The Startup CPG Podcast

Jessi: Hi, Cam. Hi, Dave. Welcome to the show today. Really excited to have you both here.

Dave: Hey, it's so great to be on today. Thanks, Jessi. Great to meet you.

Jessi: Yeah, great to chat with you. I would love if each of you could just introduce yourself briefly. And if one of you could give us a quick introduction about Crooked Owl, that would be awesome. And then we'll really dig in.

Dave: Of course. I'm Dave Bailey, co-founder, CEO, part-time CFO and head brewmaster of Crooked Owl.

Cam: I am Cam Bailey. I am Chief Brand Officer, recently decided to take up that lofty title. I lead all of our marketing, brand and sales efforts. So we have a really tight division of labor.

Jessi: Nice. I love it. And can you just give me an overview of kind of Crooked Owl and then your three products right now?

Cam: Awesome. Yes. So Crooked Owl, we are the first commercialized hard to pate brand on market. We're 5% ABV, 100 calories per can, naturally gluten-free, naturally probiotic. So we're a really interesting kind of hybrid between a hard seltzer and a hard kombucha. It's really light, really easy to drink. We like to position ourselves as a hard seltzer alternative rather than a hard kombucha player. We have three SKUs. We have Pina, which is our traditional tapache flavor profile. It's made with cinnamon and ginger. Jalapeno, which is the spiciest of the three. That one has jalapeno, habanero, and mango. And then Passione, real crowd pleaser. That one has passion fruit and hibiscus. So a little bit about tapache. Tapache is a fermented pineapple beverage from Mexico. It's a traditionally non-alcoholic beverage. You can find it most frequently in street markets or where you're going to have tacos from a taquero on the street. So we discovered it when we were traveling in Mexico, absolutely fell in love with it and started making it at home. And that's sort of where Crooked Owl was born.

Jessi: Awesome. That's great. Yeah, I would love to hear about how you got started a little bit. I also I'm curious a little bit more about the process of making tapache. You mentioned fermenting chunks of pineapple. Can you explain it a little bit more without, you know, getting into secret sauce? But I'm curious a little bit more about the process.

Dave: Of course, I'm happy to do it. And to piggyback off what Cam said, we came across it while traveling in Mexico City on a taco tour, actually, and just thought it was a really interesting beverage. It's just such a casual sipping beverage where it's, you know, not commercialized traditionally. You have it out of a bag or a plastic cup, and it's typically sold street side right out of the barrel it's fermented in. So just really interesting beverage that turns out has hundreds of years of story behind it in Mexico. Traditionally, these days, it's made with just fermented pineapple scrap. So it's made very rustically where you take the remnants of a pineapple, so the core and rind of it, you put it in a barrel or a bucket, add water, pioncillo, which is a Mexican brown sugar, and then depending on whose recipe it is, various different spices, Most frequently it'll be cinnamon and clove. And then from the naturally occurring yeast and bacteria on the rind of the pineapple, you have a fermentation process that takes place and you get something that's a little funky, a little fizzy. And because of the bacterial element, it's actually probiotic. So I thought it was a really cool beverage that had this just centuries of history and somehow was wildly on trend with all of the functional beverages you're seeing on market, things like kombucha, but isn't really thought about it in that way, or at least wasn't a few years ago. And that's what got us really excited. It was like, hey, this is centuries old beverage that's really having a moment right now, but isn't being done on a commercial scale. And that's what kind of got us thinking, well, let's try to make it ourselves and see what we can do with it. So that kind of kicked off the process of me overtaking our 600-square-foot East Village apartment with about five one-gallon fermenters that were strewn across the kitchen and even in the bathtub. I was just taking various different recipes I could find online and trying to learn how to make the traditional tapache.

Cam: And this is before we even started making an alcoholic. We started making it alcoholic because I have celiac and so I can't have anything that has gluten. And I don't really love most gluten-free, sessionable beverages that are on market. I don't drink hard seltzer. I just I don't find it has a pleasant aftertaste. Hard kombucha tends to be a little bit bitter for me and the ABV is typically a little high. Wine is not something that I gravitate towards when we're drinking outside on a hot summer day. And if I'm drinking cocktails, Dave is having a Pacifico and he's just chilling and I'm getting pretty smashed unintentionally. So we were like, all right, well, if you can make wine from grapes and you can make cider from apples, why can't we mess around with this departure that we started making and make it alcoholic and elevate that ABV. So those five fermenters turned to 10 fermenters and it was just messing around with different types of yeast and pineapple sources and sugar
Dave: Yeah, it quickly went from a little side hobby in the apartment where it was this nice functional non-alcoholic beverage that we were messing around with that we had tasted in Mexico and fell in love with to, why can't we make a party version of this? And using what I know from my homebrewing skills, take it from less than 1% ABV to something that's, you know, 5, 6%, but still tasty. And that kind of set us off on this mission to create something that, you know, at the time didn't exist. Our long-term goal is to eventually produce in Mexico, but just given that we're an upstart in the amount of red tape that it takes to get something off the ground, we had to go with the path of least resistance and wound up teaming up with someone that was capable of doing this probiotic but alcoholic beverage. But long-term, we would like to be moving that production down south of the border to Mexico. But in the near term, we aim to source as many of our ingredients from Mexico. We get our pineapple from Mexico, as well as our pilancio. We source raw pilancio from a small farm in the Yucatan.

Jessi: When you started to try to experiment with adjusting the ABV, how long did that take? Do you mostly just manipulate the recipe some or let it ferment longer so that more alcohol is created? I'm curious about how you found that sweet spot of the right ABV.

Dave: Yeah, so that was a lot of trial and error. And if you use just the traditional methods, it's reliant purely on wildly occurring yeast. And we found that that was actually a bit difficult to kind of control on a consistent basis. So while we were able to create some really interesting, small craft variants of more alcoholic tapache, we found that call it one out of every three batches got too funky in some manner. And so that kind of set us off on, okay, how do we tackle this problem in terms of consistently being able to create an alcoholic version of this product? And so that was a bit of the science and the multi-year process that went from taking a traditional tapache into something that can be made on a commercial basis that's alcoholic. Right. Without giving away too much of the secret sauce is we are bringing in an outside yeast that is made for making alcoholic drinks. We're taking something from a traditional brewing process for the yeast. And then in order to consistently make the kind of probiotic element, we were able to isolate the relevant bacterial strains from pineapple rinds to ensure that those have been propagated at a level enough to ensure that we're having a probiotic beverage and bacterial fermentation every time.

Jessi: Right. Yeah. No, that's very interesting. And I was very excited that the product was gluten free. Regular listeners know that my husband and my mom have celiac disease and we're a gluten free household. And so I like that you're providing a alternative for those consumers as well. I also want to go either further, a little further back in time too of like to each of your backgrounds, like the background that you're bringing to Crooked Owl. What did each of you do before this? Do you work full time on this or do you do something on the side? I'm curious about each of your backgrounds.

Dave: Yeah, of course. So we actually both juggle outside roles and are managing to push the Crocodile brand forward at the same time, which has been fun and scary and frustrating at times. But my background is on the finance side of things. I've spent about the last 10 years working on mergers and acquisitions and capital raise advisory for consumer and beverage brands. And Most recently, I've spent a lot of time in the beverage and alcohol space working on either advising larger companies on acquisitions of high growth brands or working with high growth brands themselves on thinking through either capital raise or sales to larger strategic companies.

Cam: And then my background has been on the brand and marketing side. I take freelance roles consulting with companies that mostly focus on brand strategy development and positioning. And then, you know, prior to that, I did a lot of work in the alcohol space on the experiential side. Wow. It's a nice blend.

Dave: Yeah. So Cam comes up with all the great marketing ideas and I'm the penny pincher in the back saying what's the return on investment there. being kind of the Debbie Downer at times, but it's a good combo, I think, to think through both the marketing and the finance side of things.

Jessi: Yeah, very relevant backgrounds. That's really awesome. And I'm sure really helpful. I'm curious about the process from going from finding the right batch and brew, getting the product right to then canning the product. What was that like? Are you still canning it yourself? Do you work with the manufacturer? I'm curious about the commercialization process and anything that was interesting or that you learned during that process.

Dave: Yeah, that was a big leap going from one to five gallon fermentation vessels in our apartment to actually being beverage in can was probably one of the biggest hurdles for us. It was during COVID that we started this fermentation at home process. And I think because of COVID blessing and curse, we had more time at home to work on it. And essentially, we kind of got the recipe, I'd call it 90% of the way there to being a commercially viable beverage. At that point, we thought, hey, look, we actually have something here. We had started thinking about the branding and the name and actually how to attack the market. And from there, we just started researching and reaching out to people that had histories or backgrounds in the brewing space or the kombucha space. And from there, we got a handful of advisors, I'd call them, that each specialized in different areas that helped kind of pull the whole thing together. So we worked with someone that helped in terms of sourcing the raw goods as well as sourcing the flavorings and working with the flavor houses to nail that down. We found someone that specialized in yeast and bacteria fermentation that helped with us on the isolation of the relevant strains we're using. And then we reached out to a handful of contract manufacturers that either had experience working with sour beers or kombucha to kind of piece together the whole back end stream to get it from raw ingredients to actually, you know, can in hand. And out of the gate, it was on the production front. We actually had to use two different people, one a brewer and one a kombucha canner where we would use the brewer to actually make the liquid. And then we'd pump it across a parking lot to a kombucha company that would ferment it and can it. because of that live probiotic strain, most brewers weren't willing to touch the product. So that was one of the bigger hurdles was just finding people willing to work with it.

Jessi: Yeah, that makes sense. With the probiotics, does that make it a challenge to put into something like kegs versus cans?

Dave: Great question. So getting it in the keg is easy if you can find the right partner to keg it for you. But it definitely becomes difficult when you're trying to win that coveted slot at a bar. Most bars don't have a dedicated what we call dirty line that has some sort of probiotic beverage going through it. And if they do, it's typically pretty fought over. And there's some marketing dollars and capital required to win that tap. So ideally, we'd like to get there. And I think we're actually starting to get some inbounds about people wanting it on tap. But out of the gate, we've kind of been hesitant to do that just because it's a tough market to break into.

Cam: I mean, from like a brand perspective, the reason we decided to go with the standard size 12 ounce cans versus the slim cans is really because a lot of brands that were coming to market when we were about to launch, we're using those slim cans and we wanted to stand out and sort of harken back to, you know, tradition and use something that's pretty classic and frankly gives us more real estate to play around with on the brand side. Because if you haven't noticed, we have a quite maximalist brand.

Jessi: Yeah, I wanted to ask about the branding because the branding is really incredible. I mean, it's beautiful. It stands out like it's just really impressive. I love just looking at the cans and I wanted to learn a little bit about the process of developing the branding and coming up with such a strong brand.

Cam: Oh, thank you so much. We're really, really proud of it. It really is our baby. Well, the name, first off, Crooked Owl, is derived from the legend of Lala Chooza, which is essentially a witch who turns into an owl at night and swoops down and eats drunkards from down square looking for her deadbeat husband. And so we wanted to bring some levity to that and make it sort of like akin to a witch's black cat. So we wanted the brand to feel lighthearted and fun, but still exploratory. So the design with the two-tone cans, the archways, all of the detail, the style of the text is very inspired by architecture in Mexico that you'll see all around Central Mexico with the sunwashed color palettes, two-tone buildings, arched doorways, arched windows, and then that just like really cool, almost hand-drawn looking text on signage. our owl, those pineapple totems, we wanted that to feel really surreal and fun. So we turned our owl's body into a pineapple and those pineapple totems are just an exaggeration of what the pineapple plant would look like. We wanted the can to feel exploratory because, you know, as Dave previously mentioned, Apache wasn't really something That was commercially available when we were building this brand. And so we wanted it to feel like a natural, discoverable moment where you wanted to learn more about Topace and you wanted to learn more about the brand. We partnered with a really amazing designer, John Schubert. to design this. He did an incredible job where we're so proud of the way it looks. And it's a testament to the thought and care that we wanted to put into building this brand as not just, you know, taking something with a deep, deep heritage and messing it up. but creating a new way to experience a beverage that you may have heard of before, you may not have heard of before, but regardless, you're going to want to learn more about what Tapache is at its core.

Jessi: I'm glad that you could bring your branding expertise to working on your own brand like that. That's really cool.

Cam: Another thing that was really important to us as we were building the brand is that giving back was embedded in the fabric of who we are. So we're a proud partner of 1% for the Planet, 1% of all of our profits go back to supporting sustainable agricultural practices in Central Mexico, as well as providing access to education and food to underserved communities in Central Mexico. 1% for the planet is our way of giving back in the near term, but we do have longer term goals as well. So we will be developing a creator platform where we're able to partner with artists, creators, chefs, bartenders of Mexican and Mexican American heritage who are already supporting communities here in the States or in Mexico, where we can sort of co-create together and uplift their brands, their causes in a way that is mutually beneficial and that is not draining on them. So that's something that we'll do long term as we continue to scale and grow ourselves.

Jessi: Yeah, that's very cool. And I believe that you're focused on, you know, you mentioned bars and I believe you're also focused on restaurants. Can you tell us a little bit about your strategy of where you're trying to get the cans, the consumer you're trying to get the cans in front of right now? Where's your focus?

Cam: So I'm going to, I guess, step a little further back and talk more holistically about our go-to-market strategy. Over the last few years, we have had the really fortunate benefit of seeing a handful of tapache brands come to market and spend a lot of capital on education from a buyer perspective and from a consumer perspective. And because it's just the two of us, we're a bootstrap brand, we have to be really smart and strategic about the dollars that we spend and the markets that we move into. So we've been able to ride the tailwinds of the work that some of these players have made because they've spent a lot of money on education, which has been nice for us because there's a little less education that we have to do. So from an off-premise perspective, We are able to target retailers that are already selling non-alcoholic tapache where it's already moving. The best way to get in well with a retailer is to sell products that are going to move for them. So if we know that it's selling, then we have the only alternative that's in the alcohol space that they can then purchase. And then from an on premise perspective, we are targeting bars and restaurants that have a focus on an elevated beverage menu, where they might not necessarily want to carry a hard seltzer. We offer something that's a little bit different, that's still gluten free, that's lower ABV, and that's lower calories. So you get all of the benefits of a hard seltzer, but a more interesting complex layer profile and a can that stands out. And then we're also targeting high-end Mexican restaurants and restaurants that have a focus on gluten-free food menus. And then I guess from a market perspective, we soft launched online or DTC in 45 states. We soft launched in New York because We're based in Brooklyn, and then we soft launched in Georgia, because that's where Dave is from. And we have a lot of really nice connections down there. We recently moved into California, where we are seeing huge, huge traction. And we're very, very excited about that. And I think the market and the demographics in California are extremely well suited to the brand.

Jessi: Yeah, that's very interesting. Launching with alcohol is always very interesting and complicated. I'm wondering, starting with the e-commerce that you mentioned, being able to ship to 45 states, can you talk a little bit about, like, did you have to find a partner to work with on that? Like, what does that look like as a regulated beverage?

Dave: Yeah, I think we were a bit, or I was a bit naive in taking the step from non-alc to alc just out of the gate and not fully comprehending the additional complexity that we were signing up for, but we did it. D2C was actually a bit of a blessing that we had an early partner, Liquid Data was the early partner, where essentially it allowed us to have a warehouse in the New York area. that we could more or less self-distribute out of. So we got to have some learnings just utilizing their warehouse where we were doing on and off premise around us. And then D2C was super important in that it was allowing us to at least be optically a larger scale brand where we were in 45 states. So other than the five states that aren't very fun, we were able to ship to a consumer that was interested in us. So It was a bit of, you know, a total win for us where we were able to say, Hey, like we're here. If you're interested, we can get you product. And so from a consumer point of view, we were able to stretch out across the nation immediately. And from our point of view, it might not have been the most profit generating because it's an expensive process, shipping heavy cans cross country. But what it allowed us to do is just get a better understanding of who our core customer is. What are the trends? Who's buying it? What age, what demographic? What flavors are they going for? Who's repeat buying? So it provided a lot of really valuable insight that allowed us to be smarter when we went to actually tackle markets in a more meaningful way. We were very particular during R&D on thinking through limiting hurdles we'd have to jump through in various markets based on the type of product we had. So especially in the alcohol space, each state does have different regulations and rules, and it typically comes down to the type of alcohol in your beverage. So you see RTDs, they could be wine-based, they could be malt-based, they could be sugar-based, they could be spirits-based. And for somewhere like New York, a spirit-based RTD can't be sold in bodega and grocery stores. So we wanted to be really particular about what we were putting out there to kind of minimize the veto vote, I'll call it, in terms of where it could be carried and the type of taxation that occurs on the product. And so that is why we wound up making the product the way we did, which is fermented via pineapple sugars and natural peel and seal because it's classified as a beer. We were able to produce a product that is treated like a beer from the TTB. And so we thought that was the best way to be able to kind of penetrate as many markets in the most efficient manner as we could. Can't mention New York, Georgia, California. moving into those markets and the alcohol business is just very expensive. Between licensing and finding full-time distribution, this is a big commitment. So being smart about who your core customer is while going to those meetings was super helpful. And the D2C really allowed us to be smart on that pretty early on.

Jessi: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That does seem like a really smart way to approach it. And on the individual state perspective, you kind of mentioned like applying for licensing. Can you walk us through maybe like what it was like to start working in, you know, Georgia or California or something like what some of the process was like and, you know, anything that you learned along the way of as of starting in a new state?

Dave: Yeah, of course. Each state's different. And I would say an initial learning was that there are people out there that can advise you, and they're more than willing to do it. And they're going to charge by the hour. So I would say be smart about allocation of your dollars. And if you're looking to move into a new state or tackle a new geography, do a lot of research yourself, at least find a good advisor that can point you in the right direction so you can start to read up on your own, because otherwise you're going to wind up burning a lot of capital having someone else do that research for you. And at the end of the day, it's better that you know it anyways. So that was an early learning that we figured out the hard way, I think, was over-indexing to lawyers that were experts in X, Y, and Z. But yeah, each state is different. We launched in Georgia. I'm from Georgia. We have a founding investor that is also from Georgia. Go Dawgs. Thought it was a good market where, you know, it wasn't as saturated as somewhere like New York and California. Given my connections in the space, we thought there would be some easy wins in terms of getting penetration both on and off premise. But from there, it was just learning. you know, what do we need at the federal level? What licensing do we need there? OK, got it. Then it was what's Georgia specific or what's city specific within Georgia that we need to know? And it was just a lot of reading the government websites, making sure we were filing everything we needed to and then trying to really minimize legal expenses. But at the end of the day, when it came down to actually getting all the licensing we needed, we teamed up with the Sharp team down there and they got us what we needed. But it was definitely a lot of red tape that requires a lot of time to figure out.

Jessi: Yeah, no, that sounds very complicated. And for each state, are you required to work with a distributor or what has it looked like to set up any distributor relationships?

Dave: That's another thing that you'll have to tackle in the alcohol space. It's very much, you'll hear this probably from anyone in the industry, it's very much like a marriage. These things require a lot of diligence, a lot of courtship. You want to make sure it's a good fit because at the end of the day, distributor relationships are hyper important to the success of your business and they're also very sticky. You want to find a partner at the end of the day. That's what you really need to find because when you win, they win. And so making sure you're finding the right person for your brand's life cycle was very important. In Georgia, we actually wound up going with the bigger distributor out of the gate, and we actually wound up unwinding that after a year because we just found that it wasn't the right relationship. It might have been, you know, 10 years down the line for us, hopefully. That could have been the right call. But at the time, during launch, we just went a little too big. And it just meant that that distributor had too many other areas to focus on that they didn't have kind of the bandwidth to focus on, you know, a small upstart brand and really have the sales force spend the time to do the teaching moments that are required. And so I would say for small brands looking at moving into the alcohol space, make sure you're finding the right partner and don't always go for the bigger name because that might not be best for your brand at the time.

Cam: Yeah, ultimately, at the end of the day, you're only going to be able to be present for a handful of those meetings. So you need a distributor team that understands your brand, that knows how to sell your product and knows how to position it so that accounts want to buy it. Having that partnership, having that open relationship with the brand managers, with the district managers, with the individual sales reps is absolutely critical to penetrating the market.

Jessi: Yeah, that's, yeah, it's so interesting. I'm really glad that we at Startup CPG, we have a alcohol regulated products channel now, and it's been exciting to see everyone have a place to talk about all these complex topics because it's a lot. So it's very helpful to hear your insights as well. And since both of you had some previous beverage and alcohol experience, is there anything else on the front of the regulated product that you wanted to share or any other learnings that have been really critical?

Dave: I mean, I'll just say the slack has been hyper important to us and has been such a value add. as a small brand, having people that are willing to show you the direction to spend your time and run in is just a lifesaver because at the end of the day, you know, there's 50 states and each state's going to have its own nuances, but those things don't change that much. So having someone that's just been there and done that and spent the time on having a network that's going to help you and save you the 20 hours or however much capital it would take you to have legal calls to get up to speed on it has just been super important. So You know, my advice would be lean on other brands. I found people in industry, especially upstart brands have been very helpful and very collaborative and helping kind of avoid a lot of the pitfalls that you would fall into otherwise if you didn't have that guidance. So, you know, don't be afraid to reach out to other people and lean on other founders, other brands to try to help guide you in the right direction, because most people are going to go out of their way to do that.

Cam: Yeah, people in this community want to help, which is so nice. There are other small brand communities that aren't the same way. This is the most uplifting, positive, amazing group of people that we've ever interacted with. Even thinking about Whole Foods submissions and the category review process, it's so hard. And having insights from other people who have gone through it has been huge.

Jessi: Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so glad that you're part of the community and that you've been finding value in it. That's that's just incredible. And that leads me into I wanted to talk about your Mic Drop Expo East experience as well, because you were one of the winners of our backpack brands. And I wanted to hear about what that experience was like. How did you find the event? What was your overall impressions of Expo East? Just would love to hear more.

Cam: It was amazing. We had the best time. I mean, I speak for myself, but I think for both of us when I say, like, I absolutely love being in front of people and talking to people about the brand and sharing the liquid and just having these types of conversations because it's so fun. And to get to see people be like, wow, wait, that has alcohol in it. It's like it's really cool. because we spent a lot of time on getting the best possible flavors that we could. And so it was great. It was really, really fun. We were slammed the whole time. I had no voice by the end of it, but it was one of the best nights that I've had in a very long time.

Jessi: That's so great. I love it. And did you walk the trade show as well or did you stick to the mic drop party?

Cam: We just stuck to the mic drop party, unfortunately, because we were juggling a couple of things from a work perspective outside of Crooked Owl and we weren't able to stay over into the next day. So we just did the mic drop event this year, but hoping next year that we'll be able to attend the sort of new format that they launched or that they're launching, because I think that'll be really interesting. And I love to see the evolution of the trade show. I know that Andrea Hernandez and her community through Snackshot has been doing an Expo West event that's an Expo West alternative for a few years. So to see that sort of like different style of demo is pretty cool.

Jessi: Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting and I'm excited to see the evolution as well, which also leads into what is coming up next for you all? What's next for Crooked Owl? What should we be on the lookout for? Is there anything exciting coming up that you can share about? Would love to hear.
Dave: The secrets. We definitely have some R&D in the pipeline. I think 2024, we'll probably see a new flavor or two that we're very excited about. We would like to think of Crooked Owl as a world of possible offerings, maybe more than just hard to poach, but I could be a few years away from that one. But we're We're always thinking about new products to bring out there, but we also don't want to lose sight of the fact that we're very early days and there's a lot of blocking and tackling we need to do in the markets that we're in. So I think near-term focus and including 2024 is just going to try to really establish ourselves in the markets we're in, try to get in front of consumers, get it in more doors, get that feedback. So that way we're even smarter about, you know, the product and if there's any tweaks or how we want to go to market about it as we start thinking about further geographic expansion. Because, you know, as we discussed, alcohol is a very expensive thing to expand into new markets. So we want to make sure we're well positioned when we do that. But I would say 2024 is going to be a period of kind of selective geographic expansion and just further kind of solidifying our foothold in existing markets.

Jessi: Yeah, that's very exciting. I cannot wait to follow along. And that leads into our last question, which I've asked many of our guests over the last few years. But I'm curious if there's any guiding questions or core tenets that you either, you know, either of you, both of you come back to when you're faced with tough decisions, when you're deciding, you know, what to do with the limited time that you have or deciding between opportunities. Is there anything that you come back to that helps guide you making tough decisions as a small business owner? Oh, there's a ton.

Dave: I would say the most critical learning I've had at least is, you know, the customer doesn't owe you any favors. It's their money. They've earned those dollars. They can choose how to deploy it. So, you know, you just need to think through, we're not always going to be in the room to explain the product. How do we reach that customer and kind of win them and also offer them a product that deserves the money we're charging for it? That at the end of the day is kind of the crucial question in consumer products. And you sometimes get lost as a founder because you just are so in love with your baby and you spend so much time with it. You always need to take that step back and be like, why do I deserve to be the thing the consumer buys? Because they have a lot of choices these days. So kind of grounding your thoughts and making sure you're being smart about why is this decision or capital going to help me win that consumer share of mind or dollar is just super important in kind of all decisions.

Cam: And then from my perspective, from thinking about our distributor partners, I always want to make sure that we're giving them as much information as we possibly can to empower them to make the sale. So it's thinking through like, OK, are we being clear about our production process so that they can give a quick overview of it? Are we being clear about how we want to position ourselves so that they can sell into the appropriate accounts and they can sell in in the right way that's going to be a yes. So that again, back to Dave's point, eliminating that veto vote. Do we have materials readily available so that they can go out and do their job without having to think so hard about, Oh God, how am I going to sell this brand? It's so new. It's so different. Like, what do I do? Another question that I like to ask myself when it comes to brand and marketing is whether an activity is in service of the overarching strategic goals that we have as a brand from a long term perspective. So not just doing things because another brand is doing it, really making sure that we're allocating our limited marketing budget in a really strong strategic way and doing things that are going to uplift our presence and our brand recognition in the long term.

Jessi: Yeah, those are very helpful to hear how you're thinking through that and really smart ways to think about it. So thank you so much for sharing. As we go in our kind of parting thoughts or ways that people can connect with you, I definitely encourage everyone to go check out your website because it's beautiful. They can order and ship straight to them if they're in one of the 45 states and it's drink. crookedowl.com. That'll get you to the website. I can link each of your LinkedIn's in the show notes. Is there anywhere else you want people to go and check out? Follow us on Instagram. It's at hard to Pache. Okay, great. Yeah. And I'll link that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you both so much for being on the show today. It was really fun to get to chat with you both and so glad that you're part of the community and that you're a backpack brand. So Thanks for sharing what you've learned so far, and we're excited to keep cheering you on along the way.

Cam: Likewise. Thank you so much for having us. It was such a pleasure.
Dave: Thank you so much.

Jessi: If you enjoyed today's episode, the best way you can say thank you is by leaving a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We seriously appreciate it so much, and it helps new people find the show. I'm Jessi Freitag, your host and producer. I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn. or you can reach out anytime to podcast at startupcpg.com with your feedback, ideas, or just to say hi. Special thanks to our podcast assistant, Stephanie Roberts. Also, be sure to check out more free resources from Startup CPG, our Slack community, webinars, databases, the blog, the magazine, virtual and in-person events, and more, all available at startupcpg.com. Our intro and outro music for today's episode is by the Superfantastics, the band of our Startup CPG founder, Daniel Scharff, which you can find on Spotify for more great tunes. On behalf of the whole team at Startup CPG, thank you so much for being here and see you next week.