838. BOXFOX Co-Founder & CEO Chelsea Moore On Identifying A Gap In The Market, How To Get Into Big Box Retailers, And The Brand’s Social Strategy

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Welcome to the Earn your Happy podcast. I'm Lori Harder, Founder of Light Pink, best selling author, three time fitness World champion and I'm a crazy multi passionate entrepreneur. My journey has taken me everywhere from being a broke waitress, barista, retails associate and personal trainer with massive anxiety and no belief in myself to later becoming a multi millionaire in love with my life. In 2007 my husband and I lost everything. We found ourselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at rock bottom. We had no ideas and I had no education to fall back on. This is when I found personal development and learned everything I could about business. Not by choice, but because I realized no one was coming to save me. The conversations on this podcast are going to let you know that you're not alone and that we all feel like we don't know what we're doing. We're going to give you the tools to help you face your fears, take action, start your business, and grow those massive dreams that are keeping you up at night. It's time to create a life that you can't hide from and put so much on the line that your higher self is forced to come out. You're going to stop waiting for someone to approve of you and you're going to anoint yourself. Because I'm obsessed about building businesses that give women a platform. I want to feature you. So if you text the word podcast to 310-496-8363, you can get your questions answered on our Q and A segment along with a shout out. And if you rate, review and subscribe to this podcast, we're choosing someone every minute month to get coached and featured on our show. It just might be you. So let's get started. So you've probably experienced this next guest business in one form or another. I can tell you that I have not only gone onto the website and ordered this particular gift from for a few of my friends, but I have also received this gift over and over and over in the mail and loved it every single time. That's saying a lot. So today I got to interview Chelsea Moore and she was born and raised in Los Angeles and attended ucla, where she met Jenny as a Kappa pledge. While pursuing her degree, she worked in marketing at Brandy Melville, and she fell in love with the power of branding and the importance of humanity in every aspect of the. After graduation, she and Jenny moved to Venice beach, where the idea for Box Fox was born after they spotted a gap in lifestyle and service space for elevated and effortless gifting. She is a recent addition to the Forbes 30 under 302019 list and she is the driving force behind Box Fox's creative and aesthetic vision, ensuring we stay true to their customers needs. They believe in well presented and purposeful gifting. You guys, if you didn't put that together, together. I got to interview Chelsea Moore of Box Fox, which I'm sure you have gotten one of these gifts in the mail. I don't know how you couldn't. And if you haven't and you're looking for the perfect gift for a friend, sister, girlfriend, whatever it is, baby shower, wedding shower, you can go on this site and you will experience elevated gifting at its finest. I promise you that anyone that you gift with one of these personal boxes is absolutely going to be obsessed. So let's get started so that we can find out all about how they brought this incredible vision to life and how they scaled it so incredibly big. Okay, let's go.

Chelsea, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thank you so much for having me.

I already like you. We were talking earlier, you guys, and I'm just like, oh, it's, you know, you just drop in with people and you make it so easy. So I feel like I've known you for years.

This is great.

So it's gonna be a fun conversation. Chelsea, you are one of the co founders of Boxbox, which is your go to for gifting. You're women owned. You make gifting effortless, effortless and elevated. And I can tell you that I'm pretty sure that I have gotten 20 or more boxes and loved them all. So that's really exciting. And I've also gifted it. And so I have had firsthand experience multiple times and it's a genius, genius concept. So we're going to break this down, but I would love to know because I always love a good founding story of where were you before this happened? Like, what were you doing? What did your life look like? And then what was the moment where you were like, oh my God, I have this idea and this might just work.

Well, thank you so much for having me on. I'm happy to hear that you are a longtime recipient and user of our services. That is so exciting. Yeah, I mean, we launched Boxbox in November of 2014. I was 22 years old and I have two co founders, Jenny Oliveiro and Spina Suri. And Jenny and I went to UCLA together. Sabina went to usc, but I met her at my first job. And you know, that year after graduation, it felt like the community that you get so close with when you're at school and college that's so comfortable was just immediately disbanded. Upon graduation, all of my very now successful friends went off to grad school on the east coast or they moved to Hong Kong. They're all over the world and, you know, adjusting to the work. The work life balance of going from going out on Thursday nights and hanging out with my friends and studying really hard to 8, 9, 10 hour work days was a little bit jarring to happen at the same time. And it just felt like there's got to be a better way to kind of have a tangible connection with the people in my life that matter most. Which got us think, you know, for happy reasons like birthdays and engagements, but also sad reasons like people's parents getting sick or grandparents passing away. And so a lot of those life events were coming up and it was just like, God, I wish I could be there with my friend who now lives in North Carolina, and I wish I could be there with my friend who lives in Chicago. And that led us to kind of this exploration of like, oh, it'd be so cool if there was a plugin on our browser where it was like you could pick out the best things from all your favorite stores. And that led us down this exploratory pathway of, oh, it'd be so cool if you could just basically, instead of driving around all day on a Saturday to your favorite boutique and anthropology in Nordstrom and Michael's Arts and Crafts, you could just do it all at once in like five minutes. And that's what really led us to build a box box platform that's on our site that we built ourselves. And it was really the first of its kind. And you know, obviously we've expanded into other avenues since then. You know, we do corporate gifting and we do ready to ship gift boxes and we have a marketplace where you can just shop generically yourself and for yourself. But that was really what started it all that year. And so we worked most of 2014 to launch it. November 7, 2014.

Oh my God, I Love it. I've had firsthand experience of looking for different boxes that we can gift to our teams, different people. We were in network marketing, so we had, you know, we had 50 different people we always wanted to gift. And I would, you know, Google for these amazing, epic women and I'd be like, I'm not sending them sausage and random wine that I don't know about. Like, you know, pears, Totally pears. No, more like, I cannot gift this bizarre fruit anymore. So truly, you're solving such a problem and you know, majority of the people that I talk to, a lot of their best ideas come because they were solving a problem for themselves. And you want something better for your friends, for your family and all of those occasions. So I love this so much. So in the beginning we get this idea and we can see that there's a bit of a white space for it and you're like, okay, I think this is going to be a great idea. But then what's the tipping point when you start, like when you actually get the ball rolling? Like, what move made you accountable enough to not quit for us?

I think honestly a lot of conviction on my part, a lot of convincing to my co founders because I was the one who quit my job first. Right, okay. So they actually were doing a harder job of working their full time jobs that first year still. I was kind of alone in the apartment during the day and they would come back and then they would do like a double shift. You know, I think for us it just kind of was a combination of conviction and also just naivete, a bit like there was not a world in which I thought that we would fail. Truly, like there's been other ideas that have come and gone, you know, in the back of my head since we started Boxbox. And I've never actually pursued them because obviously we're so busy now. But like, we were all very convinced, like this is not being solved in the way that we want to solve it. And we know that if we really dedicate to this, the market's there because the consumer, the customer of Boxbox, really was us. We were solving a problem for ourselves. And so we knew that girl, that woman, that man, and it was us. And we knew that there was a reason. There was just endless opportunity there. And so once we placed the order for the boxes from overseas, I think that was definitely the accountability moment for sure. But honestly, it was probably like I was working at an ad agency. I was just about, you could still be on your parents health insurance until what you're 26 or something like that. I was 22 and I remember I got a job and my, I was sitting at my parents house and my dad was saying like okay, so we got to do that paperwork and get you on the health insurance at your office or whatever. And I remember being like, well I don't think we should do that yet. And then I once I told my parents too, like this is something that we're going to pursue and they bought into it and gave us a little bit of that confidence boost. That was also helpful too. That was a nice kind of like positive accountability moment I would say.

I love that. Fully believe in that. The second I get an idea that I'm like okay, I don't see how this could fail. I tell people, very important people, I try to announce it on social like I'll just say, you know, as long as you can announce what you know, something you can't announce. And yeah, so like you said like put some money behind it to hold yourself accountable, which was your boxes.

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So okay, so the first step that you did was you ordered boxes like you guys Google search, tell me exactly what that looked like for people who are, are in their head, stuck in their head, making this way a way bigger deal than it actually is to get started. What was that first initial step look like?

You know, it's in one of our pillars. One of our core values at Box Box is kind of resourcefulness, which makes sense because we're, we're self funded and we've done this all ourselves. So back then I just remember we, we were like, oh I've heard of this thing called Alibaba, right. And we can find some warehouses overseas to help make us boxes. And so we started late night messaging a bunch of people and you know, communicating. And I remember we put our first order through and that was, and then once the boxes were on their way, it obviously took like six to eight weeks. We started reaching out to Vendors about products that we could sell. And that was kind of like where we started. We had a friend building our website for us. A very simple Shopify website at the time. But yeah, that was kind of, that was kind of our big start.

I love this because that is not complicated. No, because having these conversations which I bet there was a lot of power in three of you, right? Like what was the power of having other people to bounce ideas off of and get rolling? Do you suggest people from the start try to find co founders. What is your thought process around that?

I have very strong opinions about co founders. I think it's like marriages or relationships if you have one and it's great. That's fantastic. Don't force it if you don't. I was lucky that I had and have continue to have two people in my life that we were supportive that we are well balanced. We are very complimentary to each other because a lot of people will reach out to us, you know, the three of us separately to ask questions about that. And it's like if you have the idea but you're kind of solo in it and you don't think there's someone in your life that you can team up to do it well with, do it on your own. You don't need the co founder. I don't think you need it. It's been amazing for us to have. But again, it was all so organic. You know, I went to college with Jenny. We worked really hard together for in our sorority. We were leaders in our sorority. We had done a lot of big projects and we had managed budgets and things like that. We had tried. We went abroad together. We knew how each other, what made each other tick. And I think that was really amazing for us. I think if you're someone who's, who has a lot of conviction, you can do it on your own. But yeah, I mean, I guess that's my complicated answer to your simple question.

I've definitely worked in things with people, which was amazing because it was very organic like you said. And then you know, the current idea that I'm in, I didn't have that person. And right now I'm kind of almost, you know, I think what we're looking for when we think of a co founder is we really just want to feel very supported.

Right.

We want people to kind of like riff off of and be able to bounce ideas back and forth and really problem solve with. And you can hire for that. You can find those people, you can get those mentors. So if you can't necessarily find a co founder, which maybe naturally those people can turn into that later, if that's something that you want. But you're absolutely right. Like, I'm just in that place where in the beginning I was like, no, no, I want to go founder. Like, I want, you know, I want to feel supported. And I found it in so many other ways. So love that answer. But after this company, I absolutely would love some co founders. I think that'd be super fun as well. Okay, so you were talking about vendors. So you started reaching out to the different vendors that you wanted. I would love to know the process of what that looked like. Did get rejected a lot. Did you know where to start for? I think my first question, if I was doing that, would be like, how do I know kind of where to negotiate numbers with so that it was a win win for them, a win win for us. How do I go into those conversations? So first of all, how'd you go into the conversations initially and then how did you negotiate so that it was a win win for both of you?

Yeah, I think, you know, for us. I had worked in retail in college. I worked for a company called Brandy Melville, and I. I had a lot of, you know, just exposure to kind of the wholesale world and going to magic and projects and kind of the pricing structure of the deal between Brandy and Nordstrom. So I kind of had a little bit of exposure to that world. And so because of that, we, as a trio, felt kind of a little more confident than maybe other people would, because this is definitely that probably the number one thing I've always gotten asked, but I found it to be the simplest thing of everything we've ever done. You get a resale license in your state, you. We did that. We knew we had to do that. We did a lot of research in our sorority area. What is that called? Panhellenic, at ucla, and sent out surveys to people about what they like to gift and what they like to buy for themselves. And kind of just going off of our own gut, made a list, a comprehensive list of kind of what we wanted to go after brand wise. And we, I mean, just started reaching out. And we heard back from a lot of people right away. We heard back from some people not at all. And we just, you know, we pitched ourselves like a little mini pitch of like, this is what we're doing and this is kind of what we want to order. Because of our experience, we knew what markup we were willing to accept accept and what was unacceptable. And, you know, we went from there. And we were really lucky. Herbivore Botanicals said yes to us right away. And we were able to kind of use them as a way to email other brands to be like, well, herbivore is in. It was about building a couple of people and going from there. And then, you know, it gives you a little bit more reputable clout, if you will. So that was kind of where we started. I mean, to this day there's still people that say no for their own reasons. Not that often, but especially in this, this world supply chain reality, certain people have like, you know, Sephora's got such a lock on certain brands of exclusivity that I can't get my hands on certain brands or like people are just do not have the stock to support another vendor. So like it still happens sometimes, but definitely very, very rare compared to those beginning days.

Okay, so you've connected with your vendors, you found your calm, the domino, right? That one person you worked so hard to get, that now creates a domino effect of other people saying yes. So you've got some vendors lined up. Did you guys have personal followings? Did you have email lists or were you like starting from scratch? What did that look like? Do you have your boxes? How do you market and who do you market to?

Absolutely nobody. Like literally we were just a bunch of 22 year old girls that lived in Los Angeles. Like, not at all. I am so jealous. Not that I don't think people with followings who start things don't work hard. I, I think they work very hard. But like, I always am. Like, God, it'd be so nice to have a following and then start something because it's just that built in beginning, you know, not that it carries you through forever, but it is a nice built in beginning. We sat down and we made an email list of every person we had literally ever met between the three of us. My TAs, the people I babysit for, like every girl in our sorority's parents, like, and their siblings and you know, my grandma, my aunts, it was across the board, just made this email list and I think it ended up being like 3,000 people. Like it wasn't like crazy by any means. And so when we launched on November 17, we had already been telling a lot of people about it. We had started the social accounts and stuff like that. Each three sat around my kitchen table that first night we were going to launch and we emailed personally every single person on that list to tell them what we were doing. And that was genuinely what we did. At the launch. Which is so funny to look back on now, now that we've like grown our email list and it's just so funny to look back on that. But yeah, we were just a bunch of normals. No, I didn't know anybody. And yeah, that was it.

Okay. Amazing. And I think that's genius. Like when you look at what you did, you really just got scrappy. And that's how you start. And that's how people can start right now. And it would still work if the idea works, right?

Oh yeah. I love, love, love that.

And the power of just like telling that story of why this is important to you. I'm sure the emails were very convincing of why they needed to help you with this. So did you put big asks in there? Like, were you like, here's what we need, here's how we need you to show up. What did you ask them to do?

You know, that's a great way to put it. I don't even remember doing it like that. Like, I don't even remember thinking of framing it in a way where it's like, here's how we would need you to show up for us. But I love the way that you frame that. That's so amazing. I remember we, we just said this is what we've been working on the last year. Like take a look and let us know if you have any feedback. And that was kind of it. And I remember, like, I remember the people who bought the first like 10, you know, like, I remember, I'll never forget. But that was all we did. And like we went off at Goodwill for so long, it's kind of insane looking back on it. It's great.

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Can you tell me a couple of the tipping points where your numbers really shot up, how that affected your business? So in the beginning you have your list of 3,000. You know you sold your first 10 boxes and then what did it look like? Like, how did the trajectory of sales start to come in because you have the low hanging fruit and then you're like, okay, we need to kind of branch out. Like what were kind of the three first mile markers? Maybe in that first year to two years that really started to turn the tides for sales numbers?

That is a great question. I do actually, in the first Couple years. I mean, me, Jenny and Sabina could absolutely point to those. I think the first big boy moment was we launched with just ready to ship curations because we were still building the build a box box platform, which is absolutely our bread and butter. And there's a lot of copycats now, but we were the first people to do that. And that's trademarked and we have a whole mechanism for how it works. And so it was going to take a little bit longer, but we were like, we want to launch now and build a revenue and build a base and whatever. So when we launched that six months later, that was a significant uptick. At the time, looking back, it was not that big an uptick, but it felt like it at the time. So that was amazing. And then the second one was that would have been 2014, then 2015, we launched that. Then the next fall or the next Winter, February of 2016, we got an opportunity from us. I keep talking about my sorority. My fiancee is going to make fun of me. The girl that was in my sorority worked for the Grove. She worked for Rick Caruso at the Grove in la and they were launching a little pod and it was gonna be like kind of a mini pop in type thing. And she reached out to us and offered it to us for free so that they could have a use case to market other brands to be there. And so we did a Valentine's Day pop up at the Grove, which was huge for us. Like, that was so impressive. If anyone is from this area, they know that's, you know, all the malls here are very fancy and that one's, you know, the main one in the middle of West Hollywood. So that was like a very big opportunity for us that we could actually afford because it was free. And then simultaneously at the same, it was all in that same month, we got that pop up. And then we got an article written about us in TechCrunch, a very nice article, which for the first time, a bunch of men in our lives were taking what we were doing seriously. Like, we got so many emails, so much traffic off that article. I still think to this day it's like probably one of the more successful things ever written about us. So that's. That's been really nice. And then at the same time, we moved out of our apartment into a warehouse. And this all happened in February 2016, which was like a very exhausting but very important month for us, I would say. And then, like, you know, things kept going. Well, I would say, like the types of corporate clients we Got just continue to get bigger and bigger. And then we did get Forbes 30 under 30 in 2019. So that was, like, very exciting for the three of us because we had been rejected twice and then got it. So that was fun.

I love that. I love that story that you. Which meant. Means you had to apply the three times to do it. So. Oh, yeah, give up after the second time, you know, so. And I guarantee you would have applied.

Again because of, oh, yeah, we had a cutoff. You know, that's right.

That's right. You're like, dang it, I'm going to apply until the cutoff. So that's amazing. Okay, so at this point, now you're starting to see what works. And, you know, these different things are kind of. I don't want to say coming to you, but your, you know, your article and this experience at the Grove, which, by the way, that's so cool. And then are you guys sitting and having team meetings on what this. You know, what you're starting to become, what the marketing plan should be? Are you starting to really, like, understand who you are out in the marketplace and develop off of that? Like, what were some of the main objectives at this point? Now that you were starting to understand who you were, where could you see yourself? You're like, okay, we need to make sure that we are talking to these people on or going out in social media in this way, or we want to be in these actual physical places.

You know, it's funny. Marketing's always been very. We've always wanted to approach it. And I mean, obviously the goal of good marketing is to imitate word of mouth at scale, right? So, like, I worked at Brandi, which was very grassroots, and, you know, very much at the beginning of sending, you know, I sent a package to Kylie Jenner, and she posted it and tagged Brandi, and it was like, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me in 2012. And then I worked at the ad agency where it was these giant budgets and, like, I can't even remember the name of the car, but, like, Hyundai commercials and, you know, and so I got to see that juxtaposition really close together before Box Box started. And so when we were doing Boxdock, we really just wanted. One of our biggest pillars is personalized gifting and enabling people to maintain these both personal and professional relationships in a really, really authentic way. And so as we started to pick up traction, our goals really were just, how do we just consistently and organically reach out to people at scale? It really came from A place of like, okay, we're a couple years older now. Who does Sabina know? Who does Jenny know? Let's reevaluate who we know. Let's reevaluate the places in the country where we don't think we're getting the coverage, the natural coverage that we already have. And so, like, at the time I remember, I want to say this was 20, the end of 2018, I started to say, you know, I think if we can get into Nordstrom, that would be insane. That would be such a goal that would reach the US in every community across America, right? Like, that's. That's. You got your Nordstrom in Cincinnati. You got a Nordstrom in Michigan. They're everywhere, right? And when I was growing up in quote, unquote suburbia, it was still LA County, Orange county, but, like, you know, it was Whittier. I went to the Brea Mall. It's not like I'm coming out to Abbot Kinney every day. And Nordstrom is where I would go to find cool things and I would go to see exciting clothes and makeup and whatever. And so at the time, we kind of got like a bee in our bonnet, as I say, about getting into Nordstrom. And we did. I mean, by the end of 2019, we were in every door in Nordstrom for Christmas in their Christmas pop in and on their website. And it was such a crazy thing and it was so exciting. Like, it was like, how can we reach more people, be right in front of their face and not be so like, here we're. We're in LA and we're coming from LA and we're talking to you from la. It's like, how do we reach people personally? You know what I mean? I guess that's what I'm more getting at.

You get this idea in your head of Nordstrom, which I think when we, you know, for a lot of us who have companies, we have this North Star of like, okay, we would love to be here, here and here. So when you're looking at, you know, in a monster company like Nordstrom, were you guys, like, who did you. Did you walk in the store and you're like, hey, I need to talk to a manager. Like, tell me, tell me who you wanted. You.

Honestly, if you have a brand and you're doing what you're working authentically and genuinely, and you're a good person and you've maintained a pretty good network, I actually don't think getting. Achieving that kind of a thing is that outlandish. And the way you're, you're saying, can I talk to a manager? Like it's not that far off. At the time I had had an email of the person who reached out to me about Brandy Melville years ago. And so I started there and like she didn't work there anymore. And then we ended up hiring a girl who worked on our sales team for a while and she had worked at a brand that had been carried in Nordstrom and so she had a couple contacts and so she actually really was the one that muscled her way into the home buying team to try and kind of pitch us to be in those stores and stuff like that. I mean the funny thing about it is your North Star changes, right? Once you achieve something, maybe it's not what you expected it to be. You know, being in those big doors like that, it's hard, it's hard margins, it's hard distribution, it's hard quantities. We're lucky that we don't really need that. We can be direct to consumer forever and it works for us. But it's a hard game for sure to kind of keep up with that for anthropology, Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, all of which we've been in. But it's a hard game for sure.

I've definitely heard that and I can see. So, so looking back, do you think it was a great idea for obviously getting new eyes to then brand familiarity and kind of like not have it be a long term plan?

Yeah. And I mean I'd love the opportunity to do it again. I think with those types of content of companies, they have so many brands that they're trying to do right by. And like I had a very specific vision of how we would work in a store like that as a service, as kind of like a product, as a service situation. But you know, I couldn't really get the buy in that I wanted and so we were treated just kind of like on any other product which isn't really, it doesn't really work for what we do. You know what I mean? And so I would love the opportunity to experiment again and I think think with the right partner internally at one of those stores, it can really be successful. But you know, we're growing really fast on our own and there's other things me and my team are prioritizing and want to focus on. But at the time so grateful. It was kind of like that TechCrunch article where people in our like external circles saw it and we're like whoa. And that, you know, always feels good. You're not aiming to get that validation all the time. But when you get it, it still feels good. It's like. It's exciting for you to be like, holy moly.

Mm. It's. You know, I talked to so many entrepreneurs, and it's a million little moments. There's never one or ten. There's, like, hundreds. There's thousands of these little wins that just kind of keep that momentum going. Right. They're all those little dominoes that just keep tipping. And, like, you said, like, you have this. This idea, and you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm so excited about this. Especially in being like, this is gonna be the one. And then you learn that lesson that it's like.

And it's interesting.

Million things.

It's a million things. And, like, it's so funny, you know, we're. We work so hard every year, and, like, Covid was like, 2020 was crazy, but 2021 for us was all about kind of like, fortifying our systems and processes so that we would never feel shaken like 2020 did ever again. And then on social media, at the end of 2021, everyone's reflecting on their year and talking about, you know, making these reels and TikToks, about the video clips of them on hikes and whatever and all the things they accomplished. And I remember sitting there, like, at the end of Christmas and just being like, I don't even remember what happened this year. And then the other day, we do post mortems in January, and I was like, whoa, we, like, we did a lot last year. We. I won and I. We haven't switched it over yet, but we are shopboxbox.com but we've always wanted to be boxbox.com. yeah. But somebody owned it and was holding it hostage for years, and I couldn't even access who had it to send them a letter to make an offer. Yeah. And I found this lawyer last year, and I fought tooth and nail. And there's a loophole when you have a trademark, because we have a trademark. And I got them. They literally, legally had to hand it over to me for free. And it was probably the biggest, most exciting win that I completely forgot about until our CFO the other day was like, you did that? And I'm like, I forgot about that. But it's still so exciting. Wow.

That's.

I understand how huge that is. And that's so cool.

It's just validating.

Totally. Okay, so, you know, as you're talking, I love hearing just. It's never a what.

Right.

I Love that quote. It's never a what, it's always a who. When you were like, okay, who do we know who knows somebody in Nordstrom? So yes, you know your what's. But then you have to go and get it done with the whole. So with that said, like, you know, going back to the Nordstrom thing and different partnerships that you want and you never know who's listening. So who is your. When you said your dream partnership, like.

What would that look like?

Because you said who. You know who's your dream partnership? And what would that look and feel like for you to be like your best case scenario? Big win.

I mean, I still think Nordstrom is the be all end all in terms of like retail and customer service and things like that and enables you to reach more people. I think figuring out how to do it correctly, which I just don't want to give too much away because I've got some creative ideas with that. But doing something that's more service oriented in partnership with Nordstrom would be just killer. Oh my gosh. To be able to leverage their network, to be on the ground in different communities would just be so amazing. I think that would be such a killer partnership. That'd be crazy.

Well, we're just gonna put that out into the universe for you and hope that.

Well, it's funny you say that. I think what you're saying about, you know, it's not the. It's not the what, it's the who. I just learned from, you know, the Internet last year too. That's called an abundance mindset and I've always practiced that. It's always the you not. It's not an entitlement necessarily. It's like a. You can. You. You want it, go get it. Like, go ask for it, you know, And I think that we've definitely with Box Box always felt like that from the beginning. Like, why not us? Why can't we build a successful company and employ dozens of people and create meaningful lives? Like, why not?

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. If it's. If it's not you guys, it's gonna be somebody else. Literally from the same background, started in the same exact way. I seriously have a theory on ideas. And it's actual. It's an actual theory as well. I think it was Plato, to be honest with you, that there's all of these ideas that are out in the ether, like up in, let's just say the cloud, right? And they're waiting to land and like they will land. And it's up to you. If you're going to be the person who's like, okay, I'll do those hard things.

Oh yeah.

But they're all up there, they're all waiting. So anybody who like, tunes into like, okay, why not me? You know what, I'm going to start start looking for this next great idea or something that lights me up and it will come in your space because these ideas want you. Like, they want you.

Yeah.

So I love that this Nordstrom idea wants you. You just need to keep putting it out there. So super excited about that. Okay, tell me how plans have completely changed from when you started to now.

They haven't really in the term of like, like our true north. I think from the get go, me and my co founders always kind of agreed that this was not a money play or a quick turn play. This was a long term thing. Building a business that is, has a great mission, but also is an entity that is enabling us to service other things that are important to us, whether that be philanthropy or, you know, we're very passionate about creating a safe and happy and well balanced work environment, having meaningful parental leave and having a way for our staff to volunteer, like a vehicle for them to go out and service their favorite organizations or favorite entities that they like to support. And I think the true north hasn't changed. Like what we are serving and why has stayed the same. We just keep iterating and innovating within that of how to just make it better as we go.

I love that. Okay, why don't we talk about ads or organic or a mix of both and we'll talk a bit social strategy. So what are you guys doing right now? Have you done ads in the past? Are you doing ads right now? I know that so much changed in this past year. And how did that affect you guys?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we didn't really do paid until 2019. We were just kind of being. I hate the term grassroots. I. We were being inexperienced and naive if I'm being more honest, which can work.

It actually can work.

So it can work. It can work. So we were just very under the radar up until then. And then we started to do a little bit of paid social and it's taken a while to find the right partners to help us do that, but we definitely do that. We do Google search stuff as well. We've done some podcast ads for trade with some really great partners that we've been lucky enough to do stuff with. And you know, we do TikTok now too.

Okay.

And so for us what we're finding. I'm sure you are aware of this too, but last June with the Apple iOS Privacy Update Life, there was just such a shift in returns automatically. And so we, last summer, I mean I felt it across the board in the retail circles that there was a huge like constriction and so we had to pivot quickly, found some agency partners that we're really happy with that have really pushed through that for us and then some fantastic content partners to help us create some really compelling content. And now, I mean it's really about the creative. It's really about just like iterating on the creative quickly. What's working, what's not working. You just kind of have to move a lot faster now, which we didn't. We don't even perfectly have the bandwidth to do yet, but we're working towards it, you know.

Oh God. There's always more, there's always more that we'll be doing.

There's always more. But yeah, I mean it's been a game changer and we have pretty well performing stuff and so we're just, you know, continuing to invest in it and seeing where it can take us. It's exciting.

So TikTok as a modality for a product company, which is something that I'm really starting to look at and talk about and honestly we're starting for ours. Our product is not available yet but just building everything in the pre, pre launch. So with that said are you guys which I'm going to go now, your TikTok is obviously for Foxbox and then are user recreating it? Do you have a team creating it? Like do you have some content pillars for TikTok? Tell me kind of your strategy there.

So our strategy I help a little bit. Our marketing coordinator has a full path to create whatever she wants and post she wants for our organic or owned TikToks. And then we have a content partner that is like an agency network of content creators and so they deliver videos that we can leverage just as TikToks or we can spin them up as ads which we just feel like the social currency type user generated content, aesthetic and vibe just translates really well and it's more authentic and endearing I think. And we've been really happy with that partner too.

Oh, that's great. Okay, so social strategy, do you use influencers? Do you use big influencers? Are you into the micro influencers? What do you guys do?

We haven't done much. We have a few people that we've become, you know, Business friends with over the years, a couple of influencers that we gift consistently for different occasions and they always post and that's great. This year we're looking at it in a different way. I'm looking at more like groups of friends that are influencers and finding different ways to leverage their relationship and how Box Box can fit into their relationship and trying to tell a more compelling use story, if that makes sense. And we've got some exciting stuff coming out for Valentine's Day that we're really excited about to celebrate our Galentine's collection, but haven't done too much in that space. I would love to get into affiliate marketing. We just don't do it. We just haven't had the bandwidth to do it properly. But I do think that first products that can be extremely helpful too. I know I have friends that that works very well for.

I love that as well. Okay, so for products. So there's probably a lot of different companies that approach you. How do you choose what you put in the box and how do people, I guess, apply if that's how it's done?

This is something we have been so passionate about since the beginning and we still follow the same rules. When we started Boxox, it was truly about getting rid of the crap that you and I talked about at the beginning of this podcast. Right. What do people want that is utilitarian, it's well designed, and it's from a company run by good people. Those are our three benchmarks that our buying and merchandising team work off of. We have very great relationships with our vendor partners. Over the years, we've built such rapport with those teams. We just really want it to feel useful, you know, and we really want to be able to shine light on different types of brands. Bipoc owned brands, LGBTQ owned brands, eco friendly brands. Brands that give back as a significant pillar of their revenue. Because for us, like a big power we have is our purchasing power. And so we're not small potatoes. We're not, you know, urban Outfitters, but we're definitely not small potatoes. And so our purchasing power goes, I think, a fair bit far with people. And so that's kind of our benchmark. And so when people reach out to us, we get submissions all the time. People are more than welcome to email. Hello, shopboxbox.com every single submission we get gets discussed in a weekly product meeting at the head of a weekly product meeting. And. And our buyer will reach out if it's a good fit. We found a lot of brands that way because we do work with bigger brands like Veluspa and Ouai, but we also have some really small indie brands too, that we love.

Okay, so I would love for you to just kind of share anything that is coming up for you that you would love to share about the journey or something that you feel like entrepreneurs should know. A universal truth.

It's all hard work. Whether you work somewhere or you work for yourself, it's all hard. It's just different kinds of hard. It's like, are you the one that's, you know, having to deal with your, your employees and all the paperwork and making sure everyone's happy and making sure the 401k match is high enough and, and making sure the numbers are good and the ad roas is good? Or do you want to be the one that has the deadlines and you're leveling up to your boss or you're managing down to your team, but you get to. When you go on vacation, it might be a real vacation. I wouldn't say my vacations are real vacations, but I'm also in charge, so I can go on vacation whenever I want. It's just a trade off. It's all hard. I think that's the universal truth. And it's like life is hard, though. So it's like our team, we enjoy it. We've enjoyed the journey. We love building the brand and the service and the aesthetics and the marketing and all of that is such a joy. The sales strategy, the corporate gifting, that's also fun. But me and my co founders have also loved the management and building of the systems and getting to be the ones that make the decisions of what we believe are right and wrong in our policies and what we offer in our benefits and how we handle the COVID and all of that. And so we've just enjoyed both sides of it. It's all hard. It's all hard. What kind of hard do you want to live? You know, that's kind of the thing. It's. It's rewarding though. It's. It's really rewarding and I very much enjoy waking up every day even when it's hard, you know, oh my gosh.

There'S so much there that I could dig into, but that's a whole other podcast we'll just have you on in the future again. You know, just team building and who you become and, and yeah, navigating these really tough years and things that are. That come up like, it's just, I guarantee that you are just a woman you couldn't have even fathomed now, you know, 10 years in the making.

So it's so. It's interesting. It's like that's where the co founder thing comes back into play, where it can be really lonely if what you build gets very big and you don't have an equal with you. I think that can be really hard. And I'm, I'm very, very, very grateful for Jenny and Sabina and that, that we've had each other, because it's also a weird experience to start something at 22. And now I'm 30, and I wasn't necessarily a fully confidently, fully formed adult either. And then you have to manage people and you want to get the best out of these people and you want the best for yourselves and you want to respect people. You don't want to hurt people's feelings. People don't want to be your friend because you're the boss. And that's really weird. And, you know, all that's a whole other thing to unpack.

Oh, so good. Yeah, there's a lot there and I just.

So.

I so feel you on that. And I'm, I'm very grateful just for all of the wisdom that you have shared with all of our listeners. Where can we go and build a box? Where can we buy a box for ourselves? All of the things.

Yeah. So you can go to boxbox.com and you can find us on Instagram @shopboxbox. And we're there. We're there 24 7, 365.

Amazing. Well, so grateful for you and you guys. Everybody listening. The biggest thing that you can do for our guests is to go follow them, obviously. Go to the website, go to boxbox.com, which now you own, which is so exciting. Go to boxbox.com, go check it out, and also shout them out on Instagram. So go let Chelsea know on Boxbox or tag them and let them know what your biggest takeaway was from this podcast. So I know this is going to help so many people. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye, everyone.

It.