometimes. I would say half of them were, and then the other half were usually... It, it was a program that we started where we started bringing new thinking, new ideas and innovation in from the outside, so we built really good relationships with a couple of VCs on the West Coast. We brought in a Techstars program to start working with early-stage companies that would potentially be able to pilot into Target. Not all of them did. And then we were the team that would be, be the recipient of a lot of the entrepreneurs and early-stage companies that would pitch to Target from... Most like, most- mostly not product, but anything outside of product. So new, new services, new businesses, things like buy online, pickup in store. That was one of our early-stage partnerships that we did at Target.
Sean: So was... It was less focused on physical products and more focused on how Target delivered services to customers?
Stephanie: Sometimes. It was really everything. There was a big business push where we actually wanted to do a subscription box. It was during Birchbox and BarkBox, I think. I'm forgetting all the names of the of all the subscription businesses that launched in the early 2000s. So then we actually created our own subscription business with an outside partner. So that was a little bit more product-focused, but it really ran the gamut. It was just across the board. Anything that didn't belong in the rest of Target would usually be thrown into our group. They would throw it over the fence, and they're like, "What do we do with this?"
Sean: So interesting. I almost would never think of those types of businesses being involved with Target for some reason.
Stephanie: That was part of the problem prior to our team tackling that, is that we had so much structure and infrastructure around the core businesses that Target leaned into, which was amazing. But as things rapidly started evolving with digital, with Amazon, we started to recognize that we really needed to bring in a new way of thinking. And so you watch entire categories at Target that were super high dollar per low square foot, like VHS video, you know, videotapes, CDs, all those types of businesses just got decimated overnight. And so we started thinking about the fact that we needed to bring in completely new, new approaches to how we developed categories and developed new, new businesses.
Sean: How did you get involved in, in innovation originally? Like, what, what was your path there in the first place? That seems like a unique role or even, like, department to end up working in.
Stephanie: I think the most important characteristic of a innovator, which is also an entrepreneur, it's very similar, I was an intrapreneur at Target, is to be a problem solver. And my first job out of business school, I went to Kellogg for my MBA. My first job out of business school was management consulting, which is really just problem solving. And so I think that was what really set me up to be a really good innovator, especially in a large company where you're, you're problem solving and breaking really complex things into bite-sized pieces, exactly what you're doing in consulting. It's just all I've ever done. I have a lot of blue sky thinking in my brain, but then I also love to execute, so it's kind of a fun combo. It's, it's just all I know. So I did it at Kellogg as a professor as well. It's just problem solving with these student teams to figure out how they test and learn fast. How do they get a minimum viable product up and running in 10 weeks? Otherwise, they don't go to the next course in our series at Kellogg. And so you're just so used to that type of thinking, and it becomes really repetitive, which is, which is great. Repetitive in a good way.
Sean: Yeah. Wow. That sounds like an incredible cycle to go through for, like, a creative process in work, and then also going into teaching. What was it like for you switching into, into teaching after working in Target?
Stephanie: It was besides now, it was the hardest job I've ever had. Before running Small Wonder, I would've said hands down, I've never worked harder. Worse than consulting, and we all know how many hours consultants used to work and still work. Is a really intense job, and it is incredibly draining because you are, you're on for... We have quarters at Northwestern, so you're on for 11 weeks. It's really consolidated and compact. You're getting kinda hit with so many new problems every single quarter. It's never the same day, never the same types of students, never the same problem to solve and, and project to tackle. And so it's, it's definitely one of the most mentally stimulating jobs I've ever had. I, I've never been more tired. At the end of every quarter, I could, I could barely function. I was like, "I can't speak." I've been speaking for 11 weeks straight. I'm kinda tapped out. So it's a, it's an amazing job. I think I'll go back to it at some point, maybe, you know, many years in the future. But I did it for eight years and it was a really hard job. I have a lot of respect for professors.
Sean: What do you, what do you mean when you say you have new problems every quarter? Do you mean, like, new problems that you're trying to solve with students in terms of what they're working on? Or-
Stephanie: Exactly.
Sean: Okay. So not new problems, like, in the act of teaching, but new problems in the act of trying to help them through the creation process?
Stephanie: For the most part. I think it's a lot like running an incubator, so maybe the, the people that have run Techstars and Y Combinator could relate to this. You have new teams every single, single quarter, and they have such different approaches, and they are all trying to build very, very different businesses, and it's never the same thing twice. As COVID came and, and went, as digital came and, and conquered, we saw such a shift in the types of businesses that they were trying to do, the types of tools that they were supposed to use, how quickly they would need to deploy things. It was just always kind of a mental, a mental exercise every single quarter 'cause things kept changing, which is what made it so fascinating and so intellectually stimulating. But it's not like it was super repetitive. And so it- it's... Eight years of that was an incredible experience, but I was really tired at the end. So it's, it's a really neat job.
Sean: Did you-- Throughout that process, did you always imagine starting something of your own?
Stephanie: Never. N- If you had asked me up until 2021, I would've never, ever had said my next job is being an entrepreneur. The, the background of Small Wonder is I was teaching at Kellogg and it was 2019, and I became really good friends with one of my colleagues, Paul Earle. He's the co-founder of Goodles mac and cheese. I don't know if you know Goodles. Yeah. That's a really cool-
Sean: Yeah ...
Stephanie: fun business. And he's really, really innovative and loves to tackle ideas, and he carries around a notebook at Kellogg and loves to write down, like, names of businesses and businesses he wants to tackle, and things that just seem stupid, that, you know, k- you kinda ask why. Why are we still doing things that way? And he and I would meet for lunch every Wednesday at Kellogg in the cafeteria, and we would talk about some of these big trends that we were seeing in our classrooms and maybe on Shark Tank or in our day-to-day life walking through Target. And we had both watched the Shark Tank that had Blue- Blueland on. And I don't know if you know Blueland, but it's a concentrate tablet for cleaning supplies. And we're like, "Oh my gosh, that's brilliant. But why are we, why are we not tackling the biggest crime, crime on the scene, which is these large bottles of shampoo and conditioner that are 80% water that we're shipping into our shower?" Like, it's the same concept. It's, it's so insane. And so that's where the premise of this whole business started. And so we started working on it very, very casually in the beginning. Found our third co-founder, who has a PhD in chemistry, ran Neutrogena's global R&D group. And the three of us never anticipated doing this. I don't think any of us... We never really asked e- asked one another, "Who's gonna run this if we actually get some legs here?" Um, we just kinda never thought it was gonna get any legs, and so we just kept pushing forward, and it's kind of a fun story. We can talk about it in a bit. And then suddenly it started accelerating, and we just all kept looking around the table, and I'm like, "I, I guess I'll jump in." I'd never thought about being a CEO or a founder, but I'm like, "I, I'm in." Like, there's no chance in my life that we should not do this. Like, this is our passion. This is our mission. There's a lot of mission behind this business. And so there was just no choice. It was, it wasn't even a consideration. But I had never planned to be a CEO or a founder, not in a million years.
Sean: Knowing your background and also your teaching, what does it look like for you to, to actually bring a concept like this to life and work through it on your own? Did it follow, like, a similar path that you would imagine for a student working on something? Or Was it on its own timeline and pace that is outside of what you would typically think of doing?
Stephanie: You know, no one's ever asked me that question. That's a really good question. And I bet it's similar to a psychiatrist when you ask them if they kind of apply their own- Yeah ... expertise and advice to themselves, and they usually don't.
Sean: Yeah.
Stephanie: Um-
Sean: That's why I'm curious.
Stephanie: Yeah. A- I don't... It's actually a really good question. Two things. I would never teach that class the same way again. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. I- now that I've lived it, what a joke that I would think that it could actually follow as structured of a, of a path as we prescribe or process as we prescribe in that class. It's so much faster. It's so much more test and learn. It's so much more failing, and failing quickly, which we do teach, but it's... When you're living it, it's really different. And so I don't think I followed the path as, as much as I should have, uh, in terms of real structure, but you kinda get more of a gut feeling too. And I think with my decades and decades of experience, of work experience, I'm not a 22-year-old entrepreneur, I'm in my 50s. I think I developed a pretty good gut feel early on to at least somewhat navigate us through some of these big forks in the road. And so I think I would, I would teach that part a little bit more aggressively than I did when I was, when I was teaching at Kellogg.
Sean: How long, how long did you guys work on the, the idea and the product concept before you felt like the idea was, like, a real- real project that you were gonna dive into?
Stephanie: I would say close to two years. I mean, it, it also was the beginning of COVID, so things moved more slowly. Yeah. Trying to find manu- contract manufacturers, trying to understand from cosmetic chemist perspectives beyond our co-founder what was actually achievable and what wasn't. It took a lot longer than I think it would've if we hadn't been in COVID. 'Cause we were, we really started it in the heart of the early shutdown, and so most companies weren't answering their phones. We were doing a lot of research, but... And we didn't have AI the way we have it now. And so I think we, we were, we were happy being slow. I was teaching, I was still-- we were all teaching. I was teaching online during COVID, which was really un-fun. Imagine running Techstars online. It was pretty miserable. And so we were just kinda pushing it along, and then we ended up getting a really interesting break. So we had the concept in our head. We knew what we wanted to solve. We knew we wanted to build a hair, a haircare brand that leveraged the fact that potent ingredients in powder form are better th- are better than degraded ingredients. And so when you put things in water, they degrade, they become more unstable, they require more preservatives, they have more fillers, et cetera. Things like vitamin C degrade in, in a month. We knew that that was the premise of the business. We wanted to make the best formulas you could possibly make because we were powder, and we wanted them to activate as quickly and as beautifully as any normal haircare product. Then we're like, "Okay, let's go out and find a cosmetic chemist or a contract manufacturer that can make this for us," and we just kept hitting walls. Nobody understood intimately haircare and powder Those two, two, two pieces didn't intersect extensively. And then we fi- finally found a break where I found somebody on Instagram that had a really fun Instagram handle that was all about cosmetic chemistry, and I just reached out to her or him. I didn't know. I was watching some of the videos. I'm like, "God, this person seems to have a lot of knowledge. A lot of knowledge about haircare, and maybe a lot of knowledge about kind of unique formats and how to really maximize and optimize ingredients better than anybody else has." And that person ended up being the head of their global R&D group of a huge global salon manufacturer, and they had spent nine years working on the R&D to dehydrate their top salon products. It was kind of like their fun project. It, it wasn't part of the core business, but it was definitely their, you know, 10%, kind of like Google, Google X where it was-
Sean: You, you couldn't see any of this on their Instagram? No. This was just a random-
Stephanie: Very random. I had outreached about to 50, 60 people and had, had every door closed. So it wasn't like this was our first one and we were super lu- super lucky, but it was maybe like one of our last ones, and we were about to give up and we're like, "This cannot be done. Nobody knows how to make this." And then we found her. And long story short, we worked with them for about two and a half years. She broke off, is now our head formulator, and we ended up purchasing all of the innovation that they had spent now close to 11 years, 11 to 12 years on. So it ended up being a really interesting, fun evolution. But that was the impetus for me to jump out of teaching and go full-time as a CEO. So interesting.
Sean: And really save our business. How... So while you're working in that timeframe n- now, are you guys like raising money at that point to... How do you think about launching a brand like this in terms of like timeline, time to success, whatever success looks like for you guys, financing that runway to make it possible, and also like with the acquisition so early on, obviously you guys saw a big opportunity to, to jump in like that?
Stephanie: We didn't really have a timeline. That was kind of the beauty of it. We just kept pushing. And so when I jumped out of teaching and jumped into being full-time Small Wonder, we hadn't raised any money. We had self-funded. We didn't need a lot of money prior to that. We all had day jobs. We all had... Paul was starting to build out Goodles, and he had, like, seven other projects he was buil- he's a serial entrepreneur-
Sean: Wow
Stephanie: idea guy. That's great. So he was, yeah, he's, he was always, he always had the next five ideas. And then Katja, our third co-founder, she had a normal day job. She was a PhD in chemistry and was a, you know, head of R&D for other companies as well. And so we didn't have the pressure to have this timeline. We just knew we wanted to keep moving it forward. When we had the opportunity to, to buy all that innovation and kind of bring it in-house and start formalizing it, that was when we started knowing that we needed to test and learn as fast as possible. So that's maybe where I started applying our class from Kellogg more aggressively. How do we get a pilot up and running? How do we get a bulk batch of powder done so we can actually get 100 people, 200 people, 500 people to start testing it for us? And we had so many roadblocks along the way, but that's really where we started creating a little bit of a timeline. Some, some artificial deadlines of we need to launch this pilot, we need to get this out, we need to get X out, we need to get a website, we need to, you know, do
Sean: And at that point you're just testing product formulation, like every aspect you possibly can?
Stephanie: Every aspect. And we, we didn't have a clear vision of how this should look, but we knew what problem we were trying to solve, and we knew what the output needed to be. It needed to be amazing hair products that felt as good or better than any salon grade product. It needed to be clean but not all natural, and it needed to be without water, 'cause we didn't wanna ship large bottles. The mission personally was all about sustainability. That was where our personal mission was. But we knew from a consumer perspective we wanted to create the best product out there. And so we started with this crazy idea where like let's create like Tide PODS but like haircare pods. And like Paul had this really fun idea of creating almost like a Skittles bar at Target where you could imagine an end cap with tons of colors and like each one did different things for your hair. You could mix and match, and then you put them in your hand and you activate them, and they activate. You know, the pods break down and they activate into incredible haircare. And so we actually were able to do this with our, with a global salon manufacturer. They got us to that point and we tested about 100 pods with 100 friends, and it was a disaster. 50 of them felt that... An absolute disaster. It was, it was great though. Talk about failing fast, failing quickly, learning. 50 of my friends said, "I hated it. I have really thin hair, short hair, no hair," whatever it may be, "and half of it went down the drain and I felt like it was a big waste." And the other 50 were like, "I have so much hair." I have one friend who has long, thick, beautiful black hair. She's like, "I needed four pods." She's like, "That's insanely expensive. I don't, I can't imagine how much my shower would cost." And so we, we made no one happy, and the big insight that we took away was you can't pre-dose haircare. Y- you could maybe pre-dose face care or body wash when you start to think about waterless, but you can't pre-dose haircare. And so we, we started going through these failures, we call them mini failures, really quickly and we would pull out like one big insight from each, and that was a really important and valuable experience that first, that first year of like actually having access to product.
Sean: At that point, are you fully committed to the, the space?
Stephanie: Yeah, we're fully committed, committed to the space, the mission, the output. We just didn't know how it was gonna look. We got to p- like loose powder pretty quickly. We didn't love shampoo bars. They've been done. There's some really good ones out there. We felt that the mobility and the travel case for them are tough. It's a little bit more messy. You know, there's, there's a lot of positives, and I think that they're helping the broader mission, so I want them to all succeed. But we wanted to solve that more like professional grade, really high-end haircare that, that is as easy as what you have in your shower right now. And so we very quickly ran into our next major hurdle and problem, which was how do you keep powder dry in the shower but dispense it like a normal shampoo? And so we thought we had a solution. We tested it. It worked really well for two weeks, and we're like, "Let's do it." You know, move fast. And so we ordered thousands of bottles that were designed and beautiful. They arrived. We started filling them. We started selling them, and First two weeks were great. It was like week three and week four, customers were starting to tell us that they couldn't get any powder out. And so we had tested it with friends and in our showers and with kind of our pilot group, but the powder eventually had too much humidity or little droplets of water that would get in. It was almost like a salt shaker concept, but you would twist the top, pour it out, activate, you know, twist it to close. And I think that constant twisting open and closing would drop tiny, tiny dots of water on the top, and eventually it just stopped working. And so that was our next biggest mistake. That was really costly and not fun. I still, when I'm in my desk, you can see my entire back wall is those bottles. I made it into like an art project 'cause I thought it was kind of fun to always know that you have to fail a lot to get to something great. But then the next thing that got us to our ev- you know, our, our path... The next thing that got us down our path is we felt that we had to design our own bottle. We're like, "The only way we're gonna make this work is if we have our own custom design bottle that pumps as easily or even better than a normal shampoo, but keeps powder dry in the shower and is calibrated to what you're used to." So if you're a two-pump guy, Sean, you'd pump ours twice. If you're a one-pump girl, you'd pump, pump it once. And so we have our now patented utility end design. We call it the Wonder Bottle, and it keeps powder dry in the shower. It's aluminum, so it's super sustainable. It's refillable forever, so we have these adorable refills that are paper-based that you just pour in when you run out. But you just press down just like a normal shampoo. I'm not gonna do it 'cause I'll have powder all over me. But you press down and it's just a pump, and you let go. When you let go, it auto-seals, and so no water or humidity gets in 'cause it pumps for, you know, a millisecond to drop out a, a dose, and then it seals immediately. So it keeps everything dry and intact, but it's just as easy or better than any kind of shampoo pump. How long did- And then all you do is wet your hand and wash your hair.
Sean: How long was the process to design, test, and, and fully solve that, that problem?
Stephanie: About a year and a half. We worked with some top industrial design engineers that were really fantastic. We ended up win- winning the, the biggest award out there for something like that. It's called the ISD Idea Award. Like, Apple's won it, Theragun has won it, and we won it, which was really fun. We hadn't really anticipated that part of the business. But it took us, I would say, close to two years to get a real working, working model. So that was-
Sean: What's going on, what's going on in the business during that time? Because by that point you guys had already started selling product- Yep ... right?
Stephanie: Yep. You g- you, you're exactly right. We couldn't launch our conditioner 'cause the conditioner was just too heavy of a powder to go in a normal aluminum bottle with, like, a flip top. The shampoo was okay. It wasn't great, but it was okay, so we kept selling the shampoos just because we wanted to learn. Learn how to educate, learn how to communicate, learn how to deal with customer service, all those things. So we were selling slowly. Didn't invest a lot of money in advertising at that stage. Didn't have a huge team yet. But when we were able to actually launch our shampoo and our conditioner together in their forever bottles with refills ready to go, that's when we kinda claim that that's, like, the start box. That was last January.
Sean: I mean, it's so interesting, like, I've, I asked you about how committed you are to the space at that point because y- I feel like a lot of it is so faith-based at that point. Like, that you're gonna figure out some path. You don't really know what it looks like, you don't know how it's gonna work, but you're, like, iterating in the, the vein of where you found yourself in the beginning and, and you feel confident enough that you'll find the answer that will create, like, the bigger impact business that you imagined at the beginning. I feel like that commitment, yet not holding anything too tight, is so difficult.
Stephanie: Well, it's really easy to say in hindsight, and you're being incredibly nice 'cause I didn't always have faith and I did not always have conviction. And I, I mean, any entrepreneur knows that there's so many peaks and valleys, and we are in the valley so often where we just start to second-guess and question. And I don't think there's an entrepreneur out there that doesn't have that. I'd be surprised. But it's easy to look back and say, "I'm glad we pushed through." We still have doubts all the time. I mean, we're now on our V2 version of our bottle, which we're much more excited about. The V1 was good. The V2 is really good. I think we can get to great, so I think we'll get to V3 at some point. But you have to fail to get there. Like, n- no one's ever created anything amazing without failing, and so I think one of the big things we al- I always taught my students, especially students at Northwestern or any, any top, you know, academic school, those kids have never failed. Like, they are top of the top, and I think our culture is you can't fail. And I think I came from a little bit of a different generation than that where there wasn't as much pressure to not fail, and so our kids at Northwestern were so scared to fail. And so we kinda restructured the class series a little bit where we almost forced them to fail in the beginning so they could start getting used to the feeling, 'cause it's a pretty crappy feeling until you realize that you learn something from that failure. And so you can take something really meaningful from each one. And so I, I can tell myself that afterwards. It does not mean I don't come home and cry, and like feel like it's never gonna work, and I've given six years of my life to this. And it's such a part of my identity now. It's, it's such a part of my community. It's such a part of my... All my friends support me so deeply on this, and my family supports me so deeply on this. I never had such a work identity connected to my personality as I do now in my 50s, which is weird, 'cause usually it would be the other way around. It's totally, it's really- It is really interesting. But this is truly my mission now, so there is no stopping.
Sean: You'll have, have moments of doubt now, or do you feel like- Every hour.
Stephanie: Oh, God. How many times today? Should I count how many times today? I mean, we get rejected from a retailer or w- we get a bad review. There's a guy on Amazon that just wrote about us that has no hair. He is in his 70s and has never heard of what serum is, and so he, he hated our serum. That's great. Now you've given us one star and you, you weren't the right target market for this product. And then you just feel like, oh my God, how are we ever, ever gonna offset that one star? Like, it's just gonna crush us. And so you just feel so defeated. You know, you do so many things right and then you get something that's really wrong. So we have that every day. That was yesterday. So today I think we have a bunch of new ones, but there's big ones and there's little ones. But it's, it's the hardest job I've ever had by far.
Sean: How do you... You know, you talked about having the flip-top bottle while working on the V1 of the patent, patented version. Mm-hmm. Is it difficult for you to keep, keep doing the business knowing that the solution that you're selling at the, the moment is not the one that you're fully compelled by or that you don't feel... Yeah.
Stephanie: Yeah. That's a great question. My chief growth officer who worked with me at Target, we, we go back decades, and he's been in e-commerce and other earlier stage CPG type companies. He, he got me through that 'cause I, I was so worried about like upsetting any customer and, and I guess my world was, oh my God, we have these few thousand customers and that's gonna matter forever. And he's like, those few thousand customers are most likely not gonna be our customers in two years when we're kind of on the other side of this part of the problem, and we need to just test and learn and hopefully they have a great experience, but we have no, no other option. So he kinda reframed and helped me know that like the, the journey of getting to a really amazing product is, is kinda testing and learning through all these different cohorts of customers. You do the best you can do. You give them a really great product. You give them great customer service. They all loved it in the flip tops, but hopefully they love it even more. And we did things like, you know, would love to upgrade for free with our beautiful new patented bottle. You can do things like that. With V1 to V2 in terms of the caps, we're doing the same thing. If customers ever email us and say, our old cap is having this kind of problem, we're like, no problem, we're shipping out a new, new cap to you today. So there are ways to bring your customers along with that excitement. And I think some of the customers that have experienced our earlier versions are our best customers still. Some of them are not, but some of, some of them have really loved seeing the evolution and the innovation that we've kinda brought to the market.
Sean: How do you-
Stephanie: Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Sean: I'm just curious, like how do you spend your time? I feel like you're, you're... I might be totally wrong by saying this. I feel like your comfort zone is in innovation and the problem-solving area, but then the Like the day-to-day of scaling the business is how you also survive in order to, to bring to life the innovation and, and problem-solving. Like, has the shift for you into CEO changed how you, how you approach things? I don't know if that makes any sense.
Stephanie: Yeah, it makes sense. No, I don't think it has shifted. I, I mean, if, if I didn't have the word CEO, I would be head of product. That's really what I do, which I think a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs and founders are. I mean, I think even Mark Zuckerberg was head of product after he became CEO. I think, um, I think that's where I'm most comfortable and I'm most passionate, and so I spend most of my time there. I have a really great team now. It's a small team, but it's a pretty mighty team of really experienced people. And so for where we are right now in terms of how we need to scale, we have the right skill sets, and I know it's gonna keep shifting as we, as we keep growing. For now, I think it's-- I'm in the right spot. If I ever feel like I'm not doing what I'm really meant to do, then I'm very comfortable switching to a different spot. I don't have an ego about where I am in this business. I just want this business to be big. So that's kind of how I've always felt.
Sean: What do you focus on most, like day to day? Are you most focused on product innovation?
Stephanie: I would say product and customer service. Right now I am customer service, which sounds... I've- we've gone in and out of having customer service support, and I actually am not using AI at all in customer service. I know I should. I know, I know, it's crazy. But we-
Sean: Awesome.
Stephanie: It's kinda awesome, and it, it's not gonna be sustainable, but we are making so many n- we're making a lot of changes, and we have, like, a really exciting fall lineup for our entire ritual of products, the bottle, some branding. We have, like, a lot of really cool things happening, and I wanna make sure we understand where customers feel like we can do better. And so the team and I decided that I would do customer service about two months ago, and it's been really good. And so I, I just... Sometimes I just randomly email five or six customers. When somebody cancels their subscription, I email them right away and just say, "Can we hop on a quick call? We'd love to hear what you think. We'd love to hear your experience." People are amazing. Like, I never think people are gonna email me back. They all email me back. I'm always kinda stunned, 'cause I don't know if I would've emailed somebody back. So I
Sean: love this. Yeah, but it's also such, like, an outlier thing. Have you ever read Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table?
Stephanie: No, no.
Sean: Such an incredible book on... I mean, it's not really about customer service, but it kind of is, and his whole theory is that business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. I think, like, if it's not AI and you're actually reaching out to somebody after they cancel a subscription, it's, like, such an outlier thing- You're right ... that you would respond, especially if you had, like, anything go wrong. And his, his theory is that those are opportunities that are bigger than if everything went correct. Like in the restaurant industry, like if a, if somebody has a shitty experience, like, and then you go above and beyond to improve it, they'll tell everyone they know about the experience that they had. But if they went in and they just, like, had a good meal and everything went kind of how they thought it would, they would almost tell no one. Like, there's no story in it for them. So I think you doing customer service and reaching out after to... because you're actually curious, is, like, a, a shocking experience for most people probably.
Stephanie: Yeah, I think so too, and I think your story of how a shitty experience turned positive is such an amplifier. We've seen it, 'cause, you know, sometimes you'll email somebody that's just canceled a subscription and, and ask, you know, "Is there anything we can do? We'd love to hear what your experience was. We'd love to hear a little bit as to what prompted you to cancel," and you find out what the problem is. It might be very solvable, like they didn't know how to- How to undo the bottle or, you know, which helped us change our instructions, things like that. And then they are so engaged and excited. And then we actually, when we were doing our serum, we got access to some of the bulk product. And so I made, I truly made little vials at home which is crazy 'cause it's white powder. So I have like white powder all over my desk with little vials. I'm like, "If the FBI walks in, I'm in big trouble. I swear it's shampoo or serum." But I made about 100 little vials and we started sending them out to... I would email some of these customers. I'm like, "Any chance you could test this for us? We're launching it in a couple of months. Would love any feedback." And people were so excited and engaged to test some little vial of white product that they're gonna get in the mail. No instructions, no nice box, just a, a, a shipment from me. And so I think those, that's the community that we've kinda built now that's been really fun and exciting, and I think tho- those customers are the, are the cohorts that jump from cohort to cohort and will stay through our bumpy journey or messy journey, 'cause I know it's, it's messy in the beginning. It's not a, it's not all roses. I mean, it,
Sean: it sounds like a lot of the brand building in this, throughout the start of the brand for you is doing almost like customer service and engagement type of situations that are like less routine than most other things.
Stephanie: I think so. I mean, it's, it's... I, I'm sure a lot of founders do this, though. It's what we taught at Kellogg as well. We would make our students, they'd come with a pain point that they wanted to solve their first week. We'd form different student teams, and then the first assignment I would make them do is go out and talk to 10 people. You know, tell me who you think your potential target market is that's experiencing that pain, and pick eight of them. And if it's friends of friends, friends of family, whatever it takes, just find eight people that you think are experiencing that pain point, and then find two outlier, outliers and see if there's any different perspective you could get. And so I'm kinda living what we used to preach in some ways. We're, we're p- all pushing ourselves to talk to customers all the time. But if you don't talk to people, you're never gonna get those insights. You're never gonna know that pre-dosed haircare in a little pod actually pisses everybody off. You would just kind of blindly go out and build that business and make it look like Tide Pods and think that everything's gonna be great.
Sean: Do you do that on the business itself for you? Like every week do you say like, "Here's a problem that the business has overall, and this is what my priority is. I'm gonna go out and talk to customers or even team, team members and try and figure out how to solve whatever it is that's blocking the business right now"? Or do you do that mostly focused on customers and product?
Stephanie: I'm a little bit more reactive than you're painting me out to be because it's not like I start on Monday and
Sean: think- That sounds incredible.
Stephanie: Yeah. Like, I wish I could be that proactive. Um, this week we're, you know, we're designing a new shipping box and we wanna have better instructions in the box, and so we're scrambling, literally scrambling with our creative director because the dieline has to be done tonight. And so we're kinda all battling, are we gonna ship the bottles locked still or not locked? Because half our customers don't understand the lock 'cause we didn't do a good job of ex- explaining it on the bottle. So do we put it in the box? Do we put a sticker on here? Or do we just start shipping it unlocked because V2, our V2 bottle doesn't drop powder out at all. It's, you know, you have to press and click. So we don't really need the lock anymore unless you're traveling. And so that was like a fast debate this morning because our creative director is like, "What do you want me to do? I need to turn this d- dieline in 'cause we can't go to production without it." So it's not like I started on Monday thinking, "I'm gonna go talk to customers and figure out, you know, how the instructions are landing and where we can make them better." I like scrambled today and asked 10 or 12 people how these instructions were landing now, and we kept iterating and tweaking, and I think we got to a good place. I wish I'd started on Monday and called 10 customers and asked them 'cause we'd be in much better shape. That's usually where we are. I mean, you just... There's just too many problems to solve every week. With product developments, I'm doing exactly what you're saying. You know, what kinds of products are you using? What kinds of pain points do you have with your hair? Where do you feel like you have too much product, too little product? We don't wanna just make s- more shit to be thrown into the world. That's kind of against our whole mission, and so we're trying to be really intentional and thoughtful about where we product develop next, if we product, product develop next. And so that's the kind of stuff where I'm thinking I need to call five different customers and email these, these individuals and talk to these different people to really start formulating that.
Sean: How much and how often are you focused on revenue and finance?
Stephanie: Um, that's a really fun question. Uh-
Sean: Such a random way to- Yeah ... ask you that, but it's interesting because you haven't really talked about it-
Stephanie: I know, I know ... that much.
Sean: It's a good question. It almost, like, hasn't even come up in- You're
Stephanie: right
Sean: your consciousness. So I'm like, is this like you're so focused on the building of the thing and the problem-solving that revenue takes care of itself? Do you have, like, enough runway where you're not... You have, like, so much faith in that part of it that you just still focus all of your effort and energy on the problem-solving?
Stephanie: No, no. Our, our- 'Cause
Sean: that also seems incredible.
Stephanie: No, no, no. Trying to think of how to answer this. Every Monday we have a team meeting and we go through our KPIs pretty in- intensely, and we spend a lot of time thinking about some of the KPIs we need to move. We raised our first seed, first priced round last fall, and so we've been in a building mode because of that. Our investing community, who has been incredibly supportive, knew that that money was to get us to a position to be able to go into big retail. We didn't wanna go too early. We knew that we weren't ready. We wouldn't be successful until we got to a certain stage. And then as we get closer to being ready to go into big retail, we need to go raise again. And so that stage is coming up and it's most likely something I'm gonna start to tackle this fall. I'm really lucky. My husband's a venture capitalist. He's not our VC, but I have a community of really amazing advisors that have kinda guided me through this process. We raised three rounds of s- of, of friends and family in the beginning, very small, and then we did our first priced round this fall, and I don't think I would've been able to get through those processes, all four of them, without the advisors that I have kinda internally. And so it's not faith, it's just a really great network. And that's, again, the benefit of not being a 25-year-old founder. I think that's, that's where we re- There's a couple of competitive advantages I have and our team has because of the stage of, of, of work we're in, you know, in our lives, and that's our network. And so I think we're pretty calm and we're pretty balanced about, like, jumping at going to, like, a Sephora or an Ulta or a Target, 'cause I know what it's like. I, I spent 16 years there and I watched what founders and early-stage companies go through, and I, I don't wanna go too early. You only get one shot. And so we will not go until we're capitalized enough and in a good enough place with our product to know that we are ready to, like, be shown prime ti- prime, prime time.
Sean: So for-
Stephanie: So I was... So, to circle that back to the investors, I think our investors know that that's the timeline. There's not as much pressure to grow like this, get into big retail immediately, because we've always communicated to them this is our plan.
Sean: Do you feel like you have to hit certain revenue goalposts in order to make the, the raising timelines that you need to make happen in the way that you want them to? Or is that not as much of the problem-solving right now?
Stephanie: No, that's a huge part of the pressure right now, for sure. It's a steady amount of growth, but we have to grow, and we have to grow efficiently. We have to be efficient and smart about our customer acquisition. Meta is tough. We're trying our first round on TikTok Shop right now. That's complicated. I think we have the right agencies helping us, but it's really confusing and it, it's, it kinda goes against my grain. Everything's so wasteful. You're just shoving a ton of product out there and it's, it's really complicated. I know we need to make it work, so we're, we're gonna make it work. But we do have a lot of pressure to hit to get our business to where it needs to be so we can get into big, big retail, and so that's kind of the goalpost. I th- hopefully that answers the question.
Sean: Yeah, it does. Do you feel like you get sucked into that more, m- more or less than you maybe should focus-wise and time, time-wise, or no?
Stephanie: I think a better way for me to reframe that is I don't pull the team into it because I'm trying to not distract them. So it's mostly me, and I- that's where I lean on a couple of really important advisors. I have an amazing advisor that I meet with every single Thursday. His name is Chris. He started a company and sold his company, kinda paying it forward because someone in our community helped him. Now he's helping me. Helps me figure out how to communicate to, to future investors, how to communicate to our existing investors. Has helped me really get disciplined about investor communication. So our, our cap table gets a really, really thorough investor update from me on the dot every three months. Never miss. I was every other month for the first two years. I would never have been that disciplined without him. And so it's... And it's paid, it's paid in spades. I think our investor community is really supportive because they always know what's going on with us. They always have really good communication and, and transparency, and so it's, it's, it's generated a lot more support than I think I would've normally had.
Sean: Yeah. It's such an interesting dance of the growth gates that you have to or want to hit, the, the product innovation and, and making customers happy that you're, you're dancing in, and then raising rounds for the future growth to build the big, the big version of what you're working on right now. I tr- I try and ask questions about it because I am curious. It's so nuanced. I think it's somewhat hard to answer maybe also.
Stephanie: Yeah. It, it's an in- dance is the perfect word. You kinda wonder how any CPG companies make it. Yeah. Once you're, you're like, "How, how does this actually ever work?" Like, it's just a very- Yeah.
Sean: I
Stephanie: think,
Sean: I think sometimes I ask, like, a bunch of how questions, but I don't know if those are good questions actually, because it's like a one answer wouldn't work for another scenario that looks almost identical- Yeah on the, the surface. It's like there is really no answer. Like, you just figure out the next step and do your best at making it the way that you think makes the most sense in that exact moment. But, like, good luck replicating that-
Stephanie: You're right ...
Sean: in a different scenario.
Stephanie: Well, I think one of the things we were always taught at Kellogg is the number one thing that kills a s- uh, a company is, is time. If you don't have enough time, you run out of money. And so the, the only thing you're trying to optimize for is gaining more time. It's like, just give me more time. If, if we had all the time in the world, I would have zero doubt and 100% conviction that we would build this into, like, a pretty significant new category killer. But we're racing against the clock all the time, and so is every entrepreneur and every early stage company. And so how do you maximize that time, learn as quickly as you can, fail as quickly as you can so you can keep iterating to be able to get to the other side? And so that's, that's the pressure. I try to keep the team out of that pressure because it is incredibly distracting. You don't want people to think like our clock is running down each time, and then, "Oh, we raised a round. We're good. We're resetting the clock now." That's a terrible way to work, and so you try to make sure that that noise doesn't distract us too aggressively. I guess that's where I do have faith. I don't know if I'm gonna raise the next round. I, I think I'm going to. I mean, I have a good shot at it. I think we've made a huge amount of progress. I don't know. We don't have the word AI in our, in our business, and so there's not a lot of money flowing into beauty or CPG right now, and that's, that's kind of the uphill battle that I think a lot of CPG companies are, are facing.
Sean: Yeah, I was gonna ask you, like, what's your view on CPG and, and venture-funded businesses in this space now? I'm also curious, I don't know how to ask this really. Like, I'm curious your view of bootstrapped businesses too, even outside of CPG. Like, I know your experience is, or it seems like it's heavily in I mean, maybe I'm gonna put my foot in my mouth, but in venture-backed capital-intensive- Sure. Yeah ... businesses that are almost all or nothing type of outcomes
Stephanie: Yeah, for, for this business, it's all or nothing because again, the reason we started this is so mission-driven. If we create a small leisure business that's taking a little bit of CO2 out of the, the freight equation when you're shipping some shampoo bottles, I don't think I'm gonna really feel like I solved the mission. If we create a billion-dollar business, I feel like I've really made a pretty big dent on our, on our overall mission. So for us, it's, it's all or nothing, which I would assume VCs are gonna love to hear. I don't wanna create a $50 million business. I wanna create a billion-dollar business, and I And, and I need to do it for so many reasons. And so that's, that's what's defining whether or not we go to VC versus alternative methods of funding.
Sean: Yeah.
Stephanie: I think if you can bootstrap and build a really great business, oh my gosh, that's-- to not have to have an investor community that you're bringing along saves time. They add a lot of benefits. I mean, if you have the right investor community, you can have a tremendous amount of knowledge and support that you don't have. But if you can bootstrap it, that's, that's incredible. That's kinda the dream.
Sean: Yeah. So difficult either way, honestly. Yeah.
Stephanie: It is. It
Sean: is. Yeah. I don't know which is more difficult.
Stephanie: I know. Yesterday when we were having some other bottle problem, I was like, "Why didn't we just create a tech SaaS business?" That you could just code and change. Like, why do I have to deal with the fact that our timeline with this vendor is four months and there's, you know, delays on ingredients and, like, it's just so complicated when you're actually building a physical product, and I never understood that. I mean, I was just-
Sean: What's your, what's your take on, on the AI influence in, in the world that you're working in now?
Stephanie: So personally and selfishly, it's amazing for us. When you're a small five or six-person team, it amplifies all of us. I mean, we're all-- we all kinda have like office managers helping us, and admins helping us, and writers helping us. I used to be a really good writer. I barely ever write anymore 'cause I'm just leaning on it too much. But I'm way more efficient. It helps bridge the gap for me and our head of ops and logistics when we're talking to our chemists and some of the contract manufacturers when we have really complicated formula issues and changes and things like that. I usually ask Claude to explain it to me first before I get on those phone calls. So it's kinda like a research partner for me. It's not doing our marketing for us. It's not doing-- it's obviously not doing our customer service for us at this stage. But-- and it's not doing our community management. We have a real person that's making real comments all the time so we can build that community. But it's doing a lot of other stuff that's making all of us more efficient. So if we write really good copy, we have a really great creative director and head of marketing now, and the two of them will ma- will build out what we think the copy needs to be, and some- sometimes we'll drop it into Claude and say, "Can you tweak this? Can you make it 10% shorter?" But they're doing the thinking. It's just making them more efficient at the end. And so that part's really exciting. How do I feel about AI in general? Uh, it's-- that's a complicated question.
Sean: Yeah. Um, I
Stephanie: have two daughters that are in college and out of college, and so they're both kinda navigating careers as early 20-somethings with Do I become a lawyer or is law gonna be gone? Like, those kinds of questions I didn't have to tackle that at 22, so that's tricky and scary, and I guess I'm kind of a, a never-ending optimist where I think that a lot is gonna change. I know people are gonna get hurt in this process, unfortunately, but I do think new industries will pop up. I think people are gonna crave experiential and in-person, and I think it's gonna... The pendulum's gonna swing back, and those are gonna be new businesses. And so I think people that have really good interpersonal skills and the ability to communicate and connect are gonna, are gonna find opportunities. So that's what we keep telling our daughters. Just keep leaning on those-
Sean: Sounds- exactly ... sounds incredible.
Stephanie: It sounds incredible. I don't know if that's what happens.
Sean: Yeah.
Stephanie: It's pretty scary. It's a shift none of us- I like- ... lived through.
Sean: I like that view. I'll- I- ... I'll hold onto that view too. That's good.
Stephanie: I know- Yeah. I... Should I ask your view after interviewing so many people? Do I not wanna know?
Sean: I mean, I, I think I have a very similar view. I think it, it does make the best people... I mean, this is my personal experience. It makes the best people have way more leverage. I think it does create other problems if you don't have as high of skilled-
Stephanie: Yeah ...
Sean: individuals using it. I think, I think the gap between people who are good and- an average employee is, is gonna become outrageous.
Stephanie: My
Sean: God. Like, I, I mean, that's my personal belief, especially for people who really use AI, like build their own stuff in Claude Code, have like multimodal ways that they're testing how to work with it all the time. I think there, there are other problems with it. Like what I've noticed is that it makes it easier for everyone to contribute in a way that they think that they're, they have the expertise, so there's more shit to look through. And so I think that is a problem that's working against the efficiency. That's why I think the gap will become bigger, because the best people have a lot of experience, know how to work with it incredibly well, and they're like training it like a team all the time, and testing and iterating like you are with product, like obsessively. And it's because you have to deal with the volume of output that can come from AI. But just like the average person working in a job is not doing that, and they're also not aware of that. So I think the gap of top performing people will become pretty incredible. I think it can.
Stephanie: Which is, it's on top of an already more inequal system. So that's, that's, it's not gonna, it's gonna be- I
Sean: don't know though. The one thing that I think stops that is the like compensation structures, which I think are really hard. Because like if you find people that are, I heard somebody else say this about hiring, and I, I think it is true. Like, how would you find, or if you were looking for really great people who work with AI in a way that's compelling for your business, you would have to find people who are, like, willing to learn. They, they learn rapidly, they try stuff, fail constantly, and just keep taking action. Like, those characteristics are already of somebody that you would want to hire anyways. Yeah, you're right. And they just happen to align with people who use AI. But I think the compensation structure of most companies wouldn't ever reward somebody for becoming the equivalent of, like, 20, 30, 40 people. So I think that is a huge problem. Like, and I, I... That's the thing that I've seen too, is like, the interest level for people to, to actually go deep enough that it makes, like, a real impact versus just, like, casually using it. Like, you have to be pretty interested, and you have to have those charac- characteristics like crazy to do it. Yeah. I think- And, and those, those types of people are, like, gonna be self-starters. They're gonna have outsized earning power already because they're self-starters. So I think to hire them is gonna become harder also.
Stephanie: Yeah, I agree with that. I think also if, if you, if you kind of view AI as a specialized, like some type of specialty for you. Like for me, I'm really leaning on it for chemistry knowledge, really understanding ingredients that I would've never had access to understanding. I mean, I could've gotten like an old chemistry book and gone back to those days, but I- it's just, it wasn't the knowledge. It's, it's making me more efficient at learning it. Like, teach me this and teach it to me in a way that I can understand it. Yeah. That's a really neat specialty. It's like I have a chemistry friend on my shoulder all the time that I would've never had access to. And so that's, to me, very beneficial. It's not really changing my output, but it is making me ask smarter questions. Yeah. So that, that's the dream of AI. I- when it starts to go too extreme on either end, that's really, that's where it gets a little bit more scary.
Sean: Yeah. I think like you're in a different seat though, because you're more like asking good questions is good execution.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Sean: Right? 'Cause you're like working with other people to execute. But for people who are in like heavy execution roles, I actually don't think that's true 'cause you are executing all the time too. Um, but for somebody that's in like an individual contributor seat who's constantly executing, like they're gonna lean into it like that, plus executionally, like how can I train you to be more of my partner in the process, not just the coach, if you can. But I, I think that takes so much expertise in order to do that well, versus like somebody that comes in that doesn't really have that much experience. They don't know like all the trip wires that you would- Yeah ... run into if you just coach somebody else to, to do it anyways. I feel like it's honestly like working with people. It's so similar to working with people. So if you find people who are really good at managing bigger teams and they have all the expertise, like they'll probably do pretty well-
Stephanie: They'll
Sean: be 9 to 9 ... getting more. I really went off.
Stephanie: No, it's okay. I'm sure people are interested in hearing your take on AI, for sure.
Sean: It is interesting.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Sean: Yeah.
Stephanie: Such a major change.
Sean: Well, thank you so much for, for coming on. I love hearing about the process and I am so curious to see the next iterations and evolutions of everything. Thank you. And the scale.
Stephanie: Thanks for having me. Thank you. Hopefully we keep making waves and building that scale.