PRESSURE TEST IDEAS

“So I wrote this concept book. I gave it to the 20 smartest people I knew across a wide range of industries. And I didn't tell them, like, you know, hey. Tell me if you like it, because nobody's gonna ever step on anyone else's dream. They're always gonna, like, be like, yeah. It's great. Good luck. So I gave them the assignment, come back with three reasons why you think it's gonna fail. So that way I empowered them to, like, beat up my workplace.”

“I'm very right brained, left brained. Like, so I call it creating cultures of artists and operators. So I wanna build organizations that are incredibly innovative, that are creative, but also have operating rigor. Because if you operate the business well, it gives you more time for the fun stuff and the creativity.”

“I think it's still arguably my best tactic for developing new ideas, is to be in a foreign market, ideally with a creative or a couple creatives with you, so you can sketch as you go, cup of coffee in hand, incredibly jet lagged, Nobody can bother you because you're on a twelve hour time difference. When you walk through a foreign retail store, you just look everything a little differently, particularly if you can't read the language, so you have to rely a little bit more on, like, form and and graphic design.”

“At the heart of it is, like, it's a simple thing, but does the founder give me energy? Am I gonna be psyched? This is a ten year marriage with this person, most likely. And every time I see a text from them or a call, like, am I fired up to talk to them? Working on a deal right now, and I had breakfast with the founder last week. Regardless of the investment, are they like this is somebody I just would love to work with.”

“I went and walked that aisle, and I was like, this aisle is so hard to shop that people are literally stressing out trying to choose something that's healthy for them. And before Ollie, it was like it was a dog's breakfast. I mean, the packaging was horrible. And I was really inspired by SoulCycle. And I realized, I was like, oh, millennials view health and wellness as a lifestyle pursuit. So what if I reimagined the vitamin as a lifestyle product? You're like, okay, well, I'm gonna steal from the beauty aisle because I want it to look like a beautiful package. We're gonna not sell ingredients like melatonin or biotin. We're gonna sell benefits like beauty and sleep.”

“I couldn't create a new brand. I really had to create a new category to be successful. When you're building a brand, if anybody else can line extend their way in and compete against you, you're really gonna struggle to compete against a big company unless you create a huge lead. So that's the way I thought about it. It's like, I'm not creating a new brand. I'm creating this new category that I call premium home care.”

“A lot of my innovation approach is really just stealing. That belief of, like, real artists steal, but I never steal from our competition because then you're just a hack. That's embarrassing. I try to steal from as far away from what we're working on as possible, so it could be stealing an idea in a museum that you could apply to a brand.”

“Top of that list was Karen Masheed, and Karen Masheed talked a lot about democratizing design, and I loved his shapes. So I sent him a cold email, pitching him this idea to do a hand wash for us and a dish soap. And shockingly, he got right back to me and agreed to take it on in the meeting. We then used Karim to get a meeting with the marketing team at Target because they were doing the Philippe Starck line at the time, and we knew they wanted to work with Karim. So I use Karim as my carrot to get a meeting with Target marketing who then invited the merchants.”

“When you go through that sale process, you feel like you're gonna wake up the next morning like you won a Super Bowl, and you're gonna have a parade, and, like, life is gonna be great. And it's like, again, nobody's gonna feel bad for anybody going through this, but it's hard. You feel this loss of identity. I was like the method man. Like that was my identity. And then when you no longer own that, I'm somebody who generally, like a golden retriever. I wake up pretty happy most days is my default position. And it was like the first time in my life after that sale that I felt kind of rudderless.”

“We we scaled it to a 100,000,000 in four years. I definitely sold too soon, but it's that adage of, like, people have said, like, you know, people have made a fortune by selling too soon. It was better too soon than too late. And I just felt like for me and my family, that was what I needed to do.”