Same Scent, Different Story: Building Dossier for a New Era of Fragrance

Speaker A: Uh, uh, hey, everyone. I've got Sergio, the founder of Dossier on the line. I think that's what they call it in the business. I'm not sure. For those who don't know me, I'm Aaron Schwartz, one of the founders of Areita. We build AI segments for a bunch of Klaviyo's biggest brands. Our man here, Caraway, uh, Arctic, you name it. But today, we are definitely not talking about Areita. We're talking about Dossier. How you started the business, how you're running the business. You guys are just like such an incredible brand. But let me. Let me take a step back. Get out of the way. Can you please give a proper intro to yourself? Truly your background, how you started the company, and then we'll. We'll run from there.

Speaker B: Sure. First of all, thanks so much for having me, Aaron. I guess my, My career in the U.S. started when I, uh, came to the U.S. to study. I was in finance back in the day. I came to the US to do an MBA, and what was supposed to be two years became now, what is it, almost 20, I guess. I got here in 2008, and then I continued my career in banking in New York. Banking was not. It's a brutal industry. You learn a ton, and you learn discipline. You learn what hard work means. When somebody tells me, no, I'm working really hard. You don't really know what working really hard means if you haven't been in one of those industries. So taught me a lot. Um, but then I fell into entrepreneurship, and I think, like, a lot of things a little bit by luck, opportunity. So the first business that I ran was a hair care product, and specifically hair extensions. And the cool thing is we made something out of nothing. And I say we because the reason I started that business and the reason I went into entrepreneurship in the first place is that one of my. Who became my mentor in ddc, he had a successful lounge rebrand and told me, look, if you ever want to leave banking, um, I have this idea. Uh, I won't be able to run it. You run it. I'll mentor you. I'll teach you everything I know about dtc. Uh, you know, we'll build something together. So that's, that's how I got started in, in entrepreneurship. And I say we made something out of nothing because we started the company with 20,000 bucks on the bank account, which was not a lot. And by after three, four years, that company was a small success. We were generating about 4 million bucks of revenue a year. Uh, Profitable company. So that gave me that first. That bargain that gave me that. That first success really fueled my desire to be in the industry. After that, I sold my shares, the little shares I had to my partner. I started a skincare company and also self funded. And that was a bit of failure. Uh, after two years, decided to shut that down. And at the time, when I shut that down, I was trying to figure out, okay, what are my next steps? And I had a conversation with the person who ultimately became our first. Our first investor. And we were just shooting ideas around. That gentleman is a French entrepreneur who became an investor.

Speaker A: Sergio froze.

Speaker B: And we were shooting various ideas in the beauty world around, and the topic of perfume came up and it was the proverbial aha, um, moment M. Where, uh, we both realized, Sergio, God, go at it. Go, go.

Speaker A: No, no, no. You. You froze for a minute. So we missed. You had a bitter failure and then you came. And now I feel like I got to the juicy bits and then you very rudely just like disappeared. So, yeah, I'm hanging.

Speaker B: So decided to shut down that. Shut that company down because it was a bit of failure in this skincare product, by the way. Shutting down a company is insanely difficult for any entrepreneur. And any entrepreneur who's done this knows how hard it is to find that right balance between, okay, this is stupid, I need to stop. And all I need is one little extra effort.

Speaker A: So, you know, let me. Can. Can we actually pause there before we get to the. Um. Um. I've also had to shut down a company. We sold it. But years too late for too little. So it was effectively a shutdown. Um, um, what was the difference between when you knew you were going to have to shut it down and when you actually made the decision?

Speaker B: And then how.

Speaker A: How long did it take after that and what looking back on it, could you have done faster or made the choice in a different way?

Speaker B: I think what saved me for myself is, uh, my buddy I was mentioning to you before, and because he had a much more cold look at things being. Being on the outside. And he told the thing was not taking off. And he told me, look, I want you to do the. I want you to do this. I, uh, want you to put together a list of all the things that you still want to try to make sure that this is not a failure. Put that list together, do them as quickly as possible. And I want you to promise you one thing. If they all fail, you stop.

Speaker A: I love it.

Speaker B: And I did that. They all failed and I did not stop because it's so difficult. It took me another three months, three, four months. And at the end, reasonable minds prevailed and I realized I was going nowhere. And the thing I always come back to is the best thing that can happen to you is a success. That's amazing. The second best thing is a quick failure. I think the tough one is when you're stuck in the middle and you're like, uh, I'm, um, one handshake away. I'm one big thing away from making the success. That's tough, man. I've seen people stuck in that. It's not easy.

Speaker A: Um, I love the framing. A cousin who's an entrepreneur told me the same thing about my brand. That again, I kept for three years too long and yada, yada. Um, but his framing was do a pre mortem, which is like, figure out why you're going to die as a business and then write out the things that minute that you would say, oh, man, I wish I had, and then do do those things right now. And I thought that framing was extremely helpful. It, it's helpful even if you're in a, uh, like our business is doing well, but it's still like, okay, if we don't hit our peak, what are the things I'm going to wish we would have done? And I think that framing is good, right? Uh, I will say three months too long. Good. Good for you. That is, like, still extremely tight. And it is, it is wildly difficult to shut down something you put your heart and soul into. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, and you know, you, you have a good product. At least you think you do. I think we had a decent product. We just didn't have enough money to really double down on the marketing and on the promotion. You learn a ton. But it's hard, man, because you know what you're doing or think you do, and then you realize it's a failure. And I've seen people who, again, went down that road for way too long. It's incredibly difficult. And I think it takes somebody from the outside to bring reason to you. I think that that's the key. That's what saved me. And it seemed like at some point that's the advice you got also from, from that outside party.

Speaker A: All right, so now let's go to the, uh. So that was like the second best. Now what's the, uh, what's the better part? What's going on? Yeah.

Speaker B: So after, during that shutdown, I came to my senses and realized this need to, to end. I started talking to this angel investor in France and we were talking about perfume, as I was mentioning to you, when the topic of perfume came up, we bouncing bunch of ideas. But when the topic of perfume came up, it really was the proverbial aha moment where we both realized there's gotta be a better way of doing this. It doesn't make any sense that to smell nice on a date, uh, with a good perfume, we had to fork out whatever it is, 150, 200 plus. Especially when you know the cost of production of um, of a perfume, which is insanely low. So that was the aha moment. Um, that's. He became our first investor. We launched Dossier, um, with our first collection of 20 perfumes which were all what we call certainly impressions. So then what the general public will call dupes. And the whole idea was to say we're going to give you the same high quality ingredients, the same craftsmanship that the luxury perfumes give to you, but we're going to remove all the fluff. So we have a simple, elegant bottle. We don't have a super fancy ornate bottle. We have a simple elegant packaging. We don't have a mega fancy packaging. That was the whole premise of it is really the same quality, if not big, higher quality, but at a much more affordable price. So our perfumes sell now at 29, 39 and 49 for a 50ml again compared to the $200 plus start out of DDC. That's what I knew best. Um, selling perfume online is not the easiest thing and we could talk about that and what we did there, but that's how we launched. And unlike the skincare business, very quickly I could see okay, distraction here. The numbers are not big. I think in the first month we did like $20,000 of revenue. But I got really excited by that. That's, you know, for this business operating, nobody knows it. I felt excited. We can talk about this too. I'm really focused on my unit economics and my margins and I could see the potential there. My cogs were horrible because we didn't negotiate well, we're too small. But you knew there was a path forward. The CAC initially was not amazing, but you knew there's a path forward there. So just looking at those initial numbers and having gone through two other companies in the DTC world, I knew there was some potential there. So that's how it all started.

Speaker A: Did you start it as an MVP? Like hey, we've got 20 fragrances. We actually are, you know, uh, impressions. We don't know what the right ones are. We're going to throw stuff out and go figure it out and we'll do some testing. Or was it like you had a fully formed business and you were off

Speaker B: to the races somewhere in the middle? Uh, and what I mean by that is I'm a firm believer that you need to go market much quicker than people think you need to go to market. I think people take way too long to develop perfect product and then ultimately the customer always tells you what you're getting wrong and you have to change and you rather make that pivot sooner rather than later. So I'm a believer that once you have an idea, it doesn't have to be perfect. Just go to market and then your only objective is making sure that somebody is going to take out their credit card online and pay for your product. Find those first 10, 20 customers. It doesn't matter what it takes. That's your first objective. So answer your question. It wasn't, it wasn't raggedy job. It was actually relatively thought through. But we really prioritize speed and going to market versus trying to figure things out. Are, uh, these 20 perfumes the right ones? I don't know. The only answer you can get is from the market. So somewhere in the middle, I would

Speaker A: say I actually want to linger on speed because I think that's something that is very obvious to software founders, but really not obvious to brand founders, to physical product founders. Our first watch, which I sold in 2010 for my brand, for all intents and purposes, didn't work. And so we knew going in that somebody would buy and then the goal was to learn, not to make money. And then we'd refund them. Right, but figure out what were they buying and why were they buying and did they like the, like texture. But the quality was shit, candidly. But it was an opportunity to learn. And I see a lot of brand founders go extraordinarily slowly. So I'm very much bought into that being a superpower. As you have scaled Dossier, how have you been able to retain that? Or where do you see whether it's product development or just like coaching your team, how do you get people to think about speed or two way doors or, you know, whatever, whatever framing you use to help make decisions faster.

Speaker B: You know, it's interesting because I, uh, think we were extraordinarily fast in the beginning because it was a very small company. Obviously there's only like two or three of us and we had this whole boulevard in front of us in terms of developing impressions. So we scaled those 20% scale them to 40, 60, 80, 100. So now we have over 150 perfumes in about seven years. So we grew that, that quite a lot. Big chunk of our time, big chunk of up of our existence, where I think we are pretty fast to market and we develop products quickly. At some point, if I'm honest with myself, I think we slowed down a little bit and that's not a good thing. And now we're picking it up again. And speed is again at the core of, uh, what we're trying to do because I do think it's important. Obviously you can't go as fast as year one. Of course you can't, because there's more eyeballs on you. Mistakes are much more expensive. Um, you can't screw a brand up in the beginning. That's your superpower. Like you can, you can fuck it up royally. It doesn't matter because nobody knows you. So you should be going to market fast and trying new things. Um, I'm a firm believer in that. But to answer your question about what we're doing is now as silly as it sounds, what gets measured gets done. We actually put metrics in place and say, okay, once we have an idea, how long does it take from. First of all, how do we vet that idea? Is there metrics or is there a process to vet whatever impression we want to work on? And then once we make that decision, how long should it take? And let's actually stick to that timeframe. And I, uh, always go back to basics. And you'll hear me talk about basics a lot in this conversation because I'm a firm believer it's not rocket science. Ddc. If you apply the basics well and stick to the basics well, I think you'll you 80% that again, what gets measured gets done. Putting actual metrics in place and saying, okay, we can do this in this amount of time, great, let's actually stick to it. You know, um, it's an, it's, it's an interesting point that you mentioned about speed.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, and I think it's one thing for you to feel it in your heart, but then it's like in the next group and the next group. And so if you're not aligning the team or measuring it, you know, you're, it's, it's a behavior. Right. It's not a very obvious outcome. Um, I actually want to double click on what you just said. With basics, you must talk to a ton of brand founders. I have no doubt people hit you up because you Guys are wildly successful and you like, again, not your first rodeo. So they know that you've seen the good and the bad. Right. It's not like you just caught fire and figured things out. Um, what are some of the basics that you think people are missing or maybe set a different way if you're starting another brand, what are the things that you're like really holding true from the beginning? Is it, is it just unit metric stuff? Yeah, I don't know. Like what, what are those basics?

Speaker B: Most important, my whole entrepreneurship career has been in beauty and fashion, but specifically on the mass market side. So if you ask me how to develop a brand like Ferrari, I have no clue that that's not, that's not what I do, what I do well. But to come back to your question, boring works, basics work. And the one thing is obviously it starts with amazing product and I think our bias is to over deliver on value. That that's what we, that's what we did in the hair extension business, that's what we try to do in the skincare business. That's what we're doing right now. Um, at least I believe so in the perfume business is how can we deliver more value to the customer? That that's how, that's our bias and that that's what I think we do well. But otherwise just good product goes without saying. And iterate as much as you can to find to get the feedback from the consumer and then raise a focus. Each step of the growth that you have is going to be different. When we started, I mentioned this to you in the beginning when we launched Dossier, my only objective was to make sure 10, 20 people would take out their wallet and actually take out their credit card and pay. And our ads were very geared towards direct response how can get those first customers improvement. So therefore I was also razor focused on uh, unique economics and you know, again, not rocket science. You look at AOV, you look at what we call contribution margin, 1, 2, 3. So 1 is after cogs, 2 is after cogs and logistics, 3 is after cogs, logistics and acquisition costs. And how much money do I have left after each order date that is put on my website and the amount of money left needs to cover the fixed costs. I mean it's as basic as that. And so super focus on that. I think that's extremely important and it doesn't have to be perfect from the get go, but you need to know whether there's a road to the future, uh, whether there's a path to profitability or There's a path to making good money. I think those are the two things I was razor focused on. And how do we do that? Obviously negotiate cogswell getting a good 3 PL. And the other thing that I think this is a m mistake we did that we criminally underestimated is AB testing is huge in the E and the DTC world. Uh, as you very, very well know. And you know, when you have a test that performs like 10% better, it's like, oh my goodness, this is amazing. Like, we found the great. It's hard to get at some point, it's hard to get tests that work. The one thing that we really stupidly, completely put on the side is the easiest test you can do is price. And it sounds incredibly obvious when I say this to you, but, you know, raising your price point by one buck if you're, if you still order the same amount, that's one more buck in your pocket. So testing prices was a huge, huge unlock for us in the beginning of Dossier.

Speaker A: It's so funny. I was actually going to go into price. Right. Uh, first of all, I love the breakdown of COGS. 1, 2, 3. Because I was like, all right, what are we talking about when we talk about it? But I mean, right? Cogs. COGS plus logistics. COGS plus logistics plus acquisition. At some point you dial it in. You dial it in and then you play with pricing. Do you have any advice for how to do that? And then, sorry to give, two questions at once. You're multi channel. How does that impact how you think about pricing on the DTC side at this point?

Speaker B: I mean, um, the wholesale piece is a whole other conversation and would love to dive into that. But to come back to those basically unique economics, it's really the one thing I think about a lot too is pricing now, especially now, because you can have a wildly profitable product. But if you sell for 10 bucks and there's not a ton repeat, you have no room to upfly acquisition.

Speaker A: None.

Speaker B: It's very challenging to sell a cheap product online unless you have insane repeat because you just don't have that room to acquire new customers. So in the very beginning, we thought really long and hard about what can we do for our aov. Our V took to give you numbers when we launched, excuse me, was about 45 bucks. So, okay, not fantastic, not a ton of room to acquire. And I knew this. If I don't get the CLV high, we're not going to survive. So then what can I do to incentivize customers to Buy More and what can I do to increase my price points? Those are the two things I was really focused on. The beginning is, okay, there's a natural way of people shopping for this kind of. At this kind of price point perfume where people want to try different perfumes, and that's great. Uh, but how can we also encourage them? So we did a bunch of buy more, save more initiatives. Say, okay, you're buying three products, getting 10% off, you're buying 4, 15 by 5, 20. And that grew my AOV almost, not overnight, but, like, over a couple weeks, went from 45 to 75. That growth pretty much saved the company. We wouldn't be here today if we hadn't had that growth in aov.

Speaker A: The, um. I love the approach. It's funny, when you first mentioned price discovery, I was thinking much more like, hey, we went from 45 and we did a split test where we did some at 52, and we were experimenting that way. But I said, you're saying, like, look, I'm willing to take the same cogs and in fact, like, have a lower margin on more products in spirits because I'm keeping, you know, single cost of acquisition for the AOV going out.

Speaker B: So that was the first one. That's the first thing that we did. And then the second thing is we actually started playing with pricing, um, because initially our price point, all the perfumes were 29. And at some point we realized, well, first of all, the margins don't always work out. And second of all, just, frankly, there was appetite from the consumers to pay more. Um, and our job is to make sure that we deliver great value, which we still do at 49. But if we can get customers to pay more money for our product, that's a huge win for any operator.

Speaker A: M. At what point do you play with sizing as well? Right. You talked about. The first was 50ml or whatever. Do you ever play around with cool, we've got, like, a different bottle for more bulk or, like, was that kind of a choice?

Speaker B: Yeah, it was. So we didn't do that for a long time. And there's several reasons for that. Number one, one of the ways that we got our, uh, cogs down is that we have the same bottle, the same pump, the same cap, the same everything. So that gives. That accomplishes two things. Number one, it gives us nice branded look and this nice, uniform, clean look to the brand, which we liked. But number two, uh, obviously it reduces your cogs because you can negotiate better prices. It's easier to manage one SKU, one bottle versus, I don't know, 150 different bottles. So that's one thing, uh, that we did. Um. Go ahead.

Speaker A: No, I was gonna. If you've got something else, keep going. If not, I'll jump into wholesale.

Speaker B: I lost my second point. I'll come back in a second, but cool.

Speaker A: All right, sorry. I get, I get excited about this. I'm like, wait, I've got 10.

Speaker B: Me too. So I go in a lot of directions and that sometimes I lose my train of thought.

Speaker A: No, this is, this is good. Let's talk about wholesale. You kind of mentioned it again. Kind of like a lot embedded. So you can take this wherever you want. When, ah, you started the business, did you know wholesale was going to be a big piece of it? Was it? Oh, I'm going to do like online wholesale versus, like brick and mortar. What were the considerations? And then I want to go deeper into that journey. When, when did this become m a big part of the business?

Speaker B: Aaron, if I'm honest with you, we were so clueless. Um, and you know, as a DTC operator, we thought DTC was the whole thing. And then we were lucky enough that Walmart reached out to us and wholesale was not even. It was a little bit irate, but not really. And then they reached out to us, our customer. They sent an email to help. Uh, and our customer care team forward me the email saying, quite literally, I'm about to delete this email because I'm sure it's a scam. However, why don't you have a look at it just to make sure that it's legit. So then I'm like, of course it's a scam. Why would they reach out to us? And lo and behold, you go on LinkedIn, you check the person. Now I was like, okay, actually, this person does seem to work for Walmart. So that's how it all started for us. And obviously, thank God we didn't delete that email. But m. More importantly, it really opened eyes that it's. So when I tell you these things, uh, anybody listening to this and in the perfume industry will say, is this guy stupid? Like, of course they should have gotten to wholesale. But we were lucky enough that we went into wholesale at a point where the brand was strong enough to survive. I really do think there is such a thing as going too early to wholesale because ultimately, if you don't succeed, unlike, there's so many differences between DDC and wholesale. But if you don't succeed in wholesale in one go, I mean, that's it, you're uh, out. There's no testing there. There's like okay, your stuff doesn't work so we'll see you in four years maybe.

Speaker A: Well there's also the like start small and then eventually, hey, thank you Walmart. I'll see you in a year. Let me go on fair or different marketplace and go experiment with like local whatever, right? Or smaller or regional however you want to think about it. So you guys went zero to Walmart?

Speaker B: Yes. Well not to be fair, we went zero to small bar, small Walmart, middle Walmart and big Walmart mean by that is we, we launched in, it was a program for Valentine's Day in 200 doors and obviously we had no idea what, what the metrics were. And by the way for anybody who's in DDC about to go to wholesale, I think we've made pretty much every single mistake in the book. We ah, survived thankfully but it is a entire different, entirely different planet. Get as much help as you humanly can once you go into wholesale because the timeframes are completely different, the volumes are different, the metrics are different, the logistics are radically different. And that's not to be underestimated. So there's a whole bunch of advice I can give there because we made all these mistakes. But long story short, to come back to the story, we went into 200 doors. That was in obviously February, February to early March. We did well because we did well enough. They called us back in April and said hey by the way, would you like to be on Shelve in August? I'm like okay, um, so that's how we started in 1400 doors. Which you know when I tell that story and you don't know how wholesale works, that turnaround time for us was incredibly difficult. And I'll give you one example. If you. I don't have a box as you might know. I don't m. Our old box was this simple elegant box with no name on it except our logo because it was ddc. Like why would you guess, uh, what that doesn't do very well on shelves. So we had to produce more, we had to relabel things. It was, it was challenging but we got to that. We went to the 1400 doors at Walmart and then the company did well, we have enough pipeline of products to give them and then we went into 4,000 doors. That was the big expansion for us. And then now we're the number one perfume brand at Walmart.

Speaker A: So, so many, so many follow up.

Speaker B: Uh, thank you.

Speaker A: I Want to go back to something you said a couple minutes ago? Get help with wholesale. It is generally. Hey, look, I haven't done this before, so I'm gonna bring in fresh perspective. It sounds like wholesale is a very clear line for you, which is like, don't try to bring a fresh perspective. Like fit in with whatever is tried and true. Is that a fair way to put it?

Speaker B: Uh, go ahead. Sorry.

Speaker A: No, I was just curious about that.

Speaker B: One on 100%. Two, when I say bringing help, I mean people who have done this before.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And people who know how wholesale works. Because I'm speaking for myself here, as a DTC operator, I know DTC pretty well. And nothing can prepare you for wholesale if you don't know what's going on. And that was a huge challenge for the team. Just understanding everything, just setting up the systems, logistically, how. Okay, the warehouse, you had a DDC focused warehouse. Now what can they even do? B2B? Are they good at it? It's, it's difficult. And you know what? You can get a lot of things right if you can't ship your products. You are a business. So there's so many details that we had to figure out the contract. We had no clue how to negotiate those contracts. And obviously a huge asymmetry of information because they're going to. If you don't get that right, we got lucky enough, we've got it right. But if you don't get that right, that's going to be an uphill battle. So all these things that we need to figure out, that's why I say bring in somebody either, uh, full time, at least as a consultant, who has been through these things and who know the step of success, you know, on, on the DDC side, if you ask me, what are the different steps to bring the product to life? I know them, I've been through, I've been through those steps and I know the pitfalls and I can guide you through those. You need to bring that same expertise into wholesale. If you're a DDC company, when you,

Speaker A: when you think about wholesale at this point, right, and you're number one at Walmart, you still have the D2C business, right? And you have, you know, those hundreds of perfumes and who knows how many at this point, like how many different scents you have. I'm sure you do. But for me, you know, the question I have is like, where are these like two completely different businesses? And where are they self, um, reinforcing? You bring in some sense into Walmart, but then People get to explore the catalog online. Like how do you think about this from a strategic perspective?

Speaker B: There's a couple ways to think about this. Number one, and it's the most obvious one, all your branded efforts now lift more boat. And instead of just applying to wholesale, this applies to also just edc. I'm sorry, it also applies to your wholesale channel and to TikTok shop and to Amazon. Measuring the effort that we do and the marketing that we push, how that impacts Target and Walmart, very difficult. We went down that road with these and we did some geo lifts, etc. It's not necessarily easy to see that lift. But obviously the brand is growing so we feel, we feel confident taking that leap of faith. You know, in an online world where I feel like DDC is obsessed with to some extent, roughly so with ROI and metrics and how do I measure my marketing impact? Uh, at some point to build a brand you also need to take some smart bets and you need to actually focus on building the brand, which is the phase we're in now versus just being absolutely laser focused on what's my ROI on the ad. So that, that's, that's the first thing that we've seen. And also frankly we just meeting our customers where they are. Our uh, customers do shop at Target, customers do shop at Walmart. And it's a convenience factor to say that there was the two channels canalize each other. Very difficult to measure. I don't think so, but challenging to really see. I think that any DBC operator will see the cannibalization between once you launch Amazon and once you launch TikTok shop. That one is obvious. And you see that pretty quickly. Wholesale, much more difficult. I really think it grows the number of customers you can reach and it grows your conversion. And I'll give you one example that happened that we saw in the video. This person said, I discovered the brand on Instagram, I went to Target and I smelled it over there and I bought it on TikTok shop. I mean that's really, those are the touch points and that's how the consumer thinks about it versus just, you know, I'm just shopping on Instagram, said no one ever.

Speaker A: I love the framing that you put in the middle of that, which is kind of like a throwaway but is so core, which is like meet the customers where they're at. And I know for you it's both like the location but also what products you want. And like there's a lot embedded in there. But I didn't want to let that go without repeating it. Let's actually talk about how do you sell. It's easier now that you've wholesale, but how do you think about selling Ascent online, um, and how the tools change to enable you to do that? Or is it truly like you're letting people know everywhere you are so they actually go experience the product live before they buy?

Speaker B: So in the very beginning, uh, we didn't have a physical presence, it was just online. The couple things that worked out for us, especially on impressions collection, it's as simple as saying, this product smells like blood, Chanel. And that gives you a very good sense of what the perfume is going to smell like. And then it's a question of do you trust us enough that the quality is going to be good and do you like the price point? So, uh, the way I think about it is, at least in the beginning is that people were intrigued when they saw an ad for us and when they heard about us on an influencer channel on Instagram or TikTok. Oh, excuse me, on YouTube or TikTok, people were intrigued enough about the price point to go and check it out. And then they were convinced that of the quality, because of the quality of the assets we put together, how good the website looks, what they hear about us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but then also we try to make that purchase experience as seamless as humanly possible. Obviously the big risk is you don't like the perfume or you think the quality shit, whatever it is, um, that's the one thing you really worry about. So, okay, how do we solve this? Well, we solve this by saying you can buy the product, try it on, if after 30 days you don't like it, reach back to us and we'll take that product back, no questions asked. It doesn't mean m. It doesn't. It doesn't matter if you finish half the bottle, I don't care, just send it back to us and we'll figure something out. And I think that piece of reassurance was also a key factor. And then finally, obviously the price point, the price point value proposition was really strong. And it almost becomes like a, uh, what do you call them? Not, not a thought through decision, but an instinctual, like a spur, uh, of the moment decision where you say, you know what, screw it, I'll just take a chance and if it doesn't work, I'll get my money back anyway. So I think these, these factors really helped us in the beginning to get the company off the ground.

Speaker A: So you were able to de risk it. And going back to something you said a while ago, at that price point, if the product wasn't good enough, you. You didn't move from the spur of the moment decision or the, hey, let me just try it out. Whether I return it or not, it's 30 bucks. You lose the opportunity. And so, like, the product itself was obviously good enough, right? It was at that core that matter. Cool. That's very helpful. I know we've got about 15 minutes left, so I'm going to, like, take some hard turns and just cover a couple more topics, if that works.

Speaker B: Uh, any direction. 1. I love talking about this stuff, so.

Speaker A: All right, this one a little bit still about customer expectations, but I'm curious, like, how have they changed over the years? Is it just like that the product is where you want it to be? Is it. There's a difference of, like, the shopping experience online. Like, are customer expectations changing in a meaningful way right now for you guys?

Speaker B: I think overall in the perfume industry, people are becoming way more knowledgeable about perfume than before. I think that that's an interesting trend. Perfume is having a moment overall, but the, the amount of comments and feedback we're getting from our, uh, customers with very precise questions and very detailed and thought out, um, questions they have or comments they have, there's a clear difference. So I think the expectation of quality now is even higher than before and people are really, really focused on that. Because perfume now, I don't think it's a fad. I think it's a generally, generally a movement upwards. It's a step up. So that for sure has changed. Um, that, I mean, it was always table stakes. It's become even more stable table stakes than before. And then obviously every new release, the bigger the company becomes, every new release, there's more scrutiny on it just because we touch more eyeball. So a young company, in the very beginning, if you screw a couple of things up, you can get away with it, because, first of all, not that big. Second of all, customers actually do understand and they tend to be a bit more forgiving. Once you reach our size, there's much less forgiveness for anything. So I think the expectations of customers have only gone up. Um, but those are the things that come to mind is focus on qualities even bigger than before. And it was really high. And, you know, in perfume, there's a lot of competition. There's every year, to give you a sense, every year in the world, there's about 2,000 perfumes that are launched. So to get yourself, that's a real number. To get yourself out of that fray is difficult. And you know, those products are not cheap. So therefore quality is even more important than it was before.

Speaker A: Are there any tools you're using to enable your team to answer those really complex questions? I'm sure there are questions about ingredients or questions about, hey, how will this, I mean, who, who knows, right? But it's obviously to your point, it's harder than it ever was. How are you enabling your team to be able to answer these? Or is it more just the contents on the site?

Speaker B: No, we get precise questions which are not on the site quite a lot actually. And you know, there's a couple, there's a couple of types of questions that we get. The obvious basic ones that any, any operator deals with is where's my stuff? And that one is quite automated now and we, we got a lot of volume that, that, that's fine. And then once you start getting into the more nitty gritty of help me recommend a product, it's really a mix. Can the first line of defense of customer care take care of that? And they are knowledgeable enough that they can, uh, in most cases and recommend products. And then there's a very detailed question that we get. And for those ones, I mean, it's as simple as we ask our perfumers because obviously, uh, our chief, uh, product officer is extremely knowledgeable about the process. She can answer a bunch of those questions from the customer care team. And if we really, really don't know, then, then we go to our perfumers and say, hey, we got this question. Um, first of all, the reaction is, first of all the reaction is like, wow, we don't see those, those kind of questions that often. And uh, so that's, that's the process.

Speaker A: I mean it's also good, right? Going back to being able to move quickly, being able to meet your customers where they're at. Right. Like having your perfumer understand a question from the audience is actually pretty cool, right? It gets them like really into what, what's top of mind for folks.

Speaker B: And they love it because I think as perfumers they're not always exposed to that world. Oftentimes their work evolves around, not for us, but in general in the perfume world. Evolves around, okay, produce a product. Produce a perfume. Thank you, goodbye. So the fact that they feel in touch, indirectly they feel in touch with the customer, I think it's something they like. Mhm.

Speaker A: You mentioned something before about small bets and I, I don't want to ask what small bets you have going on right now because I don't want to be forward facing and diving too deep into strategy. But can you recall any small bets that you made that like really paid off or small bets that you made where you were like, oh, this is going to crush and it actually wasn't useful?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I'm racking my brain a little bit, but there's a bunch. And what I mean by that, I love using simple analogies in life. So the team hears me say the same mantras over and over again. I think they're sick of it, but it works for me. So one of the things I always say is that, you know, life is not a game of chess, it's a game of poker. And one of the. I hate referencing books that makes me feel like I'm full intellectual but one of the books that really changed my perspective on that is this book by Ann Duke, a poker player, a female poker player called uh, Thinking bets, nodding your headset.

Speaker A: Awesome book. Absolutely awesome. Yeah.

Speaker B: And in, you know one, one of the things that they say, one of the first things they say in this book is they talk, they talk shit around the table, say, oh, I bet you couldn't do that, you couldn't do that and say, okay, let's put money on it. And then you, all of a sudden you start thinking. So I think that served me well is that mentality of thinking in terms of bet. So your whole objective is you don't have perfect information. Again, life is not a game of chess. You don't have the perfect information. It's a game of poker where you operate with, with imperfect information. And your objective is to make sure that you make enough smart bets with. Not to get nitty gritty and tickle on poker lingo but with a uh, positive ev where down the road, if you make enough of those bets, your company succeeds. So that's really it. And in terms of smart bets that we made, price is one of them that changed the, fundamentally the direction of our company. That was huge. And then there's a bunch non comfortable. There's actually a lot of them where we thought this is going to kill it. And then um, complete, complete uh, fail. Like I'm sure if I rack my brain, I'm sure there was some, a bunch of big redesigns that we did on website and we're super proud of it. And look at this, how good it looks. Nothing, nothing at all. Didn't do anything for us. So I think you always have to be to test and try and improve the site and try to improve the experience. Ultimately, what I come back to, and that's the first point we mentioned, is speed. And the way I think about it is what's the effort we're putting into this? What's the potential impact? It's really that two by two, and if your effort is huge and the impact is uncertain or even worse, low, obviously don't do it. And you can think about the impact. You don't know what the impact is going to be. But that's your experience telling you this could be a major impact. But there's a bunch of does that we did, uh, redesign is one that comes to mind immediately.

Speaker A: Um, that's really helpful, by the way, going back to the beginning part of our discussion where we were talking about sometimes you need to shut down your company or, or you need to stop a bet or whatever it is. Andy Duke's other book, Quit, is really good for anybody who's in that.

Speaker B: Oh, really?

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, you shouldn't read it. It's not quitting. Don't worry about it. You don't. You don't need to worry about this right now. You guys are doing things the right way. I think the last thread I want to pull on is operating today, even in the last six months or the last year. Obviously, like Claude is just improve so much and you can project out six months from now, 12 months from now, whatever the tools are. There's so much you can do as a brand owner that you could not possibly have done two years ago, let alone 10 or 15 years ago. How do you help your team think through, or how are you thinking through, hey, we should build it ourselves versus we should use a partner, whether it's a tech company or an agency or even like a core platform of yours that you're using. We're like, could we just do this ourselves and save X tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars? What it. Where's your mentality at to jump into the mind of a candidly, like a great brand operator?

Speaker B: Oh, thank you for saying that. Um, the one thing is cost is something that we have not figured out yet, honestly. I mean, when I say we, I mean collectively. I don't think anybody has a good sense of cost and how that's going to impact the future of the business. And just to give you one example, like, if I tell you you pay, what, a couple hundred bucks for your cloud, for your cloud membership, and you souped up, if all of a sudden they tell you it's gonna be 2000. You're probably still paying, that'll be my guess. And we have, I mean, all it takes. You can do all the analysis you want right now.

Speaker A: All right, now I'm gonna just camp about how much I double, triple, quadruple their cost.

Speaker B: And, uh, that's.

Speaker A: But it's been, uh, it's been fun for us as a team to use cloud as they go to market. Um, you. You froze, so I got to tell everybody what I would pay for cloud, but you're gonna have to, so. So you want.

Speaker B: You said 200.

Speaker A: Would you pay 2,000? I was like, hell, yeah. And I'm trying to figure out what my number is.

Speaker B: Of course, of course you would. No question. But that changed your IRI math incredibly. You just did. Times 10, you said. Yes, but if you base all your, all your productivity calculations around what it costs today, that's probably not the right math. Anyway, I digress. But I just want to write that cost piece, uh, and that ROI piece, which I think nobody has solved. But the way I think about it, um, I think about this in terms of what I call individual AI versus enterprise AI. What I mean by that is there's a lot of people, everybody in that company has access to cloud. And what you tend to see, not just in our company, but to fellow founder, I think we see that quite a lot, is that individual AI, uh, is going to increase your productivity by picking number 20, 30, 40%. I don't know, uh, you write emails, it helps you think through things. That's all fine and good. And then what people forget or fail to see is that it's also compensated or even overcompensated in some case by all the crap you produce. Because it's so easy now. And I see a bunch of presentations, our, uh, company or other companies, where you obviously see that it's produced by AI. Not a problem. That's okay. What people forget is that you're still the owner of that output. It doesn't matter who produced. I mean, it's like Excel. Like, I could do my math in Excel. I could do my math on a piece of paper. It's your math. You're responsible for that outcome. And what you see is that people do not review that presentation. People that didn't really go through and understand what they were actually trying to say. And that's very counterproductive because it's going to spit out something that looks pretty amazing very confidently. And you realize that if you don't dig into this, it's not that useful. And then second piece is what are we trying to accomplish? There's so many things you can do. I think you need to be razor focus on what you're trying to accomplish. So that's, that's the part about individual, or uh, what I call individual AI, which I think is both amazing but also very costly in terms of productivity. And then the way I think about is what I call my own lingo, I guess enterprise AI is what are the workflows that exist within the company between teams, between team members, whatever those workflows have been around for. Every company has workflows. And I'll give you one that's very obvious to any DDC operator is, okay, the marketing team or the paid advertising team wants 40 assets in the next week. Cool. So then they reach out to the design team. Okay, I need 40 assets. Uh, there's a back and forth. They finally agree on what the assets should look like. Those assets, you take those assets, you upload them to Meta or whatever platform TikTok, whatever platform, you scale some ads, you kill some ads, and then you're back to the brief. Okay, Based on that, you're back to brief. That's a workflow that any, I think any DDC company has. How can we make that workflow easier? And that doesn't mean automating every single piece, but how. That's a real workflow that we have in the company. And how can we simplify that workflow by making things automated? Uh, I'll give you one very simple example. In our company, there's people whose job, that's not just what they do, but it takes a huge amount of time to reformat assets. Okay, this video is in 69. Let me put in 4. 3. Okay, you know what, that takes time. Um, and it's very, it's uh, very, it's very manual as a process. That's the obvious thing that you should be working on. So long story short, the way I'm thinking about this, and we're still at the very beginning of this, is how can I automate and help my teams go through the existing workflows that we have right now? And I think ultimately what we're going to discover by doing this is that some workflows just need to change. Um, um, we're not there yet, but that's, that's my hunch. That's, that's what's going to happen the next couple of months.

Speaker A: It's really great framing. I love the idea of the individual AI versus enterprise AI and the uh, um, your output is still. Your output is my number one probably like pet peeve right now.

Speaker B: Such a pet peeve on that.

Speaker A: Um, um, one of my.

Speaker B: Really, you know what I thought, I actually thought about this and I love to hear what you think about this. What I'm going to do from now, and I haven't done yet, what I'm going to do in every meeting when there's a presentation, say, okay, before you open this presentation, summarize it in 30 seconds or less. Tell me what the risks and challenges are. Don't open it. And I'm actually, I haven't tested yet, but I'm very curious to see what

Speaker A: it's going to do. I, um, love this. Can I be in the room when that happens? This is going to be really, really beautiful. Look, uh, one of my really good advisors, this guy Brendan Baker, who's like at a fine, but just was an advisor to Passport, my shipping company. He always, when he would give an opinion, he'd always say what his confidence interval was. And I really want to like. And I loved it. And I really want to tell Claude, hey, give me something and make it very clear what your confidence interval is. That this is correct.

Speaker B: I've done that, by the way. I've done that like literally three days ago, five days ago. Whatever it is I say, just tell me, high, mid, high, mid, low, what your confidence level is. Game changer.

Speaker A: Oh, this is so funny. Yeah, my. Um, I have so many thoughts on this. We're. We're out of time. But man, we gotta. We'll. We'll have a. We'll have a discussion offline about like anytime, anytime. I love it. Let me ask you just to wrap. Is there anything else you shared so much like I literally have a page full of notes here and like to follow questions that I want to come back to. Anything else you want to share for a brand operator or anybody in this. In this period? No pressure. If not. So then, you know, the last, last piece is where can folks find dossier. Any, you know, call to action, if you will. Sure.

Speaker B: The plugins. The plugs. Now look, I, I think we talked about. The stuff that I like talking about is basics work. I think that's very important. Don't get distracted by what I call the new shiny object syndrome, where this new amazing tool and it's going to solve all your problems. You know what? The basics still work and you need to focus on those. That's essential. Any operator needs. If you don't make money. I always say if you don't make money. It's not a business to hobby. So at some point you need to make money. So having a good knowledge of your, your profitability and economics and, and then the final piece, we didn't touch a lot about this, but, uh, I have thoughts. Is cash management, like, I think that 80% of an Eco's job is to make sure that there's enough cash, uh, on the bank account. And you know what? I failed at that. And I'm a former banker, so you think I know numbers pretty well and it's challenging. You need to be razor focused on cash no matter what, no matter what you do, no matter how big your fundraising rounds were, ours were very small. We raised very little money. But you need to be razor focused on cash because it's very easy to spend and it's very, very difficult to earn. So that if, again, I go back to basics, cash is very basic. Everybody understands that concept. But you can really screw up your company.

Speaker A: Well, you're also very clear on your language. It's not, you need a great finance team, it's you, the CEO, needs to be extraordinarily close to the cash and understand the situation.

Speaker B: Yes, you need both. We have a phenomenal finance team. That's great. But, yeah, I, uh, do not joke when I say this. I open my bank account every single day, if not multiple times a day. It's almost sad, compulsive behavior. But I literally open the bank account every single day to check the cash because it's. And it doesn't help me that much in a way, just by checking cash. That's not how you can understand what, what, what spend is going to come out of your bank account. But I feel that if you are close to the cash, and that's one of the steps you need to do, that's going to be very, very helpful for you for your company. And then we could talk about working capital and all that good stuff. But that's for another time, I guess.

Speaker A: I think it's sage advice. So thank you for wrapping there. All right, so Walmart, Dossier Co. Any. Anything else people should know?

Speaker B: Dossier Co, obviously, um, if you, if you live abroad, we're in Mexico, Canada, the uk, Continental Europe, online. Um, um, you'll find us at Walmart, Target, cvs and then in Mexico where a bunch of retailers too. Uh, and then Amazon and TikTok Shop. You know, the, that's, that's the online piece. And then trying to grow that wholesale presence as much as, as we can. If you are in New York. We have two boutiques. Uh, one of them is in Nolita. If you don't know where Nolita is, it's right next to Soho. If you don't know where soho is, it's in lower part of Manhattan.

Speaker A: It's the fun part. It's a cool part.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a nice spot. It's a nice spot. Uh, a boutique is beautiful. Um, it's actually a really fun experience going there. So it's on Elizabeth street between Prince and Houston. There you go.

Speaker A: That's great. So you can go to. Oh, uh. God. What is it? I lived at Spring and Mulberry was my first apartment in New York.

Speaker B: Oh, did you?

Speaker A: And it was the most expensive apartment I had for the next, like, 12 years of my life. It was amazing, though. I felt. I felt great.

Speaker B: Spring and Marbury. There's an infamous bar on the corner of Spring and Marbury called Spring Lounge, where I've had a. A couple whiskies.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was at Spring Lounge a bunch, and then I'm blanking on my, um, Cafe Abana is very close to your shop also, so we. All right, thank you. This was. This was a wonderful combo. Appreciate all your insights and your time.

Speaker B: I loved it. And I love this. Anytime you want.

Speaker A: I'm Aaron Schwarz, co founder of Areita AI, where we help hundreds of brands like Spanx, Faerity and Salton Stone get the absolute most out of their customer list. Learn more at Areita AI or check out my interviews with the founders of Klaviyo, Birdies, Caraway, and plenty more. Wherever you get your podcasts,