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 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 Igorganic creative use the code Dtcpod. Ten for 10% off your next content purchase.

What's up, DTC.

Pod?

Today we're joined by Zawar Khan, who's the founder of Rel brand. So, Zawar, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in the CPG space, how you work with creators, and some of the things that you're up to with Rel brands.

Totally. Blaine Ramon, thanks for having me today. Yeah. So I'm a CPG guy through and through, and for those who don't know consumer packaged goods, I started off my career as one of the youngest brand managers at Procter Gamble, where I was on the Ole women's skincare brand, and I absolutely fell in love with building and developing new product innovation. So, like, what's something that's really just a pain point or attention for my consumer? And how can we build new products to go solve those issues? But over at P G, we have such a great R D team that's whipping up Tidepods and Swiffer and Fabrize and all these other great products that we all know and love that, as a brand manager, I didn't get much ownership over our product innovation pipeline and solving those consumers tensions. So I ended up at PepsiCo, where I was in the frito lay division. So think like, 60% of what you see when you go in the salty snacks aisle of your grocery store. And there I was, co leading innovation for our Doritos and Cheetos brands.

So the challenge there was really simple Zawar. Like, what are the new flavors and the new forms and the new packagings that are going to reignite some excitement for these brands, both with our consumers and our retailers had a slow 2010 decades. But how can we just get these brands back to where they need to be relevant for our Gen Z consumer and firing on all cylinders? So, while I was there, I launched over 25 new products, some of which are launching still today. This month. Cheetos pretzels. Find them at your local grocery store and did four Super Bowl ads with great talents like Lil, Nas X and Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, which tied really well into the second half of my career. And yes, I was just absolutely having a blast there. And while I was there, I had a few friends who were saying, hey, Zawar, do you know how to build and operate these products? Like, can you maybe help us out? And I was like, man, why do you guys want to watch CPG products? I don't even know what CPG is.

And they started explaining to me, like, hey, we are doing all these brand deals, and so we know these brands are making money through our audiences, and what if we just owned our audiences directly and sold directly to them? And it was an exciting thesis. This was a couple of years ago, and so I started doing a little bit of consulting and advising on the side, which led to kind of a two year career of consulting with creators, mostly with YouTubers, between two and 20 million. I would say that there's kind of three steps to launching a brand. Kind of the ideation, the build process, and the operate and where I was able to drive the most value was with the ideation and the build process. So what are the design thinking exercises we're going to do to find out what the right brand is for you, as well as who are the right suppliers, who are the right partners to go bring this whole project to life? So that's kind of me in a nutshell. So now I'm just kind of the creator brand guy. When creator says, listen, I want to launch a brand, I don't know where to start, I'm usually there to either help or guide them in the right direction.

So, zoar two questions. One, the first question is about the difference between the scale that you guys were at at like PNG or Pepsi, right, and working with brands, because when you're starting a brand from scratch, even if you do have an audience, it's a whole different can of worms, right? So how did you catch yourself up to speed there and how did you become proficient there? And the second question was, what was your background before you started as a brand manager with PNG? Is this something that always excited you? How did you even end up in that world to begin with?

What was the first question?