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Blaine Bolus
00:00:06 - 00:00:42
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.
Blaine Bolus
00:00:42 - 00:01:20
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Blaine Bolus
00:01:23 - 00:01:35
What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Scout Brusan, who is the CEO of Desoa. So, Scout, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself as well as what you guys are building at Desois.
Scout Brisson
00:01:35 - 00:02:11
Thank you. Excited to be on so Desois. I'll just give you the one liner there. It's a wine of nonalcoholic sparkling apparatiffs. So really meant to be something if you're feeling like a cocktail or a glass of wine, but you don't really want the alcohol. It's a sophisticated and delicious alternative. It was co founded by Katy Perry and Morgan McLachlan, who I had the pleasure to join full time right before we launched. But I had spent time, certainly in consumer packaged goods before joining DSWA.
Scout Brisson
00:02:11 - 00:02:55
I had started my own brand, also kind of in the functional food and beverage space and had, prior to that, come out of the venture and consulting worlds. So was that a consumer fund, m 13, helping launch businesses, really from zero and scaling them to the kind of zero to one stage, and had previously, before that, kind of been more corporate at McKinsey. So have made my way over time, really getting to, I think, kind of the really bread and butter of what I enjoy, which is the early stage kind of crazy stuff for the crazy people. So that's what we've been in for the last 15 months since we launched D'swa, and we're having a lot of fun.
Blaine Bolus
00:02:55 - 00:03:16
Awesome. And, yeah, I'm really excited to get into D'swa, how you guys launch, where you guys are at now, but would love to go back a little bit further. You said you have a background in consulting as well as having started your own brand. So why don't you just tell us a little bit more? What were you focused on in the consulting world and then tell us a little bit about the first brand you started before you found yourself in the CEO role at Diswa.
Scout Brisson
00:03:16 - 00:04:30
Yeah, so at McKinsey, I was very much a generalist, but I found myself drawn towards certainly consumer projects before I got there. I feel like I touched everything from as kind of mundane as semiconductors and learning what that world looks like as sexy as the ecommerce world that we're now in. Did everything from gosh like indirect procurement, cost cutting to strategy and growth. And I just got really excited about the spaces where you were touching that consumer experience. Also, funnily enough, I think I had a lot of interest in the entertainment space and had some client work that I did there. So I'd say for me, a lot of that period of time was just kind of the self development and coming out of it. I did my undergrad at MIT, which is very technical education and coming out of that world of, like, everything's black and white, hypothesis driven data grounded to this interesting world of business decisions that are made in ambiguity and knew that I wanted to do something that was even more entrepreneurial. Which is really how I ended up at M 13.