Craig Dubitsky [00:00:20]: Hello, my favorite word. I’m Craig Dubitsky, the friendly founder of Hello. To me, it’s a matter of being thoughtful about everything.
Kelly Kovack [00:00:33]: Culture, as it relates to building a brand and a business, has become one of these ubiquitous talking points like disruption and community that everyone feels the need to check off. I’m Kelly Kovack, founder of Beauty Matter. Culture, disruption, and community take commitment, and more than that, they take real work, but when done right, the result is dynamic brands that stand for more than the products they sell. Sure, all of these things can be crafted in strategy sessions, but the secret sauce is, more than often, a larger than life, dynamic founder. Craig Dubitsky, the founder of Hello and Colgate Chief Innovation Strategist is that guy. Identifying white space and cracking open opportunity by building brands that defy convention and redefine categories, Craig is a visionary, a brilliant marketer, and one of the most positive, generous people I know.
So, Craig, thank you for joining us today.
Craig Dubitsky [00:01:38]: Thanks for having me.
Kelly Kovack [00:01:40]: I have to say, I was so excited that you said yes, because I’m such a fan of the work that you do.
Craig Dubitsky [00:01:48]: Oh, well thank you.
Kelly Kovack [00:01:49]: And, I also found it incredibly difficult to prepare for, because there’s so many sort of things that I want to discuss. So, I thought, you know what, we’re just going to like, go at it and see where the conversation takes us.
Craig Dubitsky [00:02:03]: Yeah, I love that. Let’s go, I’m ready.
Kelly Kovack [00:02:05]: You know, so, I think that there’s so many brands that you’ve touched.
Craig Dubitsky [00:02:12]: They may have touched me first.
Kelly Kovack [00:02:14]: Well, they may have touched you – I think brands often do that, they kind of find you, but you were involved in Method early on, you were co-founder of Eos, and now, Hello, and I think that, you know, when I think of you or when I run into you sort of in the industry, you’re always sort of the most optimistic person in the room, and you are sort of the embodiment of whatever brand you’re sort of touching at that moment, which I think is – it’s amazing, because it shows the power of conviction of sort of what you’re doing.
Craig Dubitsky [00:02:50]: Well, thank you. Positivity and optimism, I’m very fortunate to somehow have this wild clock ticking inside of me that isn’t keeping time, it’s just keeping track of how much positivity can be put out there in the world, and I’m basically the luckiest person, ever. So, I appreciate all of my luck, and I think it maintains itself because I keep trying to put more positive stuff out there.
Kelly Kovack [00:03:20]: Well, you also share it.
Craig Dubitsky [00:03:22]: Well, I try, I’m trying, I’m trying. Again, I feel really lucky, and I think the way I’m able to maintain the luck over a long period is just keep putting positive stuff out, and I feel like the more of that that goes out into the world, the more you’re going to get back.
Kelly Kovack [00:03:40]: I 100% agree. I kind of wanted to approach this from you’ve created all of these great brands, and I think the most amazing thing to me is they’re really transformational brands; they’re not even…they’re disruptive, but they’re almost more than that. Like, you go head-to-head with some of the biggest companies in the world in one of the most difficult channels to navigate, and so, in kind of…I’m trying to – I would love to understand sort of the thought process, and I guess we can use Hello because it’s what you’re doing right now. What was that moment where you were like, “Okay, I need to do oral care differently”? Because that’s not something that people sort of ponder.
Craig Dubitsky [00:04:28]: Sure, sure. If I go back and it’s a nice moment of self-reflection for me, so thank you for giving me that and this great question. I think I owe a lot, as do most people, to their parents; my mother, in particular, instilled in me this sense that I could try anything. So, I think I grew up with this notion that there’s no reason to be scared of anything, and for me, I have no fear of failure, just of not trying, because if I don’t try, I’ve already failed. So, if people are listening to this, I want to share that with them: if you don’t try, you’ve already failed, so you’ve got to go for stuff, and regret is a horrible, horrible thing, you just don’t want to have any regrets. Funny thing, on my way in today, this afternoon, to come see you, I got a call from a fellow who I’d met about five years ago, six years ago, and I hadn’t spoken with him since, and he’s an adjunct professor at a university now and he just wanted to catch up, and he said, “You know, I remember six years ago you said this thing and it was this nugget that really stuck with me,” and I was blown away that this person, who is a very accomplished person, remembered anything I had to say, let alone this thing, and he said, “You made a comment that when a lot of people told you no, you couldn’t do something, it kind of egged you on,” and that’s another thing about optimists; a lot of people told me, “No, you can’t do something,” and I always felt they were much more accomplished and much more than I was, and I looked at that as a go signal, like, “Yay, this really brilliant person just told me they’re not going to compete with me!” They didn’t just tell me no, they just told me they’re not going to compete, so I’d go for it, and I give all that as a little bit of a backdrop, because you ask how Hello got started, but I think if I go like, deep, deep, deep, it’s because my mom was like, “Of course you can do it, why can’t you do it?” So, the genesis of Hello, actually, the birth of this idea, happened not very far from where we’re sitting, which is really amazing. Yeah, when I was on my way here, I’m like, “Oh my god.” Like two blocks from here, there was a certain large, national chain drugstore, and I happened to walk in to this drug store, and I’m hypervisual, I’m just always looking around, taking things in visually, and I didn’t go in there with the intent of looking for a category in need of some love, but again, sometimes you have an idea for a brand, sometimes the idea for a brand has you, and in this case, it had me walking by the oral care set, and I just couldn’t help but look at all these pictures of extracted teeth I had seen on the boxes, like some had holograms of extracted teeth. They were teeth, and they were teeth with their roots hanging out, like their little dangling roots, and it really jumped out at me, and basically, I don’t know if this is like a G-rated or a PG-rated podcast, but my internal monologue said, “What the fuck? This is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen, like what the fuck, why are there extracted teeth? That’s the last thing I ever want to see.” I know they’re telling me their stuff is good…
Kelly Kovack [00:07:37]: But, it had never occurred to you, sort of like…
Craig Dubitsky [00:07:42]: No, I hate the dentist. I was like a normal guy hating the dentist. Now, I love the dentist.
Kelly Kovack [00:07:44]: How many other times have you walked down, sort of an aisle of toothpaste, without paying any attention?
Craig Dubitsky [00:07:50]: Countless. Countless times. For some reason, my spidey senses tingled, and there was like this giant shelf set of extracted teeth, so I just thought, “That’s really crazy. Isn’t that sort of the last thing I want to see? Aren’t they trying to tell me that if I use this stuff, I get to keep my teeth? Why are they showing me this dead soldiers? It’s just weird.” So, I stopped, and I started comparing the teeth, because some had holograms of teeth, and some had beautiful, highly stylized teeth. As teeth go, we all wish we had these teeth; they’re beautiful.
Kelly Kovack [00:08:25]: It was one of those categories where it was like a war – a war for shelf space, a war for messaging, product proliferation.
Craig Dubitsky [00:08:34]: Right, everything. So, all these, like, speaking of war – there were all these casualties of war, which in this case were highly stylized teeth, and I looked at the ingredients, I just started picking up product, and I’m not a chemist, but you don’t have to be a chemist to realize…
Kelly Kovack [00:08:49]: And this was in 19…sorry, 2012?
Craig Dubitsky [00:08:52]: No, earlier, like earlier 2000s, I think, is when this first hit me. I’m so bad with dates, I’m like a dog, you close the door, you open the door, and it’s like I haven’t seen you in eight years, I’m like, “No, you just opened and closed the door, puppy. What’s going on?”
Kelly Kovack [00:09:07]: But, Hello sort of launched in 2012, so it was like, pre that.
Craig Dubitsky [00:09:10]: Yes, yes, so a couple years before that, I have this sort of extracted tooth epiphany, and looking at these ingredients, I shuddered. I’m like, “Saccharine? Didn’t that get vanished from diet sodas, like, decades ago? Why is that in my toothpaste? And alcohol? Why is there alcohol in this stuff? And artificial flavors? Why are there artificial dyes?” So, there were all these ingredient questions I had, but then, to your point, I had a bigger question, which was, why is everything in this category talking about war? Everything was aggressive, and to me, driven by fear and shame. And, I know this conversation we’re having now has now gone on for a minute or two or three, but believe it or not, all this happened in like a picosecond in my brain at one time, and I thought, “Extracted teeth: bad. Ingredients: really scary,” and all the positioning of the categories seemed to be driven by fear and shame, like if you weren’t whitening, you were frightening, and you weren’t going to get paid and you weren’t going to get laid. The job interview was going to go poorly, the goodnight kiss at the end of the date wasn’t going to happen for you, the dentist was going to put the hurt on you. Everything was, to me, benefit driven to this extent that it was going to keep you getting kissed and getting a good outcome from a job interview and escaping the dentist chair, without any extracted teeth involved. And, that, to me, was really, let’s just go with a nice, safe word: it was disturbing.
Kelly Kovack [00:10:39]: So, then what did you…did you just feel compelled, like there’s an opportunity here?
Craig Dubitsky [00:10:43]: Yes. I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it, and having had history with Method, in particular, and Eos, you know, I really thought there was this opportunity to turn this category that had really been commoditized into something very different, and the other thing that was really striking to me was that it seemed to go with the war theme again, it was like the color wars. There was a red brand and a blue brand. There was Coke and Pepsi, well there was Crest and Colgate. Yes, there’s always been other brands, Sensodyne is a wonderful brand, but the shelf seemed to be dominated by these two players, and both the brands started with a “C.” I thought that was really weird. I’m obsessed with things like that.
Kelly Kovack [00:11:26]: Oh, I know, because you’re very much, sort of like, words matter.
Craig Dubitsky [00:11:30]: Oh my god, words totally matter. Years ago, I asked to speak to a large paper goods company, and I made fun of – I mean, I’ll tell you who it is, they’re also, I’m going to sound untoward and I don’t mean to, they’re a wonderful company and they make really wonderful products, and they asked me to come down with no agenda other than to kind of just like shake it up, which is a gift, right? If someone tells you, “Just come down and be a little crazy, and make fun of our brands,” I’m like, “You’re kidding me.” It’s like being able to do stand-up about people’s brands. I’m like, this is a treat. So, I made fun of the Brawny man, because, you know, I just said – it was Georgia Pacific, right, so I was making a little fun of the Brawny man, because we could talk about male grooming and beards and flannel shirts, and I certainly like checked shirts and I don’t like to shave, so I can certainly appreciate various aspects of the Brawny man. But, I said, “Brawny and Bounty, shit, they even start and end with the same freaking consonants. You couldn’t mix it up a little bit more? Like Crest and Colgate, you couldn’t go a little further? You couldn’t choose another letter to start the brand with?” But, anyway, Colgate has been around for, you know, 200-plus years, so they, I think, had the jump on Crest. But, in any event, I’m getting way off track. So, I’m in the store, extracted teeth, lots of red and blue, and a lot of scary stuff around benefit-driven consumer insights, and I’m being facetious, my eyes are rolling and your eyes are rolling, for those of you listening right now.
Kelly Kovack [00:13:08]: And you’re like, “I’m going to throw those consumer insights out the window.”
Craig Dubitsky [00:13:11]: Well, I’m like, there’s a basic consumer insight, which is “Extracted teeth: don’t want to see them.” How about that?
Kelly Kovack [00:13:18]: There is sort of this time where – because I am not a fan of focus groups, consumer insights, I’m just like, “Okay, you really are just…this is sort of the CYA moment where you want to keep your job, and when does common sense come into this equation?”
Craig Dubitsky [00:13:37]: That’s a great question. I think what happens is, entrepreneurs have a moment where they go, “Wait a minute, this just seems really wacked. Why is it like this?” and people have said before, “Oh, Craig, you’re a disruptor, you’re a challenger,” and I just sort of kind of roll my eyes a little bit. I like to say, “I’m a questioner.” I want people to question why it took so long for someone to take the extracted tooth off the box. I wanted someone to question why this stuff doesn’t taste great if it goes in your mouth. Like, anything that goes in your mouth, it should taste amazing, full stop. And, if it’s going in your mouth, it’s going in your body, and therefore, it should be as natural as possible.
Kelly Kovack [00:14:25]: Well, that was the crazy thing to me. So, I mean, when you launched, all of the sudden, I was like, “Oh, I need to look at oral care, because Craig has launched a brand; there’s something here.” And the first thing, I was just like, I did the same thing. Aside from the packaging, I knew sort of – I’m like, “Oh my god, of course, this makes so much sense,” but I started looking at the ingredients, and then I was looking at the warnings of like, “Call the poison control center,” and I think at that moment, I actually – I was working with a dentist, and I was like, “You know, you need to pay attention to this, you’re a doctor. I really think the next category that’s going to be disrupted is oral care,” and this was sort of around when you launched. I’m like, “There’s something happening here,” and you know when you feel like you’re the canary in the goldmine? People look at you like you have ten heads.
Craig Dubitsky [00:15:18]: All the time.
Kelly Kovack [00:15:19]: It’s the same thing when you’re like, “Amazon, you know that thing that millions of people go to? You probably want to pay attention to it.”
Craig Dubitsky [00:15:25]: Right? It’s a thing, you’re getting boxes sent to your house every day. You’re wondering if this is going to work or not?
Kelly Kovack [00:15:31]: Yeah, and so – I was just like, you know, how can you have the rest of the beauty industry, because oral care is sort of an extension of beauty, but how can you be cleaning up everything else, and putting something toxic in your mouth?
Craig Dubitsky [00:15:48]: Well, again, I think it was a forgotten – maybe forgotten isn’t the right word, but there aren’t a lot of words coming to mind.
Kelly Kovack [00:15:54]: It wasn’t sexy.
Craig Dubitsky [00:15:55]: Yeah, and it just was sort of overlooked, or people were on autopilot, or they just used whatever their dental professional gave them, and it wasn’t that those products weren’t good, it was just that the dental professional was busy being a dental professional, and they were given, you know, a bunch of product to hand out to people, and that was fine, but we’re evolved, and we want more. We don’t want to just take what someone hands to us, we want to understand the provenance, like, where did this come from? Who are the people behind this? Why did they decide to do this? And, part of what I found really interesting about oral care was it was this anonymous category.
Kelly Kovack [00:16:34]: There weren’t any celebrity endorsements.
Craig Dubitsky [00:16:36]: Not so much, or even if there were, there were just these handful of companies that kind of controlled everything, and if you went to their website, there were no pictures of the people at the company, it was like, paid actors. So, I thought that was really interesting. How do we humanize it, because oral health and whole body health are truly inextricably linked, but yet, if you looked at the category or the products you were using, they didn’t feel linked to anything; they just felt really kind of devoid of any kind of personality, and I like to think we can make personal care personal again, and give it some personality, make it zhuzh, and of course, make it as natural as we can make it, but what’s really important is it has to be really effective, because if we made – let’s just say we decided to make shampoo tomorrow, and by the way, we could make fabulous shampoo, but it’s kind of a yucky day outside. I’m looking outside our window, and it’s a little rainy and humid, it’s kind of warm for New York City in February. So, let’s say you used Hello Shampoo, our fictional shampoo, and you said, “Well, it’s humid out, I’m having a bad hair day, but tomorrow, I’m going to LA, and I’ll have a great hair day tomorrow, so no big deal, I can suffer through my one New York City rainy, humid day.”
Kelly Kovack [00:17:52]: Are you giving us a cue to sort of…where Hello is going, to personal care nomination?
Craig Dubitsky [00:17:58]: No…well, we’ll get there, we’ll definitely get there, but my point is, if we made this shampoo, you’d be like, “Well, no problem, tomorrow I’m going to have a better hair day, it’s no big deal. I still like that shampoo, it smells good, it lathers nicely, my hair generally looks pretty good, but it’s pretty nasty. Okay, tomorrow I’ll have a better hair day.” If you would have had a bad tooth day today, you’re not getting on a plane and saying, “Tomorrow, I’m going to have a better tooth day.” You’re in big trouble. So, there’s more at risk. There was more at risk with oral care, because it’s a wellness product. So, if I told you we were getting rid of fine lines and wrinkles and our anti-rigosity measurements were fabulous, maybe it takes a little longer to get that little crow’s foot that you don’t care for out of your skin, but, it’s very different with oral care. There’s kind of no room for error, so the efficacy was always, always, always the top priority, and I think with a lot of start-ups, I find that they’re just sort of like, “Oh, we have a brand, we have a proposition.”
Kelly Kovack [00:18:59]: “We’ll figure it out later.”
Craig Dubitsky [00:19:01]: Yeah, and I was like, “No, we can’t. Screw that.” So, making sure that the efficacy was there and that our product – our ingredient sourcing, the product had to be epic, and the ingredients we were using had to be really, really thoughtful.
Kelly Kovack [00:19:16]: So, did you start with sort of the formulation and the product first?
Craig Dubitsky [00:19:19]: Yes, yes. So, there was this big moment, aha moment, that everything was kind of yucky and just not delicious, and certainly not fun, and the next thing was, “Okay, how do we make a formula that’s really going to work, and go the distance?” like compete in a serious way with sort of the benchmarks for the category. So, the first person I started working with was our formulator, who is still our formulator – hi, Connie, if you’re listening. She’s amazing. Our whole team is really like, just amazing. So, yeah, I met Connie early on, and I was pretty prescriptive, even as a non-chemist, about what I thought could or should or should not be in the product, and she’s like, “Yep, I can make that.” So, the first thing was to have this idea, and then the next thing was make a formulation that was really amazing, like a real superlative formula, and I think in parallel to that was trademarking the word “Hello” all over the world.
Kelly Kovack [00:20:19]: Was that difficult?
Craig Dubitsky [00:20:20]: I don’t want to say it was difficult, but it certainly was a challenge. I was very fortunate to know some amazing trademark attorneys who could figure out how to do it.
Kelly Kovack [00:20:30]: Because sometimes you just get the wrong writer.
Craig Dubitsky [00:20:33]: It can happen.
Kelly Kovack [00:20:34]: It happened to us.
Craig Dubitsky [00:20:35]: Yeah, it can happen, it can happen. We were very fortunate and we worked really hard, and again, great counsel, and it was amazing, it just wasn’t taken. I think part of the magic was coming up with a word that, you know, there are a lot of words, so I think it becomes a brand, I think, instead of a word, when somebody actually falls in love with it, when you can ascribe some other type of emotion to a word, then it starts to become something special.
Kelly Kovack [00:21:06]: How long did it take you to sort of land on Hello?
Craig Dubitsky [00:21:08]: Oh, it was immediate that that was the name, yeah, because everything seemed unfriendly, so the word I kept focusing on was, “God, this seems so unfriendly, it’s like this whole thing is scary and unfriendly,” and I thought, “What’s the friendliest word I can think of?” and it’s “Hello,” and I also thought a lot of brands talk about killing or fighting things in your mouth, I just don’t want to fight with you when I say “Hello.” It was literally just that simple, and I think people tend to complicate things quite a bit, it’s human nature. “Oh, it can’t be that simple.” It’s hard to do simple. It’s really hard to do simple.
Kelly Kovack [00:21:42]: Well, I think you also have to – something that sort of strikes me is that you trust your gut. I think there’s, you know, there are a lot of traditionally trained marketers and branders, and then there are people who just kind of have a knack for it, and you kind of know that it’s right.
Craig Dubitsky [00:22:03]: I think as trite as it sounds for people that aren’t in love or haven’t been in love, it’s like, you know when you know, and if you’ve been on that side, you know exactly what that feels like, and I think it’s the same thing. It’s just like, you have this internal sense and sensibility, and when something goes off for you, and you’re like, “Yep,” and I think when you feel it really strongly, even if people tell you no, or there’s these seemingly insurmountable odds, when you know it as deeply as you know it, when you strike this magical cord, nothing is going to stop you. I mean, it’s just like, “Nope, you don’t hear it the same way I do, but I’m hearing it and I’m going to play this song for you until you hear it, too.”
Kelly Kovack [00:22:55]: Well, I also think that the categories that you’ve sort of tackled historically, there are incumbent leaders with way more money. How long did it take people to see your vision? Because I have a - you know, I remember when it was first on the shelf, and I was thinking, “I wonder how hard it was to sort of get people to sort of place that first order,” and sort of you just strike me as someone who you just keep saying it, and eventually they’re going to believe.
Craig Dubitsky [00:23:28]: Well, here we are now, and it’s 2020, and it’s February of 2020, and a lot has happened, but if I go back to when this thing started, this stuff, it is not a smooth ride, and to say I made some mistakes, I don’t know how much time we have, but I’m happy to go through many of the mistakes, because you learn so much from the mistakes.
Kelly Kovack [00:23:47]: Well, and also, I think it’s important because you know, what I see now is there’s amazing things happening sort of in the food, drug, and mass channels, and I think a lot of start-ups get wooed by a big retailer that’s going to take them on, and they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.
Craig Dubitsky [00:24:08]: It’s very…so, yes, it’s very intoxicating, but I’ll tell you, when we started, the first meetings I had, I had because I’m, admittedly, a little obsessive, which is a nice word for – or maybe not a nice word. The nice word is passionate, I’m really passionate, but truthfully, I’m just wildly obsessive about design and brand and how things make you feel, and I would go into meetings and I’d have like a coffee table book of what the future could look like of oral care, and I had worked with this amazing design group at BMW, and I had this really cool, like, visual presentation that, like, unless you were blind, you wouldn’t…you just wouldn’t get it. Of course you would get it, I’d be showing you this gorgeous thing of what, “Here’s what this set could look like,” “Here’s what the future could look like,” and I’d say, “Try it,” and then I would talk about the brand, and basically, I would tell people, literally, this is what I would say. I would say, “You’ve seen your grandparents’ teeth. Why would you use the same brand your grandparents used?” And, that kind of would wake people up, and the other thing is, I would eat toothpaste, which I’m happy to do for you right now if you like, because it’s a visceral kind of thing, but I would do that, only with fluoride-free toothpaste. I’m about to do that, if you want to – this is the sound of a fresh box being opened up, oh so gingery, because you know, I want to make sure it’s a freshy for you, so you know I didn’t tamper with anything. But yeah, I’d go into meetings and I’d be like, “Guess what? You’re ingesting this stuff whether you think you are or you aren’t. If it goes in your mouth, it’s going in your body. So, this other stuff that’s out there, you can’t do this with it.” You ready?
Kelly Kovack [00:25:57]: I’m ready.
Craig Dubitsky [00:26:04]: So, for those of you listening, I don’t know, I took down a pretty fair amount.
Kelly Kovack [00:26:08]: That was a lot of toothpaste.
Craig Dubitsky [00:26:10]: Yeah. And, I would show them, like, “Look, notice, the tube retains its shape, because marriages break up over things like this,” like someone calls the other person an idiot for squeezing the wrong end of the tube.
Kelly Kovack [00:26:21]: It is true.
Craig Dubitsky [00:26:22]: It is true. So, if nothing else, we’re saving marriages, we’re saving relationships, because we’re a friendly company; that’s what we do. So, anyway, I’d go to these meetings and I’d say things like that, and I’d eat a big hunk of fluoride-free toothpaste, and people would be like, “That’s insane. No one from company X, Y, or Z has ever done that,” and I’d point things out, like in this case, it’s a fluoride-free, anti-plaque, and whitening, but next to every ingredient, it tells you what it does. Nobody does that kind of stuff. And then, I’d say, “Oh yeah, and our boxes, they’re FSC-certified paper so we don’t kill more trees, and we print them in America, and our tubes are made in America and our product is made in America and it’s vegan and it’s cruelty-free, we don’t test on animals, our entire supply chain is cruelty-free,” and you know, I think it humanized everything to actually go and talk with retailers as a very passionate person, not as a representative of a company. So, I think the other thing we were fortunate to bring to the table, and I’m saying “we” because I did these meetings at the beginning. The whole company at the beginning was just me. I had this fabulous formulator, and then I brought on board some other people later, but in the very beginning, it was just me. I don’t want to take any credit, because without all of these people, I would just be a crazy person with an idea.
Kelly Kovack [00:27:41]: Eating toothpaste.
Craig Dubitsky [00:27:42]: Eating a lot of toothpaste, which I still tend to eat a lot of toothpaste – only fluoride-free, never, ever, ever with fluoride. But, I think that retailers believed, because I would show this sort of, I think, unbridled enthusiasm for the category, which most hadn’t seen, and I was very fortunate to have had these other experiences, so having had history with things like Method and Eos…
Kelly Kovack [00:28:07]: So, you were a known quantity, to a certain extent.
Craig Dubitsky [00:28:10]: I don’t…I don’t want to sound ego-y or weird about it, I don’t think I was a known quantity, maybe I was, I don’t know. I had met people before, and I think I just kept showing up. So, I think it was combination not that I was known quantity like, “Oh, this guy really knows what he’s doing,” I think it was more like, “That guy again? He just keeps showing up. What has he got now?” and I think…just constantly showing up with a smile and listening, I feel bad because I feel like now, I’m doing a lot of the talking, but the magic came from listening a lot. I would listen a lot, because I feel like if you go see a retailer, no one knows more about these categories than retail partners, because they live and breathe this stuff down to the square inch, and they are just as passionate as you are. It doesn’t matter what the category is, I haven’t met a buyer yet who isn’t passionate. I have yet to meet a buyer that’s like, “[snore] whatever, I’ll buy your stuff,” like nope, they’re in it, and that’s beautiful, they should be. That’s the right stuff. So, when you meet someone who is just as passionate, if not more so, as you are, or can certainly go toe-to-toe with you on the passionate front, if you don’t listen, shame on you. So, I think a lot of larger companies don’t necessarily go in there with the mindset that they’re going to listen, because they have huge teams of people that just do insight research and just do, fill-in-the-blank, all of these things, and they’re expert, and the truth of it is, they certainly are, but buyers are expert too, and they’re in touch with the person who is the ultimate purchaser of your product in a way that’s really different. Research, if you’re in focus groups, people will tell you all sorts of things, but the moment of truth, to use the term coined by a very large CBG company, comes when someone is willing to part with a dollar.
Kelly Kovack [00:29:56]: Yeah, and if they’re willing to part with it again.
Craig Dubitsky [00:29:58]: Exactly. So, you don’t learn, you know, you don’t learn just by winging it, you learn by listening and trying things, but trying things under the guidance of some other really smart person. They may not even realize that they’re giving you guidance, but if you’re open, they’re willing to share a lot, and you learn so much.
Kelly Kovack [00:30:19]: Well, because they want the brands to succeed.
Craig Dubitsky [00:30:22]: Yeah, exactly. So, I love retailers, and I love retail, and I’ve learned a lot just by listening and going to meetings and not just going in to sell something, but going in and having a real discussion, because that’s how you build a real relationship and that’s how you build real trust with somebody, because you’re not always going to get it right, and you need to have a relationship so that someone won’t just kick you out, they’ll say, “Okay, I believe you when you say you’re going to fix something or you’re going to try something different.”
Kelly Kovack [00:30:50]: Well, I think that’s one of the things that a lot of start-ups don’t realize when they decide they’re going to play in this sort of food, drug, and mass channels, is that there are a lot of zeros behind commitments.
Craig Dubitsky [00:31:02]: Oh boy, yes. So, when you get accepted somewhere, usually that means something else is coming out, there’s a finite bit of space. So, that buyer has made a serious commitment if they say yes to your brand and your product, so your job then is not just to ship it, your job is not just to help get it onto the shelf, but to help get it off of the shelf, and I think a lot of folks just get excited by the fact that they’re talking to a retailer. It is an exciting thing, I totally get it and appreciate it, but your job at that point isn’t just to sell, your job is to create something that’s going to make their department shine, make them and their team look brilliant, like your job is to make them look smarter than…
Kelly Kovack [00:31:45]: And also drive traffic and brand awareness.
Craig Dubitsky [00:31:48]: Absolutely, and, you know, traffic is hard because most of these big retailers, they get footfall already. The likelihood that your brand is really going to move the needle, in all fairness, is very tricky. I’ve definitely said this before, so I’m going to say it again, because the truth never changes: the most important word, I think, in the retail lexicon, is “new,” and I think, how new is defined is really critical, and I think a lot of big brands, new is using the word new on something. I think for truly new brands, they don’t have to say much of anything, because what they’re doing is so unique, it’s so obvious that it’s new, and new in a way that’s emotionally engaging, that’s the key. If it’s just new, if I said, “This is Hello and it now contains gravel! It’s natural gravel!” right, that’s going to be new, it’s going to suck. It can’t just be new for the sake of, oh, no one’s thought of putting gravel in toothpaste before, like yeah, that’s a new idea, it’s a horrible idea, but it’s a new idea. It has to be new and beautiful, and new and special, and new and provocative in the best sense of provocative.
Kelly Kovack [00:32:59]: And, there are different levers sort of in food, drug, and mass. I think you need to know the rules of engagement in the channel.
Craig Dubitsky [00:33:07]: Oh boy, do you ever. When we launched, I was sort of like, “No, we don’t really need to know, we can do it totally differently,” and the first products failed miserably. I was like, “Oh, we don’t need a box, because who needs a box?” and it turns out, well, we needed a vehicle that would allow us to tell more about the story of the product, and we had this primary pack that was so beautiful, but so austere.
Kelly Kovack [00:33:32]: I remember; they were like those great tubes.
Craig Dubitsky [00:33:34]: Yes, yeah, they were toddles and they were funky and they were beautiful and they were so efficient, like we could get more product in them than…like the biggest tube you’ve ever seen, we could fit in something really small, which I thought was really funky, because it looked really beautiful and it was minimalist, and who wouldn’t want this beautifully sculpted thing? But, it turned out people couldn’t even tell what it was, because it was so different from the category, like every norm, every convention, we basically just tossed that out the window, but then no one could tell what it was. They thought it was a hand lotion, or we didn’t realize they were going to break the case packs apart in distribution centers and basically tote these things, like throw individual pieces into totes, and they were getting scuffed up, and by the time they made it into the shop, they looked like crap. So, we didn’t realize any of that stuff, but had we not had launched, well, we wouldn’t have launched. So, the good news is, we moved off of that so quickly, and that’s the key – that’s like the other thing about being a nimble, small company, is that when you realize you’re doing something wrong, I call it FUF, which stands for “fuck up fest.” If you’re going to fuf it up, just make sure boom, you fix it, and if you develop the right relationship with your buyer, again, every buyer is unique and every retailer is different, but hopefully they’ll appreciate the seriousness and the severity with which you will turn the switch and make things right, because that’s the key. It’s like your metal is getting tested, and it’s easy when everything is great to say, “Woohoo, everything’s great!” but the way you really shine is when everything is not so great, you’ve got to come through. That’s the tricky part.
Kelly Kovack [00:35:12]: When did you know – like how long did it take before you knew you were like, “Okay, this is going to work,” where you’re sort of building on momentum.
Craig Dubitsky [00:35:24]: That’s a great question.
Kelly Kovack [00:35:26]: I mean, there’s always this inflection point.
Craig Dubitsky [00:35:28]: Yeah, I think, to be really…I don’t think there are degrees of honesty, so I’ll just be honest. I still don’t feel that way. I still feel – I know you’re laughing, but it’s true.
Kelly Kovack [00:35:38]: Well, I would argue with you, considering you were just acquired by Colgate, but we can come back to that.
Craig Dubitsky [00:35:42]: What I would say is it’s funny, I was talking with Laurie, who is my – I call her my partner in friendly RCE at Hello, and we were talking earlier today actually, which we talk every day, but it just so happens that this morning, we were talking about our approaches to things, because it just sort of came up today, and she said, “You know, one thing about you,” she’s like, “You’re never done, you’re always driving. You’ve got one speed, which is like go-go-go-go-go,” and I’m…it’s not that I’m unsatisfied, I’m very satisfied just by waking up in the morning and being alive and being married and having two awesome kids, I feel very much fulfilled, but, I always think there’s a better version of what we have made or a better version of how we can behave, or a better version – like, we’re going to say goodbye later today and I’m going to be like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I said that. I shouldn’t have said this,” there’s always a better version, and yes, you might be able to edit a podcast, but it’s really hard to edit your life, at least in real time; you can’t really go back so easily, so I’m always thinking ahead, like what do we do? How do we make it better? How do we make it better? So, that kind of drives me all the time, and I never felt like, “Oh, we really made it.” Like, now that we’ve been acquired by this amazing company, I’m sure we’ll talk about that a little bit, I just feel like it’s a start, and people have said like, “Oh my god, congratulations!” I’m like, “No, we’re just getting started.” I mean, it’s great, we’re very excited about the news, it’s amazing, but this is just the start. We have so much cool stuff, I can’t wait. I’m really fired up.
