Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our Slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools and if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. You'll be able to manage your whole sales process. Plus my favorite part, the reporting.

It's super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto, but getting set up on Saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC Pod today we have the pleasure of speaking with Colin Flood, who is the vp of marketing at Unreal. Unreal is a chocolate and healthy snacks brand that is distributed in thousands of retailers across the US. They also have a big d to c presence and Colin kind of oversees everything on the marketing front.

So Colin, without me ruining it too much, why don't we just jump right into it? Why don't you tell us a little bit of your personal background, a little bit about Unreal and kind of your journey and how you got involved with Unreal and how you became the vp of marketing there.

Yeah, yeah, of course. So I. A little in my background, I started in e commerce. I worked for a sports e commerce retailer called fans edge back in the day and sort of sharpened my teeth there a little bit. Just around how the buying house was shipped down line and then worked for a number of years at an agency called Rockfish, which is under WPP, really focusing on more the shopper marketing space, but really how CPG brands start to activate online, how they shift focus a little bit from purely offline to one that's more omnichannel and then found my way into unreal. And it was really unique opportunity to be on the brand side and make more of an impact on how a CPG brand, in this case, food, can really come to life in more ways than just in store. Obviously, it is still very, as a brand, we're still really focused on the retail side.

Cool. And why don't you tell us a little bit, just so listeners have context, what is unreal, and tell us a little bit about your scale in terms of, you know, retailers and digital presence and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, yeah. It's worth just touching on. So, like the origin of Unreal, it was started about 13 years ago by a family and really two brothers, that they grew up in a healthy household, and it was a Halloween event where they got all this candy and then their parents wouldn't let them eat it all. And so the conversation started, and really the question was asked of why the foods we love most have to be so bad for us. And so with that sort of initial question, spawned this idea around better for you, chocolate snacks. But it was really the core of it was, if we can improve and kind of remove the junk from a category that is really worse in the grocery store, you can do it with any food. And so that was sort of the quest and the mission around building that out. And really, the focus then, over the past many years has been doing that.