Welcome to DTC Pod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter, join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos or even TikTok. And IG organic creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a D to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final loop is a real time accounting service built by D to C founders. For D to C. Founders try final loop. Completely free, no credit card required. Just visit finalloop.com D to CPOd and get 14 days free and a two month PnL within 24 hours with all the ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Celia Lewis and Stephanie Kimmel, the co founders of Tulip. So, guys, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Tulip and the brand that you guys are building.

All right, so Tulip is a modern, direct to consumer storage brand, designing really sophisticated and thoughtful products for cannabis consumers. So we have been around for about six months in the market, have been working on this for several years leading up to it. And we really saw an awesome opportunity in this growing market to support people at home with a ritual that they love, that previously people were storing in shoeboxes, ziploc baggies, maybe a paper bag. And cannabis is something that is products people can go out in the world at a dispensary in many states just around the corner and buy in these really chic and incredible spaces. And so we were saying, hey, why are you still storing these products that you might be spending 50 plus dollars on? And that was the idea for Julia no.

Amazing. And I love the design of it. The products are so recognizable. So we were really excited to have you guys on the podcast to talk about. And I think you guys are at a really exciting point in the company as well. Like you were saying, you guys just came out, you're in a new and emerging space. So really excited to kind of spend this episode going into how you guys built it, how you guys thought about the product, where you guys are at today, and being able to tell that whole story. So why don't we, before we go too far into Tulip, let's go a little further backwards. Why don't you guys both Celia and Stephanie, you guys can kind of go one at a time. I'd love to get your individual backgrounds, like what you guys were doing, what you were building before that kind of led you to this path towards building Tulip.

Sure.

So I spent the majority of my career working on a business that I co founded called Dormify home Decor for college students in small spaces. And there I led a brand and product development, merchandising and so on, and started the business from the ground up. And while I was there, my father in law Joel, who's our third co founder, was looking for a better way to store his cannabis products, and he was looking at it from the lens of preservation. He thought, I buy a lot at a time and like to store it for a while and my goods dry out and there's got to be a better solution. And he had tried everything, and he wasn't really looking at it like, let's start a business, let's, you know, start a brand, let's make products. He's 72 years young, however. But, you know, with my background in developing products and a brand and focusing on a niche market and trying to solve a problem within that market, I thought this is actually a great idea that I think a lot of people or this is a problem that I think a lot of people may have. And being a mom of two toddlers and having cannabis in my home, I thought, not only are you having a problem where you can't find a solution to preserve your goods, I'm looking for a solution that locks. And with that, I'd love for it to look really pretty and be a home decor piece. And through many, many conversations around our dining room table, we thought about how, like Celia said, a lot of people are going to dispensaries that look like Apple Stores, and they're bringing their goods home and storing them in kind of makeshift ways. So why don't we offer a product and a brand that makes cannabis feel at home in your life or give it a considered place to live in your home? And while we were kind of thinking about how we would bring this to life, we were introduced to Celia, given her extraordinary background and a skill set that we would need on the team to help bring this product to life. We shared this idea with her, and I think she had the same reaction. And thus, we started building and ideating on what this would look like.

Amazing. And Stephanie, just to dig a little bit deeper there, I'm very familiar with Dormify. You guys were kind of like a marketplace for goods that were for the dorm, right? Is that what it was like, an online marketplace? Where you can go and buy any sort of goods that were related to college dorm life.

Yeah, essentially, yes. But we did develop our own line of product, too, which made up about 70% of the product catalog, as well as a marketplace for other goods that got it.

So you guys were building marketplace so you could leverage some other products, but you guys were also building your own products and selling them as your own through Dormify. So that probably gave you a good background in what it takes to develop and take products to market and grow your own sort of thing. So we'll get into that a little bit more. And Celia. What's your background?

Yeah, so my background is in product design and development. I was a business undergrad, really found this awesome niche in studying how supply chains are built, how products are made, how you actually market those products and brands loved. It was totally the place for me, and that's where I've built my career. So I've gotten to work at companies like Criminal Miller, doing research, studying how workplaces are designed, how products are made, how you make a really comfortable office chair to some of the early direct to consumer brands away being the biggest ones. They're doing product development. A Lot Of The Products That You See On The Website Today, I either developed or had Some part in influencing and got the opportunity to travel Around The world, going To Manufacturers, seeing On The Ground how You Actually Design and Make All Of These products and Have Really Gotten To take that to the team here at Tulip.

Yeah, I think that's so fascinating. Like, your background not only starting at Herman Miller, which is, like, one of the most iconic American furniture manufacturers, and being able to then transition from there into a way, which actually, I have the bigger carry on suitcase, and it's the metal version. Right. And it is, like, the best bag ever. I even tell my friends, they're like, oh, you should get Ramoa or this or that. I'm like, no, this is the best bag in the world. So clearly you've done your homework.

Yeah, well, planning. I love to hear that because aluminum was my first and biggest project when I came into a way. So I was on that one from the ground up. So about to see it from very first sample, working with the manufacturer, to getting our first production run out the door. So great end to end experience, like many startups. So yeah. Glad to hear you love it.

I don't know if you remember it, but I have the Dwayne Wade aluminum version, which has this palm tree print inside, and it's like, black aluminum on the outside. And I still have it. I ordered it, like, probably five or six years ago, and it's the best.

Yeah, that lining was sweet.

It was okay. So I'd love to why don't we dig into a little bit of the product development side of things. Right? Like you just said, a lot of the work revolved with meeting with manufacturers, taking that product to market. But why don't you talk about whether it's tulip away anything just like best practices? How do you go from an idea to ending up with an amazing product? How do you do it?

Yeah, I would love to say here's the process and here's a framework for how you do it. And certainly all that stuff exists. Obviously, the world is a much messier place and probably like a cobweb or something is like a more appropriate diagram for how things actually work. But in reality, you really look at approaching it from a couple of different angles. So one side is the actual product design and that's what is the product going to look like, how is it going to work? What materials are it going to be made out of? I typically see that approach from two ways. One is looking at market references or merchandising references. If there's anything out there in the world, what is it? What are the materials? What are similar comps you might be looking at? And then the other side of it is actually your own generative ideas. So that may come from a spark, a piece of inspiration that may come from insights, from research, and you start sketching it out in whatever way you can. I mean, look, you can hire industrial designers, you can hire professionals, and you certainly absolutely need those folks at some point in the process. But I find the best place to start is just pen to paper, cardboard, whatever materials make sense given the product that you're looking at, and that's what we did.

How do you budget for that? Because there's margin of error that you also have to account for, right? I mean, it depends as well on the skill of the people you're working with. But how do you budget for something like that? And how do you pair that up with the standard? Like, what is the minimum standard that we are going to tolerate for the quality of the product that we're making?

So are you referring to production quality at the end of the day? Yeah, there's a couple of different angles for that too, right? I mean, there's libraries of production quality standards for a lot of different types of products out there. So furniture has a bunch, luggage has a bunch, cosmetic packaging. So those are certainly reference points that you can start with and the right place to look for. The other side I call Craftsmanship. That's a lot more ambiguous, but that's, hey, what is the quality of this connection or these parts fitting together that feels like the right place for us to be? So this can be things like how flush is this particular material? With another piece of material, you really get into the weeds on some of that stuff. It's almost like grammar for writing for physical product, and there's no hard and fast rule, but you want to look through all of those types of details and that's stuff that, as a consumer, we don't think about unless it's broken or wrong in a really great product, you don't even notice it. So those are, like, the two approaches that I typically take.

And then how did you guys connect and come together to start building Tulip?

So, origin story of Tulip was when I was out of way, I was moonlighting as a Pilates instructor for just, like, a fun personal project. And I was teaching one of my friends from high school, who was a graphic designer and just had done a ton of work with Eric, Stephanie's husband, when he was working at his previous company, Flamingo. And she was like, hey, I caught up with Eric recently. He and his dad have been talking about this idea, like they're looking for a product person who knows physical product and supply chains. You should get in touch. And pretty much like the week before New York City and the world shut down for COVID, we met with masks in a cafe and talked about it, and it felt like our skill sets and interest was a really great fit. So a very serendipitous conversation and opportunity that has really grown into the business that we all get to be a part of today.

Stephanie, why don't you tell us a little bit about the origin and backstory, because, like you said, you guys started working on this idea and ideating on it a couple of years ago, and it takes time to take a product to market. So, Stephanie, why don't you tell us a little bit about what that whole process was like on your end? Now, we understand what the inception of the idea was, but what were the next steps before you could really take this product to market?

So, while Celia and my father in law Joel were hard at work developing this product, our first go to market set of products, which, as Celia said, took a long time because a lot of thought and hard work and iterations went into it, we were also building a brand around it. So really thinking about what does Tulip stand for? Who is Tulip for? And what we came up with was really just the authentic nature of how we got started, which was every one of us celia, myself, Eric, my husband, and his father Joel, all were really excited about the product for personal use. So right there, we realized that this really, like, cannabis spans across ages from 21 to 72 or 99, whatever you want to call it, as well as genders and across cultures, too. I mean, cannabis use, especially now, everybody's using it and in different forms. So there's people who use it as a wellness practice, people who use it for fun, people who use it for pain, anxiety and so on. And we'll get into this a little bit more. But also one thing that we stand for, as I say that it's kind of like cross cultural too, is we wanted to be a part of social change and awareness around the injustices that still exist today. So that was definitely going to be baked into our brand. And with that we wanted to be a part of the notion that we wanted to destigmatize cannabis use. So that's where the name came in. And developing a product that you would want to actually put out on display as far as your storage as opposed to kind of like shoving under your bed or putting in your closet. And like I said, and we can open up a whole conversation around this, we know how lucky we are today to be a part of this industry and be talking about it where there's people who are still incarcerated for carrying a small bit of weed on them even within the past few years. So that's what we were working on from the brand perspective and really wanted to go to market with a really strong brand identity both in the way that it looked and what we stood for and what we were going to talk about.

Yeah, and I'd love to get a little bit more into, like you said, the brand mission as well as the execution and brand identity on top of that. So just to clarify, was one of the motivating factors behind the mission of the brand the fact that there's all these people who might be like at a time where it's accessible, it's being legalized and decriminalized all over the US. There's also another sort of there's all these people who are also being incarcerated and maybe not let free for the same things that people can just openly have in their home if they buy it today. Is that kind of the idea?

Exactly. That's exactly right. So we partner with an organization called Last Prisoners Project through kind of donations to them financially, as well as spreading awareness about the organization through our content and social as well as information about the organization on our site, as well as allowing our customers to write to their local representatives about where they stand on the issue. And as we grow looking for other additional partners and other missions or organizations rather to support that mission.

Got it. That makes a bunch of sense and I think it's really important and I think the way that you guys are building out a product and a community with a real mission behind it, it definitely is a great way to spread that message. So that's awesome. Moving forward. So what were the next steps once you kind of had the brand mission and you understood that it was like more than just a product, you wanted to create a beautiful product, you had the use case you had the mission, then what are the next steps in terms of taking it into production? What are the things you're thinking about from an operational and execution perspective?

Yeah, we touched on this earlier. Obviously, execution quality is essential. So you're starting to pull all these pieces together. How is the brand showing up on the product? How is it showing up on your website? What's the website design and how is this all looking cohesive? So that was a really big focus. I think this team has been incredible. We've all come from really strong consumer brands. And so that experience and I that we've all been able to hone over time, I think has really helped us bring this together so successfully with tool up. So that was clearly a big piece of it. There's also just the logistical and the operational and the supply chain side of it. So it's all of this basically constant analysis that we're refreshing as we go of what's the margin, what are the costs, what are we going to do in terms of packaging, and how does this all layer up? And so that was something that, again, great, experienced team. I think we all knew where the right places were to invest those dollars and where the places were that weren't necessary from a brand or customer value lens.

How do you make the product sorry, the brand show up in the product? I know you guys have done this multiple times and it comes like second nature, but it's more than just the colors, right? It's probably a systematic process of who is our target demographic, how would they engage with this product? Where exactly in the home are we visualizing they would place it? And then what is your process when communicating with the brand team? What it would have to look like in the product?

We really put our heads together because, like Celia said, different skill sets and kind of how do we marry the two, the brand, and then the integrity of the functionality of the product. So there's a few touch points where brand really shines through. Obviously, you said color palette.

We actually spent a lot of time.

On our color palette, so we weren't just choosing millennial pink or something like that, that we know commercially does do really well, but we wanted to go to market with a palette that felt fresh and stood out a bit. And I know that sounds like, really contrived and ambiguous and, like, what does that even mean? But we developed more tangibly, I guess, this color system where the exterior of the boxes weren't boring colors, but something that felt like it could naturally fit within your home. So we have a forest green, an oat color, which is like a cream, and then a sky blue. And all these were sort of neutrals, but then when you open the boxes, you got a little bit of a pop of color, whether the color was bright or the interior color juxtaposes the outside color and creates like a really fun combination. And we just wanted the palette to kind of feel sort of owned, like tulips colors and the way that we combine colors as well as make people smile and have it fit seamlessly within your home, but stand out a little bit, like a conversation piece or something that you're proud to have. Beyond that, we actually thought pretty hard about where the brand would show up on the product, so we didn't really want to slap the word tulip all over it. Again, we want this to as much as we want it to say tulip everywhere, and people to say, what's tulip? Or recognize it in someone's home and then be able to go and buy it. We really wanted it to be very tasteful. So there are a few branding moments within the tubes and jars and in the inside of the box that we have tulip lightly embossed or debossed, and it's very tasteful. And then on the exterior of the box, we have a beautiful our logo mark, which it looks like a tulip if you're looking directly down at a flower. And it's sort of like this really fun mark, and that's on the center of the box. And we sort of liked how it was reminiscent of like an Apple logo on top of your laptop and that's in a silver plate. And then finally we did this exterior ribbing to the box, which felt like very high end and notable and reminded us of barware to kind of hint to the customer that this is something that you can put out on display.

Yeah, I love that. The reason I ask is because to me, it's fascinating how companies keep that integrity and those principles from the very early days. Companies like Flamingo Away. You could even think of Apple. All of this is definitely going to get challenged as a company grows and scales, and if you lose that touch, the brand loses its sort of entity. And so to have that defined from a very early stage, you might think some people might think, well, like, spending that much time on callers and these details sort of a waste of time, let's get to revenue. But it's probably good use of time to keep that core to the business as it scales.

Guys, the next question I have, it kind of ties into the branding component, but I think it's something a lot of founders think about a lot. When ideating on a different idea. How did you guys validate this? Obviously, there was the idea of like, okay, this is a really good idea. This is something that I would use. Was there validation that went beyond that in terms of saying, oh, once the unit economics checked out, once we know we can develop the product, we're confident. And we've done this before, so we have the reps, so we can validate it, or were there any sorts of other validation that went into it before you guys started to invest and really build the brand?

Yeah, so we did a fairly extensive amount of qualitative surveys sorry, qualitative interviews with people still in our network, but a layer or two beyond folks in your household, her best friend, and that was really telling. We got to speak with people of all ages, all different types of use cases and consistently everything that we heard was nobody had a storage solution or even knew how they should be storing product. And so that in addition to a number of more detailed insights that led to the feature set that you see today, really gave us confidence in this idea. And then we further validated the actual scale and market potential through a quantitative survey of 1000 plus respondents to further vet, hey, here's the idea, here's what we're thinking, price point, what have you and got very positive data behind that. And last but not least was also just looking at, hey, we're looking to raise a friends and family round, like who's interested in actually putting money behind that? And I think that was also a telling sign of broader network also believing in this potential too.

Yeah, I think that's really important, the different signs that you had that this could be something. I think a lot of times when you come up with an idea, there's this idea like, oh, I want it so everyone else wants it. But then it's also going through, you kind of have to go through the reps, especially if you're going to be raising friends and family capital, especially if you're going to be devoting your time to it to really validate. And I think the ways that you were talking about about doing some qualitative research beyond just your networks, as well as combining that with the general idea and the intuition that you guys have from as product builders and knowing that, okay? If any other sort of thing that's in the household, there's products around being able to contain them, display them, et cetera. So for this product niche that's emerging and only becoming more popular, we can build that solution. And as long as you validate that, you're in a good position once you guys have validated it. You mentioned you raised a little friends and family capital. How much like Ballpark did you raise out of the gates? And then what were you guys funding with that? Was it going right into production or what were next steps once you were able to secure a little bit of funding?

Yeah, I would say that was really proof of concept. It was really just saying like, hey, will other people believe in this idea as much as us and be willing to part ways with harder dollars to support us? So that was really our approach there. We've otherwise really been funded through our preorder launch, which was a really exciting and I would say somewhat unique approach at this time, especially after the last 510 years of VC money going to direct to consumer businesses. We said, hey, we believe in growing with our community and let's start by building that community and making sure the community shows up and is as excited as we are behind this. I definitely want Steph to share more about this, but we had a very successful preorder launch. We did it technically through Shopify. We had talked about Kickstarter, had its own pros and cons, still like a very valid channel that many people use, especially with hard goods businesses. We ended up going straight launching on Shopify, and that was a big part of how we were able to start this business that helped funded our first production run and ultimately get us momentum to where we are today. But Steph, do you want to share more about what we actually did? Because I think the strategy here was really unique and cool. Yeah. So we were kind of putting our.

Heads together with you asked the question about where do we use our funds and our money that we raised? And pretty much all of it went to the inventory and building the website and we didn't have so much left over for any big marketing push. And with marketing, you want to have kind of a diversified strategy. So with that, we decided to go very grassroots with our initial launch, and we decided to do kind of like the antithesis of really what you see today, as opposed to launching with paying influencers, which we truly believe in, and support that industry and anything splashy like that, or even getting launch. Press. We decided to just tell all of our friends and family about it and start this kind of chain mail where we wanted people to organically share this with everyone that they know would love it, whether it was, like, people who smoke a lot of weed or people who love new products or like to learn about things going on in the DTC world, people who love organizational products, people who are always looking to get really creative, and new gifts for people. So we each put together our own list of our personal friends through our Gmail accounts and told them what we were up to. We gave them a little discount that we said we were going to run for the next couple of weeks and we said, share this with anyone and everyone you know that would love it. And the way that we knew that it worked was because we literally did nothing else in the beginning. And all of our early revenue came from the four of us, our four team members sending those emails out to friends. And we were getting orders from people that we didn't recognize their names. I don't know anybody in this state. And that's how we knew that it. Was really working and that was really exciting. And I can also share a little bit about how we came up with that idea, but my husband and I invested in an athleisure wear brand, Outdoor Voices, many years ago early on. And I said, hey, I want to share this with my friends and everyone's going to ask me like, oh, do you get a discount or whatever. So they gave me a discount code, promotion code that I could use to share with my friends. And they said that it was one of their top promotion codes that they had had for a significant period of time. So I think that people hearing about a brand from a friend feeling like they get this inside scoop, it's new, it's cool, I get a discount to this. I get to share this with other people. I get to be a tastemaker, the first one to try it really works. Especially since I think people are kind of inundated with seeing the same things that everyone else is seeing over the social platforms, which again, also really works.

Yeah, I think that is a really cool way to launch because I know so many people think about like, okay, we know we're onto a product, but once rubber starts to meet the road, people start freaking out about launch strategy. Oh, are we telling people? Are we just going to Facebook? Are we going to kickstarter? What are we doing here? So knowing that you can build a product that not only you love, but that you can start to share with your networks and see the viral coefficiency, so to speak, of those products, like you were saying, you start to see those orders coming in from people that are outside of your networks, which means, okay, things are actually starting to work. And then if you can see those snippets of early sort of traction and early product market fit, then you're like, okay, now we can kind of start dialing up the opening up the floodgates a little bit in terms of ads and growth and that sort of thing to drive performance. So I love that in terms of strategy, in terms of presale and going through your existing network to start selling, what else did you guys focus on when you had just launched? Right, I guess by this stage, are you guys still off your first supply run? Are you guys having to order more inventory, walk us through from launch to the first couple of months and how you guys were doing things?

Yeah, so we launched on preorder initially and then basically as soon as our first order came in, started fulfilling and switching to I call it add to cart, but normal fulfillment. Unfortunately, it only lasted for like a week or two because a couple of things happened. One is our presale had gone really well, so we had sold through most of our first order. Number two was we had recently launched our TikTok channel, which just organic and that's really where we are today with it. And I think it was like I was sitting at our warehouse working with the team there going through pack of guides and all the stuff that you have to do to just make sure your first shipments go smoothly. And I'm seeing all these messages, all these orders come in and messages from the team. And we had had one of our videos had just gone viral. And I'm sitting there with the warehouse rep going through it and saying, like, hey, so this is like how our brand is going to work over the next couple of months. We're just going to be really successful on TikTok and in these other places and suddenly we're going to have all these orders to fulfill. So I think a couple of things in reality started clicking very quickly. We had just been starting to test into pay downs and we're seeing traction from that and growing our social presence on Instagram as well. So all of those I think were just things that we were growing and seeing those impacts scale. So it all happened in some ways unplanned, but at once. So we sold out and then really it's been rushing to keep up with demand largely since luckily right now we're in stock, which is great. It's an important place to be, to really be able to continue marketing and growing and running a sustainable business. But we are well beyond our first production order at this point and continuing to grow in that way.

So that's an amazing problem to have. But it is still like a problem, right? When you're thinking about you have all this demand, you have Tiktoks going off where there can be a ton of product demand coming in. How do you think about, especially in the early stages of a business, managing your amount of cash, like how much inventory you need to buy? How do you even forecast demand when you don't even have those data points like an existing brand? Who knows? Like, oh, this is typically how much of this product line we sell in this year, so we should order about this amount. How do you kind of gauge for demand and ordering when you're this early in the business?

I want to add to that too. Like with TikTok, it's like the viral coefficient is so hard to predict too. It's like how do you know when a video is just going to go completely crazy and you're going to get five, six figures of orders in a day?

Yeah, I mean you don't and so luckily I've lived through this out of way. There were many different instances of very successful marketing moments or launches. So I've seen website crash. I've seen you name it. So in some cases there's a personal element of like if you've been there before, you kind of roll with it a little Bit More Than If It's Your First Time. But I think there's a couple of things that we've done in terms of call it first order. Even first few orders approach it from a few lenses. One is certainly what are your manufacturing requirements or constraints? What are your MoQ? What can you negotiate with your supplier? What is that all summing to? There's unit costs. But what is your total buy going to be? And how much is that? What's in your bank account? What are you planning to spend on marketing? You look at it from the financial lens, and then you look at it from, like, okay, how many people am I going to have to sell this to? How many people per day is that? Per week? Per month? And what have I sold in the past? And how have those numbers gone? So it's really like a best estimate. And frankly, even when you're running, like, a core business and you're launching a new product category, you're still up against a lot of these same types of challenges. I think the color buy was something that was, like, one steph, and I spent a lot of time working on. We didn't get all the colors right, but luckily, we've learned that our customers really love our color assortment. And so that's a really unique thing. Often. Most retailers see one or two colors account for 80 plus percent of your sales. With us, we see a much more even distribution. Goes back to a really strong merchandising and color strategy that we have a fairly universal and gender neutral assortment. And so that's been something that has come back and really helped us. We haven't been sitting on, say, like, months worth of one color while we're flying through another. We've been able to manage that a lot more efficiently.

How would you say that the relationship that you have with your manufacturer plays a role here? Because the end of the day, you can have all the numbers and everything. It's still going to be hard to predict. But when you need to push something through the line and your team needs to get in there. Where is human relationship? Where does it play a factor here?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, relationships, everything. You can negotiate whatever contract you want. At the end of the day, it's the relationship that's going to make anything happen. We've been working with our manufacturer for two years now. We worked with them through all of our sampling and prototyping. I'm talking to my manufacturing counterpart every day at all hours. I've been on reach out for years with manufacturing partners, so I know her life story. I know what her latest dating history is. You name it. So I think just really building a strong personal relationship is essential. And it's been really tough in these last few years. Manufacturers in China, you can't go and see people as often as you have. And So really leveraging, all of the tools available is really important. And from the get go, there were conversation with this manufacturers that we're new business, we don't have historical numbers, we're not going to know, and we need flexibility and just really digging into what that actually means, what that looks like in terms of production schedules, so on and so forth. I think the more transparency you can bring to your partners, the better. And bringing them along in your journey. I mean, I see them as my sales rep. There is an extension of our team and she really is she spends just as much time as we all do on our product.

And Celia, another question I have in regards to the supply chain and the sourcing stuff is clearly you have a strong background in that and knowing how to do that, working with manufacturers and doing that yourself. So did you guys bring in any third parties to help you with the QC and that whole process, or was this something that you knew how to run yourself so you were able to just take responsibility for and do?

Yeah, so sourcing. I led all of that and leveraged my own network and my experience doing that. Some are, call it referred partners, or partners I've worked with in the past. Some are new, and you learn how to approach all of those relationships in terms of quality and inspection. So we've been working with a third party called Kima Qima, big third party quality network. They do a whole bunch of stuff in terms of quality and inspection services. And they were really our eyes on the ground when we were doing our first production run. You were looking at three weeks or some number of quarantine if you were traveling to China, and traveling just wasn't an option in most places aside from that. And so they were really a huge asset to us and a huge partner in this process. And I've worked with them in the past on many different types of products and highly recommend their services as an option for companies and brands of all sizes. And there's other people out there who do it. They just happen to be ones that I'd known and worked with.

Yeah. And it's such a competitive advantage for you guys to have someone who's been in the operational seat, who's really done this, because there are a lot of brands where, at the end of the day, you're trying to build a great product, you're trying to get it manufactured on time, shipped on time, and something that customers really love. And a lot of people come in and start brands because they want to start a brand, but they don't actually understand the executional chops that it takes to take a product to market. So I think you guys are lucky to have that experience in house as opposed to learning on the fly for your first time.

Yeah, I mean, I always say you can study this stuff, but product development supply chain is really like an apprenticeship, industry and space. You learn from your mistakes and you really only learn how to do it right because you've done it wrong before. And hopefully you're in communities or companies where you have experts and other people that can help make sure those mistakes aren't financially or from, like, a customer lens. Incredible, dramatic and negatively consequential. But you really need to lean on experts if this isn't something you've done before to help just keep everything afloat. There's so many moving pieces and it's really a juggling act, no matter how experienced you are.

And then, Stephanie, I also want to talk about because we were just covering TikTok and how that kind of blew up, as well as organic growth strategies. Your product is obviously cool. It's unique, it stands out. So what was the TikTok strategy and more like organic social content strategy? How do you make your brand show up in content? How are creators creating content with your brand and how has that kind of contributed to growth?

So I'll start with one of the challenges, since I think this is really unique to our industry and not something that's talked about enough. But given the federal regulations around cannabis, it's very hard for us to post as freely as we would like to around the nature of our product, how it's used, what it's used with. So it's a little bit of a fun challenge, although I wish that we didn't have to deal with this kind of hurdle. So a lot of our content sort of like hints at how you would be using it because a lot of our posts on TikTok in particular have been actually taken down and our account has been suspended so many times, which really is a whole conversation in and of itself, because so much of what is on TikTok can be inappropriate. And there are so many articles out there that we've all read about the type of content that does go on the platform. And especially given the legalization in so many states, it feels like something that we're working towards. But right now, we have to be very creative with how we position the product on the platforms, all of the platforms, really. And we want to follow the rules and regulations. So as far as our strategy, we have a little bit of a different strategy on TikTok versus Instagram, as most brands do. With TikTok, we're really trying to come up with short, quick, fun videos of using the product that sort of just make people smile. And on TikTok, it's more of a showcase of our brand as well as the product features. And we have a few different content pillars, whether it's education around our product and all of the incredible functions and features and detail that Celia put into developing the product to what the brand stands for. The people behind it our mission to support last prisoners project and the destigmatization around cannabis. And then really what works best for us is a two way dialogue. So learning from our customers, creating a conversation among them, and then we have a lot of really fun new content series coming up in the next couple of months that we're excited to share. And much like the box itself, how you kind of open it up and there's all these beautiful little gems and jewels inside and different trinkets and how they work, we're kind of peeling back the onion on the soul of our brand, which we get more and more excited about every day.

Yeah. And the other thing is just kind of as we wrap up here, the whole TikTok thing and content, it's got to be so challenging to sort of navigate. But you guys are also in a really interesting place because it seems like with the form factor of your product, it can be accessible to even non cannabis users. Right. Like, I look at it and I'm like, oh, I could store a lot of things in here. It's like a great little storage, like, mini setup for the house, for whatever it is that I want to store. So have you guys seen that as well? Are people using it in other ways beyond cannabis? Are there other ways, in interesting ways that people have created content that way? Yeah, I would love to just hear about some of the other use cases that you're starting to see.

Yeah, I just kind of had a.

Conversation about this over instagram where there's a lot of things, for example, that you don't want toddlers, for example, to get into. Cannabis gets a bad reputation, but there's a lot of medications, even cosmetics, that there's a higher percentage of poison control calls over. But cannabis is what you see in the media. So with that, there's a ton of things that for that purpose alone or for something that you just don't want anyone to see or get into. Based on the lock feature that people could store. And sex toys actually has been one of the more interesting topics that's been asked a lot via CX tickets or DMs on instagram or comments. And I think there's a lot of really fantastic brands out there. Normalizing sexual health as well. And for people who want to store it in a more private space.

Some.

Of the brand's products can fit in our box as well.

Yeah, I think that's amazing. I think there's so many things that maybe people want to kind of gate access to in their own personal life, whether it's cannabis, whether it's sex toys, whether it's jewelry, medicine. There's a lot of things that you just don't want other people seeing. By touching my girlfriend with Asher snacks.

On there because I keep eating all her chips that she priced. She did it today. She brought some sour onion chips and I just had to dig into them so I could see that use case. I'm curious, one last question from my end would be what is your team composition look like? Just kind of want to paint the picture for whoever is listening in terms of like the media side, the operation side, the brand side. What is Tulips? What is Tulips team composed of today?

So we keep it very lean.

I love them.

You're looking at the two full time team members here. And then of course, we have Joel, my father in law, who's involved in the day to day and is extremely tuned in to R and D on our current set of products, product improvements and new products down the pike as well as other areas of the business. And we have a TikTok content creator as well as another team member who is working on some paid media for us. But between Celia and myself, we really divide and conquer on every other aspect of the business. So you've heard a lot from Celia on product development, operations, supply chain, legal site, you name it. And then I probably left a ton of things out. And then I'm on brand marketing, content design, merchandising, all that fun stuff.

Amazing. And guys, for anyone listening, where can they connect with you guys? As well as learn more about the.

Brand Tulip so you can visit our site shoptulip.com and our social channels are pick.

Tulip.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the Pod. Stephanie and Celia have also been kind enough to give our listeners a little discount code. So if you're looking for a little stash box for the house, enter code Dtcpod ten on Tulip site for 10% off. Thank you guys so much. I know our listeners are going to love that. So thank you guys for coming on the Pod and we can't wait to continue to see you guys grow.

Thanks.

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