SEASON 1 EPISODE 4 with

episode transcript +

How Care/of Makes Taking Your Vitamins Good For You and Our World w/ Care/of’s Craig Elbert Season 1, Episode 4

Guest: Craig Elbert, co-Founder and CEO of Care/of

AARON KWITTKEN Broadcasting from the 10 Hudson Square Building, home of WNYC Radio in Soho, New York, welcome to Brand on Purpose, the podcast dedicated to uncovering the untold stories behind the most impactful purpose-driven companies. My guest today is Craig Elbert.

Craig is co-founder and CEO of nutrition and wellness company Care/of. Craig’s had a super-diverse career, I’m very excited to have him in the studio today. He was once an investment banker and an analyst at Lehman Brothers. He has also had various roles in ad sales and biz dev at Universal Pictures, MTV Networks, Warner Music. And before he founded Care/of, and this is my favorite part, Craig was leading marketing and, before that, finance at Bonobos, which is another one of my favorite brands. And, full disclosure, and Craig knows this, I’m not just a fan of Care/of, but I’m also a consumer of Care/of. And that’s how I actually got to Craig today, and I’ll get to that in just a second.

So, Craig launched Care/of only three years ago, with a very distinct purpose in mind: honesty and quality through the consumer personal health. And, knowing that he would need a board of real health care professionals, at the very start, he teamed up with leading doctors. And, hopefully I’ll get his name right, his cofounder is Ashak Shah, of a health care start up called Home Team, who helped Craig launch Care/of.

The past three years have been incredibly exciting for Care/of. It’s gone through multiple rounds of financing, the most recent in 2018 with Goldman Sachs putting the valuation at around $156mm. And the company has seen incredible growth. If you’ve been on Facebook or Instagram, or even been on the subway here in New York in the last couple of years, it’s hard to miss this brand. And, basically what Care/of does is they deliver customized vitamin packs right to your door. They combine technology, science and human empathy to make the journey simpler. Did I get that right?

CRAIG ELBERT That’s exactly right.

AK So Craig, welcome to Brand on Purpose.

CE Excellent. Thank you so much for having me, Aaron. Look forward to talking.

AK I’ll try not to make it awkward by giving you a huge, warm embrace because of your past with Bonobos, as well as with Care/of, of course. So the reason why we are meeting here today is because, nobody can see this, of course, but I’ve got two packages of vitamins. One for my wife, Tessa. And it says, “Hi Tessa.” And there’s an inspiring quote on her package. And mine, which just says, “Hi Aaron.” And there’s also another inspiring quote on mine.

My wife actually introduced me to this brand about a year ago. And I’ll talk about that in a second because I think it’s an interesting journey, as well. But, the reason why I reached out to you is because you guys recently launched compostable packaging. And I just, through my own personal experience with clients and a couple of start ups I nearly got involved with, I know how hard it is to put a compostable package together that can maintain the efficacy of whatever is in it, in this case it’s vitamins. It can still look good, and of course, it will compost over time.

So, I’m gonna start off with that and just tell me a little bit about one, how hard that was to do, how long that took, because I think that as consumers we take these things for granted. They’re like, “How come they can’t make these things compostable?” They think it’s like, magic. You can just make it happen. How did it happen?

CE You’re right, it was quite a journey. We initially launched the brand around December 2016. And when we built out the brand, it was about convenience and honesty and delivering this personalize pack for folks. And that core pack was everybody gets 30 packs that they take daily. But as we were building it out, we were looking at the options for film and it just felt so, personally I felt like, okay, we’ve got to be able to move to something that’s compostable or recyclable, something here, and the challenge was when we were building out initially, our vendors said that wasn’t possible.

They said, “Here’s if you want to be able to maintain the moisture seal, you want to be able to maintain stability of the product, it’s just not physically possible.” And I think, like a lot of things, when you’re building the business, you’re told “No” a lot. You’re told, “No, your idea won’t work. No, you can’t get funding.” And this was just, “No, you can’t build a compostable pack.” And, for us, we didn’t take that as the final answer.

We did do what you do in a start up a lot, which is iterate. So we launched with the initial packaging which was more plastic and was not compostable. But, in the meantime, we had an initiative in the background where we started looking for different suppliers. And really, we had somebody…

AK I hope you told your supplier that, “Unless you can evolve with the century we’re living in…”

CE I think, yeah, there was a message of that, and I think there was a little bit of dismissiveness on their side because A, they saw us as a small company, and B, hadn’t seen our growth and they just didn’t think anybody could do this.

So we had a Director of Strategy, who, one of her main goals was just trying to uncover different suppliers here. And so, that involved a lot of just cold calling packaging companies. That involved looking at other competitors. That involved looking at who weren’t competitors. And had interest in packaging.

She ultimately got after a number of kind of dead ends, frankly. We eventually got a lead on this company that is also a start up themselves, but are really focused on eco-friendly packaging. And they told us they had developed something that would be compostable coming from cornhusks and I’m forgetting the second ingredient.

AK It’s not mushrooms, is it? I’ve been reading a little about…

CE Mushrooms is something that we’re working on for the cardboard. So there are a number of mushroom packaging and sugar cane packaging for the cardboard side of things but that was not an ingredient for the packs themselves. Ultimately, it was a lot of legwork. A lot of dead ends, and finally, finding this needle in a haystack, Fender, and just working closely with them over the course of six months to develop it.

And then we had to do our stability testing to make sure that the product was good, and that took another three months. And then, ultimately, we had to trial it out and that took another month, to make sure that our machines worked with it and, overall, the journey was, like I said, probably one to two years. But it was something that mattered so much to us within the company because we were putting out this product. It mattered to our customers. It was one of the biggest complaints, probably the biggest complaint of our customers.

And you would see it on Instagram, it was “Hey I love the brand, but I feel bad taking this piece of plastic, single use plastic, everyday.” And so, finally we got there. And it meant a lot to me, personally, and a lot to our employees. And it was a fun one where I sent an email to the customers, and just the notes that you got back, you know, that I got back that were really personal.

AK That’s how we met today.

CE Yeah. And you realize how much people care. So much of when you’re building a brand is that you build something that people really care about, that people really connect on and launching with the compostable packs was one of those feelings of like, hey we’ve really connected with our customers. The feedback, just getting that positive feedback. Obviously, there was a personal reason to do it, but also just hearing from the customers you knew that it mattered. And you knew that the work was really worth it.

AK Was the gating a factor to having, I mean, I know that there are few suppliers who could do this, but was it because of a material science issue? Or was it a cost issue or both?

CE Primarily, a material science is my understanding. Because, the cost is little bit more but it’s not insanely. It was the material science and particularly being able to hold the moisture barrier and being able to allow for products stability. So stability, we have to do stability testing, where we let the product sit for months and they also accelerate that in a number of ways, and then you have to remove the product and see, ok is what’s in here the same thing that we said it was when it launched?

AK Right. Bioequivalent. After you’ve had the sun beating on it or put it in a freezer or all these different things.

CE Exactly.

AK And do you use a third party to do that, or there’s consultants, I’m sure there’s a whole industry who does these things.

CE Yeah, there’s a whole industry that does the stability testing. Stability testing itself is very common. It’s been used for years, but anytime you have new packaging, you have to do stability testing in our world. And in this case, we hadn’t found anything that passed that stability testing and was also compostable.

AK So you are in a super competitive business, an industry where I’m just wondering, what was the light bulb that went off one morning? I know ideas aren’t created right away, these things, they simmer. You also happen to work for Bonobos, one of my favorite brands, I might have mentioned that earlier. And interestingly, your journey was, you’re a finance guy at Bonobos, and then you became a marketing guy. Which, actually, I’m not sure in the 30 years I’ve been doing this has ever happened. I don’t know, I don’t recall anybody who’s ever been able to do both. It’s like cats and dogs. Why vitamins? Why personal care and health care and wellness? Is there a personal story behind it?

CE Yeah, one of the things that we’ve talked about so much at Bonobos was this idea of how do you make something delightful that’s previously boring or stagnant. And how do you connect with consumers and really create a product that people are passionate about. In that case, it was men’s khaki pants and you can think that there’s not that much more boring than men’s khaki pants, other than potentially vitamins.

AK And I would just add, that meeting on that need. So the thing, as a Bonobos customer now even still, I’m like, don’t be envious, a 29 inch waist, maybe 28 even now a 30 inch inseam, right? It’s hard to find that, right? And I want fitted pants, I don’t want to look like an old man, even though I’m an old man, right?

CE Yes. Exactly and a lot of it comes down to listening to the customer and understanding customer problems and being empathetic to that. And I think Andy Dunn at Bonobos was great at this and I learned a lot ultimately, kind of, with his voice in my head, I had the experience of shopping for vitamins and supplements. My wife was pregnant and so she was taking prenatal vitamins and I’d see her with a little baggie sometimes when we’d go on trips where it’s like the pre-natals and the fish oil and the calcium. I’d been told I was Vitamin D deficient, and so, then, going to the store and trying to purchase, like you mentioned, it’s a very crowded category. It’s a highly fragmented industry. And the retail experience was just a miserable one. You have teenage commissioned store clerks who are trying to sell you something.

AK And they know nothing, to be honest.

CE Exactly, they don’t know anything other than what product is sponsoring a deal that day, so that they can get that incentive. And I think, from a consumer standpoint, I just felt like this was a miserable experience. And I think there was a part of it, too, where I was trying to do something for my health. I kind of wondered if the whole category was all BS, but here I was with a couple of doctor recommendations around pre-natals and around vitamin D.

So clearly, there must be some science or research here, but it’s masked in that shopping experience where they kind of treat everything the same, from kind of some herbs that you’ve never heard of to these core vitamins and minerals. And it felt like there’s an ability to really dig in here and try to create something from a customer standpoint.

So I think that was kind of the moment of standing in that aisle and feeling like this was a miserable customer experience. And then, my co-founder Akash and I, I’d been connected with him from a friend from business school, and he built health care start-ups that were about impacting peoples lives. I was focused on consumer experience and we just saw this as a pretty interesting and ripe category.

And when we dug in, we saw, we looked at a metric that’s called net promoter score, which is generally how likely somebody is to recommend a brand or retailer. And we saw that, for vitamins and supplements, the experience was worse than getting cable installed. It was worse than getting health insurance. It was literally a negative net promoter score meaning there were more people that were detractors of their brands and retailers. Again, coming from that…

AK And you’re like, that’s the business I want to go into!

CE Exactly. Coming from the Bonobos mindset of, hey we can build something delightful! And so, what were the customer problems? It’s confusing. People don’t know what to take and why. There’s broken trust because there’s bad actors and there’s just, it’s hard to know what actually has science. The most challenging part is, that we’re working on long term, is there’s a lack of a feedback loop. How do you have confidence that what you’re doing is having an impact? And those are three problems that we really wanted to tackle in a meaningful way with the direct to consumer business.

AK So you did it, and I think one of the most interesting parts of Care/of is like when you sign on, you basically, how many questions is it that you answer?

CE It’s about five minutes and so it depends on the number…

AK It seems quick.

CE Yeah.

AK But they’re smart questions, and then you have some sort of algorithm or something that helps provide some level of advice, which I imagine is based on your co-founder’s background as well, ‘cause there’s real legitimate credentialed physicians and nutritionists that help to feed back into that loop based on the answers that I give.

CE Yeah, exactly and I think that was important for us at the beginning which was, how do we bring credible people to help give the guidance and how to we actually bring people who would maybe be more skeptical of the vitamin industry? And so, we saw out there, there are plenty of people who we could pay to do this who have been in the vitamin industry for decades.

And said, “Let’s find some skeptics. Let’s get some academics and let’s find some people who are practicing physicians, integrative and naturopaths. Let’s work with them on what that recommendation engine is.” And, ultimately, the goal for us was how do we build something that we feel confident actually delivers value to the user? And let’s get a variety of opinions.

So that was an exercise where, before we built the company, it was a courting process to get some of these academics and doctors to really understand that we wanted to approach this in the right way. That we weren’t just out to make a quick dollar. That we were really building something with purpose, I think was important to actually get some of those advisors on early.

AK I feel like, too, my own experience has been, there’s kind of like two main camps, right? You’ve got health care professionals who are like, “Hey, if you eat a balanced diet and you lead a pretty healthy lifestyle, you’re fine. Maybe take a one a day.” Right? And then you’ve got others who, and I think this is where the industry is going and where most health care professionals are going, a little bit more holistic approach. We’re all deficient somewhere, and sometimes it’s not based on science or blood test, and it’s just how you feel. And even if it is a placebo if it’s working, is it really a placebo? And for me, besides the fact that my wife said you have to try this, it’s really cool. I took this blood test, I think the company is called Inside Tracker? You’re probably familiar with them.

CE Oh yeah. I know them.

AK So I was in peak IRONMAN training, which is probably when I shouldn’t have taken the blood test. But I found I was deficient in a lot of different areas. And then that actually then, instead of going to CVS, no offense to CVS, and at the same time my wife said you should try this company. It felt a little more bespoke and a little more education-based and logical and a sensible approach to use Care/of.

Talk a little bit about the dichotomy between those two universes, though. And also, at some point, how many people are actually coming to you because the catalyst was a blood test and they’re looking for different kind of markers, versus people who already take vitamins? Like, how do you kind of look at your demographic? I know I just threw a lot of questions at you.

CE I think that the interesting thing is that dichotomy of people reading in the news, hey, vitamins don’t work, or have a naturopath or someone who’s very pro-supplementation. And I think the consumer sometimes gets confused by, kind of, like, the strength of the opinions and the reality is that it’s a spectrum.

If I have a doctor who says, “Oh, you don’t need to take vitamins, they’re not necessary,” then I would sort of ask that doctor, “Ok, if someone’s pregnant, what about the importance of folic acid?” And it’s like, “Ok, yes, that’s true.” And, “Ok, then, what if someone lives in the northeast coast and doesn’t get vitamin D, should they be supplementing?” And it’s like, “Ok, that’s true.” And then, “Ok, if someone’s a vegan or a vegetarian should they maybe be taking B12 because it’s only found in animal products?”

AK Or if they’re anemic they should be taking iron.

CE Right. And so, there’s certain single-use cases and I think what we realize is ultimately you wind up with a spectrum of what we call, internally, belief systems. Which is, how much does somebody want to ensure that everything has, on the one hand, you might have hey, I only want to see consensus science and just show me anything that has massive peer reviewed studies with large sample sizes. Ok, we’ll limit the results the results to that. That will limit the number of vitamin supplement options. But, that’s a route that we can go.

And then on the other side, you have folks who maybe want to try some stuff that has emerging research or maybe some stuff that’s been used in an ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. And ultimately, we realize that there’s a spectrum of belief systems that go into our category, and we want to help the customer, we want to give them guidance that’s in line with what their belief system is and help them navigate that and I think interesting thing that you mentioned is that there is, increasingly, folks thinking about preventative medicine.

There is a movement towards more preventative medicine. And its not just about treating disease states, but its about how do we actually get ahead of ourselves by preventing long term….

AK I feel like preventative medicine is the new interventional medicine. Because if it’s interventional, you’re already kind of too late? You’re already down the path.

CE Exactly. And usually preventative medicine, the more we can eat smart, the more we can exercise, and from my perspective, the right supplementation, all of that can ultimately set you up so that you have less side effects and you need less interventions down the road.

One of the things, and it’s sort of a rabbit hole to go down, but one of the things that I’ve realized approaching this category and approaching this category and I’d not been in it before was just how much our health, the systems of our health care, shape the way that we treat ourselves, the way that our hospitals work, all of that, and it ultimately filters down to people’s belief systems on preventative medicine and supplementation.

So it’s, it’s interesting and, sometimes sort of tragic, how some things are broken. But ultimately, our goal is trying to do our best to make it simple for the user. Trying to do our best to help understand their belief system, how they’re approaching us and meet them there.

AK So speaking of belief systems, and I have always liked that phrase, one of the belief systems currently being challenged right now is the efficacy of cannabis whether CBD or THC or a combination of the two. And you’re seeing this not just play out in the US, but Canada is the first country, whole country, to have it legalized both medicinally and recreationally.

How do you feel about at least the medicinal impact and what could that do to your business, if and when that happens, either federally or increasingly more state by state? Currently, you don’t offer any cannabis products, right?

CE Yeah, we currently have no cannabis products, no CBD, no hemp oil, and it’s clearly a huge rising trend. And I think there is, it’s an interesting one where over time figuring out the research and there’s some areas that have very clear research for sleep for anxiety.

AK Inflammation, pain, the list goes on. There’s a New York Times cover story in their magazine, it’s like CBD Cures Everything.

CE Exactly. And it’s trying to understand what’s true and also there is, I think from a consumer standpoint, sometimes a lack of a knowledge on the difference types of products. CBD vs. hemp oil, does something have the full spectrum? Or is it an isolate? I think there’s a lot of education that’s going to happen. There’s also, simultaneously, a lot of marketing that’s happening out there so it’s going to be a little bit, I think, noisy, but over time actually beneficial.

My sense is that there’s gonna be an initial, kind of, lots of pop in terms of, like, from a trend perspective, as regulation kind of breaks down, and then, ultimately, it will settle for clear use cases and become, kind of, less of just a peer trend product and something more than that.

It’s definitely something that we’re looking at and have, are figuring out the road map, I think there are challenges. It’s interesting in talking about systemic challenges. It’s interesting because there’s definitely regulatory challenges state by state, but there’s things like our payment process will not allow us to sell CBD products. Our bank will not write inventory loans against CBD products. And so you, there’s different challenges that I think folks are facing and I think all of that changes pretty quickly over the next couple of years, and you see it changing already.

It’s definitely a super interesting and high-potential space with a lot of benefits for folks. I think the key will be getting the right amount of education for users and setting expectations. And ultimately, kind of, understanding where the benefits are and, kind of, once it moves outside, in just the pure, kind of, like, interesting trend thing to something that’s actually having an impact for people consistently is where it gets kind of exciting.

AK I feel like you guys are on the cutting edge of discovering new products, new supplements, new ingredients. One, because I get your emails but, so, for example, sleep crystals you introduced recently.

CE We have quick sticks.

AK My wife loves those by the way.

CE Yes, excellent.

AK Can you also add something to stop her from snoring?

CE We’re working on it, we don’t have that right now.

AK That could be the most expensive, most costly comment I ever make on this podcast, by the way. How do you go about that internally without, obviously, revealing any sort of trade secrets? But that’s where the innovation is, right? I’m sure you have teams of people, or some people, who go about and are like what’s the next thing? And I feel like you’re a very responsible, very transparent company so you’re not going to bring it to market unless you feel very good about it.

CE Yeah, I think this is just an interesting thing in terms of, as we’ve built the business, the balance of what I’d call kind of outsiders in building a business vs. insiders. And what I mean there is, when we started building products, I had some ideas of what we wanted to build. But when we wanted to actually make, for instance, what’s the sourcing of our magnesium, I did not have experience there. And I could have just sort of tried to trust our consultants, but I think I would have been tricked and ultimately taken advantage of and I think, ultimately, it’s one where I felt having insiders, people who have actually lived and breathed product innovation in this category for decades…

AK And they understand the supply chain.

CE Exactly. I think you have to understand all of that. Especially, kind of, given some of the bad actors out there. So I spent time thinking about, who do I really respect in terms of product development? There’s a brand out in Vermont called New Chapter. They’ve been making botanicals and supplements for a number of years and have a rich tradition on being very smart on the supply chain. So I spent a lot of time courting their supply chain team and their head of product innovation and got them on board. You know one of them, Graham Rigby, is just an amazing product innovator who’s just incredibly bright and has his pulse on what’s new, what’s coming around the corner, what’s the science behind things.

AK So they’re a partner of yours?

CE Yeah, they joined us so they left New Chapter. I happened to benefit from the fact that P&G had acquired New Chapter and that was culturally not going well, which the kind of, the point of our podcast is that there wasn’t an alignment on values. There wasn’t an alignment on purpose and that ultimately led to folks looking outside and I was able to benefit from that by bringing aboard three or four folks from New Chapter, including our head of product innovation. And so, we were aligned on vision and purpose and they have just tremendous decades of experience.

AK And you trust them. That’s another part of it right?

CE Exactly, that’s right. Having the trust and being aligned on kind of what we’re building and why.

AK Do you think they’ll ever be a world in which instead of me getting six or seven different vitamins, and maybe this is from a chemistry standpoint impossible? Is it possible to just check boxes and have one like massive super vitamin where I get, I had the list actually here. You noted that what’s your favorite one?

CE My favorite is rhodiola rosea, which is an herb from the Altai Mountains. It helps with fatigue from stress which when you’re building a business and have two kids. There you go.

AK If you’re in a business, starting a podcast and have two teenagers.

CE There you go.

AK So, is it possible or is it not possible, from a chemistry standpoint or efficacy standpoint, to put it all together into one pill?

CE We’re looking at a number of things. I think from a pill standpoint, realistically it can be challenging. There are certain nutrients, calcium and magnesium are…

AK Like, they might not be stable if they’re put together in a pill, right?

CE Yeah, it’s less stability and more actual size. So, like, to get enough calcium you actually have to, it’s a larger nutrient. And so you have some nutrients like vitamin D or in vitamin C, which can be super small and so you could get them together, but when you start adding things like fish oil, calcium, magnesium, you’ll notice, if you look at, kind of, the multivitamin labels, you’ll notice that they have less in some of those ingredients because they want you to look and see like, hey, it’s in there but it’s probably actually not as much as if you bought it stand alone. And so…

AK Interesting. And no one wants to swallow a golf ball full of..

CE Exactly. I do think there’s a lot we can do along with others in kind of delivery innovation of the product in terms of form factor. Can it be a powder or something you mix in a drink? Like, I think there’s interesting things there. When we built the business, we thought about that a lot and, kind of, talked with consumers and found that in terms of out the gates, which access we wanted to innovate on, that felt like one where we didn’t get as much draw from the consumers because they were used to taking vitamins and supplements and totally changing the form factor out the gate was actually a lower priority than helping them understand which ones they should be taking.

AK Yeah. I think that makes sense. I just had to ask because I was just kind of curious. And I have no problem after I take my fire-cider in the morning. What do you think of that? What do you think of the whole cider vinegar?

CE I feel like I’m not as well informed as I should be. And I think that’s, yeah. I’m not going to comment on that.

AK It clears my sinuses. It does that for sure. Cause it’s kind of awful to take, but uh…

CE We have a couple people in the office that swear by it. I’ve not actually looked up the research myself hence I don’t want to comment but I anecdotally know that there’s some people who swear by it.

AK How did you get, I mean you obviously had to educate yourself in this and you are kind of like a renaissance man at a young age. You’ve been in lots of different industries, but, it sounds like you had to take a pretty serious crash course and not just in manufacturing and supply chain, but in vitamins in general, and in nutrition. It’s like a never-ending thing, right?

CE I mean, that’s one of the most fun things of building a business or building a brand is that you learn so much in I think that first year. I quit my job at Bonobos at the end of 2015.

AK Is this pre-Walmart?

CE Yeah, it was like seven months before we sold to Walmart. And so I didn’t know that that was coming.

AK I like when people are like, I really like that shirt, where’s it from? And I’m like, Walmart.

CE Yes. I’ve worked with Akash. It was basically Akash and myself for pretty much six months and then we starting bringing on some supply chain members. But so much of that first year before we launched was education. We were buying textbooks on vitamins. Going up to Boston to meet with folks at Tufts and Harvard to understand their perspective.

So much was just reading and learning so that we had a perspective and, frankly, that that perspective was shaped not just by industry but by, again, sort of outside the industry forces. And it was a lot of fun, it was fun to understand how complex human nutrition was. Very exciting to see the impact that small changes can have on people’s lives and it’s always just interesting to really dig deep into something.

I mean if you’d ask me, would I be in vitamins and supplements ten years ago, I would have laughed. And when I told my parents this is what we were going to launch a business around, my mom said, “Well what are we going to tell people you do? You sell vitamins now?” Uhhh….

AK Yeah, from khakis to vitamins.

CE Exactly. And I think there’s just so much to learn, which is a lot of fun in building a business. You learn from folks, you bring on people who are experts, you absorb it all, you eventually shape your own point of view and that continues to evolve over time. So that year was just so much learning.

AK And I feel like there’s a little bit of whimsy, I don’t know if that’s the right word, that’s how I feel, in your communication to your customers. And did you learn that, I guess, from your experience at Bonobos as well? I feel like that’s, you’re not ripping it off, you’re just using I think you’re speaking to your consumer, the customer, in kind of a fun, natural way that actually fits into my life flow.

CE Yeah, I think in developing the tone it was so important to have it feel conversational, to have it feel…

AK That’s the right word. You’d never know I was in communications. Conversational, yeah.

CE Because it creates that kind of connection and it’s just sort of different from what’s out there. And, myself, just by being someone who started in finance, my background before was in English literature in college and I love reading and, sort of, wrote a lot of the copy myself for our site, for our quiz initially. And just the language is so important in terms of creating the connection and in having a brand that feels more than just something that was manufactured in a studio or something like that. And so I think that was always really important to me and still is to this day our, the folks that are, I’m not writing all the copy anymore, but they do hear all my comments.

AK I’m sure that they do. You got to stay involved.

CE They do an amazing job of kind of translating it and then continuing to evolve it but that’s definitely intentional because I think the brand character really comes through.

AK What’s the thing you like to do most and what’s the thing you like to do least as the co-founder, as an entrepreneur? I mean the company’s not even three years old until December, right?

CE Yeah, three years old in December. I generally love the act of creation and so I think anything about creating, be it, opening on a new box design or thinking through copy, like some of that stuff is fun. Or up to, like, thinking through the next product line and just the act of creating what it could be. What’s the consumer problem? What’s the story we’re trying to tell? How do we make things better for the user? And coming up with solutions, that is always really fun for me.

The biggest challenge has definitely had been operations. Making the daily packs is way more operationally intense than I ever expected. I have no background in operations and supply chain management, in six sigma, like, black belt, like, how do we refine this process and do time trials and that stuff, we have a warehouse in Brooklyn where we have three shifts of about 50 people or so on each shift.

AK Do they all have, like, tat sleeves and man buns and bushy beards?

CE They do not.

AK Sorry, Brooklyn.

CE No, we set it up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard because I lived in Fort Greene and the Brooklyn Navy Yard has an amazing initiative about bringing manufacturing jobs back to Brooklyn. And so, probably the most rewarding thing in what we do for me is, actually, you think about start ups and ok we’re giving, it’s cool to work at a start up, but the reality is that most people at our office, probably everybody at our office, if Care/of didn’t exist they would have a form of employment. They would have a form of employment. Whereas I can’t say the same, necessarily.

Like, we’re creating jobs in a neighborhood that I live in, and creating jobs for people who’ve been in that area for a long time. One of my favorite employees, this guy William, is from the Brownsville housing projects and sort of like really values the job and loves the brand. One of our first hires out there was a mother who just moved here from Guyana three weeks ago and it’s just really a fulfilling feeling to have these people also caring about the brand and out there.

But anyway, point being operations is a pain in the ass and what they do is really hard and it’s something that now we’ve got a head of operations who’s fantastic. Nacho has done a great job but that’s the part that I can’t stand doing myself.

AK Yeah, what about raising money. I mean you had a round of Goldman last year, which is amazing.

CE Yeah, raising money is never fun. The part that I do like about it is it gives you the opportunity to step back, and like I say, I like creation and storytelling, and…

AK And people are purposely, and for good reason really testing your model, right?

CE Exactly, yeah.

AK Which is great. So you’re learning, every time you walk out of a meeting you learn something for the next meeting or for your business.

CE Exactly, yeah I mean, the part that’s fun is you think through your story, you think through your different, what’s your strategy? It is a forcing function on, you know, really pressure testing your business. The hard part sometimes is the emotional roller coaster. You’ll leave a meeting and think, oh, that person loves this, they’re definitely going to invest.

AK And you never hear from them again.

CE You never hear from them. And then you’ll leave another meeting and be like, that fit doesn’t seem right and then they’ll give you a term sheet. It’s confusing when you’re building a business, and you’re watching the bank account and you’re thinking about your team. You can feel pressure but obviously when it’s successful it just feels great. And it’s not the most fun to do, but there are benefits from it for sure.

AK So you’ve got two little kids at home. There are a lot of people who are starting businesses or thinking about starting businesses, and you’re very mission driven company and obviously chatting with you, you’re a very deliberate, very disciplined person. How do you keep it all together? You start a company when you’re, actually, probably, if you started it three years ago, your oldest is one, right?

CE So I left Bonobos when my wife was pregnant which was an interesting…

AK Great timing, great idea.

CE Yeah. Which at the time, I thought that she was all aboard on this and later I said something like, oh but she was really excited and supportive, and she was like, I didn’t think this was a good idea, why did you think that?

AK Like, what are you gonna leave me?

CE Uh, and uh…

AK She stayed.

CE Yeah, she stayed. She’s been wonderful throughout all of this. It was fun having the kid and the company come at the same time because you watch both of them grow, both get names, both go through different time periods.

AK So it’s not Care and Of?

CE Exactly. You nailed it. That’s what it is.

AK Alright, good, yeah. Obviously you’re taking your vitamins, but like, how do you keep balanced? How do you keep sane? What is it that you’re doing to, like, maintain it all?

CE Yeah, I don’t know, that assumes that I am staying sane. A lot of it has to do with one, my co-founder, we keep ourselves, each other sane. In perspective, Akash just had his first kid a couple months ago, at this point. And I think it’s having an emotional foundation in the business. For me, he’s been great at that.

It’s having a wife who’s been incredibly supportive. And then it’s just carving out the mental time of like not forcing yourself to shut off and spend time with the kids which is fun and making sure that you’re not working all the weekends. It’s conscious decisions.

It’s hiring a fantastic team that you can rely on ‘cause the reality is you need that regardless to succeed and the better you are at hiring the more likely you are to be successful, and the more likely that you are not going to be doing everything which is better for the business.

So I’d say, generally, being conscious about it, ensuring that you’ve got the right emotional support and then building a team that’s, ultimately you’re job as CEO or at least as a co-founder, is to hire yourself out of a job. It’s: Can I get enough people who are better at doing the job than I am? That they can take it on, and I want to be at a point where I look up and wonder, what am I doing here? And does this company even need me would be a great place to be. But, in the meantime I’m continuing to build that which then frees up some time for the family, too.

AK And what’s the best way to find you guys, either you personally, socially, and if that’s not good, how about Care/of?

CE I’m not necessarily the most, probably because of the kid and my own time thing, I’m not the most out their founder in terms of Twitter and social.

AK Except for being on this podcast. You’ll be super famous now.

CE Except for this podcast. This is the place where you’ll find me is this podcast. Brand on Purpose. Download it multiple times. Yeah, but Care/of, we’re at www.takecareof.com, I don’t know why I listed the three w’s there as if you do that.

AK You’re not old enough to do that. The interwebs.

CE Instagram is a big one for us, so you can check us out at Care/of on Instagram, those are kind of our biggest channels. But, yeah, we’d appreciate folks giving us a look.

AK Well, on behalf of myself, my wife, many people in my office who use Care/of, who will continue to use Care/of, thank you for taking care of us. And for making us happier and healthier people. It’s awesome.

CE Awesome. Thanks so much, I really appreciate the chat today.