DTC POD Liz Giorgi from Soona
Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:01:35
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 Liz Georgie from Suna. So, Liz, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and a little bit about Suna.
Liz Giorgi 00:01:35 - 00:04:29
Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. So I'm the co founder and CEO of Suna, but I have always been a creative person at heart. So today, while I sit in sort of a business role, I actually have a background in being a creator. So I went to college to become Barbara Walters. That was my aspiration. I thought Barbara Walters was the most powerful woman on planet Earth because as a little kid, you get to see her on the news. She's interviewing the president, she's interviewing Prime Minister. She seems very important, but very quickly realized that I didn't want to be on camera, that I far preferred the more technical and creative jobs. And so I had about a seven year career as a television editor that I'm really proud of and was really exciting. I worked on a lot of different programming, from Big Ten Network to CNN to BBC, and then eventually landed at PBS, doing a lot of different work for them. And in 2013, I became pretty obsessed with creating video for the Internet. And it's easy to look at that time now and not be very precious about it. But it's keep in mind, in 2013, the only two places you could upload a video natively to the Internet were really YouTube and Vimeo. And so I started a production company that focused on creating ad content, video ad content for YouTube and very quickly became an agency and production company that focused on everything that had video moving forward. Facebook, Instagram, every mobile app that you would open up would have video ads in them. And so we were creating video ads for a lot of different platforms. And in 2019, I decided to sell the company ultimately because I wanted to go after this opportunity with Suna, and because my co founder and Suna, Haley, and I, we really honestly just felt that Ecommerce was going to be the next area of opportunity. So sold my first company in 2019 and then started chasing after Suna shortly after that. And the idea behind Suna is really quite simple. There's not a single thing that we buy on the internet that doesn't have a photo. The photo is the most important part of the purchase making decision. It's the thing that makes you emotionally go, yes, I want that, or no, I don't want that. And it also is frankly one of the hardest and most expensive parts for brands without platforms like Trend or Suna or others. And so we wanted to solve that problem and we wanted to do it at scale. And so since then, Suna has shot 5 million Ecommerce assets in the last four years, which has been really kind of an incredible thing to think about now in retrospect. And we've just continued to be really proud of what we're doing as a business. We have 15,000 merchants on the Suna platform creating content for whatever they sell and wherever they want to promote and sell it.