Welcome to Dtcpod, 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 built. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. DTC Pod 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 Igorganic creative use the code DTC Pod. Ten for 10% off your next content purchase. What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Julia Perez, who's the CMO at Owen. So, Julia, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Owen, what's the brand all about?

Yes, Blaine. Thanks for having me today. So the brand Owen it's Owen stands for only what you need. We're a plant based nutrition company, and we are best known for our ready to drink protein shakes. I know this is a d to see pod, but you might have Cnefts at Whole Foods, target, Walmart, Kroger, Sprouts. I mean, we're everywhere. And the interesting thing about our brand, besides that we're plant based and we have super clean ingredients, we're also top eight allergy free. And I think this is something that people might not know about us, but we actually have a very strong medical roots. So the brand was founded with this passion to fill a gap in the space for safe and delicious allergy friendly products. I think in the past, when you think of like, allergy friendly alternatives, they're kind of crunchy, maybe alienating for someone with a different food allergy. So our products are all third party tested for the top eight allergens. So, nuts, tree nuts, eggs, soy, wheat, gluten, dairy. I'm thinking, what I forgot fish, shellfish. And it really matters because if you don't have a food allergy, we all know someone that has a food allergy, whether it's a sensitivity or something that's life threatening, it's very serious. And even if you're buying something like, let's say, like an oat milk and you have maybe a peanut allergy and the lines are not tested. So if it's made in the same facility, it can be very dangerous to someone who has a serious condition or even someone who's sensitive to one of the ingredients. So that's a big part of what we do here at Owen. And really, we're on a mission to take over the protein space at large. So while we are allergy free and while we are vegan, we don't see just vegan brands. With our competition, we really want to clean up the space. The category at large is just we can get more into it later about how it's very confusing for consumers. And it's been that way for a reason, because brands have been able to get away with it. They can make things cheap. They can mass produce. We're all about transparency. We're all about cleaning up the market. And our mission is really to empower our consumers and to understand the difference between a healthier for you product rather than one that just kind of says so.

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I'd really like to kind of get into is I like how you kind of are able to talk about what the general product is, but what the broader market is and where things can kind of go from there. So the question that I have is, starting out, like, when the brand started out, was the target specifically, like, allergy sensitive people who were looking for a plant based sort of nutrition or solution or what was it, and how does that branding and positioning kind of evolve?