How to Build Resilience with Gr8nola

And then eventually I started building out, I guess, like a corporate sales channel. Because I worked in tech, I was able to kind of navigate into all these different offices through my network and basically became the granola of choice for Silicon Valley. But it was really tough because not only did these offices overnight stop ordering, I actually had one of my large distributors force me to take back about $50,000 worth of product.

And they were actually stuck in the Suez Canal for that week when that happened, and we really needed them. We were in a bind, and we were texting— I mean, emailing our suppliers saying, where are they, where are they? We found that out.

Would you be like turning on the news? In this podcast, we share how we grew a 7-figure food business out of our 2-bedroom apartment in Chicago, all during the height of a global pandemic, and bring in expert entrepreneurs to share their stories and wealth of knowledge in business strategy and innovation. I'm Annie Slavotsky.

And I'm Morgan Lerner. In today's episode, Building Resilience, we are bringing in the founder of Great Nola, a superfood granola company that is just killing the granola game. And like us at GoNanas, Great Nola had to adapt their business significantly during the pandemic and all the challenges it brought with it. So we'll be talking all about adapting channel strategies, adjusting to supply chain issues, and meeting the demand of an increasingly digital world today. So lots of meaty topics here, a great way to wrap up our first season of the podcast. So without further ado, let's bite into business. And so as mentioned, this is our last episode. Kind of crazy that we're saying this. It's been a long time coming. But we thought it would be fitting to use this last episode to take a look back at the past few years. And so COVID-19 has really been, you know, taking over in a lot of ways business owners' minds. It's impacted consumers all across the world. You know, you look at some industries like the furniture industry, so hard and so long to get furniture, shipping so much longer, so much more expensive, and it's impacted businesses in ways that consumers may not even understand. So we're going to kind of dive into that aspect of things, and that's going to be the focus of this episode. So we've brought in our dear friend Erica. Hi, Erica.

Hey, guys.

So happy to have you. And she is, like I mentioned, from Great Nola. And we actually know that your main client was Google starting up, which obviously got hit pretty hard as an office during the pandemic. And we'll dive into that. But we also know that Halle Berry enjoyed some of your granola and that kind of took your business to new heights. So we'd love to kind of start off by hearing how you guys got started and some of those tidbits.

Sure.

Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So I'm Erica. I am the founder of Great Nola, which is delicious, low-sugar superfood granola. So I actually started the business about 8 years ago. Now, mind you, the first 5 years was a side hustle to my day tech job, and I just had this entrepreneurial itch to start my own business. And the granola was something I was already making at home. Which was born out of a lifestyle in this dietary cleanse my husband and I do every single year the day after Super Bowl. So it's really hard for us to find healthy, clean snacks, um, to satisfy our cravings for something sweet and crunchy. And I was watching Food Network and I saw one of my favorite celebrity chefs make granola on TV, and I thought, hey, like, maybe I can make a healthy version of this, because most granolas are usually loaded with refined sugars, bad oils, and none of the ones in the store really taste that great. So took it to my kitchen, ended up using, you know, healthier alternatives. So just honey or coconut sugar and monk fruit for sweetener, organic virgin coconut oil for fat. And the granola was so good that it ended up becoming a household staple even when we could eat whatever we wanted after this diet. So it was just delicious first and foremost. So I decided to make that my business. And in 2013 launched at my local farmer's market. I was baking out of my home kitchen and it was a very humble side project. And then eventually I started building out, I guess, like a corporate sales channel because I worked in tech. I was able to kind of navigate into all these different offices through my network and basically became the granola of choice for Silicon Valley. So you mentioned Google being one of my first customers and they still are today, nearly 8 years later. But, you know, my granola was found in Twitter, Dropbox, Slack, LinkedIn, Uber, Square, you name it, just every tech office, not just in Northern California where I'm based, but also in the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, Denver, where all these tech offices have kind of like satellite locations. So that's how I built the business. You know, the flavors are all very unique as far as their flavor positioning. So it's all anchored on superfoods. So it's clean ingredients, low sugar, but then I have really unique flavors that you've never seen before in granola. So I have a black granola that's infused with activated charcoal and has chia seeds. I have a peanut butter flavor that's infused with ashwagandha. So they're delicious, but they also have functional benefits that I think the more health-conscious consumer is, is definitely more in tune with today. And it's just me. So I have a team of contractors, but it's pretty much just been me as a solo, solo entrepreneur navigating this new CPG world, which I had no familiarity with when I first started.

We can relate to that.

And that's such an amazing story.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I love that you chose, or it kind of fell into your lap, whatever, whatever one it was, the office route because, you know, the grocery scene and I know you're, you're in there as well, can be concentrated and competitive because you're dealing with so many brands. But even just choosing a different channel can open up an entire business and allow for you to be the, you know, lead and face less competition perhaps.

Of course. And I wish I could say that I was being highly strategic and thoughtful about my channel strategy. Um, but as you mentioned, I kind of fell into it. So when I launched the business, I first shared it on Facebook with my personal network that I am starting this little side hustle and it caught the eye of an old friend who happened to work at Google headquarters. And she's the one that was like, hey, let me connect you to the food team here. Maybe they can give you advice. And it was the right time, the right person. The right opportunity. Of course, I had to deliver with a good product. I had to figure out my manufacturing and scaling because that first order they placed was not small. You know, a lot of it was timing and luck, but you definitely had to have a good product first.

I love that though, because I feel like people may assume, you know, for example, we got into Nordstrom Racks. That was one of our first retailers. And people assume like, wow, how'd you do that? And really, banana bread was blowing up and they saw us on social media and email, that same kind of thing. And it fell into our lap and we pounced on the opportunity. But sometimes it is timing. Banana bread was blowing up and they wanted a banana bread mix. And for you, you caught the eye of someone who you had a connection with. It's a relationship and that built a channel for your business. It's kind of cool how it happened.

Absolutely. Yep.

So you mentioned that you were in an entirely different industry before you started Great Nola. And as you know, two co-founders who had absolutely no background in starting a business, especially a food one, how did you navigate learning how to source a co-packer, learn the food rules, all of those sort of things.

Back when I started, it was 2013, so there was less information online and less kind of online communities that we have access to today. But I would say my number one tip for that is just to network. I did not have a single connection in the food industry, and I just started navigating my tech connections to be like, hey, do you know anyone in the food industry? And eventually it was through building my, my network from scratch that, that's given me so much knowledge as far as kind of those first steps to take. Now there are certain things you can source and find online. So when it, when I went about how do I sell at the farmer's market, you know, you could find information on that, you know, the FDA website, but a lot of times you just need to go ask people and if they don't know, you know, maybe they can connect you to someone who might know or be familiar with the industry. So networking is, is crucial here. And I like, I think so much of the success of my business has, has been purely on networking. And that doesn't necessarily always mean meeting up with someone in person, having a direct connection. It could be just putting things out there on your social network, right? Like the way I put that I launched a business on Facebook, it was not to any one person, but it just happened to catch the eye of the right person who engaged with me and helped me kind of solidify that opportunity. So even when you think you're, you know, you don't really have an audience, I highly suggest just sharing updates with your community, sharing updates on LinkedIn, on Facebook, whatnot, so people just kind of know what you're doing. And then down the road they might think, oh, Erica's starting this and I just met this person, maybe I should connect them.

Absolutely. I think sometimes I think about luck, right, and how it plays into entrepreneurship. I know we mentioned this, mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I'm kind I'm kind of a believer that it's the effort you put out there and then maybe luck will come to you on one of those things. But if you're just trying and you're putting the effort out there, good things will happen. It's just a matter of when.

Of course, I totally believe that too.

And I think that's such great advice for anybody listening who's trying to start something and they have no idea how to tackle it. I think, you know, Morgan Lerner and I have learned that time and time again where things we did, you know, we started this company when we were in college and we would have, You know, maybe we'd have a tiny bake sale where we made $50 at a workout class. And that literally led to connections that have hugely helped our business now, where we got a grant at our university for a few thousand dollars and networked with the cohort who also received that grant. And I don't want to say the retailer that we're now in talks with, but one of the people literally 7 years later reached out to us and they're like, wow, oh my God, I remember you from Optimize. And now they connected us to one of the largest food service chains in the world and we're in talks with. So just crazy. You never, never know where those things go. 100%.

Absolutely.

One of our questions for you, I know you mentioned you have all these different flavors of your granola and you started it a few years ago, but the industry is so saturated with lots of different brands. How do you, you know, beyond just those unique flavor profiles differentiate yourself?

Sure. So, I mean, I think first and foremost, there's no other black granola, and you're not really seeing too many superfood granolas, at least on the shelf. But I think one of the big things that we have an opportunity to do is build a really personal connection with our community. So a lot of people first, you know, they fall in love with the product because of the taste. Maybe they have it at the office, but then what they might find is they purchase from my site and they realize, oh wow, there's this human, this person behind the brand that really puts a lot of care into the products. And I think that's something that really anchors that customer loyalty long term, because in the beginning it might just be, oh, this is a delicious granola, I'm gonna pick this over what I used to buy. But then now people feel like they have a human and personal connection not only to the brand but the founder and the story behind the brand. I think that is super, super critical, and I think you know, some brands, especially more legacy ones, it's hard to do that enough in an authentic way because they might just be too big at this point. So I just think thinking about your brand values, your story, how you get that across and all your touchpoints, not just your packaging, but on your website, all your customer communications, customer service, your emails, everything. That is a great way to differentiate and really solidify customer loyalty and be unique in consumer's mind.

Absolutely. I think that's something that's a cornerstone for our business as well. I know, you know, we both, both of our businesses put ourselves as founders in the feed behind the stories as present as possible to let them know like we are here, we are the ones who are doing this every day. Because I think you're right, that does, that does build a connection. So that's something we prize and personalization in general, whether it's through DMs or how we, you know, our copy and our brand messaging, we try to make it as personal as possible and not to come off as this kind of salesy presence because really it is just us behind the screen creating all of that. So it's kind of a fun approach too, and it's obviously more meaningful for us to be able to connect with everyone.

Absolutely.

Awesome. We've kind of not avoided but tiptoed around the elephant in the room about both of our adaptations during this tough time, but You know, you started off telling us you sold to a lot of offices— the Twitters, the Facebooks, the LinkedIns— all across Silicon Valley. So how did you pivot or adjust when offices took a little bit of a backseat throughout COVID, and how was that moving through that challenge?

It was very shocking and hard. I think COVID was a huge shock to the world, uh, not just from a business perspective, but personally, like, it just flipped our lives upside down, which I will admit I have kind of embraced because I think prior to COVID kind of felt like a chicken with their head cut off where you're just running around mindlessly everywhere just because there's opportunities to meet people and you kind of live by this always hustling mantra, which I think can be great and also an evil. And it's awesome that people have adapted now to just online business and remote meetings. But it was really tough because not only did these offices overnight stop ordering, I actually had one of my large distributors forced me to take back about $50,000 worth of product, which I— oh my God, I like had no choice. It was either like, hey, you got to donate this or you need to take it back, but we don't have a home for it. Because any distributor will say our job isn't to sell the product, our job is just to take your product and bring it from point A to point B. And now that there's no point B, like, you're responsible for this. And they cut me no slack. And you would think that these guys would like look out for their smaller vendor partners, but they don't really. It's all business. So that's like a learning. I think as a founder, when you get in these moments that really feel like do or die, you know, and if dying is not an option, you try, you make it work. Like you get creative, you get desperate, you find other ways. And so one of the ways that I pivoted was finding online marketplaces. So these aren't necessarily my customers that shop on my Amazon or shop on my website, but other platforms such as Misfits Market, right? They're huge. They're national. You know, they'll sell surplus product to their own subscriber base at somewhat of a discount. And so I was able to find this new channel of online marketplaces, or e-tailers as I call them, to basically like deploy this product out. So I basically took back all this product that was in bulk, and I would repack it into more retail-friendly pack sizes, and then I would sell them wholesale to these other platforms. And I actually got probably like the single largest PO that I've ever gotten from one of these customers. So not only was it a great way to salvage inventory that I otherwise would have had to donate. But I've sold to them multiple times since then. These aren't platforms that you, you want to be on 24/7 because you may not want your product on a discount all the time. But if you just need to get rid of inventory, get rid of packaging, or you just want, hey, a boost in top-line revenue and you're actually still making money on it, they are great opportunities and people that you might want to sell into once a quarter. So since then, you know, I think this whole online world, whether it's my own direct-to-consumer website or whether it's someone else's platform and they have kind of this national or local audience, that is— those are the channels that I'm really leaning into today. And Amazon as well. So Amazon, again, it's, it's not really my own platform, but, you know, the sales are an output of the branding and awareness that I'm generating. And that fortunately has risen quite a bit since COVID and has sustained. And so Amazon as a channel has become one of my largest as well. And You know, I think the good thing is that we are finally getting towards like the— I don't want to say the tail end of COVID but you know, we're starting to see numbers go down. You know, we're hearing that offices are going to come back in January when previously we heard it was going to be September, but then the COVID Delta started popping off. But I'm— I feel good about next year because what COVID has taught me is it's made me pivot into new channels that I didn't have prior to COVID, which are all now a plus. I've learned to completely write off food service as a channel. So this year I didn't forecast anything for food service, even though there is some coming in still. So anything that comes back next year to me is all just a bonus, which will hopefully be a welcome relief and amazing, because again, it's, it's work that's been put in years prior that hopefully will, you know, to some extent will come back. I don't think it's going to come back 100%, but it will come back more to the extent that it has been today.

You have such a beautiful perspective on COVID because not everyone can necessarily say that. But I think Annie and I can agree that when such a macro shift happens, you're forced to rethink and look at things differently, which opens up new opportunities potentially. Like you said, it makes you get creative. For us, it was similar in our main channel of food service shut down and we had to rethink our product, how it's the whole channel. So we went from food service to focusing online and then now online and retail, no food service. That's what catapulted our business. And similarly for you, it's like now you have all these new channels or big channel that can just add to your other business when it hopefully returns. So it's, it's such a good perspective that we both have because it can be daunting when change happens. But now I feel like if other changes happen, big or small, we're equipped to be like, okay, something good is going to come out of this. Absolutely. That's awesome. Do you think you discovered any other channels, whether current or future, from this whole process?

I don't know if I would say discover new channels. Like, the online marketplace kind of channel is the biggest new one. I'm definitely leaning more into Amazon. I'm definitely leaning more into direct-to-consumer than I was prior to COVID. And I will say that retail has proved itself pretty challenging, so I'm leaning a little bit more away from that just because, you know, consumers are— you can't really go in and demo your product. So, you know, again, granola is a very saturated category. So one of the ways that I was able to kind of win customers was by doing demos and getting the product in people's mouths. And that's a lot harder now. Consumers are shopping down as far as just picking maybe more budget-friendly buys. So that's a learning that I've had in COVID where, you know, there might be one new large channel, but there's been a lot of shifts within the channels that I, I was already focused on prior to COVID. So, you know, I think in the business it's always just around pivoting and adapting and learning, but then constantly making sure that you're helping yourself move forward in a better and smarter way.

Absolutely.

Yeah, we, we can definitely agree there. You and us experienced that same thing where food service was our business when COVID hit and we completely had to pivot. I think for us another huge challenge, you know, after we got over that hurdle of, okay, food service is down, we're not going to make prepared product anymore, we're going to go strictly online like you did. Then we started facing, you know, supply chain issues that were crazy. We had a global oat flour shortage where we couldn't make product for a month, and then all of a sudden that was fixed, and then you couldn't get chocolate. So that was really crazy as a result of COVID Have you had to face any issues with your suppliers? Have you had to deal with pricing issues? I mean, the world is in such fluctuation now. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. So the answer is yes. Labor costs of goods have all gone up. I think the good news now, I think the average consumer is aware of this. This is something that's constantly talked about in the media. In the beginning though, I think it was businesses that were feeling it and consumers didn't quite know. You might have felt it more if you're like buying meat, right? You hear about these plants in North Dakota that are just hit with, with COVID but you know, most consumers were still I think naive to that. And now it's a topic that you see in the news all the time, which is, hey, grocery prices are rising, you're going to see less discounts, there's going to be out of stocks for Thanksgiving, so you better get what you need. So I think that's half the battle because I think what the scariest part when you're a small business is having to raise your price because you're always afraid like you're going to lose a customer or a customer is not going to understand why. However, I actually did go into the beginning of this year with the plan of doing a price change on my website. And that was in reaction to, number one, the rising cost of labor and cost of goods. But then also, number two, I hadn't done a price raise on my website almost since the inception of my business. So it was at the time very, very scary. But I think again, because I have a very, um, in-tune community, people who kind of know me as the face and founder behind the brand, I am sending— I am the person behind every single email that goes out to my online community. You know, you just have to approach it in a very authentic, honest, transparent way. And most of your customers are going to, number one, not even notice, or number two, they're going to be able to empathize because you're able to help them understand what you're going through as a business. I did do a price raise in January, and I think any business out there who is contemplating one, if you know it's the healthiest thing for your business, do it sooner rather than later. Like, you're not going to regret doing it, and you'll be surprised that a lot of people won't even really flinch at it. I mean, within reason, right? It's not like I doubled my prices. Yeah. And then as far as supply chain, there have been some challenges around certain ingredients. I remember there was a moment when my co-packer couldn't find any coconut sugar. I literally had to go to one of these online CPG communities and ask, hey, does anyone have coconut sugar? And I was able to buy some brand surplus coconut sugar locally. So that somehow just like worked out. Yeah, power of networking, right? As long as you, you have good communication with your manufacturing, or if you're doing your own production and managing your own supply chain, like, you just need to constantly think ahead of the game. Just try to be as overprepared as possible. At the same time, you don't want to hold on to a ton of inventory, but you kind of have to just be prepared for those scenarios. The other thing, I'm doing another big packaging order run, and prices have gone significantly up. And, you know, one of the ways I'm combating that is I'm just going to commit to a little more volume. I know I'm going to use the bags eventually, but I'm ordering a little bit more to preserve, you know, maintain my COGS. One thing that I learned a while ago pre-COVID, and so glad that I source vendors domestically, but you know, when it comes to packaging, I'm avoiding anything overseas. I've previously done a lot of overseas sourcing, and even prior to COVID, it was very difficult to get things on time. And now I've heard it's just an absolute nightmare. So if you can source domestically, that's, I think, a big tip. Even if it costs a little bit more, it will be worth the headache.

I think you would appreciate this story. I don't know if Annie knows exactly what it—

I do, I was gonna tell it, go ahead.

Are you sure?

Okay.

Our salted caramel flavor, not sure if you've had this one, but it has some prized butterscotch chips in it and they do come from overseas and they were actually stuck in the Suez Canal for that week when that happened and we really needed them. We were in a bind and we were texting, I mean emailing our suppliers saying, where are they? Where are they? We found that out, which we like turning on the news. So it's just one of those moments where you literally see it in the news and you're actually affected by it and you have this kind of laughing moment. But I also have some other memories of Annie on the phone calling 10 different oat flour suppliers during that shortage. Just kind of crazy times of, okay, let's get our hands dirty and just do all the things because this is not normal.

Yeah. And just always have multiple suppliers.

Oh yeah.

Always.

I wasn't even thinking of that story. We had something more recently that I feel like she's forgetting. Crazy happened. So we were slated to go. We went on Good Morning America. We committed so much product for airing on the show. You have to, per ABC. And we had been planning this enormous production. I mean, 3 times what we've ever done. We had been planning for like 6 months. We're on the last few batches and all of a sudden we get a call from our manufacturer and they're like, "We can't get molasses." And we're like, "What do you mean you can't get molasses?" They're like, "You normally get it like the day of. It's gone. You can't get it." Oh, shoot. Anywhere. And we're like, "We're going on TV next week. What are you talking about?" And they did the same thing that you did. They called another manufacturing facility in another state and purchased their molasses at an increase to get it to us. But I was just like, this is crazy what's going on.

That's so scary. I mean, it just happens like when you have the biggest opportunities, those things come up. So nothing should come as a surprise, you know, don't be surprised when you're surprised.

I was just about to say, you kind of get used to this level of like dysfunction. Like you get a call from your manufacturer and you're like, okay, what's up? How do we, how do we handle it this time? You know, so you become a good problem solver and it's, it's definitely absolutely a challenge and a learning experience, to say the least.

Yeah.

And I think another thing too that I've, I've learned over time is, you know, there's some things that are out of your control, or you can only do so much to really make an impact to the scenario. So try not to overstress about things if you know you're doing all you can. And that is something that when I look back at how I was when I was a younger entrepreneur to where I'm at now, you start to get used to situations where of course it's going to stress you out in the moment, but you stressing out more than what you are is not going to actually help. So you might as well give yourself some relief and realize like, look, this isn't worth like ruining your day over or just sulking over or stopping anything for, you know. Just take it in stride. These are going to come all the time, and try to relax as much as possible into the problem. I mean, you know, I think one of the challenges lately has been just getting freight out to some distributors. Like, I've had one purchase order that was going LTL freight to Washington, and my broker was like, hey, this carrier is going on embargo, so that means they're not delivering anything. So they had my pallet, and then we had to go book another freight carrier to go pick it up and deliver it. And then with that carrier, they missed like 3 appointments, didn't know what was going on. And at this point, it's just like, I'm used to it, I'm not going to stress out about it. There's nothing I can do besides just, you know, constantly check in with my broker to to make sure that it gets delivered, which it did, but it wasn't worth losing sleep over.

That's true. You kind of learn that no business ever is perfect. So even if it's, you know, that big distributor or that big supplier, it's like they mess up sometimes. We're in a crazy world. We mess up sometimes, and the consumer doesn't notice most of the time. And if they do, you, like you said, you kind of be transparent and say we're not perfect. We're just trying our best. You build that perspective, and I think we're still working on it. Absolutely. It's always a work in progress, but to some extent you definitely get used to it.

Yeah.

Easier said than done.

Yeah. Yeah. That's why I said it's, it's always a work in progress.

Oh yeah.

Um, but our last kind of topic that we wanted to hit on, obviously the world has become much more digital these days. We grew as an online business and are now kind of dipping into some other, other channels. But have you had to change anything else? Maybe it is on your own platform or your Instagram and social media to adapt to the increasingly, you know, e-commerce and digital world, whether it's your website, ambassadors, any of those things.

I think this was last year in COVID, but I definitely optimized and revamped my website. And with the user experience in mind, thinking about, you know, not just like the information hierarchy when you get on the home page, but also from a product perspective, how do you kind of push higher price items first before, you know, maybe single or lower price items? You know, I think in the beginning when you're putting together a website and you're doing it for the first time, or at least for me when I didn't have as much like marketing experience, you're just like, okay, well, I'm going to list all my single products I'm just going to get my brand out there, you know, some call to actions. But there's so many best practices around direct-to-consumer shopping, the user experience, the information hierarchy, that it's really important to be thoughtful about that first-time user journey when someone lands on your site and this is the first impression of your business and your goal is to get them to check out and buy the product. And then from there you have to think about, all right, how do you keep that relationship going and make sure that you have that customer for life? And so there's so much other stuff in the back end you need to think about when it comes to your email marketing, or your SMS marketing to make sure that you constantly stay in touch with that consumer, but at the right level where you're not inundating them. So there was a lot of optimization that was done kind of behind the scenes on customer communications, but then also front-facing with a whole website revamp. That was a lot of work last year. And then as far as just different marketing strategies and channels, you know, influencers have always been something that has been in my arsenal since I've started. Have not paid any influencers to promote the product. It's all been through just authentic relationship building on Instagram or, or whatnot. And, you know, once you kind of have those relationships established and then you launch new flavors or you have big announcements or you just want to make sure that these people are constantly sharing the product, it's awesome because you already have your cheerleaders who have an audience willing and ready to share your product. So that's something that I consistently have, you know, my eye on and want to maintain and grow. And then You know, one channel that I think, you know, I don't have it figured out, but it's like top of mind to figure out is TikTok. I know this is kind of the, the new Instagram in some ways. And, you know, personally, I'm not much of a social media user in my own life. And so I'm not that familiar with TikTok. I wasn't that familiar with Instagram even before the business. So just have to dive in and test things, right? If you say, hey, I'm going to try to do TikTok or I'm going to try to do Pinterest It doesn't mean like, oh, you need to go hire this full-time staff or contractor and put all this budget to it. Everything that I do in the business always starts as like a lean test. And then you put a little time, put a little effort, see how it pans out. And then if it's worth pursuing, then you keep going. If not, you could just, you know, slow it down. And all you— what you did was learn. So I think it's all about testing right now.

I let Annie run our TikTok. I'm not TikTok savvy whatsoever.

I'm not that TikTok savvy, but I'm learning. It's, it's definitely a fun platform. Um, and I loved what you just said, you know, about always testing it yourself to begin with, you know, as a scrappy startup. And for people listening that are maybe trying to learn, you know, maybe want to start their own business or, you know, learn how to evaluate their marketing practices, I know you mentioned, you know, there are so many resources to find best practices? Can you talk about that? Maybe books that you've read that have been really helpful, blogs, things like that, you know? How did you learn?

Sure. So a lot of it is looking at the brands that you know are super successful and kind of imitating, you know, taking inspiration from them. And, and if you start to see, okay, these are really strong direct-to-consumer brands, and like you're trying to to say revamp your website or revamp your emails. Well, sign up for those lists, go through their email flows. Like, what is the cadence? What is the meat of each email that's being sent when you're a first-time, you know, subscriber? Go purchase their products. What are the communications you get after that? Or go look at their product detail pages and look at the hierarchy of how they set up their images, their add to cart buttons, what, what's below the fold, what's in the hero section. A lot of that just done by doing competitive research in many ways. There is one email newsletter that I've found has been really, really awesome, and it always has a lot of like real-life examples. It's called D2C. I think D, the letter T, the letter C. And they have really good nuggets of advice and real case studies that, you know, I don't like to subscribe— I don't subscribe to a ton of marketing newsletters for marketing-focused topics, but this is one that I've like shared with other people and, you know, keep my eye on my inbox because usually I scroll and I can usually take away something from it.

So I love that. We absolutely are big on competitive research, and I think I was actually talking about this recently. There's an element of learning and imitation in some ways, but sometimes it's just inspiration for your own creativity. I think when I'm crafting a post or when Annie's making an email and looking at another brand and how they set it up, it can spark ideas too. But you're right, a lot of these big guys who are doing it really well have the research behind it, have that data to know it's good. So learn from those who have done well in the past and then iterate and make it your own. And that's a very good strategy for learning really anything, I think.

Absolutely.

Well, awesome. I think that's all for our final episode of the podcast, which is again crazy, but this was such a good one. We always like taking a step back and reflecting. It definitely has been a crazy few years, but it's so cool, um, to be where we are today as founders and business owners. And just, I think we should feel a little proud for that because it's not been an easy time. So this has been awesome. We are so happy that you got to join us, Erica. And yeah, thank you again.

Thanks for having me, guys. So good to see you.

Yes, so good to see you too.

Well, thank you guys for joining in on this fun episode all about how we've adapted during these crazy last few years. Learned so much about adapting channel strategy, adapting to the e-commerce world that's growing really fast, and just coming out stronger as entrepreneurs and business owners. And it was so fun having Erica on this episode, the last episode of our season. And that is all for the last episode of our first season. More to come of Bite Into Business. I hope you all loved it as much as we did. It was so much fun. If you loved what you heard, we would also so appreciate it if you shot us an email at biteintobusiness@econanas.com and give us some feedback. Write us that review, DM us on Instagram. Don't be a stranger, and we are grateful we've gotten to do this. So thank you guys, and more to come from your banana bread girls. Morgan Lerner.